Unedited version of her autobiography, written for the book “Under One Sky”
This unedited version of Joyce’s autobioography is nearly twice as long as the one that appeared in the fascinating study of astrology, “Under One Sky” by Rafael Nasser (who is also a student of Taoist inner alchemy). Included are the “sensitive” outtakes, such as her contacts with Aliens, a sexual affair, and many fascinating details of her life that there was simply not emough room to include in the book. Joyce labored for three years to distill her life down into this long version.
Under One Sky has astrologers from twelve different schools, many of theim quite famous, do blind readings of Joyce’s birth chart. The idea is that the reader can decide whose reading most accurately reflects Joyce’s actual life. Each astrologer also describes their process of reading a chart, and their ideas on fate, destiny and the use of astrology. This is the only book on astrology that offers some an obvious way to test the validity of astrology.
Rafi chose Joyce as his subject because she had already lived a full 60 years of life, by which time any planetary influences should have had time to manifest. Rafi admired Joyce personally and found her life itneresting, as you will likely also find it. Joyce’s story is of a women struggling against huge odds and repeated tragedies and physical suffering. Her drive for spiritual dvelopment trumps her suffering with light and grace.
Everyone who knew Joyce agrees she was a being with remarkable spiritual presence. She was a talented healer, movement artist and teacher, and writer. Her life touiched many people, as evidenced by her Life Celebration service after her passing.
Healing Tao USA is pleased to carry Under One Sky. 500 pages. $25. Of the 12 readings in the book, Joyce thought four were excellent, four were half-accurate, and four had misssed the mark completely.
Age 0 – 22 What Delights Me, Love-Hate with Daddy
Age 22 & 26 1st Marriage & the 60’s
Age 26 & 28 Life in Peru’s High Andes
Age 28 & 32 Raising goats, Mother’s death
Age 33-35 New Zealand, Spiritual Awakening
Age 35-41 Feldenkrais, Polarity, Divorce
Age 42 – 46 Mantak, Tao, Marriage to Michael
Age 47-49 Father murdered; Great Pyramid initiation
Age 49- 54 Car Accident, Surgeries, Broken Life
Age 54-60 South Pacific & Asheville, Rabbit & Dolphins
About my process misc. out-takes from published bio
What delights me:
smiling eyes, laughter, music, light, sunshine, hugging, teaching, learning, playing, talking with friends, snuggling, solitude, babies, trees, river otters, ocean, tropics, warm seas, swimming with dolphins, islands, white sand, clear bright colors, aquamarine, kissing, being on the sea, in the sea, near the sea, snorkelling, gardening, cooking, flowers, flutes, fertile soil, rocks, roses, lilies, daylilies, summer, singing cicadas, spring, emerald green grass, rabbits, soft fur, dark chocolate, goats, fragrances of rose, jasmine, rose geranium, plumeria, vanilla and coconut, waterfalls, making love, moving, meditating, butterflies, hawks, hummingbirds, turtles, seabirds, new snow falling, dark starry nights, evening star, new moon, full moon on water, reading, a clean house, long walks in the country, dancing, singing, acting, painting, telling stories, swimming in oceans, ponds, lakes, rivers and pools, whalesong, chi kung, long warm baths, volcanoes, lightning, thunder, tropical rains, crowns and garlands of flowers, Polynesian dancing, massages, silk, velvet, high mountains, pandas, the call of loons, redwood trees, subtle energy, inner sound, following the mysterious unfolding of the Tao, running freely, jumping for joy, Rumi, Hafiz, ancient stones, the company of mystics, breathing, being alive now…
Shortly after I was conceived, one of the deadliest tornadoes in Oklahoma history swept through Pryor. Although our family escaped harm, the tornado made a big impression on my mother and on me. Pictures of me as a newborn safe in my mother’s arms were on the same pages in the family album as photos of the devastation wreaked by the tornado. The theme of change, often sudden and sometimes destructive, has run throughout my life.
I was wanted, eagerly awaited, and warmly welcomed to this world. My maternal grandmother came out from Indiana for my birth. When I was six weeks old, my father drove my grandmother, my mother and me back to my grandmother’s small hometown in Indiana. He left the three of us there while he went off to join the army. We saw him sporadically until I was a year old. Then he went off to the war in the South Pacific and I did not see him again until I was more than three years old.
I was very happy during my first three years. I formed strong bonds with my mother and grandmother who were both warm, affectionate and loving. They were also fun-loving, and my grandmother had a great sense of humor and a wonderful laugh. They were both devout Roman Catholics who nurtured my spirituality as well as my deep affinity for nature and my sense of wonder. In my earliest memory, in the autumn before I was three, I am with my grandmother in the woods at the edge of town. We are standing beneath a large beautiful hickory tree, holding baskets in which we are gathering nuts. Everything is glowing. One vast unified web of life is filled with an inner radiance. The essential unity experienced in that moment resonates throughout my whole life.
I was a sunny, gregarious and self-confident child. During the war, when my mother took me on the train to visit relatives in the city, I would walk up and down the aisle, talking to all the soldiers. I was also very precocious and could read, count and recite many nursery rhymes by heart by the time I was three. I enjoyed helping with chores and being given responsibility. I loved sunlight, but when I was three I was kept in the darkness for what seemed to be weeks so that I would not become blind while I had German measles. The dance of light and darkness is also woven into my life tapestry.
I talked about my Daddy all the time although I only knew him from unconscious memories, photos, and what other people said about him. He was tall, handsome, very intelligent, and charismatic. I was very proud of him. Life seemed perfect and would only become more perfect when he came home from the war. When he finally did come home, my whole life was suddenly changed in quite the opposite direction. He thought I was too independent and self-assured, and he set out deliberately to break my will with stern discipline and physical punishment. He was from the mountains of Kentucky where a peach tree switch was preferred for its sharp sting, but a powerful hand would also do. I was terrified of him and began having nightmares. I was also terrified of a big ghost who would come down out of the high ceiling of my closet at night, but Daddy would say to me, “Don’t be afraid of ghosts. I’m the only bogeyman. I’m the only one you have to be afraid of.” He would not let my mother come to comfort me at night. I felt banished from paradise. My guardian angel was my only protector. In my big bed, I slept on the very edge so that she would have room for her wings.
One of my strongest early memories is from the summer when I was three and a half, when Daddy took me to Kentucky for the first time. Our first stop was the general store. Inside, in the dim light, I stood enthralled by all the exotic sights and smells. Strange people sat all around talking in a dialect I could barely understand. Just then someone handed me a piece of candy. I was just about to say, “Thank You” when Daddy yelled, “Say thank you!” Startled, I hesitated. He yelled, “Say thank you, dammit.”
Startled, scared, stubborn, I hesitated longer. He started violently spanking me, then yelling even louder when I started crying. Finally people pulled him away and made him stop. I felt ashamed, humiliated, and resentful. After that I was uncomfortable being the center of attention in groups of people.
When I was four years and thirteen days old, my sister was born, a rude awakening for someone who had been an only child for so long. Two years later, on January 22, my brother was born. Finally my father had a real son. I was displaced somewhat as the carrier of his hopes and dreams, but he still focused much of his attention on me. Although I was my mother’s favorite, she had less time for me. I had more chores to do, which I did enjoy. I was standing on a chair washing dishes before I was six. I liked doing anything that was grown up. My mother also confided in me and asked my advice. She often said to me: “It is strange, but it seems as though in some way you are the mother and I am the daughter.” Even though I always felt cared for and nurtured by her, I understood what she meant.
My father was friendly, generous and helpful to his extended family and to strangers but often saturnine with his own children. If he didn’t have something as a child, he didn’t want us to have it. He was proud of me and would brag about me to others, but with me he alternated being warm and affectionate with being critical and demanding. If my brother or sister did anything wrong, it was I who was punished for letting them do it. He seemed to enjoy inflicting pain and dominating me and yet expected me to instantly forgive him and come sit on his lap. I was expected to suppress my own feelings in order to be the child he wanted me to be. I loved, admired and feared him, and I tried to please him, but I was determined not to let him break my spirit.
By the time I was seven, I wanted to spend as much time away from home as possible. I remember standing on my back porch one day, saying to myself, “I’ll never get what I need around here.” I began spending most of my time with my grandmother who now lived, with my two single uncles, two houses away from us. I would come home from school, do my chores, and then go to have dinner and spend the night at her house. We would stay up late, sitting at her kitchen table drinking RC colas, laughing together, and talking about everything just like grownups. We were each other’s favorite person in the whole world.
She was like a strong old tree whose resiliance and inner strength was transmitted silently and steadily to me. Although she exuded light-hearted joy, she had experienced adversity in her life. At the age of two, her mother had died. When she was still a young woman, her husband had died of pneumonia after spending days in the cold, damp earth digging a well. She was left with five of her eight children still at home. They survived during the depression by tenant farming, raising tobacco. My mother and her sisters left school to work in the city as maids. Around the kitchen table at night, my grandmother told me her stories, including some she hadn’t told anyone else. She never complained, though, or dwelled on the past. Living joyfully in the present, she gave me gifts of spirit which have sustained me all my life.
Other than spending time with my grandmother, my favorite activities as a child involved nature, color, and movement. I was passionate about coloring and hunting Easter eggs, being thrown high in the air and caught by my uncle, planting flowers, swinging high for a long time, roller skating, riding my bicycle, doing somersaults down the grassy green slope, running barefoot in freshly-cut grass, picking plantain to feed my rabbits, lovingly caring for my bunnies and dolls, sitting under the grape arbor sharing secrets with my favorite cousin, running in the dark catching fireflies with my friends, eating homemade ice cream in the summer and snow ice cream in the winter, coming home from school to my mother’s freshly baked pies, visiting my city cousins, taking pictures with my Brownie camera, reading, simply drinking in color, painting with watercolors, listening to music, and dressing up at Halloween.
Our small town was evenly divided between Protestants and
German Catholics, two distinct groups, two distinct cultures, which did not mix. Our lives revolved in a relatively small orbit around the church. Every day for years the same little boy carried my books on the four block walk to Catholic school. There the same three girls were my best friends. On weekends aunts, uncles, and cousins visited. My mother’s two sisters together had five children, and my cousins were very important to me. The one who was just two months older than me seemed almost like a twin sister. Family, church and school were my whole world and I felt in place in it, grounded and connected. It was my mother’s world. My father, who was an agnostic, lived in it but was not really of it.
He liked to think for himself, outside of conventional belief systems, and he didn’t mind being seen as different. Even as a small child I sensed his restlessness. He had wanted to go to college and law school on the GI bill but decided that he should instead use his many construction skills to support his growing family. He worked very hard to provide for us, but he felt that in our small town his opportunities were limited. He talked of moving us to Peru. The idea of living in South America appealed to my own adventurous spirit. I longed to explore the world. Most of the year I travelled through reading, but in the summers from the time I was three years old until I was nine I lived in what was to me a foreign land, the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky.
My father was born on a remote farm deep in the mountains and lived there until he left home at the age of fifteen. His mother had died when he was only two years old. She had worked herself to death, he said, caring for six young children while living a harsh pioneer life. His father and his second wife still lived on the old homeplace. Getting there was an arduous adventure, for after a certain point there were no more roads. From there on, we had to slowly maneuver a big truck down meandering creekbeds all day before finally arriving in the wide green valley cradled by mountains. To me it was the end of the world. Beyond was only wilderness: deep, dark, primal and awe-inspiring.
I was welcomed as my father’s child, as kin. My step-grandmother, appropriately named Luna, was warm and nurturing, getting up each day before dawn to milk cows, churn fresh butter and bake biscuits for our breakfast feast. From Grandfather, who seemed dour and stern, I kept my distance. I wore sundresses made out of flour sacks, ran barefoot, rode donkeys and horses, climbed mountains, listened to long-told stories, and learned to milk cows. By the time I was six, I also had an important job. On the sandy bottom land my father was raising acres of strawberries to sell in the faraway city. He hired local people to pick the berries. My job was to sit on the big porch and count how many baskets and crates each person picked. As always, I enjoyed having grownup responsibilities. My happiest moments were spent out in nature. Running wild over the mountains, exploring the creeks, I experienced many magical moments.
My desire to explore the outer world has always been balanced by my yearning to discover the inner. All of my life I have navigated by deep inner knowing and passionate longing for union with my source. Whether I have called it God, the Beloved, or the Great Mystery, my orientation has been the same. As a young child my spontaneous nature was to be compassionate, generous and joyful. My father and my mother’s relatives would often say, “She is naturally good, just like Grandma.” After hearing that often enough, I became self-conscious and rather than being just naturally myself, I aspired to be good. Although he was not religious, my father held up a very high ethical standard, expecting me to be impeccably honest, kind, and generous.
My natural spirituality was primarily shaped and conditioned by my Catholic upbringing. I delighted in the holy feeling of the Mass and the music, light, color and fragrance that created a sacred atmosphere. As a child, when I would think about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I knew I wanted to be a saint, the lover and beloved of God. I especially wanted to be like St. Francis of Assisi, a blessing to humans and animals alike. As a Catholic, in addition to being good, I was supposed to avoid sin. Because there were so many sins, both mortal and venial, they were impossible to avoid. Guilt and shame began to cloud my natural joy. Nonetheless, I was a happy child, enchanted with life, seeing the bright side of everything.
When I was nine, several life changing events occured. At the end of the summer Luna, my step-grandmother in Kentucky, died suddenly. My grandfather went to live with his oldest daughter, and the wilderness overtook the gardens and pastures. There would be no more summer vacations with my father’s family. Then suddenly on the night before Thanksgiving my father came home from a trip and announced that he had bought a farm and some other land in another state and we were moving the next day. My mother refused to move until the day after Thanksgiving. He gave me a choice (which I had one day to make) to stay with my grandmother whom I loved more than anyone on Earth or to go with my family. I wanted to stay with her, but I thought I should go with my family. I went, making a choice I greatly regretted later.
I never got to say goodbye to my friends or to get my books from my desk at school. On the way to our new home, the truck with most of our belongings was in an accident right in front of us on the road, and we saw everything scattered damaged over the highway. Fortunately, my rabbits, who were in the back of our truck, were not hurt. When we arrived at the farmhouse, we found it had no running water, plumbing, insulation or heat except for one coal stove. It was also haunted by ghosts. I had to get up early to milk our four cows, then wear high boots to wade through the knee-deep rushing waters of the creek to get to the road. I rode the bus to a country school with violent children who threw knives and threatened me. I was terrified. I was seen as an outsider, the first new child in years to move into the area and a Catholic besides. If I ventured outside the small schoolhouse, I was attacked and thrown to the ground by large gangs of boys who would all pile on top of me. Because the school had only an outhouse, I stopped drinking water so that I would not have to go outside. Academically, I was far ahead of the other students. Eventually I was skipped a grade ahead.
One day I came home from school to find all my rabbits gone. My father’s older sister had taken them away to be butchered. I was heartbroken. My mother, who had always been a vibrant presence at home, was gone until evening working in my father’s new business. After the freedom of living in town, able to walk everywhere, we were suddenly dependent on my father for transportation. My mother did not drive and my father did not encourage her to learn to drive his trucks, our only vehicles. He seemed to enjoy having more control over us. A source of pain for my mother and for me was that my father would often refuse to take us to church on Sundays. My life was narrowed down to home and school, and both seemed cold and bleak. A measure of my desperation is that I overcame my lifelong honesty to steal money from my mother’s purse. I bought snacks for my schoolmates, hoping they would treat me less harshly. I found my only comfort in nature: in the solid bodies and simple affection of the cows, their warm creamy milk, the lush green life bursting from the the earth after long, harsh winter.
In the Spring when I was eleven, we moved about fifteen miles away to an apartment in a big boarding house my father had built to accomodate forty male construction workers. Soon after we moved, on May 22, my beloved grandmother died suddenly of a stroke. Although I had not been able to see her since we moved from Indiana a year and a half before, we wrote to each other, and I always felt her loving presence in my life. She had not been ill, so her death was a great shock. I was devastated and felt there was no one left in the world who understood me. At the same time, I sensed her always present, watching over me. A few months later, on September 15, my youngest sister was born. I was thrilled to have someone new to love. I named my sister and took care of her as if I were her mother.
The area where we were living was in a state of rapid change. My father had moved us there because he knew a nuclear facility was to be built. Thousands of construction workers were pouring in and my father was ready for them. He bought and sold land, built highways and a supermarket and established a restaurant, lumberyard, hardware store and boarding house. From the age of eleven to almost thirteen, I lived under unusual circumstances. Our front yard was the entrance to the lumberyard. The front door opened into the hardware store which adjoined our living room. We slept under the same roof with forty single men and three women housekeeper-cooks. I was also working hours every day in the boarding house as a waitress. Surrounded by men, I enjoyed talking with them and enjoyed their attention, developing a crush on one of the younger ones.
I was also exposed to a dark side of life. Against my mother’s wishes, I sometimes went with the maids when they cleaned the men’s rooms. I would see lying around magazines with titles like True Crime and Sexology. Their covers often had pictures of women tied up or lying murdered in a pool of blood. These vivid images appeared in my dreams as I, night after night, hid or fled from a rough looking man who wanted to torture and kill me.
At school, since I had skipped a grade, I was the youngest girl in my class surrounded by older girls and boys who were much tougher than me. I spent my time in class drawing and daydreaming, taking refuge in a fantasy world where I was a princess who had been sent, for some unknown reason, to live among strangers completely unlike her.
When I was twelve, I discovered a world where I felt blissfully and completely at home. My father built a large swimming pool, not for us children to enjoy ourselves, he insisted, but for the boarders and as a ready water supply in case of fire. Before I entered into watery bliss, however, I went through a rite of passage.
As the pool was being filled for the first time, my brother and sister and I ran back and forth, up and down the steep slope from the shallow into the deep end where the water was already a few feet deep. My father was working up above, pouring the concrete walkway around the pool. Suddenly I slipped on the slick slope, my feet flew out from under me, and I landed hard on my back with the lower part of my body in the water. I was paralyzed, unable to move, breathe or speak. No one seemed to see me. I focused my mind on my father and willed him to notice me. Finally he turned around, jumped into the pool, picked me up and began to carry me toward the house, about a hundred feet away. I was immobile, in a deep stillness, suspended from ordinary reality. We were almost to the house when I began to sense how concerned he was. Just as I thought, “He really does love me,” I was able to breathe. Within a week, my whole back was covered with small, hard painful boils. Once the boils were healed and the pool was full, I spent every spare moment in the water, swimming and diving hour after hour until I fell into bed at dusk exhausted. I discovered that I am a water creature, that water is my natural element.
The dreamworld was also very real to me. At night I dreamed in vivid color of swimming through subterranean rivers, sliding down vast snow covered mountains, encountering wild animals, moving with a few companions through and on Earth as it was long long ago. At some point, I began to call these dreams, which I had had since I was four, my primeval earth dreams. I also flew and glided between the trees in great forests, did aerial gymnastics and taught others how to fly.
Just before my thirteenth birthday, the construction phase of the nuclear facility was completed ahead of schedule. The construction workers suddenly left, and our businesses collapsed. My father couldn’t collect on money owed him, but he was determined to repay his debts rather than declare bankruptcy. It would take him many years to repay them, so during my high school and college years our family lived with intense financial and emotional stress.
My father’s response was to have unpredictable, violent outbursts of rage, sometimes hitting us, always yelling, criticising and belittling us. All of his anxieties and frustrations were taken out on us. He believed it was wrong to hit a woman, so no matter how angry he was, he never hit my mother. It was ok to spank and whip his children, however. It was for their own good. I began to live in a state of hypervigilance, always on alert, trying to do the right thing to avoid his anger. If he was in a bad mood, he would listen to no one. When he was in a good mood, he enjoyed having intellectual arguments with me, but he hated to let me win.
Daddy told us every day how rough he had it as a kid and how lucky we were. He often shared with us his ideal of family life. He wanted to be a patriarch like Ol’ Tom Sutton down in Kentucky. When Tom’s children married, he made them build houses right next door.The whole clan ate at his long table. Tom kept handy at his side a long stick so he could hit anyone who said or did anything he didn’t like.
Daddy felt that children needed to work to earn their keep. He turned the empty lumberyard into a mini-farm with cows, pigs, chickens and sheep. I saw him as a slavedriver forcing us to care for the livestock and work all day in the hot summer sun to grow a big garden. We also had to can, pickle and freeze the harvest. We had always enjoyed an abundance of good nourishing delicious food and that continued to be true, no matter how little money we had. In fact, we had so much that we were giving away much of the food we grew and canned. I learned and mastered skills that would serve me well later in life, but, because my labor was coerced, I lost all joy in the process.
The fear and paranoia of the Cold War era had seeped deeply into my consciousness. At night I dreamed of either North Korean soldiers or Nazi stormtroopers invading our house, seeking us out to kill us. In my dreams I would hide in the back of my closet, close my eyes and, hoping to be invisible, draw my attention inside so that they would not even sense my presence. By day, I acquired an extensive list of provisions for a bomb shelter and made one in a basement room. I filled bags with sand and put them over the windows from the outside, then went down the list, filling gallon jars with water and lining the room with supplies of canned food and blankets left over from the days of the boarders.
I also had a long range plan to run away from home, taking my sister and brother with me. For years I saved my money and worked on my plan, knowing I couldn’t attempt an escape unless I knew I could succeed. My father told us often: “If you run away from home and I catch you, I will kill you.” He also said if I ever got pregnant he would kill me. Probably he wouldn’t have actually done it, but at the time he had me convinced.
