On a frigid winter day exactly 109 years ago, my father John Rempel Schmidt was born in a small farmhouse in a Plautdietsch (Low-German) Mennonite community in south central Kansas. I dedicate my very first podcast to my father’s memory. The show “We Are All One” will air on January 13. It will bring you best-selling author Dr. Larry Dossey’s latest thinking about the deep connectedness among all sentient beings, which my father and I experienced as “nothing [bad] between us.”

From a very young age, John Schmidt was a pull-himself-up-by-his-own-bootstraps kind of guy. He managed his own team of plow mules by the age of eight; he shoveled coal and waited tables to pay his way through medical school; and he spent most of his adult life among the Mennonites in Paraguay, South America, a stubborn lone ranger and medical pioneer.

He was a great man who worked tirelessly to make the world a better place. He was also an angry man who defied anyone who interfered with his work, which he viewed as his calling from God.

I spent a troubled childhood locking horns with my dad, and with the Mennonite church that was his bedrock. At eighteen, I stood before the entire congregation, including my father, and after confessing to unpardonable sins, I was banned from participating in church activities and rejected by my father.

My father’s journey was equally challenging. He began as a willful and powerful hero doctor who seemed invincible to the world and to me, and eventually became a humbled man no longer feeling useful in the world.

At the intersection of our broken lives, increased openness and healing between us became possible. In 1988, when I was thirty-seven, I received a surprising letter from my father asking me to once again appear before him and a congregation of Mennonites, this time to be the MC for my parents’ 45th anniversary. By now, I was beginning to understand that open vulnerability in front of this clan wouldn’t lead to my downfall, but rather to increasing strength, connection and authenticity.

After the anniversary program, family members congregated back at my parents’ home. The little house was filled with boisterous laughter and numerous conversations in multiple languages going on at the same time. The kitchen table was piled high with leftover food from the celebration. In the midst of all of the havoc, Dad seemed slightly bewildered, sitting off by himself at the end of the sofa. I caught him looking at me and crossed the room to sit next to him.

We sat side-by-side on my parents’ worn dusty-pink sofa with squeaky springs that sagged in the middle. Just sat there, silent, watching the commotion around us. I grabbed his hand, that hand with the big knuckles and thick veins running across it, like lots of crisscrossing dark blue rivers.

“Doa ess nuscht tsweschen ons (there is nothing [bad] between us),” I said hoarsely in our native Plautdietsch.

“Ne, doa ess nuscht tweschen ons,” Dad repeated.

Those were the last words my dad and I spoke to each other at every goodbye during the last two decades of his life.

We were as one. Nothing between us. I was frequently swept back to this profound personal experience of connection with my father while reading Dr. Dossey’s latest book One Mind. Dr. Dossey and I will talk about his book and its implications for our lives and for the planet in the podcast airing on January 13, “We Are All One.”