Life at the Borderland: Seventy-Five Years of Becoming

I was born in 1950 in a displaced person’s refugee camp, on a frontier between the ruins of the old world and the beginnings of the new. My very first breaths were taken in that liminal place, a borderland where history itself seemed suspended between devastation and hope. For me, that idea of the border — between nations, languages, cultures, and even ways of being — has shaped much of my seventy-five years of life.

The twentieth century, as I came to see it, was marked by a single great war, interrupted only by a twenty-year pause. World War I was merely the overture; World War II completed the collapse of the old order. My family stood in the shadow of that collapse. We were stateless, waiting for somewhere to belong. Growing up without a fixed home left an imprint on me: an enduring fascination with language, culture, and the fragile but resilient ways that humans seek connection.

At the Borders of Language

My earliest years were spoken in High German. My father, a teacher at the second Waldorf school in Stuttgart, encouraged me to use language as a living force, though I must admit much of what came out of my mouth as a child was, in his words, “strange.” When my family began preparing to migrate to South America, I started to learn Spanish. But plans changed, and instead we found ourselves boarding a ship to the United States. By the age of six, I was learning to live and think in English.

This set the tone for a life of linguistic border-crossing. Over time, I added French and Dutch, revisiting German with an adult’s ear, and circling back to Spanish whenever possible. One of my peculiar joys has been reading the Harry Potter series across four languages — English, German, Spanish, and French. What began as a playful experiment became an unexpected form of immersion, sharpening my ear, enriching my vocabulary, and reminding me of the intimate ways words carry culture within them.

The Wild Ride of Curiosity

If being stateless gave me a hunger for languages, it also fed a hunger for almost everything else. I sometimes describe my mind as a machine that spins at high speed — curiosity rarely rests, and when it grips me, it does so completely.

At fourteen, convinced it was perfectly ordinary, I built the equipment to culture my own penicillin. I thought this was just something a boy might do in his spare time. Around the same period, caught up in the fever of the space race, I designed and built rockets. Many of my peers were doing the same, but my most ambitious creation — a five-foot solid-fuel rocket — nearly brought down an airplane. I can still remember looking anxiously skyward, waiting for the police who, thankfully, never arrived. My parents must have alternated between admiration and terror at what their son might do next.

My curiosity could be reckless. Once, at ten years old, I damaged my lungs by inhaling sulfur dioxide from a jar I had carelessly left open. That same boy, though, had already assembled a fully functioning chemistry and biology lab in the family home. Even then, I understood experimentation carried risk, but I was not deterred.

Shaped by Family and Mentors

Behind my experiments and explorations stood parents who encouraged rather than restrained me, even if they sometimes shook their heads in disbelief. They themselves were remarkable people, and the lineage of their passions has always guided me.

My father was a mathematician, a landscape designer, an artist, and a teacher. At just fourteen, he was involved in the early development of biodynamics, after he became one of the first students at the inaugural Waldorf school in Stuttgart. His university capstone project was nothing less than contributing to the design of the landscape around Berlin’s Olympic Stadium for the 1936 games.

My mother was a gifted violinist. Music filled our home, especially during evenings with my grandparents in Danzig, where impromptu concerts carried warmth through otherwise uncertain times. My wife’s father, too, brought genius into the family: an aviation engineer who designed critical elements of the American space program. With influences like these, it is little wonder my son also grew up with both an appetite for knowledge and a sense of daring.

Equally important were my mentors outside the family — teachers and thinkers who fanned my natural enthusiasm into disciplined study. From them I learned not only facts but the art of seeking out interesting people, a habit I have cultivated throughout my seventy-five years.

A Life in Education and Invention

The threads of these influences wove themselves into my vocation. I became a teacher — first almost by instinct, later by deliberate choice. Over fifty-four years in education, I have been privileged to expand young minds and to help them question the world around them. My path was not confined to classrooms: I became a psychotherapist, an inventor, even a farmer experimenting with alternative ways to capture rainwater during dry seasons. I was never satisfied with being just one thing. Reinvention, rather than retirement, has been my rhythm.

As an educator, I played a role in founding two Waldorf schools, echoing my father’s legacy. These projects were not just about institutions but about creating communities where imagination, discipline, and inquiry could thrive together. I have come to believe that the early experiences of a child — their mentors, their experiments, their freedom to try and fail — have profound influence on the flow of an entire life.

Lessons Across Generations

That conviction shaped how I raised my own son. When I chose to homeschool him, I made sure he not only learned theory but practiced creation. Together, we built eight personal computers from scratch and set up a home network — this was long before such projects were commonplace.

I also encouraged him to ask a question that has served me well: What do I have the most of, and in how many ways can it be used? When I asked him this about our home, he quickly listed two pages of possibilities Uses for Douglas fir trees. Among them was the idea of distilling essential oils from Douglas fir and other plants around us. That experiment eventually grew into one of his first companies.

Now in middle age, he is an information technologist, managing computer networks with a focus and steadiness I never had. Watching him pursue learning with such discipline has been one of my life’s great rewards.

Wisdom of the Elder Years

Reaching seventy-five, I find myself reflecting less on accomplishments and more on patterns. One of the most enduring lessons is that life is structured by both positive and negative events. The triumphs, the mistakes, the painful accidents, and the sudden strokes of luck all weave together. What matters is not avoiding the negative but learning from it, carrying forward knowledge and understanding.

I look back on near-disasters — rockets brushing too close to planes, poisons inhaled by curious lungs — and see not only recklessness but resilience. I look at the generosity of mentors and the genius of parents and in-laws and recognize the inheritance of curiosity and daring. I see the way language opened worlds for me and how passing that love of discovery to my son extended the journey.

Far from feeling finished, I often say I am ready for the next seventy-five years. Reinvention has no age limit. Curiosity, once awakened, does not dim with years.

Living at the Borders

The theme of the borderland has never left me. I was born between the old and new world. I grew up between languages. I learned to live at the boundary between danger and discovery, risk and reward. I worked between disciplines: education and therapy, invention and farming, music and mathematics. My family, too, lived at these borders, carrying culture, science, and art across nations and generations.

If there is a single lesson I might offer, it is this: seek out the borderlands. They are uncomfortable places, to be sure, but they are also the most fertile. At the borders of languages, we discover new ways of seeing. At the borders of disciplines, we invent. At the borders of generations, we pass on wisdom that might otherwise vanish.

I began life with no country, no clear home, no certainty. Seventy-five years later, I find that uncertainty has been a gift. It has made life not just a ride, but a wild ride — and one that I would not trade for any other.