My father was working long hours as a general contractor but, since he could no longer afford to send me to college, he had an idea for a side business. We would raise a thousand chickens to lay fertile eggs for hatcheries. He said I would do most of the work and the money earned would be for college. For about a year and a half I did strenuous physical work several hours before school and about four hours after, carrying heavy five-gallon buckets of feed and water and collecting the eggs. My mother was afraid I would injure myself carrying so much weight, but I was determined and driven. Suddenly one day my father announced that we were not making enough money and he was selling the chickens. He pointedly avoided acknowledging my efforts and did not mention the chickens or college again. I deeply felt the lack of acknowledgement.
Under stress, my father became more controlling. All through my high school years he would only rarely allow me to participate in extracuricular activities or to spend the night at my friends’ houses. He wouldn’t allow me to date until I was sixteen, but he was sexually intrusive with me, speaking in a suggestive manner and always trying to fondle me. I spent a lot of energy trying to evade his advances. I was seething with rage which I could not express to him without provoking even more violence. I remember one day when I was fourteen, standing in my bedroom feeling my blood boiling and thinking that if I didn’t control my anger I would actually burst a blood vessel and die. I made a conscious decision to suppress my anger. I unwittingly also subdued my vitality. I had always been very healthy, never ill except for croupe once as an infant and measles, mumps and chickenpox. Shortly after I decided to suppress my anger, I started getting sore throats; then my tonsils became inflamed and were surgically removed. Doctors also discovered that I had an extra renal artery looping around my right kidney, constricting it and keeping it from fully functioning.
With the boarders gone, the building had forty empty rooms. When I was fifteen, I moved into one of them. Although we had many battles over the subject, my father refused to allow me to have a lock on my door. At night the door to my family’s apartment was locked from the inside. I was on the other side with thirty-nine empty rooms, my fears, and my very active imagination. I had nightmares of the devil coming up the stairs from the vast dark basement, slinking through the hallways, slipping into my room and trying to get into my bed. I spent my nights struggling with him.
When I was thirteen and fourteen, I felt scornful of my mother for being weak and unable to protect me from my father. No matter how he treated me, I admired my father, the strong one. I deeply loved and needed my mother, however, and by the time I was fifteen we were very close again. When my father hurt or disappointed me, she cried with me. I appreciated everything my mother did for me. With very few resources she did her best to help me feel confident. She taught me how to sew and together we designed and made all of my clothes.
At school I was extroverted and had many friends, but since my home and family were so unusual and I couldn’t date or share much in my friends’ extracurricular activities, I always felt different. Even though I was pretty and bright with a rich inner life, I often felt ashamed, inadequate, inferior. I longed to live in a real house near normal people and to ride in a family car instead of my father’s big old construction trucks with his name printed on the side. The happiest time of the year for me and my siblings was summer, when we could swim in the pool and our cousins, my mother’s family, would come for long visits.
Since we had moved from Indiana when I was nine, getting to church on Sundays was never something we could count on. At my school, I was the only Catholic. Perhaps because I had very little external support, my spiritual life became self-directed. I would officiate at bedtime prayers for my sisters and brother and also spend some time every day praying alone. I kept a notebook where I had made a list of all the virtues. Every night I would reflect on how I had done and decide which ones I needed to live more fully. By the time I was fifteen, I was praying fervently every day and experiencing states of mystical union and bliss.
Not all of my awakening sexual energy was transformed into spiritual experiences. I read the “good parts” of sexy novels my friends passed around. In the barnyard I watched, fascinated, as the bulls and cows, horses, sheep, chickens and dogs had raw animal sex. My own sexual impulses were colored with emotion and romanticism. I had a crush on a boy at school and entertained intensely erotic but somewhat chaste fantasies about being with him in a swimming pool, kissing passionately underwater. .
Learning was always a joy and easy for me. I was one of the two brightest students in my class and easily completed my homework while at school so that I had the nights free for reading. I had an excellent memory and never needed to study for tests. All through high school, I read three or four books a week. My interests ranged from literature to history to science. My algebra teacher, who was always very supportive of me, encouraged me to participate in the state academic achievement tests. Every year in the Spring, the top two students in each subject from a school gathered in a regional school to take state achievement tests. Every year I took the tests in English, history and mathematics. I usually ranked first place in the region and third or fourth place in the state in each subject. I loved winning, and the tests became extremely important to me.
In the Spring of my junior year, when I was sixteen, I woke up the morning of the first day of testing with a sore throat. I didn’t tell my mother because I knew she would want me to stay home. I went that day and the two following days, pushing myself to go on. Only after the tests were completed did I admit how sick I was. My mother wanted to take me to the doctor, but my father refused, saying we couldn’t afford it. He simply ignored me as I got progressively worse for more than a week. My mother nursed me, but when my temperature spiked, my heartbeat accelerated, and specks of blood appeared in the pores of my skin, she called the doctor to come for a housecall.
I had a severe strept infection in my throat, respiratory tract, ears, kidneys and blood. The doctor wanted to hospitalize me, but we couldn’t afford it so I stayed at home in bed on antibiotics. I missed the last two months of the school year. That summer I was so weak that I could hardly move, but my father would yell if he came home and did not find me working. I would listen for his truck and then jump up and start doing something.
That summer we moved again. Our roof was leaking beyond repair, and we were being overrun by roaches, so my father sold the boarding house and lumberyard. They were demolished, and the land became a gravel pit. We moved across the highway to an abandoned former motel and restaurant. We broke down walls to link the individual motel rooms together, but once again my room was separate. We put the cows in some of the motel rooms and chickens in the restaurant and created a pasture and garden in the field on the side.
In the fall, very thin and weak, I started back to school but collapsed on the first day and had to be hospitalized for a week. When I got out of the hospital, my doctor advised me to stay home the rest of that semester. It was a very bleak time for me. Mostly I just lay with my face to the wall, picking off the plaster with my fingernails. Fluffy, my big red Persian cat, was my only comfort. My mother was very worried, not only for my health but also for my sanity. My father continued to ignore me, so in some way my illness served its purpose.
By an act of will, I got myself together and returned to school for the Spring semester. I was still very thin. I am five feet, seven inches tall, but I weighed less than a hundred pounds. I felt very gangly and unattractive. Having been ill for almost a year, I had lost my momentum in terms of college plans. I was awarded a scholarship as the most outstanding female student in the county, but my father refused to allow me to accept it. He felt it was an issue of pride, that he should be able to pay my college expenses and if he couldn’t, I should wait another year. I felt I would surely die if I stayed at home another year, so I applied for and received a scholarship, a board job and an NDEA loan at a state university. I didn’t tell my father until that September, a few days before I left.
The day I left home I felt exultant, as if I had finally, with great will and effort, escaped from a whirling vortex of misery. I had not drowned or been broken. I had survived. I was free. I felt a deep sense of relief, expanding after long contraction, gaining twenty pounds in the first month. I was optimistic, enthusiastic, open to life. The outer world mirrored my new sense of ease. My board job involved checking meal tickets in my own dorm of four hundred girls. I enjoyed greeting them with a smile and soon knew each one. I loved my classes and was always the first one with my hand up to participate. Around campus I smiled at everyone, made many friends, and soon had a steady boyfriend. As another expression of my newfound freedom, I attended Catholic Mass every day.
The day I arrived in college, I had been on a total of four dates, seen only three movies in my entire life, been to a zoo once, but never to a museum, a concert or a play. I had never had an art, dance or music lesson. Suddenly everything seemed possible. I wanted to be and know and do everything and to travel the world. I wanted to do something great that would leave the world a better place.
My family was still very poor and my NDEA loan only covered bare necessities. I got rides home with friends for major holidays, but I could not even afford to call home. My mother sold milk and butter from our cows to make extra money to buy stamps so that we could write to each other. In the fall and spring I would spend about twenty-five dollars on fabric and my mother would make me simple, elegant clothes. I learned to look great with very little money and very few clothes. It was extremely important to me to not look poor. More that that, I wanted to feel that I had the bearing, manners and appearance to feel at ease and confident anywhere.
At the end of my freshman year, I went for the summer to a city where two of my high school friends were living. The only job I could find was selling Bibles door to door. All day long I walked hot city streets in high heels, knocking on strangers’ doors, asking them to buy a fancy Bible that cost more than a hundred dollars. I didn’t sell many, but I learned a lot about human nature. Many women at home alone were desperate for someone to talk to, pouring out their troubles to me. I also learned about deception because my boss not only tried to seduce me but also turned out to be a con man. After we bailed him out of jail, there was no money left to pay us so he gave us each two Bibles. I gave one to my mother who sent me the bus fare to get home.
My sophomore year I was counseled to begin to narrow my interests so that I could eventually graduate with a major. I was equally interested in natural sciences, social sciences and humanities and just wanted to learn as much as I could. In high school I had thought I wanted to be an archaeologist, a physicist or a doctor, but in college I was discovering other interests. I knew I didn’t want to get married right away as most of my friends planned to do. I didn’t see any point in bringing children into the world simply to replicate the dysfunctional patterns of my parents and ancestors. I wanted to wait until I was able to help my children manifest new possibilities as human beings.
I assumed that when I did have children I would also have a profession. I finally decided to focus on English, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology as possible majors. I was still a devout Catholic, but my mind was being opened by reading philosophy and literature. I was developing a broader perspective and finding the Catholic worldview too narrow for me. My boyfriend from my freshman year had graduated. I dated casually, but men often told me that I was too deep and complex for them. I loved socializing and dancing, but I drank very little and was not a party girl.
The summer after my sophomore year was a turning point in my life. Three friends and I took the Greyhound bus to Cape Cod to find summer jobs. We changed buses in New York City and then traveled up the East coast. Having just taken a semester of geology, I was enthralled by the changing landscape. I also had the first intimation that for me travel was not just about new people and new experiences but about deep connections with the land and the spirit of a place. The first time I saw the ocean I felt I had truly come home. I wondered how I had been able to live without it for nineteen years. A few days after I arrived in Hyannis, I met my first true love. Mike was seventeen days older than me but very mature. He was also intelligent, tall, handsome, and charming.
We were soon deeply in love. He got me a job working in the same oceanfront restaurant where he worked. I was in heaven: being in love, being together, being on the water. I felt a profound connection with him. The first four weeks I continued to attend Sunday Mass while struggling with the conflict between my religion and my desire for my beloved. Then I decided that any religion that made sex with a loved partner a sin was not in alignment with the truth as I knew it. I left the church and began discovering my own way to meditate and connect with God.
Mike wanted to go to medical school and was determined that we take absolutely no chances on my getting pregnant. I was equally determined not to lose my freedom, independance and chance for an education. I also felt a deep irrational longing to abandon myself to love, give up everything, live with him, and bear his child. At the end of the summer we each returned to our colleges on almost opposite sides of the country. We both felt that our love was deep and eternal, much more than a summer romance. We wrote frequent letters but we could not afford to see each other again until Christmas.
I missed him terribly and thought about him all the time. A month after I was back in school, I was sure I was pregnant. Before I found out that I wasn’t, I told him, and he became very upset. Feeling the stress of my inner conflicts, I became anxious and depressed. At my roomate’s suggestion, I had a few sessions with one of the school psychologists. At Christmas, Mike and I met in a city where no one knew us, spending a passionate week together. My depression vanished instantly. At the end of the week he suggested, and I reluctantly agreed, that our lives would be less stressful if we trusted our love and focused on completing our educations. We would keep writing, but date other people and meet again in three years.
Back at school I missed him, but I felt much more clear and balanced. I completed most of my courses for majors in English and anthropology. I also wanted a major in psychology. As a way of getting more insight into the subject and into myself, I decided to return for sessions with Matt, the school psychologist I had seen in the fall. He was forty-five and very attractive. Every girl on campus, including my roommate, had a crush on him.
I began seeing him a couple of times a week. Although I felt fine when I began, I was soon stirring up buried feelings and old pain. He was very sensitive and a wonderful listener. One day rain was pouring outside and I was crying when I said, “My real problem is that I am in love with you.” I was shocked to hear him say, “I’m in love with you too.” Although I was then, and still am, strongly opposed to getting involved with married men, I was thrilled to learn that my feelings were reciprocated. I was also very confused because I was still in love with Mike. Matt told me that he had never fallen in love with a student or a client before, and he had always been faithful to his wife. Just before the semester ended Matt asked me if I would stay for summer school so that we could continue seeing each other. I agreed. He arranged for us to meet for two to four hours every afternoon. I took the back stairs to his office, bypassing the department secretary so that no one would know he was seeing me so much. We had long conversations, held each other and kissed passionately, but restrained ourselves from going further.
Along with my summer courses, I also had a job with a great deal of responsibility. I was the assistant to the director of the largest dining hall on campus. We served twelve hundred students and conference attendees a day and also did catering. I loved my job which required many different skills and gave me the opportunity to meet people. For some reason that summer I was like nectar to bees. If I had accepted all the invitations, I would have had eight dates a day. As it was, I usually had about four, one each for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and evening. Except for Matt, there was no one I was interested in romantically, and I didn’t even kiss most of them, but I was enjoying getting to know a lot of different men.
At the end of the summer I only needed one more semester of school to graduate. Then suddenly the whole situation with Matt exploded into a major drama. The department chairman had noticed how much time we were spending together. Matt was in danger of losing his job and his marriage. He told me that if I were on campus, he would not be able to stay away from me. He asked me to leave school for the fall semester and return in the spring to graduate with my class.
I reluctantly agreed, not foreseeing how that decision would complicate my life. I moved to a distant city, chosen because Matt’s friend was a psychologist practicing there. Matt wanted me to see his colleague to deal with my transference, and he himself entered therapy for his countertransferance. I had a few sessions with the colleague, but he seemed to regard me as a dangerous temptress from whom he needed to keep a cool and protective distance. I didn’t find the sessions at all helpful so I discontinued them. I also felt that love is mysterious and not so easily reduced or analyzed.
I soon found out that thinking I could sit out one semester had been a big mistake. As soon as I dropped out, my NDEA loan became due. I had to repay it at the same time that I was trying to support myself and save money to go back to school. The only place I could afford to live was at the YWCA. In September 1963, I began working as an editorial assistant for a magazine. I also volunteered in a hospital and took classes at night to complete pre-med courses because I was again seriously considering becoming a doctor. By the time I completed the courses, however, I had decided that I didn’t have the stamina to survive the sleep deprivation an intern endures.
In February, I met a painter who had shipped his trunk of jeans and Pendleton shirts and ridden his motorcycle across country to attend art school in my city. That winter and spring we rode his motorcycle around the city and countryside and had a very passionate sexual relationship. He taught me to paint with oils, and we spent many happy hours painting together. When he left to go back out West, he asked me to marry him. I declined. I cared for him, but I wasn’t in love with him. After my boyfriend left, a woman at the Y began to pursue me in a romantic way, wooing me ardently with flowers, cards and gifts. She was a deeply feeling person and I responded powerfully to her feeling, developing a strong emotional connection. Although I was in love with her, we didn’t have much in common, and I didn’t want to pursue a lesbian lifestyle.
I went to my friends’ graduation in June 1964, disappointed that I wasn’t able to graduate with my class and feeling out of sync with my friends.
In September, I returned to college for my last semester, again with a job as asssistant manager of a cafeteria. I lived off-campus and dated several graduate students and an unmarried philosophy professor. With my old friends gone, I felt a little disconnected. I sometimes saw Matt with his wife at school events, but we did not acknowledge each other. Shortly before graduation we met just once to have some closure, but there were still many feelings we would need to leave unexpressed as we moved on with our lives.
After graduation, I left for New York City where I joined my best friend and college roommate in a Greenwich Village apartment. I found a job working as an editorial assistant for a magazine and began enjoying the adventure of life in New York. For the first time in my life, I was able to feast on art, music and theatre. Always attracted by everything exotic and foreign, I dated a Sri Lankan and a Pakistani who were with United Nations delegations, an Irish poet, and a German businessman, but I wasn’t interested in a serious relationship. I was planning to go to graduate school but felt torn between anthropology and English. I eventually decided upon English. I was accepted at one of the best university English departments in the country and began there in September.
Age 0 – 22 What Delights Me, Love-Hate with Daddy
Age 22 & 26 1st Marriage & the 60’s
Age 26 & 28 Life in Peru’s High Andes
Age 28 & 32 Raising goats, Mother’s death
Age 33-35 New Zealand, Spiritual Awakening
Age 35-41 Feldenkrais, Polarity, Divorce
Age 42 – 46 Mantak, Tao, Marriage to Michael
Age 47-49 Father murdered; Great Pyramid initiation
Age 49- 54 Car Accident, Surgeries, Broken Life
Age 54-60 South Pacific & Asheville, Rabbit & Dolphins
My first year in graduate school I was a resident counselor in a dormitory, a role which challenged me to develop many new interpersonal skills. I was thrilled with my courses. Reading, discussing and writing about literature was a joy. In a highly competitive atmosphere, I was happy to be doing very well. I knew I could get a Ph.D and go on to be a university professor, but I still was not certain what I wanted to do. I was in graduate school primarily to continue the great adventure of learning and growing as a human being.
My interest in literature was in many ways an expression of my passionate interest in human beings and my search for answers to the great questions. Since childhood I also had been enchanted with words, tones, rhythms, stories, images, symbols and myths. Through reading I expanded beyond my own personal identity and experience. Immersing myself in the imaginative world created by the writer, I participated in the inner lives of others, lived more lives than just my own, and in the process came to know myself and others better. In sympathetic resonance with other characters, I discovered new ways of sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting. I developed more insight into how people respond to challenges with integrity, integrate experiences, and create meaning.
Over the Christmas holidays, three years exactly since we had last met, I spent a week with Mike, my first love. Although we had a wonderful time together and still loved each other very much, we realized that we were no longer in love. Our lives were going in very different directions.
At the end of my first year of graduate school, I spent the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, completely falling in love with the island and the sea. I had an evening job as a waitress in a very nice waterfront restaurant. I liked waitressing and enjoyed interacting with the customers. Except for when I was with people at work, I preferred solitude. In the mornings I bicycled to the beach to swim and to sit for hours meditating with the waves.
Beginning my second year of graduate school, in the fall, I was a teaching assistant in the English department, teaching basic writing skills to freshmen. I liked teaching, found it was very natural for me, and realized I could be quite happy making it my life work. I was living with a roommate in an apartment in a large old house off-campus. We enjoyed cooking, giving parties, and being elegant hostesses. At one of our first parties, I met Bill, an anthropology graduate student who lived downstairs. He was five years older than me, bright, interesting and warm-hearted. Well-travelled and fluent in several languages, he had a master’s degree in political science and Latin-American studies. Having spent two years in the Peace Corp in Peru, he planned to return there to do fieldwork for his dissertation. By Thanksgiving, we were in love and at Christmas he invited me home to meet his family.
Although his family was wealthy and class-conscious, he held radical political views. We had stimulating conversations, and I became much more aware than I had been of political, social and economic issues.
For the second semester advanced composition course, I could choose a research and writing topic for my students. Bill suggested the Spanish civil war. Since I read and spoke Spanish and knew the literature inspired by the war, I agreed that it would be an interesting topic. It proved to be a good choice, not only for my students, but for me as well. By the end of the semester I had learned so much about Spain that I decided to spend the summer there.
Bill had a summer fellowship for research in Peru. We felt the pangs of parting to our separate destinations, but we made no commitments to each other. I spent three weeks in England, Wales and Ireland before taking the train to Spain. For two months I traveled alone by train and local buses, completely falling in love with the country and the people. Body and soul, I felt totally at home there. Knowing as much as I did about Spanish history gave layers of rich meaning to my experience, with some ironies. My sympathies were with the Republicans in the civil war, yet I met an older man who had been and still was one of Franco’s leading generals. This very courtly gentleman insisted upon being my protector and guide, squiring me around Madrid, showing me Spain from a very different perspective.
Bill wrote about once a week, but his letters were lengthy travelogues, and I longed for more romantic expression. Near the end of my trip, I didn’t get any letters for weeks. Not knowing if we still had a relationship, I responded to a few of the men who were pursuing me. I had a wonderful sweet romance with an ardent nineteen year old pre-med student in Northern Spain. Later in Paris I had another brief romance with a Sorbonne graduate student who gave me a beautiful ring. Once Bill stopped receiving letters from me, he began writing every day, then calling. When we met again, his first words were: “Will you marry me?” I had been in no hurry to get married, but I spontaneously said, “Yes.” We found a Unitarian minister who would let us write our own ceremony, a radical idea at that time. I designed and made a beautiful long gown. At the rehearsal dinner our families met for the first time. Bill’s parents had been divorced since he was twelve. In many ways his mother’s strong personality was like my father’s and his father’s gentleness like my mother’s. I liked both of his parents very much, but his father and I felt a special affinity for each other. With our families and many friends present, Bill and I were married in the campus chapel at 6 P.M. EST on Oct. 7.
We honeymooned at home, blissfully happy. I felt profoundly changed in a way I hadn’t imagined, as though on a cellular level I was buoyed up by love, supported and carried home. We loved being married and nesting in our tiny apartment. I cooked romantic dinners, he washed dishes, and we shopped and cleaned together as a fun adventure. I was still a teaching assistant, so I had my own money and checking account. I kept my maiden name as my middle name and added his. On May 3, Bill’s birthday, I watched a beautiful silver Siamese kitten being born and gave him to Bill as a birthday gift. We named him Tupac Amaru after the last Inca to resist the Spanish conquest. Like his namesake, Tupac was rebellious, strong-willed, and often difficult, but he was part of our family and we were very fond of him.
