In this book, a longtime academician recalls his life and the shaping influence of his mother, a woman of plain origins who gave him insight, by her example, into the timeless wisdom of the worlds great spiritual traditions.   This story, in part, is a memoir of Kelly Nicholsons youth and subsequent adventures. Beneath its surface lies the enduring question of how we might acquire a sense, amid a world of competing influences, of what life means and where we are ultimately headed. Its thesis is that we gain insight not merely from analytical scholarship but also from our daily flesh and blood encounters with those around us.