Growing up
I was born in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden, on a sunny day in July 1970 in a neighborhood called Skärholmen. At first I was a normal child, happy and very curious about things, animals and people, especially old people. They always had something interesting to tell and they seemed to appreciate that I chose to talk to them for a while rather than messing around in the sandbox with the other dirty kids. When I was three years old they discovered that I had a severe hearing loss, about 80 percent. I was lucky to be a Swedish citizen in this case because Sweden is very socialistic and healthcare is given free and paid for through taxes. The first pair of hearing aids was big as old electric razors. I had to have them attached to my chest on suspenders and a cord ran from each of them into my ears. I was not bothered by this. Actually I thought I was rather cool. Through my imagination I got my new equipment to be something a pilot had when he was flying. I could also use the ability to switch off into total silence whenever I felt like it. For me these hearing aids only offered me opportunities. I don’t think my mom and dad were so pleased to have a damaged goods kid but I think they got over that when they saw that it didn’t affect me negatively. I have always been lucky in finding good friends, and I was always hanging out with them, but I also had no problem spending time by myself. I developed a grown up voice when I was playing around. That voice made me even more special, not only because I was running around with 2 kilos of electronical stuff in each ear, I also sounded strange. There were situations when I was playing in the bushes and someone walked by and heard an adult bas voice and a kid’s voice. They might have wondered “what is a man doing with a kid in those bushes?” But eventually my neighborhood got used to me.
When I started school they forced me to have a “special teacher” to give me extra help because of my hearing problem. The doctors and the teachers were convinced that I could not handle school like a “normal” kid. They were terribly wrong and I resisted this at all times. These special teachers even wanted to force me to be together with other kids with hearing problems. I never understood the point of a bunch of kids with hearing loss screaming “what” or “What did you say” to each other all the time. After a while they stopped sending me these “special teachers”. My mother made that happen because she, as always, believed and understood me fully. I have one older brother, my mom worked at a bank and my dad was a police man.
I spent my summers either at our summer house in the archipelago outside Stockholm or on my family’s sailboat in these same waters. I learned to appreciate nature, the sea and the life that exists around me. I had a dramatic experience learning how to swim. When you are a little kid, 5 years old or so, you run around the summer cottage naked, which I think is kind of natural. But when we were going up to see grandpa and grandma we were supposed to have at least bathing trunks on, only this day I had thrown them on the lawn and now there was a bee inside. I put them on without looking and the bee stung me somwhere in the frontal area below the waist. My eyes blackened and somehow I knew I would ease my pain by sticking my “damaged part” into cold water. I stormed down into the water without thinking of the consquences of not knowing how to swim. When I was in the water I was swimming towards shallow water and the pain went away, or at least I was no longer screaming with pain, and I could, surprisingly, swim.
I grew up as a normal boy, at least in my mind; I still had those big hearing aids on my ears, but at least they became smaller and smaller. I was not a girl charmer or a cassanova; I think that was because I wasn’t interested. I had so many things to do with my friends, fun stuff like driving like idiots on mopeds, stealing apples from old angry neighbours, windsurfing, playing Dungeons & Dragons or playing wargames in the forest with wooden machine guns. It was not an environment for girls and I had no time to try to convince one of them to like me. I just didn’t have the time. At least I thought so back then, but I think the truth was that I had no clue what to do or what to say. I was a complete looser when it came to girls back then.

The Sinking Ship
I got together with my first girlfriend when I was 18. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow she didn’t see that I wasn’t boyfriend material, that I was still an immature jerk. I must have fooled her somehow. It was summer and two of my friends suggested that we meet on an island in the archipelago. They had a sailboat and I shared a motorboat with my brother at the time. We met at the island around lunch time; my friends had already found a good spot to tie our boats to. We ate lunch and after that we decided to take a few trips with my innertube. The innertube was a ring with handles to hold on to and it was attached by 30 feet of rope to the rear of the boat. The idea of this toy was to get the person in the ring to crash into the water at high speed, just a fun water sport thing. First my friend’s girlfriend went on the ring a few laps then it was my turn, and all hell broke loose. My friend dragged me a few laps and suddenly a huge bang came from the rear of the boat. Shortly after the bang smoke appeared and my friend began running around like crazy trying to find the fire extinguisher. The girls were running to the front of the boat, both with panic in their faces. That the smoke came from the rear of the boat was horrifying because the gas tank was there. I understood I had to do something to help my friends so I started to pull myself toward the boat. When I finally got there I pointed out the fire extinguisher and we aimed it at the smoke and started to spray white powder. Then we saw what had caused the explosion and the smoke. The boat battery had exploded and battery acid was everywhere around it. A motor boat without a battery is not a success story. After we drifted for a while another boat came to our rescue. Our rescuer looked exactly like the man on the label on “Fisherman’s Friend”; a true fisherman look. He dragged us to shore. Our girlfriends sat in his boat while my friend and I remained in mine. When we came back to the spot where my friend’s boat was the next scenario started. We were not alone in this bay, and everyone was standing up and looking at us, asking themselves “what happened to these guys?” We thanked our rescuer and the girls were going to jump over to my boat so our rescuer could leave. When it was her turn to jump, my girlfriend, who was not all that graceful and also little chubby, somehow tripped and fell down on her butt on the front tip of the rescuers boat. She bumped out from it and crashed down into the water with a huge splash, landing on her chest and probably with her mouth open. After a few seconds she came up to the surface and totally panicked. She was screaming and starting to take in water. My friend stood closest and his reaction made David Hasselhof look like a wimp. Only seconds after my girlfriend went down he dove gracefully down to her rescue and dragged her to shore. Everybody in the bay was now once again standing up and staring at the disaster scene, asking themselves, “What is going on?” The embarrassment of this could not possibly have been more intense.
