Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak.   Measuring in around 5’6” AJ Koziel isn’t tall, but he’s built tough. A self-proclaimed blue-collar Joe, he’s almost always dressed in a suit of Carhartt armor and, on this morning, like most mornings, he stops by the Train Car Coffee Shop, his thick and calloused hands folded around a thermos of hot coffee.

Since the age of 14 AJ has been working with his hands and now, at the age of 47, he’s indistinguishable from the strength required to run his concrete business, a trade that makes for notoriously hard work.

Tie rebar. Hammer stakes. Install branding. Nail boards. Build forms. Mix concrete. Pour forms. Wait. Trowel. Wait. Remove forms. Sand. Cleanup. Rest. Repeat.

Despite concrete’s mean reputation in the contracting business, there’s a subtle poetry and softness behind its tough demeanor. A heavy and wet mix of sediment churning around in liquid form, the concrete worker can’t demand it do too much of anything and must steward it instead, channeling it from one place to another, corralling it into level shapes, and waiting for its pool of promise to harden into a foundation strong enough to stand on. To build a house on. To make a home on.

By both blood and demeanor, AJ was born to do the job. His Dutch grandfather, who immigrated to America in the 18th century, worked as a straapmaker (road maker), paving early New York area streets. His work was integral to American history and his name is brandished on at least four of the buildings George Washington used during the Revolutionary War, including a little house in Tappan, NY where John Andre the British spy was tried and hung. As if to speak to the family’s higher calling, he also built the church next door, tasked with the spiritual repercussions of such bloody times.

Contained within AJ is a similar mix of the earthly and divine, which is to say he pours concrete just as he does the ethereal energies swirling about. At heart a pagan (by which I simply mean someone who finds the divine outside of mainstream religions), AJ has always taken his communion with nature. Raised on a 180 acre retired farm in New Jersey, his earliest memories are of gratitude for the company of trees and animals. But still, living just 35 miles away from New York City, he longed for an environment free of city skylines and smog.

So, around about 20 years ago, AJ and his young wife made their way to Nederland where AJ got a job at One Brown Mouse. Only in his 30s, his body was already worn from manual labor and he struggled to clasp his gnarled hands around the wares he sold. Regulars chided him, likening him to a friendly ogre (but an ogre nonetheless). One of them though, Sal Vitale, offered to help.

A Reiki master, Sal was a practitioner of the palm healing technique first developed by Mikao Usui in Japan in 1922. Then a young man seeking spiritual enlightenment, Usui sought the advice of a Zen teacher who told him fast atop Kurama Yama, a sacred mountain north of Kyoto. On the 21st and final day of his fast, Usui received a white light, which he described as a mysterious atmosphere and a miraculous sign, both of which he later encased in the term “Reiki.”

More than an energy, Reiki is a healing technique, one Usui practiced by translating the energy from the air to others in need by working it through the soul. Although the substance with which he worked was intangible, he believed it could be channeled and redirected to produce concrete healing in physical beings. Nearly 100 years later and thousands of miles away, Sal sat firmly in his lineage and offered Reiki for AJ’s untimely ailment.

“I hadn’t heard of Reiki, but it was the last resort before surgery,” AJ says. “I came to it with an open mind and even in our first session I could feel the bones in my hands opening up, I could feel the energy working.”

In that moment AJ became an avid student of Reiki and now, 10 years later, he’s a Reiki master and teacher who works through his own able hands on anyone in need of the good juju the universe inherently contains.

Over the years he’s worked with hundreds of people, most of whom he already knew, and much of the time without a fee because, well, “Reiki’s the sort of thing that doesn’t really have much to do with money,” he says.
It’s the kind of spiritous thing that’s notoriously hard to work with. Study. Meditate. Work. Be grateful. Be generous. Wait. Watch. Rest. Repeat. But, despite Reiki’s mysterious demeanor, it has a way of giving a person a sense of balance, which is to say it gives them a foundation to stand on. To build a life on.

A weekly column about locals living along the Peak-to-Peak. To suggest someone for a profile please email Sarah at mountainfolktales@gmail.com.

(Originally published in the November 1, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)