WHO IS MARK A. SHRYOCK?

A FEW OF YOU HAVE ASKED

By Mark A. Shryock

Several of you have been messaging asking who I am. Fair question. I have worn a lot of hats in this life — some of them quite different from each other — and I thought it might be useful to offer a brief window into the person behind the analysis you have been reading.

I live in Clayton, Georgia, tucked into the southern Appalachian Mountains, where I run my independent journalism and research operation under Earth Heart Encounters LLC. I write long-form investigative and geopolitical analysis and writings on practical spiritual topics.

But I did not start here.

I spent years teaching and writing internationally — South Korea, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Malaysia. I was a professor, a social justice journalist, a consultant, and eventually a PhD fellow at Pondicherry University in India, where I studied Indian spirituality, cultural studies, and the writings of Tagore. I hold an Honorary Professorship at the School of Ancient Wisdom in India. My academic work in nursing education is used in more than fifty universities. I left academia in 2018 to focus full time on writing, art, and the work you are now reading.

The moment in my journalism career that I return to most often happened in South Korea in 2009. Korea was in the aftermath of the Hebei Spirit oil spill — at the time the worst in Korean history — and two Indian sailors, Captain Jasprit Chawla and Chief Officer Syam Chetan, had been wrongfully imprisoned for over a year for a collision caused by a Samsung Heavy Industries barge. On New Year’s Eve, I went to the Indian Embassy and sat across from their wives. I looked into their tear-filled eyes and promised I would write their story. I wrote it for the Korea Times. Within thirteen hours of publication, the sailors were freed. I include that story not to take a bow, but because it is the reason I still believe that words, sourced carefully and aimed precisely, can change reality. You can read the original coverage and the documentation at the Free Hebei Spirit archive:

https://freehebeispirit.wordpress.com

Before the journalism and the academic years, there was a very different chapter. A business collapse. A dark night of the soul. A spiritual awakening that rerouted everything. Plateau Magazine published a profile of that part of my life in 2022 — a piece called “Into the Mystic” — that I think gives a more honest and vulnerable look at the interior architecture behind the exterior resume than anything I could write about myself. If you want to understand the person doing this work, that piece is probably the best place to start: https://www.theplateaumag.com/into-the-mystic

Somehow, throughout those years, the work kept placing me in rooms I had no business being in. I was asked to provide analysis and advice on all manner of things — government policy, nation-building, systemic change, cultural transitions. I consulted with officials and sat with world leaders and found myself contributing to conversations well above the pay grade of a prairie-restoring mystic from Kansas. I was never entirely sure how I got into those rooms. I think the pattern recognition had something to do with it. People working on large broken systems tend to find each other eventually.

And then there were the other calls.

One night at one in the morning my phone rang. On the other end was one of the world’s largest coconut plantation owners. He got straight to the point. His roosters were not winning. He needed my help. What could he do.

I was stunned — first because it was one in the morning, and second because I could not think of a single human being less qualified to answer that question than me. But as it happened, I had just the week before attended a rooster soup gathering with friends, where a champion rooster fighter had shown me how he swam his roosters with small anchors tied to their feet to build their strength.

I told the plantation owner what I had seen. There was a long silence, and then he shouted into the phone: my God, that is genius. I knew you would know.

And so it went. And so it has gone through much of my life — stumbling into the right room at the right moment, carrying some odd piece of knowledge I had no idea I would ever need, and finding that it mattered to someone. I have never fully understood it. I have learned to stop questioning it and just show up.

Another example. I had traveled to the School of Ancient Wisdom outside Bangalore simply to rest — a holiday, nothing more. While I was there I went to hear a well-known Oxford professor deliver a talk on morphic fields, a subject I had spent years researching and had recently been writing about extensively. The room was standing room only. When the professor stood to speak he looked out at the crowd, paused, and then said — to me, a stranger in the audience — that he did not know why, but he felt he was supposed to let me give the talk instead.

The entire room let out a collective gasp. So did I.

I got up and gave the talk. That is how I became an Honorary Professor at the School of Ancient Wisdom. I did not apply. I did not campaign for it. I walked in for a holiday and walked out with a professorship.

I have stopped trying to explain my life. I just try to be ready.

Though I should add — not everyone has been taken with me.

I was walking outside of Pollachi in Tamil Nadu one afternoon, on a dirt road that ran between the Western Ghats and the coconut plantations, using a long walking stick as I went. Coming the other direction was a man with a long white beard and white flowing robes. As he drew close he stopped, looked at me, smiled broadly and said — ahh, like Gandhi.

I was delighted. At the time I was deep in research on Gandhi for my doctoral work. I told him so. I said yes, I had read Gandhi’s words that very morning before my walk.

Instantly rage crossed his face.

Not you, he shouted. The stick.

And then he stormed off.

I am also a galleried artist. A mystic. A spiritual teacher with a growing body of work on spiritual ecology and consciousness transitions. A couple of my spiritual books are available on my timeline. I closed my author storefront on Amazon some time ago — I neither buy from nor sell through them, a decision rooted in conscience rather than convenience — and have not yet had time to build a replacement platform. When I do, all of my writing will be available as free downloads, with print copies available to order for those who want them. Knowledge should not be gated. I play Santa Claus. I maintain a long beard for reasons that are spiritual rather than seasonal. I have a teenage daughter named Tara who is an editor at Foxfire Magazine and who is, frankly, a better writer than I was at her age.

I have a Master’s in Systems Studies and Evolutionary Dynamics of Consciousness. My thesis was a seven-year project called Willow Creek Clearing in Cherokee County, Kansas — the first academically documented complete recreation of tallgrass prairie on destroyed land. I see the world in patterns. I always have. The dyslexia that nearly ended my academic career before it began turns out to be the thing that makes the work possible — I connect dots that linear thinkers miss because I have no choice but to see systems whole.

The geopolitical analysis, the spiritual ecology, the prairie restoration, the journalism that freed sailors, the art — these are not separate lives. They are the same set of eyes looking at the same broken and beautiful world from different angles.

I am grateful you are reading. I am more grateful still that the work is landing where it needs to land.

More to come.

— Mark

Read “Into the Mystic” — Plateau Magazine profile: https://www.theplateaumag.com/into-the-mystic

Read the Hebei Spirit coverage and documentation:

https://freehebeispirit.wordpress.com

Copyright © Mark A. Shryock — May be shared with attribution