Like this wasn’t enough, the next disaster scene occurred. A few hours after the panic and the rescuing, my girlfriend finally stopped crying and the embarrassment was not that intense anymore, (so little we knew). My friend and I put together a plan, “clean sweap”. We needed to clean the boat from that dangerous liquid from the exploded boat battery that was everywhere in the boat. My friend volunteered to take the huge risk of towing away the remains of the battery from the boat. But he did not want any of this liquid on his bare skin. He needed to wear protective clothing doing this. In his boat he found an old winter coat, heavyduty rain pants, rubber gloves, goggles and a snorkel to protect his face. He put on all these clothes and the goggles and he was ready for operation “clean sweap”. He looked like an employee at a nuclear facility in the Soviet Union in the 60’s. He approached the battery and started to lift it. Suddenly my friend dropped the battery and it fell down and a splash of battery acid splashed up in his face. With the same speed he had jumped down into the water with earlier he now jumped down again only this time he was the one panicking. He was floating like a wine cork and frantically rubbing his face to remove the acid. For the third time in the same afternoon, every boat owner in the bay was standing up, staring at us as we tried to reach my friend in the water with boat hooks.

The voyager
I always wanted to explore new places and find out more about the world, and also find out what I wanted to do with my life. I went to the island of Madeira, outside Portugal, in the middle of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean. Through a friend I got a job at an exclusive hotel to convince people to buy timeshare apartments. I really thought this could be something for me, to be that sun burned guy with a sparkeling smile, world experienced and rich. I did not dare to think of how many chicks I was going to get. The whole thing started out just fine, I found new friends and there was a lot of partying all the time. I did not do that well selling timeshares but I had a lot of fun. I saw tourists coming and going, and I felt very cool not being “just a tourist”, I lived and worked there. So one night a blonde girl stepped into the bar we were hanging out in. She was a Swedish blonde beauty. The clock stopped on the bar wall and everybody was looking at her, including me. She came over to my gang and we started to talk. She was extremely nice and extremely good looking and she spoke to me without being forced, how often does that happen? We met in this bar for a few days and somehow I convinced her to take a car trip around the island with me. I had done it several times so I knew I could be an excellent tourist guide.
We rented a war grey Fiat Panda, a very small and tight car. Madeira is a very high island, 1 100 meters above the ocean, and there are different climates at the different elevations; it is much colder at the top than at the base of the island. I was driving and we were going on Madeira’s twisty roads up hills and down hills. We stopped and ate lunch and looked at several spectacular view points all over the island. Everything was going fine, I was eating with my mouth closed and I laughed at her jokes all the time even if there were bad. I was doing great, I was going to score. Then it happened. We were headed back toward the hotel. I was driving and she was holding the map and we were looking for a road sign telling us to go left. We just didn’t know when the sign was going to show up. Suddenly she yelled, “There it is, turn left here”. It was very close to the turn so I had to react fast, and I turned my head over my left shoulder to be sure that no one was going to pass us on our left. When I turned my head I banged it into the driver’s side window, which was half way down.  Somehow half my head was jammed between the window and the window frame, I was stuck! I tried dragging my head back, we missed the turn and I was still driving very wobbly with my head still stuck, and I remember cars were honking their horns and she was screaming in the passenger seat. I tried to get the window down and relieve my head, but I was doing it wrong and instead of pulling the window down I pulled it up and my head got even more stuck! Finally I pulled down the window and could get my head inside the car. My face was all red and I looked at her and she stared at me with big eyes, probably thinking “what is this moron doing?” We drove back the rest of way in total silence. I was so embarrassed that I just could not say anything. I was so embarrassed. Everything I had built up with her was now collapsed by this clown car show. I couldn’t even look at her anymore and I was not going to score, that’s for sure. We turned the car back and I walked away and never saw her again.