That third year of graduate school I completed most of the required courses for a Ph.D in English and American literature. I was also completing additional multidisciplinary courses in American Studies. As part of the American Studies program I was studying history as well as anthropology, my other consuming interest. I planned to write my dissertation on some aspect of nineteenth-century American fiction with an American Studies orientation. I had already received an M.A. degree in English the year before.
Bill and I studied, but we also played. He played soccer with friends and I occasionally joined in. I had never liked any team sports, but I was very enthusiastic about soccer. On weekends we went to concerts or foreign films and to parties with fascinating conversation, music, dancing and wine. The psychedelic sixties were under way. We smoked a little marijuana and, once, hashish. The summer we took our first trip together, driving across country to visit Bill’s brother in San Francisco. We discovered that we travelled very easily and pleasurably together. We enjoyed our first-hand experience of Haight Ashbury and Berkeley. Although we shared in their idealism and political consciousness, we were not tempted to become revolutionaries or hippies. We needed to find our own way. The war in Viet Nam was accelerating, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated, and there were riots across the U.S. Influenced by Bill’s advisor and his wife who were Quakers, we were peacefully expressing our opposition to the war.
After California, Bill and I visited family, then accompanied my father on a pilgrimage to his Kentucky mountain birthplace and spiritual home. From the day I went off to college, my father had unceasingly criticized my choices, furious that he could no longer control me. His inviting us to share what was most dear to him seemed to me to be a gesture of peace. I accepted his gift with an open heart, enjoying and appreciating him as I never had before. We visited the old homeplace, his mother’s grave, and the settlement school where two women from New York had given a little mountain boy love, attention and hope. He told me stories of our ancestors, and wordlessly transmitted to me his love and knowledge of the land.
From Kentucky we went to Martha’s Vineyard, one of my favorite places, to spend the rest of the summer with Bill’s mother, aunt and cousins. I enjoyed being with his extended family for long days at the beach and family dinners. Bill and I went off on our own bicycling and blueberry picking, and I made blueberry muffins, pies and jam for everyone. Everything Bill and I did together was fun, easy, flowing and harmonious. We rarely disagreed and never argued. As happy as we were together, I was nonetheless becoming increasingly troubled by two major issues. One was that, although he was very warm and physically affectionate, Bill had a much lower libido than I did, which I found frustrating. The other was an undercurrent of tension in my relationship with his mother, in spite of both her and my best intentions and efforts. All my life I had had easy, harmonious relationships with women. I found it quite challenging to be having a different experience with my new mother-in-law.
When we returned to school for the fall semester, we learned that Bill had received a grant to do his anthropology dissertation research in Peru. We would be living in Peru for about a year and a half. We wanted to make a documentary film while we were there so we continued photography and filmmaking courses we had started in the spring. We also studied for our Ph.D qualifying exams. At first I thought I would try to work on my dissertation while we were in Peru. I finally concluded that that was unrealistic. I decided to immerse myself in the fieldwork experience, helping Bill with his research and starting on my own dissertation when we returned. We both wanted children and felt the perfect time to start would be when we came back from Peru.
We spent Christmas with my family. By this time my parents had gotten back on their feet financially. A few years before they had turned our motel/barn/home into a nursing home. Out went the cows and the chickens. After renovations, in came thirty former inmates of the state mental hospital, released on a wave of deinstitutionalization. Since they had spent most of their lives in confinement, my mother wanted to bring them as much happiness as possible. My visits home always involved visiting with the patients, my new extended family in a sense.
The nursing home business was profitable. It should have been a good time for my parents, but something was wrong, and I wasn’t sure what it was. My father seemed distracted and not really present. Then on Christmas eve he received a mysterious phone call, broke down sobbing, spoke briefly to my mother in private and drove away. He had not returned by the time we left a few days later. My mother was distressed, but she wouldn’t tell us what was going on. We had no choice but to live with the mystery.
Age 0 – 22 What Delights Me, Love-Hate with Daddy
Age 22 & 26 1st Marriage & the 60’s
Age 26 & 28 Life in Peru’s High Andes
Age 28 & 32 Raising goats, Mother’s death
Age 33-35 New Zealand, Spiritual Awakening
Age 35-41 Feldenkrais, Polarity, Divorce
Age 42 – 46 Mantak, Tao, Marriage to Michael
Age 47-49 Father murdered; Great Pyramid initiation
Age 49- 54 Car Accident, Surgeries, Broken Life
Age 54-60 South Pacific & Asheville, Rabbit & Dolphins
We had decided to drive to Peru in our red VW bug, a very daring proposition at the time. The Pan-American highway which runs from Mexico all through Central and South America was in many places a highway in name only. Often it was just a rutted path through the jungle. We bought a book called Repair Your VW Bug Yourself and plenty of spare parts and tire repair kits. On a snowy March day, we loaded up everything else we would need. We packed the back seat tight to the ceiling with clothes, books, office supplies, professional cameras, tape recorders, and a new 35mm movie camera. We had reels and reels of tape, hundreds of rolls of film, sleeping bags, canteens and gifts for people we would meet along the way.
We drove South, leaving the snow behind. As we travelled down the length of Mexico, the places that touched me the most deeply were Oaxaca and San Cristobal de las Casas. Always a lover of trees, I was awed by the ancient Tule tree, 2,000 years old and, at over 50 meters wide, said to be the largest tree in the world. As we met people on our travels, I discovered a joy and talent in portrait photography. I found I could make connections with people in a way that helped them to open up and reveal their essence. I was utterly enchanted by Guatemala, feeling a deep heart connection with the gentle, graceful people. We did not experience first-hand the violence that was beginning in Guatemala, but we did have several close calls in other Central American countries. Once out in the middle of the jungle, Bill glanced in the rear view mirror to see a soldier lifting a machine gun to fire at us. We screeched to a halt and backed up, realizing we had passed a military checkpoint without seeing it. The soldier said his finger was on the trigger just starting to pull it when he saw our brake lights.
In Panama, we put our VW bug on a big Italian liner for the journey through the locks of the Panama Canal. We had planned to get off in Colombia, but because of flooding and landslides there, we stayed aboard until Guayaquil, Equador. We drove up from the sweltering heat of the coast past perfect snow-capped volcanic cones to Quito. After exploring the North of Ecuador and setting foot upon the equator, we drove south along the verdant green spine of the Andes mountains. Then we headed back down to the coast on the Peruvian border and drove south to Lima along the narrow highway as the ocean waves crashed on the rocks hundreds of feet straight below.
From Lima, we made our first trip up to the town that would be our home. To get there we drove for six hours continuously uphill on spiralling switchback roads barely hugging the sides of the mountain. At almost 16,000 feet in altitude, we leveled off on a high plane. From there we dropped down to 12,500 feet and entered the high mountain valley that would be our home. The town we had chosen was strung out for several miles on both sides of the road passing through the valley. A few miles past the town, the road climbed precipitously to higher mountains and then descended to the jungle. Behind the adobe houses that lined the road, the fields spread out and up the mountainsides in a tapestry of green and gold. The air was sparking clear, fragrant with eucalyptus. We were immediately entranced.
We arrived with a letter of introduction to a high school teacher who had gotten a Ph.D in the capitol and then decided he could best serve by returning to his home town to help the young people. Don Moises was a true gentleman-scholar who welcomed us with open arms and introduced us to his family and to the community. Like him, his wife Emiliana was in her fifties, but of a far more practical and extroverted nature. She and her son-in-law were often away buying fruit in the jungle or trucking it to markets on the coast. Her daughter ran the household, cared for the grandchildren and kept the hearth. Their warm kitchen became our home base.
They helped us find a simple unfinished adobe house for only two dollars a month. We hauled building materials from Huancayo, a city about an hour away, and finished it ourselves. I had decided that I did not want to hire servants as most anthropologists and even Peace Corp workers did. I felt the servant-employer relationship would create a sense of separation between us and our neighbors. I didn’t want to carry all our water from a block away, however, so we hired someone to lay a pipe to bring water to our house. We made the twelve hour roundtrip drive to Lima several times to bring up things we thought would make our life easier. We bought a two burner propane stove and a tiny hot water heater.
On one trip we tied two mattresses on top of the vw bug. They hung down over the windows like a cap on a mushroom. Another time we had a full-sized yellow bathtub tied to the top. That bathtub proved to be our greatest luxury and comfort. No matter how cold, dusty, muddy or wet we got during the day, we could look forward to soaking in hot water at night. Our Coleman lanterns provided our only other heat and our evening light. The bathroom contained only the tub. The outhouse was out back. I washed laundry by hand, shopped in the local market and cooked our meals in a pressure cooker. The pressure cooker was essential if I didn’t want to stay home all day tending food which cooks so slowly at that altitude. Our only furniture were a table and chairs downstairs and a homemade bed with the mattresses upstairs.
During the weeks that we were working on our house, we were also developing relationships with the townspeople. They observed us with curiosity, good humor and plenty of helpful hints. Finally, we were settled into our new home. Our neighbors said we lacked only a dog. Everyone in town had a watchdog, but unfortunately there were no spare ones available. A few days later some new friends, missionaries from Texas living in Huancayo, offered to lend us their dog Duchess. She was a rather plain looking but sweet brown dog and we gratefully accepted. We took her home and made her a shelter on our upstairs porch.That night the male dogs in town visited Duchess.
We were up everyday at dawn, getting into the rhythm of daily life. There were four thousand people in town. Most were mestizos, of mixed Inca and Spanish ancestry, who spoke Spanish as well as Quechua. A smaller number spoke only Quechua. Many people didn’t know who we were when they first saw us. Most people were very warm and open. Some people were suspicious. The conservatives thought we must be communists. The communists were sure we were C.I.A. agents.The police in Jauja, a nearby city, wondered if we were drug dealers. They announced on the radio that we needed to come in to get fingerprinted, a process I found both amusing and humiliating. There had been a coup in October of 1968, and we were living under a military dictatorship so we needed to tread carefully with the authorities.
Fortunately, our friendship with Don Moises, who had been almost everyone’s well-respected teacher, calmed most suspicions. We soon formalized our relationship with the Ortegas, becoming compadres by serving as godparents for the newest grandson. In the evenings Don Moises would visit. The three of us would sit around the kitchen table, talking in the glow of the Coleman lantern. He was our friend, mentor and wise guide. The nights were magical. In the velvety darkness, the stars seemed close enough to touch. Deep silence was shattered occasionally by choruses of barking dogs.
Bill had chosen this town because its craft was music, but the musicians were not often around. They were usually away, travelling all over Peru to play at weddings and fiestas. Bill became very involved in mapping the whole town, an extensive project. I was keeping house, Andean style, and getting to know the local customs, sometimes in surprising ways. A few months after her arrival, Duchess gave birth to six adorable puppies. The neighborhood children all visited and oohed and ahhed over them. My favorite of all the children was Heide, who was eleven when we arrived. She had a radiant smile, two long glossy dark braids and skin burnished bronze from the bright high-altitude sun. As the oldest child, she was in charge of her younger siblings. Often she carried her baby sister, wrapped in a colorful handwoven blanket, on her back. Heide and I had become special friends. I had discovered that she knew almost everything that was going on in town and that she was a very mature, wise and resourceful person.
On the eighth morning after their birth, we found the puppies missing and Duchess whining and whimpering. The missing puppies were the talk of the town, but no one seemed to know who had taken them. On the fourth day Heide discovered where the puppies were. She said, “It turns out that everyone knows, but no one wants to tell you. The curandero who lives next door to you took the puppies. When a sick person comes to him, he rubs a guinea pig all over their body and then cuts the guinea pig open to see what is wrong with the person. Then he can heal them. He ran out of guinea pigs so he took the puppies. I found out that some of them are still alive. I think maybe if I talk to him I can get him to give them back.” I had had no idea that our next door neighbor was a curandero. The next morning Duchess was wagging her tail, looking blissfully happy. Nursing contentedly were three puppies who owed their lives to Heide. Recovering from their misadventure, they grew healthy and fat. We kept blonde Curry (a short form of the longer Quechua name given him by Heide) and gave furry brown Winnie to Don Moises.
Our neighbor was one of several curanderos in town. A medical doctor visited once a week. Senora Wally, the town pharmacist seemed to bridge both worlds. Many people in town thought of her as their healer. From the first moment I met her, I felt inspired by her. I watched her hold a patient’s hand, taking her pulse, in a sympathetic resonance. Very warm and perceptive, she knew what her patient believed would heal him and prescribed accordingly, from herbal teas to tinctures to aspirin to antibiotics. I think people went to her because in some way she healed their souls. She touched me deeply and became a guiding light for me.
Senora Wally taught me a little about Andean medicinal herbs and from other women I learned about culinary herbs and foods. I decided to do a study of the local diet so I went to Lima to be trained by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization to do a nutritional survey. Returning to our town, I trained three local women to assist me. I invited families from each of the four socio-economic groups we had identified to be part of the study. Every day for many weeks, I was at someone’s house for each meal, weighing and noting exactly what foods the family was eating. The nutritional value of the foods would later to be determined from established nutrient composition charts once we returned home and had access to the university computer.
As anthropologists, we absolutely had to eat and drink whatever was offered us. People were incredibly generous and hospitable, sometimes insisting we eat vast quantities of food and drink copious amounts of beer and cane alcohol. Most of the food was very delicious. Unfortunately we kept picking up amoebic parasites. The major cause of death in the town was mal de higado (liver sickness) from the damage the amoebae do to the liver. Like every one else, I kept going even when I didn’t feel well. Once a month we made a brief trip to Lima to be treated by the Peace Corp doctor. While there we visited friends, enjoyed restaurant meals and movies and caught up with world news via the New York Times.
In between trips to Lima, we kept up with U.S. and world news in Peruvian papers we could get locally. One big event of 1969 captured the imagination of the Andean people. At that altitude, the stars and planets seem intimately close. When two men were reported to walk on the moon for the first time, many people told us, “I saw them. I saw them with my own eyes.” By the fall, the big news in the U.S. was the acceleration of the Viet Nam war and heavy bombing of North Vietnam. There were massive peaceful protests across the U.S. We were strongly opposed to the war, but the U.S. seemed far away. We were deeply engrossed in our life in Peru.
We felt very peaceful living inside our house made of earth. As if they had just risen up from the great earth mother herself, the thick adobe walls sheltered us. The earthen floors beneath our feet were continuous with the earth outside. The boundary between inside and outside was sufficient for shelter, but not enough for feeling separate from nature. When they had finished gleaning the fields, mice tunneled through the two foot thick walls looking for food. With our sparse furnishings there was no place for them to hide so we shooed them out and sealed up the holes with mud, a Sisyphean task.
Being in the mountains, I had many extraordinary experiences long before I had any context in which to place them. Walking on the mountains, I would sense spots where a powerful energy emanated. Sitting to rest, I would go into altered states. Local people would tell me not to sit on the mountain, that I would have a susto, lose my spirit to the mountain and require the services of a shaman to get it back. Perhaps I did give a bit of my spirit to the mountain and receive some of its spirit in return. I have certainly never been the same. I entered into the experience in Peru with the willingness to be totally changed, and I was.
Earth became more richly, resonantly alive for me. The spirit of the Earth and mountains, whom the people called Pachamama, was everpresent in consciousness. When we helped our neighbors build their adobe houses, we took part in the ritual offerings made to her. Sky, sun, moon, stars, planets, and the darkness of space became equally vivid. Night was vibrant with mystery, the veil between dimensions very thin. Several times I woke with the full moon shining on my face. Going to the upstairs window, I saw Franciscan monks in their hooded brown robes walking in the moonlight down below. Later I learned that hundreds of years ago they had briefly been there.
The seasons passed as dancing tapestries of elements, colors, and light.
We arrived in late May, autumn in the Southern hemisphere, a cold, dry golden harvesttime. The brilliant afternoon sunlight turned the ripe grainfields into golden treasure. In the winter sun we helped thresh the grain, then watched the mice gleaning the bare fields. By the time wet, warm spring came, people were lean and hungry. As the fields grew vivid green, we eagerly waited to feast on the first peas. Lush summer yielded again to autumn as the cycle continued.
One of the first things we learned after we moved into our adobe house on the road to the cemetery was that it was for rent because no one else wanted to live there. The dead are believed to have simply shed their bodies and to live in the cemetery during the day. At sunset they go home to their families. All the previous townspeople, buried in the cemetery on the mountain were said to pass down the road outside our house at dusk and dawn. All Souls and All Saints days are devoted to making all these souls feel respected, happy and content so that they can be harmonious members of the community. As new members of the community we were invited by our compadres, the Ortegas, to participate in their family celebrations.
All day on Oct. 31 is spent preparing a magnificent feast. In the dining room, a table is set with the finest tablecloth, dishes and eating utensils the family can afford. Bottles of soft drinks, wine and cana, strong sugar cane alcohol, are brought. Then all the special dishes are placed on the table at sunset. The whole family gathers to pray for all their family who have left their bodies and to invite them to come and feast that night. Leaving all the tasty food and drink behind, the family leaves and locks the door so that no one can disturb the souls feasting.
The living get their turn to celebrate the next day. Everyone goes to church early, then opens the door to the dining room and brings out the food and drinks. The souls haven’t eaten much, only tasted, since they don’t have much appetite these days. The leftovers belong to the living. They are loaded on donkeys or carts or trucks and hauled up the mountain to the cemetery.
We joined our compadres in the procession of motley vehicles heading up the road past our own house. At the cemetary, each family headed off to their own section of plots and spread a tablecloth right on top of the grave of the most important ancestor. Then the picnic began. The food and drink were spread out on the tablecloth and everyone ate, pausing frequently to toast the person buried beneath, each time pouring a little on the grave so he could drink too. After a while, people started to move to other family graves so they could be toasted as well.
The children were bored so they grabbed my arm saying, “Senora , come see the bones.” They took me to see all the places earthquakes had cracked the earth open revealing the skeletons below. Seeing the bones was scary and thrilling for them and a moving experience for me. The Ortega women invited me into the little mausoleum where the family bones were kept. A family shrine, it’s priestesses are the women. It is their role to feel deeply and to grieve. They began to cry and to wail for people who had been dead almost as long as they themselves had been alive. After a while, I got into the spirit as well, crying for my own grandmother. When we all were cried out, we rejoined the others for the trek down the mountain, knowing that we had deepened our connection with the other, invisible, members of our family and community.
Once we drove deeper up the valley to where the valley and the mountains around it all rise up high above the tree line. Only sheep and a few lonely shepherds lived there, but on that day there were no shepherds in sight. Hiking among the groups of sheep, we found a lost baby lamb crying for its mother. She cried back from another peak across the valley, but neither made a move toward the other. I picked up the baby to take her to her mother. She shuddered and sighed, then immediately nestled contentedly into my body, sucking on my natural wool sweater. Ecstatically, deeply merged with her, I carried the baby lamb for almost an hour until we reached her mother.
My most memorable birthday was January 16. The middle of summer in the southern hemisphere, the day was warm and sunny so I put on a summer dress and sandals for the drive to Lima. When we got up to the high plain at 16,000 feet and had just started down the mountain, a freezing blizzard came out of nowhere. The narrow two lane dirt road became slushy and muddy. Big trucks full of oranges were sliding off the road, tumbling down the mountain to land in the river hundreds of feet below, scattering oranges all over the mountainside. I didn’t want to think about what was happening to the drivers because we could be next. We were sliding all over the narrow road, completely out of control.
Finally we made it safely most of the way down, only to be stopped by a two mile wide landslide wiping out the road. We found a place to pull off, left the car, climbed up the mountain, hiked past the landslide and back down to the highway again. Then we hitched a ride on a truck, arriving at our Lima hotel filthy and exhausted about seven in the evening. We decided to take a nap before showering and going out to celebrate my birthday. We didn’t wake up until the next day.
We had planned to drive to Chile, but with the car stranded, we flew to Santiago and then to the South where we backpacked between the lakes at the feet of snow capped volcanoes. Salvador Allende was running for president and from the people we met we heard both sides of the passionate debate about the future of Chile. Finally we flew to Punta Arenas in Tierra del Fuego and stood in the tidal flats at the very bottom of the continent, looking awestruck across the frigid seas to Antarctica.
Home from our trip, I discovered in nearby Jauja, the first capitol of Peru, a treasure trove of old newspapers. Inquiring about the distribution of surplus food received from the U.S., I serendipitously found the papers in a shed belonging to the church. Every issue for the last hundred years was there. Eager to discover the answers to many of my questions, I began driving the half hour to Jauja almost every day, reading the papers and putting together, like a puzzle, a history of the region. I was intrigued by the way, even a hundred years before, events in Peru were influenced by the politics and economy of the U.S.
I have always been fascinated by outdoor markets. I find their vibrant color, their vitality and abundance, deeply nourishing. We decided to make a documentary film of Jauja’s colorful market, an important social and economic hub for the whole area. People from all the surrounding towns and villages sold their crafts and bought what they needed on Sunday market days. Couples were married and babies baptised. We planned to do most of the filming in June, noted for dry, sunny weather.
Deeply immersed in our life in Peru, we were often shocked by news from home. When President Nixon, on April 30, announced that he was sending troops into Cambodia, protests against expansion of the war ignited across the U.S. On May 4, at Kent State University, National Guardsmen fired into a group of protesters, killing four and wounding others. In the aftermath, colleges were shut down by student strikes and demonstrators marched on Washington, D.C.
