(as told by a friend)
Brian began this life playing in the farms and forests around Owen Sound, Ontario, blessed by the fresh water breezes of Georgian Bay.
One snowy December evening, at age nine, while delivering a shared newspaper to a neighbour down the road, he was struck by an auto and knocked unconscious. The driver had been drinking though was never charged.
Multiple lacerations, with both sides of his jaw broken, he was in a coma for three days. This was the first of nine concussions in his life, but it was also an inner initiation that served to give him outer wings. The next year, he skipped another school grade, and later secured dubious boasting rights in a Bantam hockey tournament when he scored all eight goals for his team’s 8-1victory.
He stood first in his graduating class in Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in1969, later following up with an MBA specializing in Arts Administration at York University.
He side-stepped a promising career as Manager of Communications at the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts, two different times to go travelling on the cheap, the very richly cheap, each time for thirteen months.
Strange fact: He dramatically met and lived with all members from his two immediate past life marriage families, in Paris, Mexico, on an Israeli kibbutz, and Santa Monica, California.
Brian communed with Spirit, an ongoing quest, in sacred sites of Greece, Isle of Iona in Scotland, Isla del Sol and Sun Gate in the Andes, and Egypt where one midnight with a composer friend, he climbed the Great Pyramid of Giza with the musical strains of Ramadan accompanying.
He taught Holistic Healing courses with Barbara D’Arcy Thompson, an elder mentor, at The Findhorn Foundation, an international non-denominational spiritual centre in northern Scotland. He lived and worked there for three-and-a-half years.
For 10 wonderful years, Brian also taught a universal energy healing method, originating in Tibet via Japan. It took him to ten countries over four continents, including Venezuela, Bolivia, and Romania just after the revolution in 1990. He also had the privilege of teaching and anchoring the technique in over thirty communities throughout Ontario.
Brian encountered ‘A Course In Miracles’ in the year 2000 through a Parry Sound newspaper ad, although it took him another nine months to decide to purchase the book for himself. But as you know, “there is no such thing as being a little bit pregnant.”
Simultaneously, for twenty-five years Brian engaged in entrepreneurial ventures, marketing holistic air and water purification systems in the Muskoka region of Ontario.
It is not unusual for this creative mind to write as many as one hundred poems in year. He has published two complete poetry books in 1993 and 2014, as well as one poetry/music CD in 2019 with Toronto musical recording artist Doug Wilde.
His eye-hand-mind meditation practice, involves finding and sculpting idiosyncratic natural wood pieces which began when he lived in a semi-wilderness community, SunDog, over twenty years ago in Muskoka. Present inventory is over 250 pieces.
Brian has also produced and promoted several Spiritual Awakening seminars; one with Dr. Kenneth Wapnick of 'The Foundation for A Course in Miracles' and eight with international author Gary R. Renard. These non-dualistic seminars, all held at the University of Toronto, were based on the ground-breaking psycho-spiritual manuscript, ‘A Course In Miracles.'
Brian James Wark - Centre
