Timber Hawkeye

Before he became known as Timber Hawkeye, he was Tomer Gal, born on July 19, 1977, in Bat Yam, Israel, and raised in Katzrin, a town in the Golan Heights. At 13, he moved with his parents and older sister to San Francisco, entering adolescence in a new country and culture. That mix of places, Israel, California, later Seattle and Hawaii, helps explain the grounded, searching quality of his work. He writes less like someone handing down doctrine and more like someone sorting through life in public, trying to make it simpler, kinder, and more honest.

Hawkeye worked a string of ordinary jobs before becoming an author. At 14, he delivered the San Francisco Examiner in the Sunset District. During his senior year of high school, he worked for the State Compensation Insurance Fund. He went on to attend California State University, Stanislaus, where he also worked for the university’s Foundation Department. Later, he worked as a paralegal in the Bay Area and in Seattle, Washington, focusing mainly on commercial real estate. He has said that living in Seattle felt more rewarding than living in California, even though he earned less money there.

That preference says a lot about the themes that would later show up in his writing. After Seattle, Hawkeye sold his belongings and moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, intending to lead a simpler life. On the island, he worked odd jobs to cover expenses while spending his time on leisure activities and study. The setting did not turn him into a distant guru; it gave him room to observe, reflect, and write in a direct, accessible way. The material that became his best-known book began as emails he sent to friends from Hawaii over roughly eight years.

In 2013, those emails became Buddhist Boot Camp, first self-published and later published by HarperCollins. The book introduced many readers to Hawkeye’s compact style: plainspoken, practical, and focused on how people meet everyday difficulty. After touring for Buddhist Boot Camp, he moved to the Eastern Sierras to write and publish his second book. In early 2016, he founded Hawkeye Publishers, a publishing company created to publish his own work and the work of others.

His memoir, Faithfully Religionless, was self-published for readers who consider themselves spiritual but not religious. It launched at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and its tour included appearances at several churches across the United States. In 2022, Hawkeye self-published The Opposite of Namaste, which contains 84 transcripts of his podcast. Across these books, his appeal rests in a steady message: life will not always become calm on command, but people can practice meeting it differently. As one of his widely shared lines puts it, “You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying. What you can do is calm yourself. The storm will pass.”