On a more personal level, I learned that my father had begun an affair with a woman about my age. Against my mother’s wishes, he hired the woman to work in the nursing home, then decided to move her into a small house right next door. For my mother that was the very last straw. She filed for divorce. My father was furious. He threatened to kill her lawyer and, at one point, tried to choke her. As she escaped through a doorway, he trapped her in it, mashing and bruising her breast.Then he began concealing assets so that he got the lion’s share. My mother had moved out but was still working with him as a partner in the business. I followed the unfolding drama with great sympathy for my mother and outrage toward my father.
For months we had been planning to leave on a trip in late May. First we would travel to the northern part of Peru, then go south to Cuzco and Puna. We set off down to Lima as planned, but when we arrived at the fork in the road where we could go north or south, we suddenly turned to each other and said “Let’s go south first.” As the sun set on May 30, our second day of travelling south down the coast, I said, “I have never felt better in my entire life.” I felt healthy, strong, vibrantly alive and eager to get pregnant when we returned from our trip. As darkness fell, we headed inland for the beautiful colonial city of Arequippa.
We could see the city lights filling the valley below as we spiraled down the mountain. Suddenly we came around a curve to find a large truck with no lights parked right in the middle of our lane. With a mountain on one side, an abyss on the other, and someone coming in the other lane, we hit the truck. Sand on the road caused us to skid so that we were saved from going under the metal truckbed, but the front wheel on my side hit a truck tire, pushing the floor up into my feet, compressing my spine. I immediately knew that I was badly hurt. Bill, who had been driving, was unhurt.
Eventually a police car arrived and we were taken to the worker’s hospital, the worst one in the city.There was no one to help me and no place to lie down so I had to wait sitting for hours until someone could take x-rays. They showed that my T-12 and L1 vertebrae were fractured. I was taken to a room with only a bed with a bare mattress and left alone overnight with no food or water or any care at all. Meanwhile the police, influenced by the truckdrivers’ union, were trying to blame the accident on my husband and put him in jail. He was saved, at least for the moment, by an Arequippa friend.
The next day, Sunday, May 31, lying in my hospital bed, I felt earthquake shockwaves, distant ripples of a 7.7 magnitude earthquake in northern Peru. If we had not made the last minute decision to travel south, on this day we would have been in the city of Yungay. At 3:23 P.M., the entire city of Yungay and everyone who was there, almost twenty thousand people, were buried under eighty million cubic yards of snow, ice and earth. The earth tremors had broken loose a massive part of Nevado Huascaran, the highest mountain in Peru. In all of northern Peru seventy thousand people died and four hundred thousand were homeless. Our impulsive decision had saved our lives. We had eluded death but not completely escaped from harm.
Later that day a doctor finally appeared. Bill and our friend had to go to a pharmacy to purchase twenty-five pounds of plaster and hundreds of feet of gauze so that the doctor could put me into a body cast from thighs to collarbones. I felt like a flower whose stem was broken, but I was sure that I would heal very quickly and continue completely unaffected on my former trajectory. I did wonder, however, what would have happened if I had been driving. I had much better night vision than Bill and saw the truck and yelled before he even saw it. Would I have been able to stop in time? After resting at our friend’s house for twelve days, we left our mangled car behind to be restored and took the train to Puno and Cuzco. At Machu Picchu I climbed steep Huaynu Picchu off the trail, dragging twenty-five pounds of plaster up the mountain, trying to prove to myself that nothing could stop me and that I was still in control of my life.
After three weeks we returned for our car which had been expertly repaired and painted. When we returned home, we found everyone very disturbed by the continuing earth aftershocks. I, as well, felt the loss of a sense of safety and security on the earth. It was a very unsettling feeling. I was in pain and had to sit on pillows to ride on the rough dirt road to film the Jauja market. No longer able to carry the heavy camera, I had to content myself with directing.
In August we said goodbye to compadres, community, and mountains and left Peru. We made our final trip to the coast with the car filled with exposed film, recorded tape, maps, bundles of note cards, and journals. Our dog Curry lay curled up at my feet for the first leg of his journey to a very different life. We had wanted to send the car back on a ship while we flew home. Unfortunately the military dictatorship decided to confiscate our car and we had to come home without it. On the flight home I deeply felt the loss of our simple lives in Peru. I didn’t see how modern conveniences would be any compensation for all that we were leaving behind.
When we landed and the baggage compartment was opened, Curry hopped down to the tarmac, running to greet us. Our hardy mountain friend had amused himself during the flight by chewing his way out of the metal container. We bought a white vw bug, visited family and returned to school, renting a duplex with a yard outside town. Every day we took Curry for long walks in a nearby state forest. Our cat Tupac returned from his sojourn with my sister and eventually forgave us for abandoning him. Bill spent his worktime at the computer center where he was analyzing the voluminous data from Peru.
I took two literature courses. In one I wrote an excellent paper which my professor wanted me to submit for publication. When I took my one remaining Ph.D. qualifying exam in fiction, the results were ranked, and I was at the top, summa cum laude. I was relieved that I was doing so well after almost two years away, but it was not so easy to continue as before. While we were gone my dissertation advisor, who was an English professor and also the head of the American Studies department, had left for a position at another university. I had had a great relationship with him and I couldn’t seem to find another advisor who shared my interests. I still had seven years to complete a dissertation so I decided to let it go for a while. I had been profoundly changed by my experience in Peru and felt called in other directions.
I was very interested in the computer analysis of the nutrition data I had gathered in Peru. It became apparent that the most well-nourished were the second from the bottom of the four groups economically. They were poor and for the most part outside the cash economy, but they were eating an abundant diet of traditional unprocessed foods. Surprised by these findings, I began reading a multitude of nutrition books, both academic and popular, and making changes to our diet. Also, after years of taking my strong healthy body for granted, I was being forced to pay attention to it. My spine was still healing and I was experiencing pain and some neurological symptoms. For about six months after we returned from Peru, I had to wear a steel-ribbed corset to keep my spine immovable whenever I was vertical. I was very focused on getting healed and healthy so that I could get pregnant.
Age 0 – 22 What Delights Me, Love-Hate with Daddy
Age 22 & 26 1st Marriage & the 60’s
Age 26 & 28 Life in Peru’s High Andes
Age 28 & 32 Raising goats, Mother’s death
Age 33-35 New Zealand, Spiritual Awakening
Age 35-41 Feldenkrais, Polarity, Divorce
Age 42 – 46 Mantak, Tao, Marriage to Michael
Age 47-49 Father murdered; Great Pyramid initiation
Age 49- 54 Car Accident, Surgeries, Broken Life
Age 54-60 South Pacific & Asheville, Rabbit & Dolphins
In August, we moved to North Carolina where Bill had a university teaching position. In the country about fifteen miles from town, we rented a small rundown tenant house with two acres of land so depleted that it was just white sand, too barren to even grow weeds. We spent countless hours refinishing floors, painting, making fences and improving the soil. After our experience in Peru, a simple self-sufficient life appealed to us. Because we could easily live on one salary, we decided Bill would teach for several years and I would farm and do volunteer work. Then we would switch roles.
In September, my mother came to visit us. Thriving on her own, she wondered why she had waited so long to divorce my father. She and Bill had always gotten along well and the three of us had a wonderful two weeks together. I treasured every moment with her and felt that I had never really appreciated fully her many wonderful qualities and talents. A week after she returned home, she called to tell me that she had been diagnosed with a rare form of inoperable breast cancer, probably caused by the trauma when my father crushed her breast in the door. She had been given only a few months to live. In shock, I began researching alternative cancer treatments.
Bill began teaching anthropology and I took a biochemistry course at the university. I also started doing volunteer work teaching low-income families about nutrition and helping in a day-care center. Together Bill and I wrote a paper on our Peru research for the American Anthropological Society meetings that fall. While we were gone, our cat Tupac ran away from his caretakers. I spent days looking for him, putting flyers in rural mailboxes for miles around. Finally, six weeks later, someone five miles away found him, scrawny and starving, in a tree. We brought him home and nursed him back to health, but he never regained his old spirit.
In late November I traveled with my mother to a clinic in Mexico for a few weeks of treatments with laetrile. She was very worried but still in good health. I was very concerned for her. For the first time in my life I was confronting the possibility of losing my mother. After I left, she stayed on for a few more weeks of treatment. She had a dramatic improvement, but relapsed a few months later under stress from her business relationship with my father. She continued trying various therapies with some success, going through an accelerated personal growth process which I found very inspiring to witness.
We were still planning to make the documentary film of the Jauja market as soon as we had time for editing. I also had from our trip to Peru thousands of still photos, of which my favorites were the black and white portraits. I had been interested in photography ever since I saved to buy my first Brownie camera when I was eight, but when I read an article by Susan Sontag in the New York Review of Books, I changed my perspective completely and decided to give up photography. Her point, as I remember it now, was that the act of taking a picture separates us from the present. We are not in the moment but outside it, a spectator. We ourselves lose our experience of the moment we capture on film. Had I not been in a time when I was radically recreating my life, perhaps the article would not have evoked such a deep response.
Shortly after moving to our country place, we had decided that if we were going to continue eating meat, we would take responsibility for raising and killing the animals ourselves. We started raising chickens, feeding them organic grain which we ground ourselves in a hand grinder. We wanted to give them a good life. Their accomodations were clean and spacious and they had a grassy yard to scratch in. I was very fond of the chickens and, besides the ones we were raising for meat, I kept a variety of laying hens. My favorites were the downy blonde Buff Cochins. Holding them in my arms, I would bury my face in their soft clouds of feathers. I was also rescuing baby ducks from an experimental lab at the university. They made a mess, first in the bathtub, then in the yard before graduating to our neighbor’s pond, but just to feel the imprint of a tiny webbed foot in my palm filled me with joy.
Unfortunately the time came when the chickens to eat were big enough. We couldn’t even keep up with grinding all the grain they ate. We had to think about killing them. Neither of us wanted to do it. Finally we worked out an arrangement. I would hold and pet the chicken until he was in a trance, then Bill would quickly break his neck. We felt miserable. We spent a week over the Christmas holidays killing chickens and putting them into the freezer. By the time we finished, we felt so distressed that we couldn’t bear to eat them. We sold them and became lacto-ovo-vegetarians. We kept the egg-laying hens and decided to raise dairy goats for milk and cheese.
When spring came, we began to create pastures for our future goats and gardens for us. Our dream was to turn our two rented acres of barren white sand into fertile soil which would nourish lush gardens and pastures.Thanks to my father, I had a multitude of skills. Gardening, which had seemed drudgery when I was a child, became a great pleasure. My spine had healed enough for me to do strenuous work, although I would often have to spend a day in pain lying flat to recover. Bill, who had spent his childhood in New York City, was eager to learn and enthusiastic about all our projects. We were a great team. We were inspired by A.P.Thomson, an organic apple grower in Front Royal, Virginia, whom we visited whenever we drove north. He introduced us to Acres USA, the newspaper for eco-agriculture and told us about biodynamic agriculture and the power of compost, seaweed and rock dust.
With the war in Viet Nam continuing, our best hope for ending it seemed to be new president in the White House. We pinned our hopes on George McGovern. With some other university people, we developed a strategy. In numbers we attended our local precinct meetings. I was elected a delegate to the county Democratic convention and then to the state convention. At the state convention we elected McGovern delegates to go to the national convention in Miami Beach. After McGovern won the nomination, I turned my attention to voter registration. I began spending every spare moment driving around the countryside, registering people to vote. Even if a candidate I favored had not been running, registering voters would have been rewarding. As I traveled down dirt lanes I had never before noticed, I met many wonderful African-Americans, even elderly ones, who had never voted. I was welcomed warmly into their homes and churches. On election day I drove people back and forth to the polls all day long. When we heard that McGovern had lost to Nixon in a landslide, I was devastated.
I turned my attention to our mini-farm. We travelled all over the state and, one by one, brought home the goats who captured our hearts. April and Izarra were capricious Nubians with Roman noses and long silky ears. Taterbug was a feisty chocolate and tan Toggenberg. Balancing out the vivacious ones were Curly, a calm, matronly black and white Swiss Alpine and Sally, a stolid white Swiss Saanen. Each one had a unique personality and became a dearly loved friend. I was awed by their generosity and by the sacred relationship we shared. We fed them food which became their blood. Then they turned their blood miraculously into milk to nourish us. Vicariously, I delighted in their heel-kicking glee as they ran though the pastures, making music with the bells they wore around their necks. I played goat with them, rearing back like they did with my hands like hooves, then lowering my head and butting theirs. They loved the play and were very gentle with me. When they gave birth, I was the midwife. After I touched the wet newborn, I let the mother smell and lick my hands, bonding to me as well as to her child. When I milked them, resting my cheek on their flanks, they would turn around to lick my face with passionate mother love. I named the first baby goat Elfrie after a little girl I knew in Peru. I loved the little goat as if she were my own child.
The goats, chickens and garden were providing most of our food and a deep sense of joy and satisfaction. We made goat butter and cheese, baked bread, and ate fresh vegetables, herbs, melons and berries from the garden. We ate whatever was in season and froze or canned the surplus for winter. I was reading books on nutrition, herbology, and biodynamic agriculture. What I learned I was condensing into a newsletter for the organic gardening club and sharing with anyone who was interested. I was also helping Bill teach his anthropology classes, and together we taught an anthropology course called “Alternative Lifestyles.” Reading the complete works of Wilhelm Reich, we experimented with breathing and orgone energy. We practiced yoga, ran, and bicycled. Our friends were a diverse group. We were woven into a lively community with many people, each of whom shared some aspect of our interests and ideals. Being the more gregarious and enthusiastic, I usually discovered and cultivated friendships and new activities that Bill later shared.
Together we created a very satisfying life for ourselves and one we hoped would be of some benefit to others. We were also building a foundation for our future children. Although I was very happy with my life, I was not necessarily happily married. We agreed on most things or adapted easily to each other, but we were in conflict about sex. Like his father, Bill had a low libido. His mother had had an affair and divorced his father. I didn’t want to repeat that pattern. Bill also had a fiery temper. Most of the time he was gentle, mild-mannered and easygoing, but if something upset him he would become a dark storm cloud gathering. He could go on like that for hours or days before finally erupting into a rage. Once when we were in Peru, he hit me. I told him clearly that if he ever did it again, I would leave him immediately. He knew I meant it, and he never struck me again. When we got the goats, he started kicking them if they did something naughty. I was horrified and made him stop.
After the one time in Peru, his rages were never directed at me, but I found them disturbing, too reminiscent of my father for comfort. I did not get angry easily, but after a few years I started getting angry when he was having an outburst, especially if he broke something. I wanted to have a temper tantrum too. Finally, I had had it. I kicked the screendoor and said, “You are not the only person around here who can get angry.” That enraged him even more. He rushed toward me, put his hands around my neck and started choking me. Fortunately I was able to get away into the bedroom and lock the door. After another similar incident, I concluded that my expressing anger escalated his. I would leave the house and blow off steam by going for a walk, but once I was so furious that I went out in the backyard and pounded the frozen ground with a hammer.
On a global level, in spite of the Paris Peace talks, the war in Southeast Asia raged on. Even after U.S. troops were withdrawn, our tax dollars were financing the continuation of the war. We felt morally responsible. Bill suggested leaving the country, an idea that would probably never have occurred to me alone. I was reluctant to leave family and friends and would not leave as long as my mother was still alive. However, in spite of our hopes and efforts, it did not look as though she would live another year. Not that enthusiastic about teaching anthropology, Bill wanted to move someplace where we could run a plant nursery. We researched climate and demographics. We did not want to move anywhere that we would be taking land from native people who needed it. We chose New Zealand and began investigating the immigration process, with the idea of going in September. I was very ambivalent about going. I wanted to get pregnant and have a baby before moving again, but Bill thought we should wait until we were settled there. I could see the logic of his position, but it ran counter to my feeling and instinct.
By the Spring, Bill had decided not to write his dissertation. I felt it would be a waste to not share what we had learned in Peru, especially with the people of our town there. Bill told me he would write it if I would help. I agreed and we began a process that, given other events in our lives, would take about a year to complete. He wrote two chapters. I wrote two chapters on the two parts of the research I had done: the history and the nutrition survey. We co-wrote the introduction and the conclusion. When we finished, we wrote a summary in Spanish and sent it to the people of our town. I did not feel that helping Bill write his dissertation was dishonest. The research he had done and the part of it he wrote were equal to any other anthropology dissertation. My part was just a bonus. I enjoyed the writing. I wanted to share what I had discovered. Writing my own dissertation would have been difficult in comparison. The standard for an English dissertation is very high, not just in content but also in style. If I had written mine, it would have been I who would have had to defend it before a group of older men.
As part of her healing process, my mother decided to tell me family secrets she had long kept. I learned that my father’s mother who had supposedly worked herself to death had actually killed herself with rat poison (strychnine). Probably manic-depressive, she had previously been sent twice from her remote mountain home to the state mental hospital.
My father, who had threatened to kill me if I ran away from home, had himself run away from home at the age of fifteen. Between the ages of ten and fifteen, he had completed twelve grades at a settlement school run by women from New York. When they got him a scholarship to an Eastern college, my grandfather refused to let him accept it. In frustration and anger, he ran away.
Although he insisted we be scrupulously honest, he lied about his age to join the army. Later, during Prohibition, he made a substantial amount of money transporting alcohol from Canada. He married a beautiful and bright woman, but when he was sent to prison for a short time, she disappeared with all the money. After that he was very mistrustful of women. My mother thought he had been attracted to her because she seemed so innocent and guileless. As a devout Catholic, she would not have been willing to marry a man who was divorced, much less one who was still legally married, so he didn’t tell her about his first wife. She did not find out until she met his family for the first time when she was already pregnant with me. In shame, she kept the secret from her own family and friends.
I finally learned what had happened one mysterious Christmas. My father, who had had several other affairs over the years, had met in Kentucky a widowed schoolteacher with a teenage daughter. She was in love with him but refused to sleep with him unless they were married. Telling her that he was divorced from my mother, he married her, asking her to keep the marriage secret for the sake of his children. When she told a friend, she found out that my father was still married and living with my mother. She immediately shot herself. The phone call my father took that Christmas was from her daughter telling him of her mother’s death. Learning all these family secrets, I felt shocked, overwhelmed and profoundly disillusioned, but also relieved to know consciously what had surely influenced me on an unconscious level.
All of the Spring I felt painfully torn between my desire to spend time with my mother and my feeling of responsibility to Bill. He insisted that my primary responsibility was to him and that he couldn’t teach and at the same time milk goats, feed chickens, and tend the garden. By March, Mother was so ill from pain medication that, at a cancer clinic, she went through an extremely difficult and painful withdrawal process and was thereafter able to be so present with the pain that she somehow neutralized it. While she was going through the hellish withdrawal process, she called me and pleaded with me to come to upstate New York to be with her. As I write this almost thirty years later, I am sobbing. I regret more than anything in my entire life that I did not go to her when she needed me.
Finally in July, I felt I had to go. With the various alternative therapies she had tried, she had lived two years rather than two months. Now it looked as though the end was near, but she still had hope. I wanted to care for her at home, such as it was. While she was away at the clinic, there had been a fire in the apartment she shared with my youngest sister, a senior in high school. My sister had managed to save the family photos, my mother’s most treasured possession, and found a place for the two of them to live temporarily. Mother wanted me to just sit quietly, to be present with her in silence, but I couldn’t sit still, and there was plenty to do to keep myself busy. After I had been there about two weeks, I called my other sister and asked her to come help. The day my sister arrived, Mother’s doctor told us he thought she had only a few days to live. With that pronouncement, she surrendered, saying that now that my brother was married and my youngest sister just graduated from high school, she felt she could let go of the effort to stay alive.
That night she asked me what would happen after she died and I had to honestly tell her, “I don’t know.” She was very thin and frail, but as soon as she let go of her will to live, she became so heavy that two of us could no longer move her from bed to chair. She slept on the sofa. Early the next morning, August l6, I made her a cup of herbal tea, then left the room for a few minutes to call about renting a hospital bed. When I walked back into the room, I found her dead. She had vomited up the tea along with some foul-smelling liquid. Too week to sit up, she must have choked on it. In the minutes after I found her, I alternated from moment to moment between profound grief and sublime exultation. As I woke my sister and, grief stricken, went through the physical motions of cleaning my mother’s body, I was simultaneously transcendant, sharing in her spirit’s liberation. After a few hours the experience diminished in intensity but stayed with me for months. I thought of the Kalahari Bushmen, who believe that when any being dies, a hole is created in the web of the universe, and through that opening those left behind may get a glimpse of the Infinite. I knew that was true for I was standing in that opening.
When I returned home, I lay in bed for a week, exhausted and grieving, but also immersed in a profound spiritual experience. I decided the time had come to meditate in earnest. I began looking for a spiritual path. I didn’t want a guru or a belief system, simply a way to meditate. After being turned primarily outward for years, my attention was being drawn inward. The year before we had been initiated into a simple meditation technique by members of Ananda Marga, but I didn’t resonate with my mantra. Bill and I decided to try Transcendental Meditation. We were soon meditating twice a day. My sisters and brother also started practicing TM and our meditation practice became a bonding force. In the months after my mother died, I dreamed about her every night and also felt her spirit present with me.
