Chronology 
“Life — mighty journey!
“Looking back and reflecting on life, I feel grateful for and humbled by its gifts: the challenges and joys of this endless, awesome serpentine path.”
one: overview
For over 20 years, Gene de Paule has worked in various creative fields, including music, photography, nonfiction writing, and developmental editing. He is fluent in three languages and many art-related technologies. Since 2022, Gene has collaborated with Zo Viya on Vocarium Author Services’ editorial projects. He is also a Lyme disease survivor.
Gene was born in Mexico in 1979 to a family of academics and spent most of his formative years in Jesuit institutions. Extracurricularly, he studied music, operatic voice, theatrical voice, and other vocal techniques, eventually developing and teaching his own vocal training program. He is passionate about music, the written word, discovering world cultures, and his practice of Siddha Yoga.
After spending time photographing nature on the East Coast of the U.S. in 2019, Gene experienced a monthslong cascade of debilitating ailments: myalgia, dermatitis, arthralgia, and finally, carditis and cognitive impairment. A year later, in Mexico, serological and PCR tests confirmed his dreaded suspicion: while in the U.S., he was bitten by ticks carrying the spirochete that causes Lyme disease.
During a year of antibiotic therapy in Mexico, many symptoms gradually faded. But the disease continued to progress, affecting the depths of his mind. Day after day, Gene’s thinking and speech slowed down; night after night, hypersensitivity, sleeplessness, anxiety, and an uncontrollable temper grew darker. He looked to the East Coast of the U.S. for more specialized treatment.
After two years bedridden, Gene’s first thought when deciding to get back to work was: “We must write about all this, raise awareness, join forces with others in this fight, and do all we can to make sure that not one more person suffers from these awful tick-borne diseases.”
two: beginnings
I was born on a rainy summer day, the firstborn and only child of a short-lived marriage of two psychology students from a Jesuit university in search of their buddha-nature, in the great metropolis of the Valley of Mexico.
My first friends were large ocote trees and sheep. That’s because, soon after my birth, my parents moved from the capital to a remote village in the depths of the Huasteca forest to live a simple life, meditate, and work for the local indigenous community radio station, a product of the social work of the Society of Jesus.
But, like ocote wood, our provincial, forestial heaven was quickly consumed in the fire of my parents’ passions, and within a few months, our very young and tender family returned to Mexico City, where the civil, Zen marriage was dissolved.
So that my mother could remarry, when I was 4 years old, I was baptized in the Catholic faith. A gentle, loving giant from a traditional Catholic family became enamoured with my mother and her child — and we with him.
A new normalcy set in: an urban, upper middle class, academic, religious, all-planned-out world. Yet, despite the comfortable predictability of our new life, as time went by, I felt more and more as though I was not at home and dreamed of starting my own journey one day.
three: music all around
I grew up surrounded by music. My mother’s family carried a passion and talent for choral music, and there was always singing at my grandparents’ kitchen table.
One of my uncles had studied music pedagogy and was eager to use me as a test pupil. When I was not yet eight years old, we would sit for hours at the piano in his apartment a couple times a week for him to instill in my young being his vast knowledge.
The tutoring ended before he could accomplish his goal, but in the following decade, his investment paid off. I would spend many hours at music school, learn classical guitar, participate in the school choir, and write and perform many juvenile love songs.
four: at school
At the advice of my mother’s Jesuit counsellor, I began attending religious school and continued to do so all through university.
As an average teenager, I didn’t find high school very interesting. I only got a taste for it when I began winning writing competitions and when guitar-playing fostered a tribe of schoolmates who sang clever covers with me all recess.
Despite an earnest desire to “serve God,” and the school priests’ high hopes that I might find a spiritual vocation, I didn’t truly awaken to the religious experience until the winter holidays in 1994, at my father’s house, during an unexpected encounter with a cassette tape of Hindustani sacred music. That one encounter would forever change the course of my life.
five: ashram life
At age fifteen, I dropped out of school, left my tribe, and moved in with my father, who didn’t want a problem teenager but, rather, a young disciple and a pal. He allowed it, so I began participating full time in chanting and meditation programs at the yoga ashram in Mexico City and continued high school by homeschooling myself, as a mere obligation.
A year later, I met my Guru, and I started making yearly pilgrimages to her ashram in upstate New York for summerlong retreats of service, chanting and meditation.
Most of my exuberant teenage years were spent imbibing Sanskrit hymns and spiritual books and helping produce chanting and meditation programs with the happiest crowd of like-minded “loonies.”
six: businessman
At the turn of the millennium, after briefly coursing through Theological Science at university without much satisfaction, I decided it was time to become wealthy.
I wasn’t interested in the money per se. I naively thought that having money would make it easier to dedicate myself to my higher aspirations: searching for God and studying whatever and wherever I wanted.
Thinking that within a couple years we’d consolidate a mighty fortune, I went into business with a good friend. We were young and inexperienced in the long-fang ways of the business world, and we soon ran into unforeseen, unpayable issues.
After a few more unsuccessful moneymaking trials, three years later, I started a music and multimedia production business. With the help of an uncle, I set up a project studio at my home, in the beautiful colonial district of Coyoacán, in Mexico City. There, through hours of concentrated focus and effort, I taught myself to arrange, record, and produce music, working on hundreds of tracks, as I watched the seasons pass and the vines spread, year after year, around the bars of the studio’s window.
