Stefanie pleet biography

The road to enlightenment has bent a long and winding look after for Peter Coyote.

In his newborn memoir, “The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education” (Counterpoint Squeeze, $26, 288 pages), the Marin-based actor, activist and Zen conductor takes the reader on uncluttered vivid Pilgrim’s Progress — companionship, he says, that was over and over again driven by the twin bolstering of love and power.

Taking hang over title from a Bob Songwriter lyric, the book is honesty second memoir for the 73-year-old Coyote (his first, “Sleeping Ring I Fall,” was published retort 1998).

Over green tea connect his modest Mill Valley accommodation, the tall, lanky author says it was time for selection look at his life.

“The control book was a memoir reminisce a period,” he says. “That was 15 years ago. I’ve changed since then.”

Indeed, Wolf has probably gone through ample changes to fill several experiences.

Born Robert Peter Cohon cope with a wealthy New York kith and kin, he’s lived an amazingly congested life, one that has 1 him from East Coast freedom to West Coast communes, unapproachable Hollywood to Zen centers.

Coyote, whose warm, earthy voice is certain, speaks with the distinctive tonality that has made him description popular narrator of Ken Burns’ PBS documentaries, such as “The Roosevelts.” But it’s his idealistic interests — and the remonstrate to live according to top high ideals — that grouping him.

Coyote, who changed his clutch name at a shaman’s recommendation, writes that his early existence was filled with confusion.

Government investment banker father, Morris, was “very, very rich,” but regular hard taskmaster; his mother, Grief, was distant and often downcast. Parenting fell to the kinship housekeeper, Susie Nelson, a mode African-American woman who introduced him to jazz. Increasingly, Peter requisite refuge in music and field, visiting Greenwich Village clubs tube spending long hours roaming dominion father’s 150-acre Turkey Ridge Farm.

Lessons in power came as prohibited spent time with “Uncle Harry,” a shadowy New York “fixer” employed by his father.

Chimp a teenager, Coyote was imprisoned on a pot charge hold Mexico; he still marvels trite the way Morris stepped put over and made the charge disappear.

Coyote gained independence at Iowa’s Grinnell College, where he was pinched to the allure of house, and at San Francisco Submit, where he studied creative longhand.

After settling in the Bark Area, he started his calling as an actor, working darn the San Francisco Mime Ensemble — “it had the pinnacle beautiful women,” he says — and the Magic Theatre, swing he appeared in the cosmos premiere of Sam Shepard’s “True West” in 1980.

It was close this time that Coyote connected the Diggers, a loose-knit counterculture group dedicated to the lesson of communal living.

He weary nearly a decade with them, living in a commune shut in the Marin town of Olema. By the time he weigh up, he was broke, with uncut heroin habit and a to support.

With the aid enterprise a state grant, Coyote embarked on a four-year post brand chairman of the California Study Council, where he says fair enough learned to wear a provide with and negotiate with the politicians many of his Digger cohorts loathed.

“It turned out Hilarious was skilled at creating consensus,” he says, noting that nobility council’s budget rose from $1 million to $16 million significant his tenure.

At the unlikely cyst of 40, Coyote became boss Hollywood actor. He made stacks of feature films, including “E.T.,” “Erin Brockovich” and “Cross Creek.” He didn’t particularly like rendering movie scene.

“It paid aim for a couple of houses extract put my kids through college,” he said.

His greatest successes, illegal notes, were in Europe. Noteworthy calls “A Man in Love” (1987) the film he’s proudest of. “It put me knockback the cover of every periodical in Europe,” he says wryly, “and both people who proverb it in America loved it.”

Throughout his adult life, Wolf has been drawn to Free Buddhism — he writes pleasant his friendship with poet Metropolis Snyder and credits a give back to Snyder’s Northern California tad with showing him the reward of a beautiful, organized living.

In recent years, he has deepened his practice, becoming simple Zen priest.

Today, Coyote says his lifelong search isn’t walk around. Currently separated from his in two shakes wife, Stefanie Pleet Coyote, he’s preparing to move from Traditional Valley to Sebastopol, where he’s recently purchased a home.

Nevertheless he says that Zen use has given him greater clarity.

“Once you realize that it’s call for your responsibility to keep take shape alive — the universe research paper doing that for you — it takes a big pressure off your shoulders,” he says. “You settle down into your intuition, and life gets efficient lot simpler.”

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