In October I began to have a very strange experience. Every morning I would be awakened around 4 A.M. by a very high pitched whirring sound coming from outside our house. Falling asleep again, I would wake about six to feed and milk the goats, then lie down for a brief rest. Every day for about ten days just as I lay down and relaxed, I would see beings in white come floating in through the bedroom door. In that moment I would know exactly what was going to happen and remember that this same thing was happening every day. I was not afraid and felt that the beings had my best interests at heart, but I dreaded the pain. They would hover over me like a surgical team and begin drilling into my third eye. When the pain became too intense, I would become unconscious. When I woke later I would have no memory of the whirring sound or the visitors until the whole sequence began again the next day. One day I could hear the sound all day as it moved from place to place around our house. As I followed it around, unable to see anything that could be causing it, I remembered the morning drilling. In late afternoon, a friend stopped by for tea. She also could hear the sound and was equally mystified but thought my experience might be connected to a spaceship her friends had been seeing over their field in the evenings. She told me she had heard on the news about two fishermen in Louisiana who reported being abducted by aliens in a spacecraft. I did not know what my experience was, but it seemed to coincide with my renewed interest in meditation.
I was the executor of my mother’s estate. Because she had been so ill and some of her papers had been lost in the fire, my responsibilities took up a lot of my time. We were also in the midst of a sibling conflict. During her last days, my mother wrote me a letter giving me access to her safety deposit box . She kept insisting that I go get her will so that she could rewrite it. She wanted to change her will, which gave my youngest sister, who had been fourteen when she wrote the will, twice as large a share as that of the other three. She wanted to change it so that all the shares would be equal. I was so busy, and she died before I went, so the will was never changed, but all four of us knew of her wishes. Finally, my little sister agreed to divide the estate equally. My father compensated her for the amount that she gave up.
Living without my mother seemed incomprehensible. From the moment that I was conceived, she had loved me unconditionally. She had accepted me and everyone else without judgment. Everyone who knew her loved and respected her. She was consistently kind, compassionate and generous. Her worst faults were that she was sometimes shy, nervous, and unsure of herself. She was prone to worry. When she was grieving her own mother’s death, she had lamented that she had not written to her mother more. She felt guilty that she had not done more for her. I never wanted to feel that way. As a child of twelve, I had vowed to always be good to my mother, and I had, but after her death I also was beset by regrets and guilt. She was the best of mothers. She would have anything for me. Yet the one time she truly needed me, I had let her down. In my last weeks with her, I could feel how deeply hurt she was that I had not come to her in the Spring when she had asked.
In December, Bill’s father suddenly became ill and died. He was a beautiful man, whom I dearly loved. Bill went alone to the funeral while I stayed behind to do the chores. After his father’s funeral, Bill visited his mother, who persuaded him that, since I had been gone when my mother died, it was only fair for him to stay with her for an equal amount of time. I was happy for him to have the time with her, and I covered for his classes, but when he came back he was very cool to me. Finally, in an accusatory tone, he told me that his mother had led him to understand that I had always been jealous of her relationship with him and wanted to move to New Zealand to take him away from her.
I felt that was so unfair, that exactly the opposite was true, that she had been jealous of me. I understood that she was hurt and angry that we were moving to New Zealand. What deeply troubled me was that Bill had taken her side and turned against me. I felt hurt and betrayed. I had been more loyal to him than to my own mother, and he had chosen his mother over me. Once out of her constant influence, he started seeing that she had once again manipulated him, but I felt as if she had finally succeeded in driving a wedge between Bill and me.
In February, Bill suddenly needed to have hernia surgery. I felt overwhelmed taking over his classes, doing all the farm chores, delivering baby goats and preparing food to take to him at the hospital. As much as we loved our life, we were finding that we could not both go away at the same time for more than a couple of days. It wasn’t easy to find anyone to help. Few people knew how to milk. If one of us went, the one who stayed carried a heavy burden. We thought the solution might lie in a community of kindred spirits who could share both creative play and responsibility. We began running ads in national magazines and corresponding with people who were interested in creating intentional communities. Most of them were interested in country living but had no experience or comprehension of the physical work involved.
We had found gardening and keeping animals to be hard work, sometimes frustrating, but always deeply satisfying. We had worked for days planting only to have early seedlings freeze. Our clever goats occasionally unlocked the gate, pulling up carrots, chomping holes in cantaloupes, eating all the raspberries. Gardening was teaching me non-attachment, teaching me to live in the moment enjoying the process. We had made and dug into our soil tons of compost. Minerals, seaweed and biodynamic preparations had enlivened it. When we added a ton of glacial rock dust, the whole garden evolved to a whole new level of aliveness. The garden became a magnet for lightning. It vibrated with energy and consciousness. When I had free time, I would lie on the earth in the center of the garden. I became aware of presences, intelligent forces in nature that were communicating with me and I with them. The vegetables and flowers were scintillating, luscious, full of vitality.
I was having amazing experiences unlike anything I had ever heard of. Then late in the summer of 1974, I read The Secret Life of Plants and realized that I was not alone. For the first time I heard of people who had had experiences similar to mine. I learned about people who played classical music to plants at dawn, who caressed plants and noticed their responses. I read about the Findhorn garden in northern Scotland where Dorothy Maclean had communicated with the devas and nature spirits, where the garden was co-created with Nature. I wrote the Findhorn Community an eleven page letter describing my own experiences. They invited us to visit.
We had devoted our love, energy, resources and much hard work to our gardens, animals, home and community. It was far from easy to leave them behind to emigrate to New Zealand. We donated our extensive libraries to the university, took the goats to a new home, turned over our mini-farm and dog Curry to a young couple, packed a few things to take to New Zealand, and flew to Scotland. We arrived at the Findhorn community just at dinner time. When I walked into the dining room, I instantly felt that, after a lifetime of feeling always different, I had finally found kindred spirits. We were a part of the Findhorn community for about a month. While there I discovered flower essences. Standing in a shop, I squeezed onto my head a droplet of a potion called “Exultation of Flowers” and I felt something. It was subtle but powerful. I also discovered the Bach Flower Remedies, began to study them, and ordered a set of the thirty-eight essences to be shipped to New Zealand. We were very impressed with Findhorn and hoped to create a community like it in New Zealand.
Age 0 – 22 What Delights Me, Love-Hate with Daddy
Age 22 & 26 1st Marriage & the 60’s
Age 26 & 28 Life in Peru’s High Andes
Age 28 & 32 Raising goats, Mother’s death
Age 33-35 New Zealand, Spiritual Awakening
Age 35-41 Feldenkrais, Polarity, Divorce
Age 42 – 46 Mantak, Tao, Marriage to Michael
Age 47-49 Father murdered; Great Pyramid initiation
Age 49- 54 Car Accident, Surgeries, Broken Life
Age 54-60 South Pacific & Asheville, Rabbit & Dolphins
After Findhorn, we visited our families to say goodbye and then tied up some loose ends. Although I still had a number of years to write my dissertation, I burned my bridges by writing a very dramatic letter to the chairman of my English department. I said that I had decided to live my life fully rather than to be a scholar writing critical commentary on other writers’ evocations of life. To illustrate what I was rejecting, I melodramatically threw in a phrase from a book I had once read: “with the dust of libraries thick on his heart.”
In March we began our journey to New Zealand, stopping for several months in California where we lived with Bill’s brother while studying Polarity Therapy. I immediately felt a deep affinity for the work. I intuitively understood the principles and had an already well-developed natural ability to perceive and work with energy. Along with training and hands-on experience, I was reading carefully all of Dr. Stones books. I knew I had found an important aspect of my future work. Since our time in Peru, I had completely altered course and left academia behind. My new work was still unfolding, but I knew that it involved enhancing health and awareness on all levels.
We had been approved for immigration and were in close communication with officials at the New Zealand embassy in Washington but were waiting to get our entry permits dated just before we left. By the time we were ready to leave California, a newly-installed New Zealand government was putting almost a total freeze on immigration. Embassy officials in Washington encouraged us to go on six month tourist visas and arrange immigration once we were in the country. The war in Viet Nam also ended about the same time, on April 30. In retrospect it seems we could have decided to stay in the U.S. but we had left everything behind and had some momentum going toward New Zealand so we continued on.
In the Esalen Bookstore in San Francisco I bought books to take to New Zealand. Among them were books on The Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique, two forms of somatic education. While I was standing in the store, a woman walked in and put up a large poster advertising a three-year training in The Feldenkrais Method. I knew instantly that that was what I wanted to do, but it was out of the question since we were leaving the country permanently in a few days.
We had plane tickets which allowed us to stop in Hawaii, Tahiti and the Cook Islands on our way to New Zealand. Our first stop was the Big Island of Hawaii. We were so captivated by it that we decided to bypass the other islands and spend all our time there. All of June and July we travelled and camped in state parks, living in a big green roomlike tent that I sewed by hand from double sheets and mosquito netting.
My favorite places were the wide white sand beach at Hapuna and the old ironwood forest above the black lava cliffs at MacKenzie. Swimming in the crystal clear water at Hapuna, I felt the massive overshadowing presence of Mauna Kea volcano as a powerful, ancient being. At MacKenzie, the deep peace of the ironwood grove spoke in whispers of needles falling softly on our tent as we slept. Wherever we were on the island, I felt the powerful energies of the volcanoes moving in me. I felt I was being initiated, perhaps by Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess, into my own deep transformational nature. Whether gazing into the seething fire deep in Kilauea’s crater, discovering in the midst of lush green foliage deep earth cracks exuding steam or feeling the misty spray as the ocean crashed against high lava cliffs, I was in awe. I was meditating several hours a day and having very intense experiences that led me to believe I could use some guidance.
One morning as we ate papayas beneath the ironwood trees, Bill and I turned to each other and simultaneously said, “Let’s go to Honolulu.” We knew that Pierre Pannetier, Dr. Stone’s successor in Polarity Therapy, was teaching an advanced seminar in Honolulu starting the next day, but we hadn’t planned to attend. Our decision spontaneously made, by a series of unusual supporting events we found ourselves that afternoon on a plane to Honolulu. At the seminar the next day I happened to find a copy of a book Dr. Stone had written about the spiritual path he followed. I stayed up all night reading it, feeling a deep inner knowing that this was the path for me. Bill stayed up the next night reading the same book and was equally moved. We returned to the Big Island with more books to read and the name of a woman to contact in New Zealand.
*talk about Inner Sound and Light?
In mid-August, we left Hawaiian summer to arrive the next day in New Zealand late winter. We first stayed near Auckland with friends, then bought a small van and outfitted it with gear to travel around the North Island. Although most of the island was covered in lovely farms and green pastures, the remaining areas of primeval vegetation touched something very deep in me. Wherever we travelled, we offered free Polarity Therapy sessions. Our van had no shock absorbers and the constant impact was affecting my spine and reactivating the injuries from the accident in Peru. I was soon in constant pain, worse than anything I had experienced in years. We decided to stay near Auckland for a while. We read all of Dr. Stones books from cover to cover several times and became friends with several older people who helped deepen our understanding of vibrational healing. They also taught us about healing with color, with sacred geometry and with trees.
The day the Bach Flower Remedies arrived was a big moment in my life. Just as I had taken them out of the box and was holding in my hand a small amber bottle labelled “Rescue Remedy”, a bird flew into the glass window and fell unconscious onto the grass outside. I rushed out, picked up his limp body and, holding him in my hand, put a few drops of Rescue Remedy into his mouth. He opened his eyes, ruffled his feathers, stood up, and, using my hand as a launching pad, flew away singing. I was thrilled. Of course he might have recovered anyway, but I saw the event as an auspicious beginning. I began giving flower essences to everyone who was willing and learning from experience, books, and correspondence with practitioners in England how to use them effectively.
The day after we arrived in New Zealand, we had called the lady involved with Dr. Stone’s spiritual teacher. From the books we had read, we knew that applying for and being accepted for initiation was a lengthy process. Instead we suddenly found ourselves on an accelerated course. She immediately invited us to lunch. On the following day we attended a satsang and were encouraged to apply for initiation immediately. A few weeks later we heard from our teacher-to-be in India that we had been accepted. Our initiation, by proxy, was scheduled for the evening of November 21, in Auckland. All the events of our first few months in New Zealand, and even our whole lives, seemed to lead up to that moment. At our initiation we vowed to meditate two and a half hours a day, in effect tithing one tenth of our time back to God. We were soon so enthusiastic about meditation, however, that we were devoting six hours a day to it and organizing our whole day around it.
Nonetheless, we needed to keep our feet on the ground to deal with our immigration status. We learned we would be welcome to stay as teachers but not as farmers. We investigated university positions but there were none available. We could easily get high school teaching jobs, but the education system seemed very regimented. We didn’t think we could tolerate it for more than a year or two. One choice would have been to take the teaching positions, quit in two years, and do what we wanted. That seemed dishonest to both of us and we decided not to do it. We were able to extend our six-month tourist visa to seven, but we had to leave in March. On the way to pick up our plane tickets for our flights to the U.S. the following day, we met a friend who told us that our spiritual teacher would be visiting Australia and New Zealand in May. We instantly decided to fly to Australia instead. We would spend six weeks there until our teacher arrived.
The moment that we landed in Sydney, I recognized Australia as the land of my lifelong primeval earth dreams. I felt a deep and profound resonance with the land and had powerful dreams and visions while I was there. We did not travel far from Sydney but mostly meditated and waited for our teacher to arrive. Months before, when I had first seen pictures of him and of his teacher, I had felt a deep connection and remembering of his teacher and of the path. I had felt no connection whatsoever with him. That changed as soon as I was initiated. Even before I met him in person, bonds of love were forming. When I first saw him, I fell instantly deeply in love. He was the most beautiful, loving being I had ever encountered. We, along with a small group initiates, spent a precious week with him in Sydney. Then we flew with him and a few fellow initiates to New Zealand.
At the end of May, we left New Zealand, stopped for a week in Hawaii, then returned to the mainland. We bought a red pickup truck and visited our families. Bill’s mother disapproved of our strict vegetarian diet and long hours of meditation. As with anything we did that she didn’t like, she blamed me for it, refusing to see that Bill was just as committed to our way of life as I was. His mother’s reaction was the most extreme, but many people in our extended families had difficulty relating to our diet and meditation. I felt sad that our new way of life was creating separation from people we loved.
After spending several weeks looking for land to buy in the North Carolina mountains, we still had not found a place that sang to us. We also encountered bureaucratic obstacles to practicing Polarity Therapy there. We decided to take a weekend off from our land search to visit an older couple who were practitioners of our spiritual path. Their son was the mayor of their small city in central North Carolina. Within a day they had persuaded us to move there, found a very nice house for us to rent inexpensively, found a legal way for us to practice there, and booked their friends for appointments with us. Since we had sold or given away everything before going to New Zealand, we started over, shopping for dishes, pots, linens and appliances. We had never had real furniture before, but we bought a few pieces to go with our new role in a conservative Southern town. We even bought new clothes as we deliberately reinvented our exterior selves for the next phase of our lives. Our Polarity Therapy practice was small but successful. Most of our clients were professional people with esoteric interests.
After reading Astrology, Psychology and the Five Elements by Steven Arroyo, I called him to get his recommendations for other astrology books. I had had my first natal chart reading and had read several books. I was eager to learn more. Fascinated, I read scores of books. I paid attention to my own transits and progressions and began doing charts for all my clients. I found that astrology was very meaningful and useful to me, but I wasn’t interested in becoming a full-time professional astrologer.
I was still very interested in both the Feldenkrais and Alexander approaches to somatic education. Tom Hanna, the philosophy professor who first brought Moshe Feldenkrais to the U.S., adapted the word somatic from the Greek soma to bridge the gap in the West, where body and mind were, and for the most part still are, thought of as separate entities. One of the books that I had carried to New Zealand and back was Awareness through Movement by Feldenkrais. It contained ten movement lessons which I recorded in my own voice so that I could lie on the carpet, play the tape, and follow the directions without needing to look at the book. I immediately noticed an effect. After following instructions to do a movement only with one side of my body, I would notice that I would feel larger, longer and lighter on that side. After doing a series of simple movements with minimal effort and maximal awareness, I would stand up feeling lighter, taller, more fluid in my movements.
In May, we went to Washington, D.C . to spend two weeks studying with a man who was still a student in the Feldenkrais training I had read about at the Esalen Institute. Every day we had one group Awareness Through Movement lesson and we each had one private Functional Integration lesson in which the trainee practitioner supported and guided our movements with his hands. Every day I felt more changes in the way I moved and breathed. On the tenth day, as I was walking down the street, suddenly I was vividly aware of my whole body, including my whole skeleton. To experience myself so embodied was to me a revelation.
I returned home with the ten lessons from the book recorded by Feldenkrais himself. As I did a lesson every day, I found the results to be cumulative. In the summer I began doing the movements lying outside on the ground under the majestic oak trees that encircled our house. Movements that differentiated and freed the movement of my eyes and jaw evoked deep changes. I found that as I was resting, I would begin experiencing very subtle spontaneous movements which arose of their own without my intention or doing. Feldenkrais had not mentioned this possibility. I felt curious, interested, as I explored new territory.
The movements were freeing up many old conditioned patterns and habits of sensing, feeling, thinking, and moving. Bill and I could both feel that we were changing internally and in relation to each other. Going to New Zealand and coming back, we had let go of everything in our lives except each other. In a way we had become each other’s only solid ground. The ground was moving. We looked to our astrological transits and progressions for some understanding of the nature of the change.
We supported each other and were both very devoted to our spiritual practice, which was the major focus of our lives. Every morning we arose to meditate at what Indian mystics have called the elixir hour, the silent pre-dawn hours. We began at 3:30 A.M. and meditated until around 6:30 or 7:00 when we greeted the day with the birds as the sun rose. Being in tune with the rhythm of the day was very satisfying to me. Other initiates from far ranging places gathered on Sundays for satsang at our house. We cultivated a holy and serene atmosphere in our home and in many ways were very peaceful and happy, but the movement rumbling underneath threatened what appeared solid. Our unconscious family dynamic had shifted. He saw me as a sibling in rivalry for the guru-father’s attention. I saw my guru as the Beloved and Bill more and more as a brother-friend.
Bill had also decided that he no longer wanted children, that I was enough family for him. He told me he had actually decided before we went to New Zealand, but he didn’t want to tell me. I began to have serious doubts about our marriage. I felt I would be a very good mother, that mothering was a natural expression of my essential nature. I asked Bill to go for marriage counselling with me, but he refused, saying, “I’m perfectly happy and if you aren’t, it must be your problem.” As I began thinking about leaving him, I felt intense stress from inner conflict. It was affecting my health and intensifying the back pain. I deeply loved Bill and appreciated his many wonderful qualities as well as how harmoniously we shared everything. On the other hand, I wanted children and I wanted more emotional and sexual intimacy than he did.
I also wanted to know who I was as an individual. For the ten years of our marriage he had joined me in my every new interest, which was at the same time delightful and maddening. The last three years we had spent practically every moment together. We suffered from too much togetherness. We had become a Siamese couple, a single entity. As though we were joined at the side, we together faced out to the world. Feeling I needed my own space, I moved into the spare bedroom. We continued our longtime practice of giving each other a Polarity Therapy session every day. Although there were tensions between us and we weren’t having sex, we were sharing loving touch every day.
In the fall I had a very powerful dream:
I am standing at the foot of a vast mountain of light. When I step forward, I find myself spiraled up easily and effortlessly, as if I am on a walking sidewalk, a ribbon of light that sweeps me up. I am one with the light mountain, absorbed in bliss until suddenly I have a thought. I remember that I had been with some friends and realize they must have fallen behind. I realize I have a choice: to go on without them or to go back for them. I realize it will be harder for me if I choose to go back, that I will be giving up something. Moved by a feeling of love, I decide to do it anyway. Instantly, I am back at the foot of the light mountain, separate from it, facing downhill. I walk down a short distance and on my left see a fence surrounding a vast savannah.
Climbing over the fence, I begin to walk, encountering lions, giraffes, and wildebeasts. Every kind of wild animal, all the wildness of the Earth, is present. Eventually I come to a farmyard full of domestic animals, and finally I enter a small building where there are people. My friends are among them. As soon as I go in, the door springs shut, and I am just as trapped as they are. The whole inside surface of the room is smooth with no apparent windows or doors. I know there is a way out, but the key is inside me. It is a particular state of consciousness that I know and must find again.
I close my eyes. I make a few very subtle shifts in consciousness and finally I find it . In that instant all the walls disappear. We find ourselves standing outside in a clearing by a forest, just at dusk. I know the way back to the mountain of light, but it is far and there are many obstacles ahead. Resolutely, I set off with my friends following. We walk through dark woods, climb over large boulders, go over waterfalls, and swim through underground rivers. Finally we arrive back at the foot of the mountain of light. We able to ascend, but it is more difficult for me now, more climbing than gliding. I realize fully what I have given up by making the choice I did.
I awoke to a vivid awareness of the whole dream and the knowledge that I had already chosen. I had chosen to, in some way, give up my attachment to the blissful, transcendant spiritual states I had been experiencing in order to go back for the parts of myself I had left behind. I also felt that, in addition to representing aspects of myself, the friends of my dream were real people that I would meet in my waking life. Although I had had the complete dream, I would for the next year find myself re-dreaming parts of the journey back.
Age 0 – 22 What Delights Me, Love-Hate with Daddy
Age 22 & 26 1st Marriage & the 60’s
Age 26 & 28 Life in Peru’s High Andes
Age 28 & 32 Raising goats, Mother’s death
Age 33-35 New Zealand, Spiritual Awakening
Age 35-41 Feldenkrais, Polarity, Divorce
Age 42 – 46 Mantak, Tao, Marriage to Michael
Age 47-49 Father murdered; Great Pyramid initiation
Age 49- 54 Car Accident, Surgeries, Broken Life
Age 54-60 South Pacific & Asheville, Rabbit & Dolphins
A few weeks after I first had the dream, I heard about Giovanni, a Feldenkrais teacher in New England. When I called him, the moment I heard his voice, I recognized him. I knew that I knew him from some other life and that he was one of the friends in my dream. He told me he was sponsoring an upcoming workshop with a woman teacher from abroad. There I met Giovanni, the teacher Ruth, who would become an important role model for me and also Marilyn, my soul sister who would become my lifelong friend. Giovanni, a psychologist, was going to be starting a two year training program in body-centered process in the summer. I knew it was my next step. I returned home to tell Bill that I was moving to New England to do the training. He decided that he wanted to do it also.