Between 2004 and 2010, collaborating with dozens of artists, I produced hundreds of music tracks and one documentary filmed in the Mexican mountains, at 16,000 feet. And then I retired from that business, way up high.
seven: the voice
I studied theatrical voice with Roy Hart teachers in France and operatic voice with the soprano Rosa Maria Diez, a bel canto professor at the Music Conservatory of Mexico. I worked with and learned from working with many singers. For a while, I had the fortune of working as a backup vocalist for one of Mexico’s most beloved popular singers, Juan Gabriel.
A couple of times, I tried to launch a solo pop rock project, but to no avail. I knew how to connect with an audience, but I was insecure about my voice and content. After years of vocal training and experiences, I still felt I hadn’t found my sound. (My pets, at home, however, disagreed. Every evening, my dog, Olaf, and my cat, Kana, would sing along, very emotionally, during my vocal practice.)
Through the voice, I continued to grow as a human being and learned to connect with people. For some time, I taught a vocal workshop, Body, Mind & the Voice!, a signature program that I developed based on my years of vocal studies, practice, and unique experiences.
One such unique experience was being invited to participate in a summer festival of rural opera, in Vaala, Finland. During the nightless summer of the far north, a group of amateur musicians and I rehearsed and performed an opera by a local composer, sung in a local dialect — all in a refurbished 19th-century cowshed!
eight: Russia
In 2011, feeling increasingly constricted within the studio walls, I decided to close it down, spread my wings, and fly east. I started a new business project, promoting premium agricultural exports from Mexico, and went on to develop new markets in Russia and Europe.
In Russia, I fell in love with the language, and I decided to return often and stay for longer and longer periods of time to study Russian — the language, the culture, and the people.
I studied in the Pushkin Institute, where I was exposed to an interesting mix of a Soviet-style teaching environment with a buoyant community of students from all over the world. It was a rich and formidable experience! I’d continue studying Russian intermittently for some years.
Around that time, I also began writing a number of essays, with the intention of putting together a book on philosophical principles, of which I completed a first draft in 2015: 800 pages long and still many revisions away from seeing the light of day!
That same year, with the economy contracting as a result of the economic sanctions, it soon became unsustainable for me to continue promoting premium exports to Russia. I was forced to pause my export business and return to Mexico.
After many years of multiple enterprises, I had become wealthy not in dollars — or in rubles — but in myriad experiences, some tough and exhausting, others sublime, all enriching and life-affirming.
nine: shadows and light
Before long, the great love of my youth took hold of me again and brought me back to the ashram where I used to spend my summers twenty years before. This time, I would stay not just for one summer but for two wonderful years, in between the shadows and the light.
At the ashram, I offered full-time volunteer service as a photographer. My daily task was to discover and capture nature’s infinite nuances: from spring to autumn, from summer to winter, from sunrise to sunset, always chasing the moon. Every day, I photographed and edited hundreds, at times thousands, of images of nature and the shining faces of visitors and residents: light and shadows confabulating to express the love and teachings of the great sage of upstate New York.
ten: facing east
On leaving the ashram, I returned to Moscow in the fall of 2018 to continue studying the Russian language. This time, I shared the experience with Zo. She wanted to see Russia, and I invited her to write about her experiences of observing and meeting real people on the streets and in their homes, whom I would photograph for a coauthored photo travelogue book, Facing East. This was at a time when many of us thought that fostering bridges between peoples was more important than ever: people meeting people, raising our mutual understanding of each other’s uniqueness and of how our basic needs, so similar — love, friendship, sustenance, safety — should trump the charade of politics and division peddled on the news.
During what would be my last visit to Russia as yet, I was invited to participate in a modern performance of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and in a poetry recitation day at the Red Square, all in Russian! For the time being, that much would have to suffice in my love affair with the Russian world — a world that showed me and taught me about what basic humanity and friendship truly are.
eleven: welcome to ixodia
The 2019 pandemic grounded me in Mexico, where, a year later, I learned that I was suffering from an insatiable infection affecting my heart and brain, caused by the bite of an Ixodidae tick: Lyme neuroborreliosis.
Month after month, I spent my days looking out at the beautiful perennial trees outside the window in my hut-refuge in the forest, learning to make friends with pain and, unbounded by time, reflecting on my life’s journey thus far. In the darkness, under a clear, starry sky, I dreamed of new journeys and new creations.
In 2021, Zo came from the US and joined me in my forestial healing retreat. Full of hope, she dived with me into the complex informational landscape about the disease, helped me explore therapy options, and began campaigning among our friends to raise funds for specialized therapy on the East Coast of the US, where I chose to continue my treatment.
She accompanied me through my wretched days, and I accompanied her through her grief: life, we learned together, was as beautiful as it was tough. But Grace shone bright and, somehow, guided us both out of the whirlpool of suffering.
twelve: a new full cycle
During four years in recovery from neuroborreliosis, accompanied by Zo, I slowly gestated a publication project, Ixodia, based on interviews with many heroes on the frontlines of the fight against Lyme disease.
Galvanized by a friend from my high school musical tribe, I developed the concept of a new music project, Moonphonic, a musical reflection on healing.
Now, in 2025, I wish to pour my newly found strength, the practice and learning of years, and my ever-present joy for life into these projects.
With the blessings, love, and support of the wonderful people in my life — let us begin!