About Allen

As a child in a dusty corner of Romania, I ruled the unpaved road leading up to my home. The hill across the railroad tracks was the frontier land of my experience, and my American birthplace lied somewhere just behind that hill. I flew back to the United States finding an ocean between my two homes. Just when I began learning my first language, Romanian, I found myself in a strange place having to learn a new one. In school, they taught me only to forget who I was. 

But I found myself again, through trial and error, in the teachings of great persons before me, and I found expression through music. I taught myself guitar and poetry, yearning to simultaneously understand myself and to make myself understood. When the time came, I chose a literary, academic path through college thinking it as fair a course as any and a reasonable way to write and travel. My degree in English literature from the University of Nevada, Reno, only proves I was there, but it’s there that I learned to unite my mind and body through yoga, and I learned the yoga of words and music. In Las Vegas, I took graduate-level courses in English rhetoric and composition theory dropping out when academia, research and the Ivory Tower lost its Romantic allure. 

Music filtered through the thick growth on the edges of my well-worn path, and I left that path for the mysterious and luxuriant lands beyond the edges of what I could see. I began cutting through the thick growth towards the distant lure of a Siren's song and spent five years ensnared by weeds and thorns at the University of Las Vegas School of Music where I studied classical guitar performance with the same zeal with which I studied literature half a decade before—and the same disappointment. I emerged from the rough, bruised and bleeding, only to find myself on yet another well-worn path, eerily similar to the one I spent such great effort leaving.

It’s then that I realized the path is within, and I was empowered—empowered by inner strength to create my own reality and no longer fighting the obstacles and paths presented by the physical world. Please visit my personal website, www.allenmichaelmusic.com for the culmination of my life’s experiences.

I do not want to be another drop of water competing with the sea to reach the shores of delight. I am like the sea itself lapping up the grains of Truth on endless beaches, but even the vast sea cannot reach past its own shores. Zen Ritual is my ship. It is my vessel for conveying to the world every aspect of my being and expression. It is my vessel for employing the talents of the gifted and passions of the compassionate to carry our vision and to take those wishing to reach a new world and those who are weary of the old one with us. I am not the shipbuilder, I am not the ship, I am not the sails, I am not the crew, I am not the winds, but they are all me.

Zen Ritual is a multitude of differences, synergetically synchronized with one vision of reaching, one hope of obtaining, one dream of discovering. Wherever a new shore lies, we implore destiny to take us there and beyond.