In the spring we read about Dr. Mays, a dentist in New Mexico who balanced the whole body by working with the bite of the teeth. We flew there and had him make his appliances for us. At first mine seemed miraculous. My whole body let go of all its stress instantly. The dental appliances required constant balancing as our bodies changed. We had a little acrylic kit and a Dremel drill. We would muscle test ourselves and adjust the little devices. Over time they became more difficult to balance.
In April, just as we completed our income taxes, my body completely collapsed. I suddenly lost weight; I was in pain; I felt depleted; and I felt as if I were going to die at any moment. I truly felt as if my life were hanging by a thread. There were perhaps many factors involved including the painful conflict I felt about separating from Bill, not enough protein in my diet, the constant changes in the dental appliances, and stressful planetary aspects. In some way, however, my condition was mysterious. Bill was afraid I would die and wanted to send me off to a clinic somewhere. Instead, I found a local chiropractor, one of the first practitioners of Applied Kinesiology, who helped me slowly regain my balance.
The beginning of July we sold our furniture, and Bill drove our truck up North. On July 4, I flew up. Bill met me at the airport and drove me to our summer sublet, an A-frame cabin surrounded by woods. I was so weak and sensitive that as we drove the back roads I could vividly sense where all the battles with the Indians had occurred. In August, all twelve members of our group gathered to begin our training with a ten-day intensive taught by Giovanni, Ruth, and Ron, a brilliant therapist who was developing his own somatic work. All three were excellent, very creative, inspiring teachers. Those ten days were a turning point in my life, evocative of my first days in college when I entered a nourishing environment and began to flourish. When we began I was still thin and weak, but on the threshold of a new life. As we explored a form of rebirthing, I re-experienced my birth for the first time.
My mother is drugged with ether, unconscious, no longer present with me, unable to help me be born. I also am sleepy, falling into unconsciousness, unable to move myself out into life. I know that I will surely die unless I mobilize all my consciousness and will. I do and I begin to move. Hard cold metal reaches in and grasps my head, hurting me, and pulls me out. The room is cold and I am laid on cold metal to be weighed and measured. There is another baby being born in the same room.
Our training integrated aspects of Feldenkrais, Rebirthing, Al Pesso’s Psychomotor work and Bioenergetics. We were not only learning a whole new orientation and skills for working with people but also going through profound transformational processes ourselves. By the end of our first ten days together, we had supported, nurtured and challenged each other. We had danced and played together and become a community of close friends. We would become central to each others’ lives, meeting one weekend a month and several times for ten day intensives over the next two years. By the end of that first ten days, I felt reborn, renewed, young again, and eager to explore life. Bill and I were stunned to find ourselves back alone together needing to decide where to go next.
In moving, we had reduced our belongings to very few, but for some reason at the end of the training we felt the impulse to lighten up even more. We held a yard sale, selling our bicycles and all our garden tools. We were down to a few books, clothes, household items, and a few boxes of journals and personal treasures. Giovanni proposed that the three of us live together. Not having any other plans, we agreed. The three of us began to look for a house, but we didn’t seem very clear about what we wanted. I suggested that we formulate a description of the ideal house. Bill didn’t want to participate so Giovanni and I together created a detailed description of our ideal house.
The next day an ad for our house appeared in the paper, but the realtor told us that the eighty-year-old lady who owned the house was very particular. After screening dozens of people, she had not yet found anyone who satisfied her. We saw the lovely, large New England house several miles northeast of town. Built in 1830, its foundation walls were large old stones from the land itself. Circling the house were five sheltering presences, ancient maples, too big for me to fully embrace. Seven acres of wildflower meadows merged into forest on three sides. We loved the house and land. Miraculously Sarah, our landlady, liked us. It was ours for a very modest monthly rent, a fraction of its true value.
Giovanni had three rooms upstairs and we had three rooms downstairs as well as a living room, kitchen, bath and small office we all shared. Bill and I bought rugs and a mattress and settled in, but our relationship felt very tenuous. Finally willing to acknowledge that our marriage was in serious trouble, Bill agreed to come to a session with a couple who did marriage counselling. Afterward they said they didn’t feel too hopeful about our relationship. They suggested we have a trial separation. We agreed. We wanted to separate while we still had good feelings for each other. Bill had more hope than I that we would get back together.
Although I had been thinking about leaving for some time, the actual separation seemed sudden and literally happened overnight. The day after our counseling session, we bought me a car, a green Datsun station wagon. Then we loaded up the truck for Bill. That evening, November 18, l978, Bill left to stay in Boston with a woman friend from our training group. He had offers to spend one week each with a series of people in our group. When he was all ready to leave, we stood together at the door, gazing into each other’s eyes, acknowledging our deep spiritual connection and the eternal nature of our love.
Bill and I spoke on the phone often. We were best friends who had shared everything. We naturally shared the pain of our separation. Even though I wanted the separation, I felt grief stricken to lose him. He felt he was being rejected by me and was hurt and angry. I felt hurt and angry that he had been unwilling to address our issues and accept counseling earlier when it might have made a difference. I also was exhilarated, appreciating my freedom to discover myself and to follow my own timing and rhythm without adapting to another person. We saw each other one weekend a month at our training group sessions, where we had loving support from the others. Over time we used our new skills to heal our wounds and transform our relationship. Meanwhile, our situation became more complex. The friend from our group with whom he was going to stay for a week invited him to continue living with her. I became involved in a very confusing and unusual relationship with Giovanni.
Since Giovanni was away about half the week, working in the city, I had time for solitude, time to meditate and reflect. We initially found another roommate to share the rent, but he was not around much and eventually moved out. Giovanni and I had found the house together and neither of us wanted to leave it. We also enjoyed living together. He was charismatic, creative, intelligent, and playful. We were attracted to each other, but he was in a relationship with my friend, although he did not believe in monogamy and was also seeing other women. He was a sanyasin, a follower of Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh (now known as Osho) and ardent about sexual as well as spiritual freedom. The whole time I had been with Bill, I had been completely faithful to him, although I had twice been tempted to have an affair.
In mid-December, about a month after Bill left, Giovanni suggested we ask his girlfriend (my friend) if she would be okay with our sleeping together just once to diffuse the sexual tension between us. She said she wasn’t happy about his being with other women, but since she knew he did it anyway, she would rather it were with me. This was a big mistake on my part, for which I later apologized profusely to her and was generously forgiven. Once I slept with him, I found myself falling in love with him, or, perhaps more accurately, falling into obsession.
The beginning of January, I sublet my part of the house and flew to San Francisco to spend the winter. Ruth had introduced me to Mark, a friend of hers who had studied hypnosis with Milton Erickson and was a good friend of one of the developers of neurolinguistic programming. By phone, Mark and I arranged for me to live in his apartment. He would share his Ericksonian and NLP skills with me and I would share my Feldenkrais skills with him. It was a great arrangement. We learned from each other and he introduced me to many interesting people. I took classes in Ericksonian hypnosis and training in neurolinguistic programming. Mark and I also took ki-energy classes from George Leonard in Mill Valley. I took a few aikido classes and was very drawn to it but was concerned about damaging my spine further. I also had private Feldenkrais sessions and became friends with some of the practitioners in the city.
While I was in San Francisco, Ruth introduced me to Springers, round mini-trampolines. She taught a weekend workshop where we did Feldenkrais movement sequences on the Springers. I loved it! By the end of the weekend I was so bouncy that I could jump high up in the air without the trampoline. I started selling them and kept a circle of ten for us to play on in Mark’s big living room. One morning, not quite fully awake, while doing spins and leaping from one to the other, I landed on a frame instead of a mat and turned my left ankle, injuring it so severely that after that I could no longer run. Running had been one of my great pleasures and I missed it.
When I arrived in San Francisco, I had been a vegetarian for seven years. I was beginning to realize that my diet had something to do with my illness in the Spring and the depleted state in which I still found myself. I could feel my cells hungering for something they weren’t getting. When I had been initiated by my teacher, I had vowed to not eat meat, fish or eggs, drink alcohol or use drugs. I had also vowed to live a clean moral life, which meant, among other things, not having sex outside marriage. In spite of my best intentions, I had already broken that one, which was humbling. I was still meditating two and a half hours every day and I took my vows very seriously, but I was also feeling more and more that I needed to listen to all of myself. I felt called to wholeness, as a sacred imperative, more than to holiness.
Aside from my vows, my feelings for animals made even the thought of causing them pain or taking their life extremely painful for me. Out of compassion, though, for what poet Mary Oliver calls “the soft animal” of my own body, I was thinking of giving it some fish. Every day for a week, I visited the fish market and looked at the fish. Finally I bought a small piece, took it home, cooked it and ate. As I swallowed the first bite, my whole body sighed. The conflict about eating animals is something I have, so far, never resolved. Over the years I have alternated long periods as a vegetarian with periods of overriding my feelings for animals and my spiritual considerations to give my body what it craves. When I eat animals, I do it as native peoples do, with deep reverence and gratitude, as a sacrament.
At the end of March I returned to New England and began offering private sessions in Polarity Therapy, body-centered process, and Ericksonian hypnosis. I also studied Bodymind Centering intensively with Bonnie Cohen. Studying developmental movement and experiential anatomy with her deepened and amplified the awareness I had developed from the Feldenkrais work. I was also teaching workshops using the rebounders. I loved sharing the leaping joy they evoked in me. The summer of 1979, I spent a month in San Francisco and six weeks in Boulder doing intensive Feldenkrais courses. In the fall, I continued studying with Bonnie, and I began teaching classes and weekend workshops which I called Explorations in Awareness. I integrated what I had been learning from others for the last several years but created original lessons of my own.
While I was in California, my friend and Giovanni ended their relationship. He asked me to come home. I decided that as much as I wanted the opportunity to begin a relationship with him, it was more important for me to keep my focus on my own learning. By the time I did go home, he had met someone new he was seeing regularly. We decided to continue developing our friendship, but within a few months we were also lovers.
For four more years we would share a home. We would be lovers for periods of months or a year or more at a time. Always we were friends and companions, and in many ways we became family. Only for very short intervals was I ever the only woman in his life. Since I wanted to be the only one, I caused myself a lot of pain. Some of our off-again times occurred when I felt guilty about breaking my spiritual vows and went back to celibacy. At other times, we felt we had come to such an impasse that we didn’t even feel attracted to each other. During the periods when we were not lovers, I dated other men, but I was not able to be intimately involved with two people at the same time as he was. The longer we were together, the more he expressed his love and appreciation for me, but he was never in love with me as I was initially in love with him. Even so, he did not want to let me go, and when I would move away, he would draw me back. As challenging as it was for me, I thought I might as well learn as much as possible from my experience rather than leave it and have to learn the same lessons somewhere else. I kept feeling that what I most needed to do for my own growth was to learn to love and accept him just as he was.
For years I had been wanting to do a complete training with Moshe Feldenkrais himself. In January, my friend Jerry called from California to say that Moshe had decided to do a training on the East coast and if I could find an appropriate place, he would do it in Boston. In the end the best place I found was at a college in my own town. In June, 1980 the four-year training program began with students from all over the world. It was great for me because I could live at home and continue seeing clients, a financial necessity. All twelve of us who had just completed the second year of our body-centered process training were enrolled in the Feldenkrais training.
I had filed for divorce from Bill in the Spring. On April 10, I changed my last name back to my maiden name. I also changed my first name, reversing my first and middle names. The legal divorce decree, dated May 14, 1980, would become final on November 15. Soon after the training began, Bill and his partner told me that they had had an amazingly accurate astrology reading from John Ramsey. Bill asked me if I would go with him to John and, without telling him anything at all about our relationship, have him do a reading for us.
I was amazed by what John said. He was accurate to the month in telling us when we would meet, when we would get married, when our relationship would begin to end, when we would actually separate, and when we would divorce. The most important thing he said was that our marriage had not ended but been completed, that we had reached a spiritual union and simply didn’t need to be together physically any more. Hearing that, we knew it was true and felt deeply healed to have it acknowledged.
***more about what training was like — vignettees from those years: lying on the gym floor doing movements, chest opening, lightness, ease, good stuff, swimming at puffers pond in the afternoons, integrating the changes, dancing.
In the fall I continued my teaching and private practice. In December 1980, my sister, as a single mother, gave birth to a daughter. Right after the baby was born I flew there to help her. One day my sister was delayed in returning from an errand, and the baby started crying. I tried giving her a bottle of breast milk my sister had left for her, but that wasn’t what she wanted, so I nursed her with my own breast. She didn’t get any milk, but she seemed satisfied with the love and sucked vigorously and contentedly. When I sang to her, she would look into my eyes. I felt she was my grandmother looking back at me.
In March I also had become pregnant, but the embryo had not implanted. I was fully aware of the moment when the conception occurred and also aware that the spirit left because I felt uncertain in my relationship with Giovanni. I felt very sad when it left. I wanted to give birth to a child, but I wanted a solid relationship first. In retrospect, I see that I was at a crossroads then. If I could go back, I would take a leap of faith, trust myself and welcome that child.
On Feb. l4, Bill and I flew together to India to spend two months with our spiritual teacher. It was a final stage of healing for us. I finally let go of all my grievances. Although I could sense that for him some hurt lingered, all that remained on my side was love. Although we were clear that our relationship was complete, we were so close and loving that people thought we were engaged rather than divorced. Our completion allowed Bill to move to the next stage with his partner. As soon as he returned, he proposed and they were married soon after.
*The time with my teacher in India was extraordinary for me.
When I returned from India, I felt very clear, very complete in myself. I gave myself space from Giovanni. Then in June, quite suddenly, we came back together. He told me that he wanted to let me be the only one for a period of time so that we could see what was possible. For me the next few weeks were a time of unclouded happiness. I was opening up, beginning to trust him completely, when suddenly one day he said, “Do you remember what I said about not seeing other women? Well, I didn’t mean not ever.” An old girlfriend was in town and he wanted to be free to see her.
I felt devastated and, though I stayed two more years, I never opened up to him in the same way again. That October I was out dancing with him and another male friend, who was interested in me. In a moment of confusion, just as I was about to descend a long flight of stairs, I caught my toe in the full fabric of my slacks and went flying headfirst down the stairs. I did an aikido roll at the bottom. My only injury was a broken left thumb, but I had to have surgery to put in a pin. Giovanni was very supportive but he was away a lot.
In the summer, I was deeply involved in the third year of the Feldenkrais training. At the end of the summer, I made my first flower essence, on September 5, Near Ithaca, New York, where Giovanni and I were visiting friends, I found a splendid mass of North American Bamboo. It called to me and I responded. When I took the essence, I was amazed. My whole body became a hollow bamboo with a clear fountain of energy in the center. Over the next four years I made almost a hundred essences, mostly from wildflowers that grew on or near our land.
Tall purple irises, small deep pink wild roses climbing the trees, daylilies, bluets–making flower essences….In summer thunderstorms, I lie on the ground beneath the tree naked letting the rain soak into me, press me into the earth, washing away my pains from opening my heart… when did we spend the summer in new hampshire at the lake, and go skiing in vermont, and hiking and climbing in the White Mountains, hunting wild mushrooms.
Frances McEvoy, Giovanni and i did counseling and relationship workshops
Selling and giving away stuff-clearing out.
giving all the photos slides and negatives to Bill
destroying journals and writing
not oriented toward material security or possessions but have expensive taste.
I always want the best…
Joanna Macy peacework…I felt the fear as war vibrations in the womb. My mother’s fear came from collective fear from WWII, and was passed to me at conception…
crying, grief, dance spree, the garden, flowers, sarah my 80 yr old landlady, dinner with Giovanni, italian christmas with his friends and family; taking LSD in the poison ivy…love during thunderstorms/lying on the earth in thunderstorms. rollerskating/iceskating, X-country skiing, bicycling, swimming, snorkeling, dancing.
Hypnosis from stu fabric. Veil moved aside: at age 15 memory of my father coming to my bed at night. Source of the dreams of trying to get the devil off…painful for several years. Divorce like a death….
By the Spring, I was finally able to completely accept Giovanni just as he was. As soon as I was able to let go of wanting him to be different, I could discriminate clearly and see that the time had come to move on. I could see how he mirrored my own freedom-loving nature, my own hesitation to commit, my own fear of losing my freedom.
When I later looked back at the five years I spent with him, I usually thought of it, with some embarrassment, as a state of prolonged temporary insanity in which I acted out unconscious patterns. When I reflect upon it further, I know that in addition to my own personal unconsciousness, and his, we shared a karmic connection that drew us and kept us together. As I wrote this, I decided to tune in to see what it might have been. What came to me was only one lifetime, in China, as the first of his three wives, deeply loved but not the only one and not the favorite. I am now grateful for all that we shared and appreciate that we both did our best to wake up and grow through our experiences together. I had an opportunity to get in touch with the wild depths of grief and to reach the shores of peace.
In the spring, I met Hal, a man with whom there was an instant mutual attraction. We spent half the night talking and the rest making love. The next morning I told Hal I knew I couldn’t handle being involved with two men at once. He told me to call him when I was available.
That summer I completed the last summer of the Feldenkrais training and was certified to practice Functional Integration. Although we were still living together, Giovanni and I were clear that our relationship was at an end. One chapter of my life was ending and another about to begin. I knew I wanted an outer marriage to mirror the inner mystical marriage. To clarify my intention, I wrote out a description of my ideal mate so that I could draw him to me.
In August, Giovanni and I attended a weeklong Taoist chi kung and meditation retreat with Mantak Chia. I was eager to immerse myself in the practices. Since 1979, I had studied tai chi, received acupuncture treatments and even taken an introductory acupuncture course. I was first introduced to a comprehensive system of chi kung and Taoist meditation in the summer of 1982 by Gunther Weil. I was thrilled to discover that I could learn to balance and evolve my own energies.
At the retreat I met Michael. I had not noticed him at all until a friend said she thought he was the most interesting man there. Just then he walked up to where we were standing. We started talking and spent quite a bit of time together over the next few days. He was not my type, and I had no interest in him at all romantically. I thought we were just friends. I was surprised when he kissed me on the last night. On the final day it seemed very difficult for us to leave each other, but I still thought of him only as a friend. He invited me to stay at his apartment in New York city when I came there in October for a seminar.
When I returned from the retreat, I called Hal. We started seeing each other immediately. We really liked each other. On physical, emotional and mental levels we were totally compatible, but he once said, “I think you are too spiritual for me.” I felt that was true. Although we were totally in tune sexually and shared a deep feeling connection, I didn’t really think we had a future together.
In October, Michael called to renew his invitation to stay with him when I came to the city. The afternoon that I arrived at his apartment, a small birthday party for a Chinese Taoist teacher named T.K. Shih was in progress. T.K. had lived in Michael’s apartment for several years before that. After his friends left, we sat, listened to music, and talked. The more I got to know Michael, the more attractive I found him. He could be tender, soft-spoken and romantic as well as very fiery and dynamic. He had been working as a free-lance explorer, photographer and writer. After his articles on exotic places were published, he led groups of people on trips there. Deciding he was ready for a relationship, he had recently opened an Ethiopian ethnic food restaurant so that he could spend more time in New York. He was nine years younger than me, but that was not a problem for either of us. By the next morning, I felt so strongly about him that I returned home, called Hal, and told him I had met the love of my life and wouldn’t be seeing him anymore. Three weeks later, on November 19, I returned to visit Michael, and we had a powerful spontaneous Tantric experience of being Shakti and Shiva. We felt we were united in a mystical marriage.
Shortly afterward, in December, Giovanni moved out of our house, and a woman friend moved in. I started a pattern of spending ten days at home, then five days with Michael in New York. In New York I lived in a timeless state of love, passion, and mutual discovery. When I was at home, I spent all my time working with clients. I stopped teaching weekly classes and taught only weekend workshops in New England. In the spring, I also began spending ten days each spring and fall teaching workshops and giving private sessions in North Carolina.
In the summer, Michael took me and his parents on a trip to the fabled land of Hunza in northern Pakistan. From Islamabad, we drove up the Indus river valley to Gilgit and then through the Karakoram Valley to the mountain kingdom of Hunza. Surrounded by the glistening white peaks of some of the highest mountains in the world, feeling the Earth massive and powerful beneath me, I merged with the powerful spirits of the mountains. I came home not only with wonderful memories but also with giardia parasites that would plague me for years.
After our trip, I took Mantak Chia’s first-ever teacher training course to become a certified in Taoist chi kung and meditation. I then did a meditation retreat where I began learning the process of Taoist internal alchemy. After that I began teaching chi kung and meditation workshops in addition to the Feldenkrais ones I was already teaching. That fall I travelled to Lincoln, Nebraska for the first time to study with Marjorie Barstow, one of the first teachers trained in the Alexander Technique by F. M. Alexander.
I had long been interested in the technique, but I had never met a teacher who attracted me. One lunchtime during our Feldenkrais training, Nancy, a fellow student, showed some of us a TV program honoring Marj, as her students fondly called her. I was inspired and delighted to see Marj, in her eighties, moving gracefully and easily as she raked leaves, carried her own luggage, and boarded flights to teach in faraway places. I wanted to move with that same light and effortless quality and knew immediately that I wanted to study with her. After that first trip to Nebraska, I returned again and again to learn from Marj. For the next seven years, I spent about a month every year with her. She was a great inspiration to me, giving me a new vision of my own life. I could see myself like her still working, doing my best teaching in my nineties.
