I was born in a suburb just south of San Francisco (a city I was later lucky enough to live in) in 1954. Four years later, my parents migrated two-hundred miles east and 5,200 feet in elevation to where I was to grow up: South Lake Tahoe, California, a resort town bordered by gambling casinos and built on the shores of one of the bluest, largest, purest, and deepest bodies of fresh water in the world. Nature became my first religion.

 

Since 1966, or between the ages of twelve and fifty-four, I worked as (among others): a paper boy, dishwasher, janitor, groundskeeper, housepainter, nurseryman, census taker, shipping clerk, certified public accountant, technical writer, software consultant, university finance director, chef-caterer, professor of creative writing, freelance writer and filmmaker. The richness and wreckage of these jobs/experiences led me to my current vocation and avocation.

 

When I was nineteen I bought a set of watercolors, hiked into the Sierra Nevada wilderness and painted the view from my campsite. An extraordinary moment of falling in love. A jolt I followed. Each week I bought new pigments: cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, vermillion. Each week I bought new books: Goya, Kandinsky, Cezanne.

 

When I was barely twenty-two I met and began to study with Chögyam Trungpa, who become my spiritual teacher, though the term is inadequate, since he taught about everything - perception, art, the natural world, poetry, politics, history - crossed every boundary, took every risk, divided nothing into the secular and the sacred. I began the path of meditation.

 

In the late 1970s I completed my undergraduate studies at San Francisco State University, a diverse commuter campus three blocks from the Pacific ocean. I received a BA in Business Administration. A swerve away from art, I entered a twelve year tunnel of adding machines, computers and desks, the whole feeling of which is captured in the title of a poem I wrote about the era: Cement.

 

In 1992 I traveled to Mexico. Cement. Mexico. Journals. Writing and travel began a sequence that led to an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University. I studied with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman and Diane di Prima, among many others. Writing, like meditation, came to me as a life-raft, a mystery, as something I could commit to. Writers are truth-tellers and have the luxurious freedom to reinvent themselves through language.

 

My work is the legacy of my own teacher, Chögyam Trungpa, and the modernist lineage of writing and art. I directed Shambhala Training for twenty-five years, including three Warrior Assembly - two-week meditation and training programs - in the United States, Canada and Cuncumen, Chile. During twelve years at Naropa University, I taught Writer's Craft, Poetry Workshop, and Shambhala Meditation Practicum. For several years, I led a writing workshop, sponsored by the University of Colorado Speech, Language and Hearing Department for people recovering from stroke and head injuries. For over ten years I taught a weekly creative-writing workshop, Chance, Synchronicity and Mind-writing (as if this title gradually became my life).

 

I Currently devote my energies to the work described in this website. - Bill Scheffel

 

 

Bill, Istanbul 2011.