I am a very different person than I was before acquiring my brain injury on the last day of 1977 in a car accident. At that time, I was a student at OSU studying architecture with plans to build ecologically sustainable buildings. My plans were changed on that day. When I met my wife, Faith 34 years ago, neither of us had any idea how much my TBI affected my life. I did, however, with Faith’s encouragement, finish my degree 5 years later. As I lost job after job and found myself unable to succeed in pursuing my interests, we began to understand the effect my injury had and I began attending brain injury support groups in order to spend time with people who understood my issues.

I have been married to Faith for 31 years and we have raised three wonderful children and so far we have 2 granddaughters. My wife’s passion for life inspires me. Life is an ongoing process of learning and change. I choose different systems and activities than I did before. After much work and struggle, including the loss of many jobs – I am now a thriving survivor of brain injury. I have worked in sales at Costco for the last 3 years and Am very successful at this. The challenges of sales inspire me.

I have been meditating for the past 25 years and I have found it to be extremely beneficial to embrace and find peace and focus in my new life. I also teach meditation to fellow survivors and their families using my Gold Mind Meditation Project, which I began five years ago. I love books and as part of my Buddhist practice I founded the Barking Dog Library at Portland Insight Meditation Center and am training to be a Buddhist teacher.

I am interested in neuroscience, nature, climate change, Buddhist meditation, the Chinese Garden and the Japanese Garden. The biggest difficulty I have now is remembering my commitments, both day to day and bigger picture, I aid this with use on My Bionic Brain program on Apple iPad. I am in touch with many interests that I would like to share and also to learn about others and their interests. I care a lot about the people in this community and along with Faith, I’m very active in the BIC-NW social committee.