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April 10, 1984

Dear Mr. Nakashima, 

First, I want to apologize for writing to you like this out of the blue as it were. We’ve never met and I think writing a rather intrusive letter of this kind and under these circumstances is at best impolite. I hope that I’ll be able to make my reasons for writing clear and that they will in some sense explain, if not make up for my lack of courtesy. I have been reading your book The Soul of a Tree and I hope I don’t overstate it or dramatize it by saying it has had a very strong affect on me. I see in it elements of something I have been hoping to find but was never sure where to look and often enough had even very little idea of what it was I was after. I guess that is the unhappy and confused state of affairs that many young people fact today but, because of enlightenment, or divine guidance, or plain luck you seem to have found something of importance which has allowed you to live a meaningful life founded on inner peace and harmony with your surroundings. If that is true then you have been fortunate to have found what I have been hoping to find for myself. 

My career is still a short one. I studied philosophy in college and then spent several years in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer. On returning home I spent some time in graduate school studying are history. All the time I have been looking for something. 

Now, I look around me and I am frightened, truly frightened, by the violence, egotisim [[egotism]] and unhappiness that pushes the world ever closer to disaster. What frightens me still more is my feeling of total helplessness to do anything about it. I have for as long as I can remember felt that to do any good in the world one must first find a source of peace and harmony within oneself. Without that nothing truly meaningful is possible and with it - who knows?