My interest in Rime goes back several decades to the late 70s when I began studying Tibetan Buddhism. At that time, Tibetan teachers in the west were few and far between. A fledgling dharma student such as myself would take teachings from whoever came through, whether it be a Geluk, Nyingma, Sakya, Kagyu, or even Bon teacher. I didn’t know that much about the differences between sects, and didn’t see any conflict between the various teachings I had taken. Many years later, someone asked me what lineage I “was” and I was stumped for an answer. When I explained that I took teachings whenever and wherever I could, from whomever, the questioner said, “Oh, then you are Rime.”

I have enjoyed a long love affair with sacred texts. My definition of sacred text or scripture is when revelations and understandings of the Divine are made available to one during the study of a traditional or nontraditional spiritual text. I started seriously reading sacred texts at the age of 14 and have continued to this day-mostly Buddhist texts and have studied Chinese and Tibetan to understand them more fully.

I was days before my 14th birthday when Jethro Tull’s album Aqualung came out in 1971. Hearing the songs for the first time gave me full permission to raise my voice and question what I had been force fed about organized religion. The songs spoke to the religious ideals of high culture, which I felt as distrust.