**The Alexander Technique, as presented by Marj, was a wonderful complement to the Feldenkrais Method. Spiritual-verticality was my challenge, and this method offered a path to ease my resistance.
In the fall Michael was abroad for four months In China, on an expedition following Marco Polo’s route. I luxuriated in staying home, devoting myself to my work, and spending time with friends. I looked forward to his return and to the next stage of our relationship. When we had begun our relationship two years before, I had told him that being a mother was very important to me and that I wasn’t going to get involved again with any man unless he was willing to be monogamous and eventually get married and have children. He said he also wanted to have children but he wanted to wait for two years. He asked me if I could wait that long. I had said I would wait.
While Michael was away, I was very aware that two years had passed, and I was eager to become pregnant, assuming we would get married first. When Michael returned, we had a wonderful reunion, but when I brought up the subject of children, he said he had changed his mind. He felt perfectly happy with me, but he no longer wanted children. He didn’t feel that having children was his purpose in this life, and he didn’t want the responsibility. He wanted us each to focus on growing the immortal child within, the Taoist ideal. He refused to negociate or waiver from his new position, nor would he go with me to a counselor to even discuss. He felt only a counselor familiar with Taoism could comprehend that this possibility was real.. He said that if I decided having children was more important to me than being with him, that he would accept my leaving. He said he loved me, but could understand if I my need for a child was more important than me.
I felt deceived and betrayed. I had believed him when he declared his interest in having children after two years. After two years of very profound and intense sexual alchemy together, I was so deeply bonded with him that I did not see how I could possibly separate. I decided to continue, not fully realizing the cost nor how difficult it would be for me to let go of the anger I felt. He felt we were spiritually married and there was no point in getting legally married if we weren’t going to have children. He wanted me to move to New York to live with him, but I was unwilling to give up my home, friends, and community if he wasn’t willing to get married.
About that time, in addition to my private practice and teaching, I started another business. My roommate had introduced me to some nutritional products made in Sweden from flower pollen. I loved the products and felt completely in resonance with them, especially since they were made from flowers. They were distributed through network marketing so I became a distributor and began developing a downline of distributors I sponsored. The work required presentation, leadership and coaching skills. I enjoyed the work and seemed to have a natural talent for it, but I wanted to improve my skills so I began taking seminars in leadership, relationships, coaching, committment, time management, excellence, and many others. After several years, the company shifted to a direct marketing approach and all the downlines disappeared. There were no lasting financial rewards for my efforts as I had hoped, but I learned a great deal in the process. While the business was in the active phase, I began spending more time in New York.
Michael had developed a new position, that he was willing to get married, but only if I moved in with him first. I finally agreed. In September, I moved to New York, but I kept my part of the house in New England in case he changed his mind about marriage. In December, I flew to Bombay for satsangs with my spiritual teacher in the Sant Mat (Path of the Saints) tradition. Michael also wanted to see my teacher, since he knew how important he was to me. He flew there and stayed in Bombay separately as he arrived a week after me. I was deeply moved by being with my teacher and felt inspired to renew my vow to be celibate if I weren’t married. I decided that I would move back to my home and let go of my relationship with Michael. The next time I saw him, I said, “I have something to tell you.” He said, “Please don’t say anything yet. Let’s walk out to the beach.”
There on the shore of the Indian Ocean, he took my hands, looked into my eyes and asked, “Will you marry me?” I accepted. He admitted that he had known what I was going to say. Since I had renewed my vow to be celibate until I was married, I wanted to get married as soon as possible, but he wanted to wait until we could plan a wonderful wedding on the edge of the Grand Canyon. He had spent many summers as a boatman on the Colorado River and felt a special attachment to the Canyon. With the understanding that we would be celibate until then, I agreed to wait until the summer to get married. I gave up my home and stayed with him in his tiny New York apartment while we planned the wedding and renovated a larger apartment downstairs.
With the aid of astrologer friends, we picked an auspicious day. We reserved a private place on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon rim for August 23. This turned out to be very close to the Harmonic Convergence ceremonies being held in the Southwest on Native American lands. Our friends and family began to plan their summer vacations around our wedding. For our honeymoon we planned a two-week raft trip down the Colorado with a dozen close friends.
By summertime, the wedding was well-organized, but Michael was still not legally free to marry me. Years before he had married a Ethiopian woman he hardly knew so that she could stay in the U.S. After they were married, they had fallen in love and lived together, but the marriage didn’t work out. He had not seen her for years, but whenever she was in need, she called him for help. He had filed divorce papers before, but they had become invalid because he couldn’t find her to sign them in time. I felt he had some unconscious attachment to her.
The week before our wedding, we were still in the middle of renovations when I injured my back carrying a heavy box upstairs. By that next day, I was in so much pain that I couldn’t sit or stand at all. I lay in bed for several weeks, completely helpless, with Michael tenderly caring for me, while I recovered. I was like a small baby, even wearing diapers as I could not walk to the bathroom. It was the first time in more than seven years that I had had any kind of back pain.
By the time we flew to Arizona, I knew I would be fine for the wedding, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to go on the rigorous raft trip down the Grand Canyon Michael had arranged as our honeymoon with a group of our friends and family. The day before our wedding we found out that Michael’s divorce would not be final in time for us to be legally married. I was very upset, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I let it go. It didn’t really matter in the end, as we didn’t get legally married for another six months. We moved on with preparations for our spiritual wedding. We stayed up almost all night putting the finishing touches on the ceremony and vows we wrote together.
August 23, at 9 am, eighty-five of our friends and family from all over the world gathered to witness our marriage in a majestic setting on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Michael had rented a space from the Park Service that gave us privacy and incredible views looking over the rim of the Canyon. Many friends participated, bringing sacred objects to the altar, singing and dancing. We invoked the presence of God and read mystical poetry from Rumi, Hafiz and Shams-i-Tabriz.
We called the spirits of all the directions, the Canyon, all the saints and sages, our spiritual teachers and the teachers of our friends. By our own authority, under Heaven and Earth, we married ourselves in a self-created Taoist wedding ceremony. Michael wore a gold-filigre and dark velvet cloak woven for Ethiopian royalty. My wedding dress was a lovely old silk dress I’d found at a yard sale for $25. We spent the rest of the day celebrating with our friends and local banjo and fiddle players, amid the grandeur of the wondrous canyon. Late in the afternoon, we decided to do a group photo out on a promontory over the Canyon. After all of us brave hardy souls were perched there, out of nowhere appeared lightning so close that all of our hair stood straight up. By the time we were safely back on solid ground, the rain was pouring down, a blessing we welcomed.
Wedding, Grand Canyon, with Michael’s parent’s Dean & Shirley
The next day I reluctantly kissed Michael goodbye as he and our friends set off on our honeymoon down the river without me. Deciding my spine was still too sensitive for the rough rapids, I gave Michael’s sister Heidi my place. With my husband’s parents, I flew to central California to spend my honeymoon with them. His parents were wonderful, and we had a lot of fun together, going out to eat, talking, and watching slide shows his father prepared from the family archives. By day I swam in the family pool or floated on a raft and thought of Michael and our friends rafting on the Colorado river. After two weeks we met in Denver and flew home together to our new apartment.
In September Michael’s divorce was final, but there were no optimal dates for our legal marriage until January. Our civil marriage took place in New York’s City Hall on January 12, at 11:35AM. Shortly after that we flew to Hawaii for a honeymoon together, two weeks on Kauai and a week on Maui. The highlights of our trip were whale watching and scuba diving. I felt sheer joy standing at the bow of the boat, dolphins leaping in the wave ahead of us as the humpback whales dived and surfaced all around us. Snorkeling later, I was deeply thrilled to hear the humpback whales singing underwater. Scuba diving for the first time, I stroked a moray eel who felt like warm jello cloaked in velvet.
In spite of the warnings and repentant letters on display at Haleakala Crater, Michael brought a few volcanic rocks home from Maui. Not normally superstitious but very respectful of Pele, I hoped the warnings were wrong and that nothing terrible would befall us.
Back home in New York I continued establishing my private practice and began teaching weekly movement classes. I also taught classes in meditation, chi kung, sexual alchemy and tai chi, some of them alone and some with Michael. I continued participating in advanced trainings and exploring other practices. I wanted to be able to be lovingly present with a person in the moment with a variety of skills at my disposal.
Generally I had spent several years training in a new approach and thoroughly integrating it before pursuing another, but for a number of years, I simultaneously studied in depth several practices that were very powerful for me personally as well as professionally. These included work with sound, breathing, and voice as well as Authentic Movement. I also studied Process Oriented Psychology and what is now called Soul Dramas, two forms of work developed by Jungian analysts.
daddy-sexual abuse
his mother rhoda’s suicide, ancestors pressing on me
past lives filled with violence
central park jogger-my dreams of central park rapes at night in a city.
Not realizing until too late that I am in a dangerous section of the city.
themes web of light life
light and dark dance
sudden change-lightning
With an affinity for metaphor myself and a perception always tuned to synchronicity,
and pattern
layers of resonance, image,
character, fate, motivation, meaning
why how symbolism mythology
theme pattern thread tapestry
evolution of language-how we express our inner richness, share it with others
carl stough
breathing and voice lessons
tomatis work with listening, the Electronic Ear
Process Oriented Psychology with Arnold Mindell
and associates
iAuthentic Movement (graduate, Center for the Study of
Authentic Movement
Roger Woolger past life work
I had broken the vessel of holiness
what does it mean to break vows, to break bones?????
Over the years I generally called my father about once a month and, with my siblings, visited him once a year. As the rage I felt toward the father of my childhood bubbled to the surface and was transformed, I was more able to see and be with my father in the present. Acceptance, appreciation and love slowly grew. He was not very interested in my life, or if he was, he was unable to express it, but we found a point of connection. He enjoyed talking about the mountains of Kentucky, and I enjoyed listening. Like some ancient bard, he was a master storyteller who knew the names, geneologies and colorful histories of hundreds of people.
At the age of seventy-nine, he was still in excellent health. When he began putting his assets into a trust that she would not control, his wife JoAnn, who had caused the divorce with my mother, became furious and began making threats. He expressed concern that she was actually going to do something to him. By August my siblings and I had ample reason to suspect that JoAnn was poisoning him. We decided to fly there, but just before we were due to leave, Joann called to tell us that he was in intensive care, near death.
When I arrived, he was unconscious, mumbling about “poor abused children.” He was helpless as I had once been helpless. I felt I had to protect him. I called the local authorities to say that I was sure my father was being poisoned, but I was told that with their small budget they could not afford to deal with family crimes. Perhaps because it was not so easy for Joann to continue whatever she was doing under scrutiny, my father improved in the hospital and she took him home again.
As the oldest, I spearheaded a legal campaign to get him out of her clutches, flying there repeatedly for court dates and meetings with lawyers. She succeeded in having him declared legally incompetent, with her as his sole guardian. Once, when I showed up at their house unexpectedly, he was bedridden but completely lucid. He said, “She is poisoning me. Don’t leave me here. Please get me away from here so I can get well.” There was no way I could move him without an ambulance, which she assured me I could not legally do. By the next day, he was unconscious again. After months of court battles we were still not able to get him away from her. He died on January 31. She had already made funeral arrangements and had his body on the way to Kentucky before she called us. We talked about trying to get an autopsy, but decided he had suffered too much already. We did not want to disturb his spirit any further. Being murdered by his wife was enough.
In Kentucky, I touched his cold hand, felt his spirit near, and felt my heart open in deep compassion and love for him. We buried him next to his mother Rhoda in a lovely mountain cemetery. It seemed fitting. The child in him had longed for her his whole life. I felt so sad that all along he had only wanted love, but to dissociate himself from his own vulnerability he had dominated us, made us fear him. Free of fear, we were finally able to love him.
After my father’s death, Joann claimed there was no will, no trust, no assets except the real estate of the family home in Kentucky. After much sleuthing, my brother and I discovered that while he was unconscious in the hospital, she had taken his hand and marked an x on a Power of Attorney notarized by her friend, then used the document to liquidate all of his assets before his death. I wasn’t going to give up without a fight. Over the next year, with a great deal of effort, my brother and I were able to locate and return to the estate about a third of the assets. We worked hard to get the money for ourselves and our sisters. For me it was virtually a full-time job. Although I had to work for it in the present, I saw the money from my father as a healing balm, a form of reparation, a way of balancing the pain and deprivation of my childhood.
Meanwhile, on May 31, four months after my father’s death, my spiritual teacher in India left his body. I was profoundly grief stricken. The next night I had a dream that he had appointed me as his successor. I understood the meaning of the dream to be that it was time for me to claim the guru and the father inside.
A few weeks later I spent two weeks visiting my brother in Kentucky. I visited all the family cemeteries, honoring my ancestors. When I stood on my great-grandfather’s grave, I felt a very familiar vibration. My bones resonated with his. Looking down at the tombstone, I discovered that his birthday was January 15, the day before mine. On top of the mountain, I lived very simply, washing in a basin with rainwater. Skies and time were spacious, allowing for meditation, painting, writing and long walks. My grandmother Rhoda began communicating with me.
Anguilla
Sabbatical
Dream about meeting man at workshop
met Horacio
At the end of the summer my siblings and cousins gathered in the town, Dale, Indiana, where I had spent my first nine years. One day, standing in our old back yard, my cousin said, “Here’s where your rabbits were. I remember that when your father killed them, you would never eat them. You would say “The rabbits are my friends and I don’t eat my friends.'” I was dumbstruck. I have an extraordinary memory, but I didn’t have any recollection at all of him killing my rabbits. All my cousins agreed that he killed many of them, that even though I did all the work and thought of them as my pets, the rabbits were raised to eat. Somehow I hadn’t let myself know that. I thought my father had given me the rabbits because he loved me. I felt used and deeply disturbed.
About a month later, I spontaneously wrote the following, remembering as I wrote:
“Did my rabbits howl? I don’t remember yet their howls except perhaps distantly, faintly, echoing through all the time forgotten. Remembering now one rabbit dead, without its shining fur, without its warm beating heart held to my heart, to my ear. In death it is silent, mute, numb to all further pain. Wondering a small child’s wondering, not comprehending the connection between the friends of my heart hopping joyfully across the spring grass and this something red and ugly that I long to forget. My eyes shut tightly against this seeing. It’s body intact, enclosed within a silken membrane unbroken except where its feet have been cut off, hacked off, those unlucky feet, at the ankles, cut through the joint cleanly, nicking the bones only a little.
“I scream in pain. Silent screams inside me throw themselves wildly off inner walls, echoing, rebounding, lacerating tissue, abrading, making me raw, bloody, reduced to this too, the possibility of annihilation. Yes, now I remember, not just the feet hacked off, but the head too. No head, no eyes to see, remember, no ears to hear, no mouth to scream, to tell. No, not to tell. Silenced, silenced in death. Destroyed for being soft, warm, so palpably alive. This too could befall me at these hard hands, these hands I fear. Am I any safer than they?
“I with a soft heart, warm flesh, just meat too, someone to own, claim, use? Not for my self alone given life, and the life given can be taken away all at once or torn from me, struggled over, in death throes day by day. Will I too be cut apart, cleanly, at the joints with a sharp knife? … I shrink from remembering the actual cutting, the separation of bone from bone. What extra strength does it take to cut the hard, strong tendons that once leaped those legs in bounding joy? No way of knowing.
“Leaping, bounding, cut down by the executioner, that man who works each day to cut me down to size. What steady work, day by day a little more, so carefully, so steadily! This is hard work to tame a child, to kill the wild in her, the unruly animal life. A cautionary tale, the rabbits. Was it conscious at all? Let her know what can happen. The ultimate annihilation: dismembered, cut off, dead. Whatever is mysterious when people die is so very clear here: red flesh, between the bones, clean cuts, no doubt about it at all. Hurt, pain, anguish, not any heaven here or long peaceful sleep resting in peace.
“Like the torturer who wants his victim to hear the echoing screams of unseen others, imagining. What is worse than seeing but imagining? She’ll be good now, She knows what can happen to her, her tender flesh, her bones. “For your own good, of course. You wouldn’t want to grow up wild would you?” Yes. Yes, I would recover now the wildness, let the beast free. That’s the worst of course, an untamable creature, free as a beast, a lowly beast like a rabbit, too trusting to know.
“Or am I a great wild one, dangerous, a force to be reckoned with, bigger than a man and fiercer too. The beast in me, a formidable adversary, challenges this man, big, tall and strong as he is with those cruel hands. Face me. Do you see me? I stand before the rabbits, the gentle creatures who can’t defend themselves. I face my Father and protect them. And I remember now, they too had the wildness in their feet, the power of struggle, and yes, just faintly I hear their screams.”
How do I feel now after writing this? Strong, like I can bear something. Seeing it gives me power to see more, Feeling the strength of survival and resistance, the wildness in my small soft body that survived, still wild, feeling my fierceness, honoring my fierceness of protection
Someone wild in me bit and screamed and kicked wild powerful feet inside.
Horacio -H-rune-disruption-to Nyc
Jacob’s ladder with Horacio
Hieronymous Bosch
I received the inheritance from my father, Used it to heal, help transform process authentic ecstasy.
While getting body work, the therapist, channels in a very sensitive daddy wanting to contact me, to say he was sorry – he hadn’t meant to hurt me. I had broken the vessel of holiness — but
what does it mean to break vows, to break bones?????Hieronymous Bosch
Jacob’s ladder with Horacio
In the summer, I created for myself a six-week personal process retreat. I rented a room on a quiet Caribbean island beach. Other than saying “good morning”, I did not speak at all and I did not read. I meditated, walked on the beach, swam and snorkled. I spent hours every day alternating between painting, writing, sounding and moving, my process going deeper as I moved from one mode of expression to another.
Leaving the island was quite a transition. I had not heard, seen or read any news for six weeks. On the ferry to the airport, I learned that the Soviet Union had collapsed. In September, back in New York, I began teaching Feldenkrais and Alexander in a training program for actors at the New Actor’s Guild. I loved working with actors and was even thinking of taking acting lessons.
In December, I took a weekend workshop in Painting from the Source. The painting I did was of a great ocean goddess, a Kali-like figure with the ocean and all life inside her and around her. In her mouth she was holding a woman lying between her teeth.
Jan 4-5 Authentic Movement.
8-11 Wolker and Bruce voice training, Lichtenburg Institute.
25-26 Proprioceptive writing with Toby- nyc
process group using authentic movement
On February 14, with my husband and a group of people, many of whom were old friends, I travelled to Egypt. Since childhood I had felt a deep connection to Egypt but never before had an opportunity to go. Even though I did not feel aligned with the purpose of the group trip, it seemed the right time. A friend of ours had been for some years channeling an Atlantean scientist-priest named Yokar. Our friend would lead the group and, in each of the temples along the Nile, Yokar would perform an Atlantean initiation. I have always been skeptical of channels and was quite skeptical about Yokar but willing to keep an open mind.
I did however see the trip as a personal initiation and I felt called to sing and dance in each of the temples. We landed in Cairo at night, traveling in the dark to our hotel in Giza. As soon as I lay down on my bed, I began having visions of past events in Egypt. The next morning at sunrise I opened the door of my room and suddenly saw, across the Giza Plateau, the Great Pyramid. I felt my heart expand, resonating powerfully with that ancient place. I was home. At the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, I was deeply moved by the powerful statues of Horus and Sekmet and the images of Nut, her body formed of dark sky and stars. All day and for another night visions and blissful dreams continued.
I dream I am with Bonnie riding lying down in a car. A beautiful hawk flies low and free overhead, circling us. I call her attention to it. Every feather is clearly defined. It it is a luminous, numinous, awesome dream of Horus.
The next day Michael invites me to go with him down into the Chamber of Greatest Ordeal, the pit below the Great Pyramid, so that I can face my worst fears. He has been there before, ten years ago he had himself locked inside the Great Pyramid for the night and had encounters with the guardian spirits of the Pyramid. The descent into the Pit seems a fitting beginning to our initiatory journey. My fears are of being trapped inside stone tunnels, suffocating, being crushed, being lost, hopeless, unable to go on. This past fall I have remembered many past lives like this and several seem to be under the pyramid. Also with the descents of the last year, I have gone down into the darkness within.
Am I ready to go down, complete the descent and rise into the light bringing the lost selves with me? Dena, my friend, asks to go along. Inside the Great Pyramid, Michael bribes the guards to let us descend with lights off. We bow low to enter the tunnel, then descend silently in the dark, duck-walking in the low, narrow passage. The walls close in around us. Turning around is not an option. I know my fears are from another experience and that realistically there is no danger in the present. I go on down into the darkness, into the earth.
When we arrive in the chamber, I am surprised. It is formed of rough-hewn stone, very primitive compared to the upper pyramid. In the dark we feel for places to sit in meditation. I feel the Earth powerfully under me, the pyramid above. Stone, weight, heaviness. I hear the inner sound, see light in the darkness. I feel the impulse to tone, but hesitate to disturb Michael and Dena. Dena says she is getting a communication from Yokar for us to tone. We do Ah with the head back, then La and N humming. I realize it is Lan, the middle name he had suggested for me. He asks us to sound spontaneously.