I have taken a lot of interesting trips in my life and am going to take several more. I have been in Turkey a couple of times checking out the remains of the Roman Empire and the Diana Temple. My friends and I went to Istanbul and visited the Blue Mosque. It was very interesting to travel in a Muslim country. We almost always had to drink their orange tea every time we stepped into a store. The tea tasted like heated Fanta or something like it. I hated their toilets, or should I say, their holes in the ground, and they don’t use toilet paper either, they use water that they splash up there where the sun never shines. I have always been good at adapting and I never got Montezumas Revenge or anything like that, knock on wood.  Often they did not speak English but I discovered that there is always a way to communicate even if we don’t understand each others languages. I learned that the world has a soul, and that whoever understands that soul can also understand the language of things. We also went to Romania and Transylvania. We were following Bram Stoker’s legendary figure Dracula’s footprints. Dracula was a real person who’s name was actually Vlad Tepes, and he was an emperor working for a king in Romania. Vlad Tepes means “Vlad the impaler”. He got that name because he hung his prisoners of war on stakes. He fought the Turks and was very successful. He was the one who started the phenomena of war propaganda. He had printed drawings on flyers showing him eating lunch, with a smile on his face, in a forest of stakes with Turkish war prisoners on them. He made sure the enemy got the flyers and when they met at the battle field they were scared. They got the message. Bram Stoker took this historic man and made the legend Dracula. Bram created all the myths and mystique around Vlad Tepes. Vlad lived in several castles around Transylvania and we visited every one of them. We drove passed many gypsy villages and saw traces from the Soviet Union everywhere in the form of huge areas with steel factories.
I’ve also been to Mexico and discovered the Aztec pyramids and learned about Montezuma and that not so nice Spanish guy, Cortez. We started in Mexico City, the world largest city. The city was crowded and full of these green old Volkswagen beetles everywhere. We saw the Aztec Moon and Sun pyramids. After Mexico City we went across the country by bus to Puerto Escondido on the pacific side of the country. We saw and met a lot of people on the way. I found it interesting to travel deep into the country, to see the culture and meet the real people. Not the tourist hunting people that want to sell you tourist crap. This way might not always be the safest way to travel but it gives you so much more than hanging around a stupid resort all day long. Courage is the quality most essential to understand the language of the world.  I don’t understand people that do not like to travel. They miss so much and they don’t get to know other cultures, or people other than their own. They don’t get the chance to see what is out there waiting for them. People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them. My absolutely favorite thing to do is to sail. When I grew up we had a sail boat and we spent a lot of time on it. I learned to love it and I always yearn to be out on the ocean sailing. People learn early in their lives what is their reason for being.  A bunch of guys and I have rented big sail boats in the mediteranian, both in Greece and Croatia. Being out there and feeling the power of the world in the form of wind forcing the boat through the sea is fantastic. I know that one day I will own my own sail boat. It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.

The hooves of death in the dark
I’ve only had one near death experience in my life. It was in the middle of Sweden outside the town of Örebro. This particular summer the guys and I had been down to the Greek island Paros partying insanely for a week. We met a couple of Swedish girls there and when we got back to Sweden we decided to go and see them. It was in the middle of summer, it was warm and the weather was delightful. There was just me and two of my friends in the car. We came down to their place around lunch time. The girls had tricked their parents away for the weekend and we were supposed to sleep over one night at their house. We immediately started to open the first beer cans when we got there. The house was a long way from town and there were a lot of fields with cows and various crops everywhere. In the house the party started and we were barbequeing and listening to loud music. The hours went by and we became more and more affected by the liquid we were drinking. Around the ghost hour, midnight, me, one of the girls and a friend decided to take a walk around the area. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision. For this story it is necessary to know that I have very poor night vision, I always have had. We ended up on a path in the middle of a nearby forest. It was a clear night with a full moon which helped my night vision a little. After talking and walking along this path a big field appeared. In the middle of this field was a big rock. We decided to climb up on this rock and continue talking and drinking beer. We had been sitting there for a while when suddenly sounds came from the edge of the forest. We looked over and saw a cow standing there staring at us. We did not pay that much attention since we knew that we were in the countryside and there are cows there. We continued to talk for few minutes more and when we looked back to where the cow was we now saw 20 of them slowly, silently walking toward us on the rock. We started talking about this and I asked the girl about these cows, I thought she should know something about them since they were her neighbours.  