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70 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z H E I L I G HEILIG GABE Gabe with granddaughter, Maria in Haifa. THEN AND NOW 4 B.A. Education 4 M.A., English, Univ. of Hawaii ADDRESS 4 8211 Sligo Creek Parkway Takoma Park, MD 20912 CONTACT 240 247-0055 B E I N G A N A N T I O C H graduate is like being a Marine.We all leave the Corps one day, but we leave as Marines.We conduct ourselves dif- ferently in life. Our DNA is different. Antioch was structured and cul- tured to affirm a sense of self-confi- dence and an inner-directed engage- ment with the world, with ethics proactively seeking social justice. As it has for thousands of other stu- dents, walking past Horace Mann’s bust every day and glancing at his charged words gave me at least 60% of my college education.Antioch set the course of my life and I’m still on that journey, with no desire to seek a different path. I’ve had my own go at Mann’s challenge, in various ways. The world’s a tough sell, but hey— I’m a Brooklyn-American. Expecting back-talk, making a little construc- tive trouble—that’s part of our life curriculum. Going to Antioch was a natural choice. I also think that one charac- ter trait Antioch graduates share is that more of us become indepen- dent practitioners in the use of our skills, rather being employees in jobs defined by someone else. Joseph Campbell noted,“the hero is the one who enters the forest in the place where there is no path.”With no claims to heroism whatsoever— having entered this life as an over- protected only child—in retrospect I can see that I kept making deci- sions that set me on a path to career independence. Without much of a plan, I created a fascinating, flexible career as an executive career coach and résumé writer—with 14 years in the Pentagon, five on K Street, and the rest working from my home in Takoma Park,Md., a town that’s a lot likeYellow Springs. I haven’t needed a job in 32 years. Now I want to assist people in creating their own career libera- tion process by showing them how to construct opportunities in their professional lives. I apprenticed with one of the deans of strategic corporate consulting, George Land, author of a Pulitzer-nominated book, Grow Or Die: The Unifying Principle of Transformation , which examines na- ture’s process of self-integration as its “growth strategy.” Fast Company named its annual innovation award for George. We met when he was Senior Consultant to the board at AT&T, teaching executives to pro- actively construct business oppor- tunities. I’m converting his oppor- tunity mapping method into e-tools for people to use in creating their careers. After Antioch, I spent two years getting a master’s in English at the University of Hawaii, where things were so relaxed the English depart- ment didn’t even bother offering a Ph.D.. I found other poets there and after Hawaii, I taught at a com- munity college outside Chicago for two years, then found another edu- cational hotbed, the UMass-Amherst School of Education, which was like Antioch in many ways, with every- one a decade older. Friends thought I’d have an easy time with my doc- toral thesis, but I didn’t want to squeeze my mind inside a thesis for several years. Cashing in my credits for a master’s in education, I headed for southern Mexico. I lived in Cuernavaca, spend- ing much of my time at the CIDOC Institute. Founded by Ivan Illich, whose writing buddies would stop in, share their latest manuscripts and teach brief seminars, CIDOC proved an antidote to grad school; and it epitomized Illich’s ideas about de- schooling society. I found its atmo- sphere exhilarating and relaxing. I loved living in Mexico.Arriving knowing no Spanish, I was wide- eyed in disbelief at the churning mural of Mexican street-life—drunks asleep on the curbs, burros standing dead-still in the middle of streets, dogs snarling from rooftops, exotic estates a block from the zocalo, their lavish grounds safe behind 25-foot walls topped with razor-wire and