The thought came to my mind that maybe it was good idea to see what their bellies looked like. I had learned that cows have this german sea mine looking belly and a bull has nothing there. I looked at their bellies and made a very scary discovery. These guys did not have any sea mines on their bellies, these guys were bulls. We were sitting in the dark, at midnight, on a rock, surrounded by bulls. I shared my discovery and the girl started to panic. It was then I knew we were in trouble. The bulls were just a few meters from us now and we all started to panic. Suddenly my friend and the girl jumped down from the rock and ran towards the path we had used to get there. I could not do that because I could not see very well in dark. They left me sitting on that rock surrounded by bulls. They shouted at me to follow them but I couldn’t. I sat there for a while looking at the bulls that were standing still just staring at me. I knew I had to do something so I started to slowly get down from that rock. I was wearing a red sweater and I was thinking about the matadors in Spain with their red cloths that they use to piss bulls off with. I was a living cloth, they would eat me alive. When I was on the ground again I surprised myself and started to talk to my observers and said, “Hi guys, just take it easy now, I am just passing through, don’t mind me, continue eating grass or something and relax, please”. Then it happened. One of the bulls lowered his head and charged at me. I totally panicked, and ran for my life toward the dark forest. I could feel and hear the whole herd running after me. The ground shook from these thousand pound beasts chasing me. I ran into the forest without seing anything. The whole forest roared with the sound of broken branches snapped by my advancing followers. I ran into a tree and tried to climb up, but could not see any branches to climb on. I changed my mind and stood absolutely still. Maybe they wouldn’t see me.  Nothing happened and the dark forest became quiet. I still could not see anything, not even the tree I was standing next to. A few minutes went by and I slowly looked for a way out of this nightmare. I was so afraid that I could hear my heart bouncing like crazy in my chest. I looked out from the forest and saw a fence and behind it a yellow crop of some sort. I was about 150 feet away. I started slowly toward the fence. Then all hell broke loose again. The whole forest became alive and I knew the bulls were coming for me again. I ran like crazy toward the fence. The ground was shaking and the sound from their hooves was deafening. I was thinking of the next days headline in the paper while I was running for my life. “18 year old youngster killed by bulls outside Örebro”. I also saw my broken glasses lying on the grass, with a clear mark from a bull’s hoof on them. I reached the fence and started to climb over it. Then I felt a strange feeling in my body, like my muscles wouldn’t obey me. But I forced my self over the fence and I heard the aggressive herd approaching fast behing my back. I threw myself to the ground only to find that the farmer had just watered his crop and that I had landed in a foot of mud. I hit the ground with a muddy splash. I lay there for a while and everything became quiet again. I was thinking, “Where are they”. I stood up and saw a long row of bulls on the other side of the fence, an electrical fence I understood now, just staring at me. I could now safely, but muddily, walk back to the girl’s house and into safety. The next day the owner of the bulls told one of the girls that there were no bulls. He had woken up around midnight hearing strange sounds from outside, like the cows were playing or something. He looked out through his window exactly when the cows hunted me into to the forest. He also saw me run over the field and grab his electrical fence and take a dive into his muddy field. He went back to bed with a smile on his face thinking, “This is no place for fancy big city boys”.
 The bulls were actually heifers, cows that haven’t had calves yet. And that explains the thing with the german sea mine. Cows have them when they give birth to calves, not before. The farmer also said they were just curious about us. They would never harm us. “Yeah, right”, I thought.

I am still today looking for my ultimate treasure. Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him. Since the day that I ran in front of those cows I have had a few miserable relationships and a couple of different jobs. I have been a chimney sweeper, carpet seller, worked with wooden floors and been an office manager. I still did not know what to do with my life. I was working only for the pay check so that I could travel and enjoy life in present time, not just stick around at home and fall into a boring daily routine. I don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we're living now.  I always wondered if it was possible to have a job and pleasure at the same time. I always envied people who say they love their jobs. I never loved any of my jobs. But one day, a coin fell down the slot machine. I knew I loved to do things in the garden, digging, planting and messing around with soil. I always enjoyed nature and plants, but it never crossed my mind that I should work with it, like a gardener or something. When you want something with all your heart, that's when you are closest to the Soul of the World. It's always a positive force. When I realized that this is worth a good try, I drew a line over my old life and started all over again. I came over here to California to collect my elixir of life. I am now trying to achieve something new with my life. And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. My goal now is to start some kind of business around horticulture and make a living of it. I haven’t decided yet where I am going to end up. It depends on where fate takes me and I am open to that, but it is important to me to be able to live now, not later.