A wise one, Yokar wins my heart by requesting what I desire to do. I hear the high overtones in my voice, something wild and pure, deep and true. Then he asks us to lie on our backs. I love it down here and never want to get up. I want to rest long in the deep dark earth before being reborn. Is this the womb of regeneration for the initiate, a gestation? The birth canal awaits, ascending the Grand Hall above in the pyramid. I remember my many recurring dreams of finding a passage to ascend inside a stone or brick wall. I have to find the key to open the secret passage and there is no way out but up, no way to turn back. We stand at the edge of the pit holding hands, bringing present the whole group to share in this experience. We start up, one step at a time in the dark.
The tunnel is brilliantly designed. Going down, only darkness. Coming up, a shaft of light is visible far up at the top. I savor this ascent into the light from the dark. One step at a time, mantra, holy names move soundlessly in my mind. I climb to meet the light. Outside in the late afternoon sunlight I feel wonderful. I realize that the full moon was exact while we were down in the pit. The moon is in Leo conjunct my Pluto, opposed to my Venus and Mercury and South node (past lives in Aquarius). This is deeply meaningful for me.
fly to Aswan, felucca to Elephantine Island
lying on the fallen obelisk
Komombo-first initiation 2nd chakra sobek and horus
3 pm February 20
Cruising along the Nile from Aswan and Isis’s temple at Philae to Komombo
A boat to the temple of Isis at Philae.
Sacred gestures, moving hearts and feet, at home. I am restored, deeply moved, remembering from time before. Heart waves lap along the banks of the Nile. Isis pours down her blessings, love. Great goddess, Isis, virgin mary, Feminine Face of God, Bless me. Today in the temple just before dancing I spontaneously said a Hail Mary. Philae became a church of the blessed Virgin. hail mary, Mother of God. In Isis’s temple, I found you here in an ancient and holy land.
Dancing in Isis’s temple at Philae. In an outer court with a view of the Nile, I take off my shoes, feel the cool stone and begin to dance. Rylin and Dena join in. Dena stops but Rylin and I dance on and on until we are dragged away. I am in the open courtyard, open space, being danced, being prayed. Many Egyptian men and boys watch. When we finish the men applaud.
So bright in the sun, I stop to get my sunglasses. I sit in my cabin with the African sun beating on me as we sail past green grass, palm trees, burros, desert, a smoky fire, a boat, a man. This morning I thought that Isis the Mother Lover pours her love down the waters of the Nile. We are descending the birth canal and ascending, being born and reborn, regenerated returned.
Headfirst we are borne down the Nile to be born again. Headfirst, spiralling down, borne on a wave of womb water. In the pit I was comforted by the earth. What I thought I would fear became a blessing. Deep Earth home Mother dark love valley shed tears same salvation, same save me. Christ spirit, Horus, son of God.
Dancing in the temple I am Isis dancing, mercy, love, compassion, Isis has entered me and made me whole, The language of her temple is of love and regeneration. Cobras curled at the ovaries, womb crowns birthing pearls. Hail Mary, Hail Isis, bless me on this journey, Mother, great Mother God. I call on you hear my call and come live in me, left side strong. Powerful spirit dancer help me to dance in the temples of my mother land.
In the temple when I remove my shoes and feel the cool stones under my feet I am winged isis protecting Osiris . I am winged light dancing in the sun. Hathor’s crown I wear, two horns hold the egg of time. I birth deltas and islands of calm. Your time has come. Stand and claim your home. Light song, river heart beating calm pure flow home dance sleep. I am flowing pure, I let go and do not cling to anything. I am flowing, moving, My riches are in exquisite subtlety of moving. I carry mantra down the river. I am the song , the mountain of light. Poised, I stand centered and tall, erect, pyramid crowned. I hear the sound of a boat or train. Slowly we move past a simple mud-brick village.
I felt sweet sisterly love with my friend Rylin, who is battling breast cancer, and will die after the Egypt journey. We are sacred dancers together. I danced openly in the temple, joy, as Isis. My shyness was not there.
This trip to Egypt for me is about humility. We are of god only when we are One–whole–embracing others. when I see god in every heart and honor the divine in each human temple I am with him/her. Nile is a River of Love Nourishing/Mother Water.
Michael and I are remarried in the Kings chamber by Yokar. After the initiation with the group, we return to our room. We hallucinate together past lives in Egypt for many hours. We lie in a trance, both of us dreaming the same dream. It is eerie but wonderful, being one mind in two bodies.
In May, a few months after the trip, I had a very intense experience, a vision of a lifetime in Egypt. I am a pharoah, lying on a stone table in the center of a room. Around me people are standing in ritual positions. They cut me open, take out my organs and place them in canopic jars on ledges around the room. Presumably I am dead, but I have complete awareness and even feel intense pain. The experience was so intense that I could not complete it or resolve it. It lingered unresolved.
A few days later while dancing exuberantly, I strained my left psoas muscle. Gradually the pain increased. For Memorial Day weekend, I had signed up for a four day intensive Painting from the Source course in the country. I was longing to be outside in the late Spring. Instead we spent the whole weekend in a windowless basement standing on hard concrete, painting on large papers on the wall. In pain, I painted something that was at the time inexplicable to me, but which would, like the December painting, prove to be quite prophetic. At the bottom of the painting, a blonde woman is upside down, bleeding. Beside her, her twin spirals up twined in growing green leaves. In the middle of the painting, a green man, a Pan figure smiles out. At the top an invisible Sun radiates clear golden light. From the light, many eyes look out, clearly seeing all.
June 14 to Anguilla full moon–Bumpy ride with Penny-severe pain in spine.
June 25 Nik and Penny left
June 30 lowest point pain, intense pain went deep inside it; the pain miraculously ended.
Summer Anguilla. We are staying at Nik Douglas’ house, a thai temple he imported from Asia to the Caribbean. The pain I felt as I told Michael about my several months affair with Horacio. He accepts it gracefully as necessary opening of my soul, as breaking my Catholic guilt about sexuality. Our marriage agreement is that the true need of our souls to evolve takes priority over marital fidelity, as long as it is not with anyone within our social circle. But I still feel guilty over this.
Joyce, my totem baby turtle, hatched as I slept in my room in Anguilla.
lying at night gazing at the stars, contemplating infinity. rebirth at new moon
July 31 to Portland, visited Michael’s brother Chris, drove to Sun River.
August 1, 2, 3, 4, 5-Sun River
I had plans to leave to fly home from Anguilla to New York. The day after I arrived home, I would fly to Oregon with my husband to spend a week at a resort with his parents. After that I would fly to Seattle for a few days with a spiritual teacher and then travel to northern California for a chi kung course.
One morning a few days before I was to leave the island, I awoke with a strong intuition that it was not safe for me to travel. I knew that I needed to stay where I was for at least another week and then return to New York, cancelling the trip out West. I was torn. On the one hand the message was so clear to me. I knew, however, that my mother-in-law had made our reservations a year before, that she would be very upset and that no one in Michael’s family would appreciate my acting on my intuition. There would be a big family disturbance. Finally, overriding my intuition, I decided to make the trip. In Oregon, we had a lovely time with my husband’s parents. On the night before the next leg of my journey, the evening of August 5, 1992, in Sunriver, Oregon I looked through a telescope and saw Saturn for the first time. I was mesmerized and deeply touched by its yellow brilliance. Was Saturn looking back down at me, getting ready to offer me my greatest test yet?
Age 0 – 22 What Delights Me, Love-Hate with Daddy
Age 22 & 26 1st Marriage & the 60’s
Age 26 & 28 Life in Peru’s High Andes
Age 28 & 32 Raising goats, Mother’s death
Age 33-35 New Zealand, Spiritual Awakening
Age 35-41 Feldenkrais, Polarity, Divorce
Age 42 – 46 Mantak, Tao, Marriage to Michael
Age 47-49 Father murdered; Great Pyramid initiation
Age 49- 54 Car Accident, Surgeries, Broken Life
Age 54-60 South Pacific & Asheville, Rabbit & Dolphins
The next day, on August 6 at 2:25 P.M. my husband was driving me to the airport. I was lying down on the backseat, feeling peaceful and absolutely content. Gazing out the car window at a perfectly clear blue sky, I was contemplating infinity. At that moment, Michael thought he was on a highway without stop lights, and accidentally sped through a red light. Our car was struck broadside by a big recreational vehicle.
As I heard and felt the impact on the car and on my body, I instantly knew that the shape of my life had been forever changed. I let go of all my hopes and plans for the future. When the car, after spinning around and going down an embankment, finally stopped, I found myself trapped in the car. I was upside down, unable to speak and just barely able to breathe a tiny amount of air. I knew that I would need to stay very calm in order to make the best use of the small amount of air available to me. If I panicked, I would suffocate. As the intense pain threatened to overwhelm me, I prayed for the grace and strength to endure whatever I would need to endure.
My husband was in the front seat, unhurt, but he couldn’t help me. I saw many people surrounding the car, but they were also powerless to help me. After some time, rescuers came. As the firemen cut the car apart and peeled it open like a sardine can, a woman paramedic came to the window and touched my arm. She said in a confident voice, “I know you are going to be all right.” She spoke with such conviction that I believed her. Once I was lifted out of the car, I was put on a helicopter and flown to St. Charles Hospital in Bend, Oregon.
In the emergency room, I had iv’s and breathing tubes put in, had my cuts tended and had x-rays and ct scans. I had nine rib fractures, a crushed and punctured right lung, injuries to my liver, hip, knee, shoulders and head and seven fractured vertebrae. The bad news was that my first lumbar vertebra was completely shattered and a sharp fragment of bone like a spear was pushing my spinal cord to the other side of the canal. Miraculously it had not severed it. The doctors were concerned that, with the slightest movement, the cord could be severed and I would be paralyzed. Before that happened they wanted to surgically remove bone from my pelvis and fuse all seven fractured vertebrae together with long titanium rods to stabilize them. The other choice was lying immobilized in bed or in a Stryker frame for 4 to 6 months while the bones healed.
I couldn’t imagine losing the beautiful undulating wave of spinal movement, one of my great pleasures in life, so I chose the bed rest. Immediately a succession of specialists began arriving at my bedside to tell me that without surgery my spine would heal in its present deformed, twisted shape. The nurses were also very nervous because two of them had to roll me from one side to the other every few hours and they were afraid each time that, as they moved me, the bone fragment would shift and sever my spinal cord. Finally the surgeons decided they could fuse only three vertebrae. They also agreed that I could have a second surgery in thirteen months to remove the metal rods.
Sometimes the challenges we face are so great that the inner resources we have previously accessed are insufficient to get us through. To survive intact we have to draw much more deeply from the Source. Totally in the present, I said to myself, “It is what it is.” I was in a state of grace. Love and light filled me and emanated out from me. I was also profoundly aware of all the friends and family praying for me.
In tremendous pain, dependant upon the nurses for everything, more helpless than a baby, I recognized and deeply appreciated the quality of mercy the nurses embodied. After a couple days, Michael stayed with me in my hospital room. He was my witness, helping me by his presence to stay present with the pain.
We played Gregorian chants and I did authentic movement with my arms, the only part I could move. I sang the pain, it was the only way I could merge with it. I was experiencing great pain but not suffering. Prayers, meditation 24 hours a day. I felt grace, the presence of light; not a personal sense of sacrifice, this was all for something much bigger, beyond me. The hospital room had a crucifix with the exultant risen Christ, his arms uplifted, as if he were doing authentic movement with me.
The impending surgery activated the memory of being cut apart in Egypt. Most nurses and doctors were very compassionate. But there were two who were on their own power trips in regulating my pain medication and restricting it. With the pain out of control, I became anxious. My nervous system felt on fire. I wanted to jump out of my skin and run out of the room, but if I moved I could sever my spinal cord and become paralyzed.
I asked Michael to contact Arnie Mindell to do a process work phone session with me. He generously interrupted his retreat to call me the day before the surgery. I mentioned that I was afraid I was being karmically punished for eating fish. He said maybe I needed to expand my concept of what it means to be spiritual. He asked me “What is the pain like?” I said it is like an ax hacking me apart. He asked me to look for an image. I saw a cosmic egg being cracked open. He asked me if I had a power animal. I told him about Joyce, my baby turtle friend in Anguila and he suggested I go on a journey with her sometime.
On Friday, August l4, at 11 AM I had the surgery. All my friends were tuning in, meditating and praying for me. To support me some friends in New York gathered to do Authentic Movement during the surgery. Bone was removed from the left side of my pelvis and used to fuse three vertebra. Metal rods were inserted along my spine from L3- T7. After the surgery, I was in pain more intense than anything I could ever have imagined. My whole consciousness, my whole reality, was pain. I was floating in a sea of pain. I didn’t resist.
Fitted for a hard plastic clamshell brace – two pieces clamped around my torso like a turtle shell. I had become my turtle totem animal. Finally vertical again, I stood, walked a little. After nineteen days I was discharged from the hospital. Since I didn’t have health insurance, they were reluctant to keep me longer, but I was in no condition to fly back to New York. Michael found a retirement home where we could rent an apartment and get meals. There, in a lot of pain, I walked outside to a beautiful old pine tree and held on to it and sang the pain.
August 23 left hospital
Sept 3 to Portland, to NYC
September 13-Nov 11 cold spring
I got through days, then weeks. I walked again, deeply grateful for this freedom I came so close to losing. Eventually I left the hospital and flew home to New York. Because of my background in movement and rehabilitation, I had a lot of resources for helping myself. A year later I had a second surgery to remove the metal rods.
I wish I could say that was the end of it and I’m good as new, but the reality is that every day of my life I am challenged by my physical limitations. My spine has seven vertebra fused together, I discover from the surgical report. I am furious at the doctor for lying to me, that he would only fuse three vertebra. My spine has no shock absorbers….every car bump can do permanent damage, and put me in agony for weeks.
Moved to a house in the country Sept., -didn’t go anywhere in a car for 2 months. like a turtle
menopause. not disruptive, my Tao practices seemed to have smoothed the way.
November 19, got Loplani my pet rabbit who was a best friend and like a child to me — all my mother love opens up.
Looking for Loplani in the bushes at night at 2 am, after he gets used to running wild outside. Find him huddled in a thicket. He is so happy to see me.
September 24 Loplani born
had to sue Michael’s father to get insurance, as Michael was driving his father’s car when accident happened. Strange, as I love Dean so much.
June 23 x-rays
August 6 Hiroshima Day volcanic 3 days later Nagasaki
immobility Nov.
saw bite, stiff neck. jane removed tick, took curare
September l8, l 8AM, Great Neck, NY Surgery to remove metal rods from back
although it was likely that all seven would fuse anyway from the accident
upset when didn’t get mvt back read surgeons report-all fused
Dec. 1-Loplani neutered, started kayakalpa
——–
Kayakalpa with Dalai Lama in Madison Square Garden
Feb. 12 to anguilla
March 26 to NYC
MApril 6 Deposition
May 1-2 Kelly-alexander worksho
June 3 to NYC
June 6 to Anguilla
November 15-30 Toronto: Tomatis/Owen/Olena
December 9,10,11 David Bersin spine
——-
April-Continuum NYC
June 9 to Sedona: Teacher training, Releasing, kan and Li, Solstice at Canyon
Sept 6-14 Ottawa Ruthy
Sept 21 Prepare Divine Love Elixir I
Oct. 12 Mediation Hearing
——-
January-Marj Barstow, my Alexander mentor, died at age 96.
Feb. 21 to Grenada
Feb. 25 to Carriacou
March 4-michael left to NYC
March 17 moved to hope’s inn
April 3 lunar eclipse
April 17 solar eclipse
April 23 Dr. shimlock
May 7- started estrace cream
July 13-20 sun river oregon-volcano prevision
December 23-move nyc to cold spring
1997
Jan. 1-to san francisco, to penny and christopher hills. He dies a month later while we are in south pacific.
Michael and I re-marry in a traditional Tahitian wedding ceremony, each of us dressed as locals, with beautiful hula dancing and fire-stick juggling.
regretted giving up having children
voice training-Frau rohmert
kriya swami hariharananda admires my soul, he says
loyal to my teacher no other initiations but sat in the shade of other teachers: dalai lama hariharananda Amachi Dec. 3, 2002
Making Divine Love elixir on train back from Ammachi got name Mother Mary
see:
How to be bad speech
My loplani memorial speech
anguilla
moved out of house
to anguilla for summer-penny in ny
stayed in Ny
spring -moved back to cold spring
garden
making soil–micorbes intelligence communication\
garden when I make first divine love elixir
lawsuit-got settlement
painting, work with clay, clear colors
Age 0 – 22 What Delights Me, Love-Hate with Daddy
Age 22 & 26 1st Marriage & the 60’s
Age 26 & 28 Life in Peru’s High Andes
Age 28 & 32 Raising goats, Mother’s death
Age 33-35 New Zealand, Spiritual Awakening
Age 35-41 Feldenkrais, Polarity, Divorce
Age 42 – 46 Mantak, Tao, Marriage to Michael
Age 47-49 Father murdered; Great Pyramid initiation
Age 49- 54 Car Accident, Surgeries, Broken Life
Age 54-60 South Pacific & Asheville, Rabbit & Dolphins
got idea to go to tahiti how? I couldn’t imagine making such a trip. Thinking of doing it–believing I would somehow be able
inversion device lawn chair Dorothy
——
had money from lawsuit
Jan. 1 to mid April Tahiti,
married again in traditional ceremoney on Moorea
swimming in the lagoon of bora bora feeding wild rays and sharks, leopard ray
dengue fever portal on huahine welcome entry to the south pacific
cook islands
loplani very unhappy talking on phone to him from South Pacific
waiting for something I came for to happen. Lemuria, portal-stars-initiation
Aitutaki means broken back -Ru-
you are making this up right? -remembered being brother
connection to whales and dolphins
Jan-July marital stress-thinking about leaving-decided to stay and work on myself
holographic repatterning w/ robin
For several years we had been looking for a new home. Finally, after trips to Oregon, New Mexico, and Virginia, we decided on a small city, Asheville, in the mountains of the Southeast. In August, 1997, we made a quick trip there and rented a beautiful house on a wild, forested mountain only twenty-five minutes from town. In September, l997 we moved. I was sad to leave behind the gardens I had created, but took along my portable garden of almost a hundred large pots, many of them full of roses, perennials and herbs. Having my pot garden with me in a new place was very grounding. Loplani quickly adapted to his new home, bounding out the door the first day to explore the woods and mark his territory.
The day after we arrived, I saw an advertisement in the local alternative paper for a class in Playback Theatre. For years I had been wanting to do Playback, an improvisational theatre form in which performers act out the stories of audience members, a process that is both healing and entertaining. Michael joined me in a new class starting that week. In a fun, creative atmosphere, we made new friends and through them were woven very quickly into a community network of kindred spirits. When the class ended, six of us continued meeting once a week. Eventually we formed Living Story Theatre, a playback group that practiced and performed for years.
Caribbean February
In the Spring, I began training in Holographic Repatterning. The trainings, the sessions I did for myself and the sessions I did with my clients were all profound transformational experiences. In the summer I began teaching classes and workshops for the first time in six years. I felt very rusty. I taught Awareness through Movement and led an Authentic Movement group. I also started teaching what I called Moving from the Source in Communion with All life, an integration of all my previous learning and practice.
With Loplani as my companion, I raised flowers and vegetables in my pots. Irises, peonies, gardenias, roses, lilies, daylilies, purple coneflowers, pflox, Brandywine tomatoes, six kinds of beans, tender sqash, little lettuces. On the summer solstice, I made an essence of a stone a friend had brought me from Rumi’s rose garden in Konya, Turkey. Then I combined that essence with seventy-two flower essences to make the second octave of Divine Love Elixir and bottled it in cobalt blue bottles. I began sending gift bottles to all the people who had touched my life.
In late summer I heard about an opportunity to spend a week on a boat in the Bahamas among wild spotted dolphins. Financially and in terms of my schedule, it seemed impossible, but I kept feeling drawn to go and getting little signs. Finally, I realized that an older wise female dolphin was communicating with me. She really wanted me to come. In early October, I flew to Bimini and joined six other practitioners of Holographic Repatterning for a week onboard a catamaran. Once we were out in open water, I communicated to my dolphin sister, “Well, I am here. What’s next?”
Within a few minutes two seven foot spotted dolphins appeared and began swimming around the boat. I knew that one of them was her. After they swam away, I sat down and communicated with her. She told me that she was the leader of a large pod of dolphins which included some bottlenose as well as spotted. She asked me to help her be a better leader. She also told me her dolphin name was in sounds I would not be able to understand but that I could call her Heartfriend. Communicating with her, I did a session to help her with her goal of being a better leader. The next morning we awoke to find a group of more than forty spotted and bottlenose dolphins circling our boat. They continued for hours and hours putting us all into a trancelike state. Finally the restless captain, against our wishes, guided the boat away from the dolphins, but they never left us.
When I returned from my trip, I continued communicating with my dolphin friends. One night at a playback theatre performance I felt inspired to tell the story of my swimming with them. As I told the story and the actors acted it out, something extraordinary happened. The dolphins were present, as though two realities overlapped, as though the whole room turned to water and we were all inside it with the dolphins. To this day, I meet people who vividly remember that night.
In November, we received a letter from our landlord giving us notice to move by December 1. We found a house on a quiet street in an older part of town. Compared to the beautiful large house we had been living in, it seemed small, dingy, and noisy. The rent was lower, however, and after a year in the country, we were ready to move into town. We could drive much less, be more spontaneous in our activities and be more accessible to clients and students. Once again we moved our whole household and my portable garden. Our house was encircled by big beautiful oak trees. Beyond our grassy back lawn was a woods for Loplani to explore, but he could no longer go bounding outside on his own. We had to carry him up and down the steep steps.
Our large living room was perfect for my classes. Our improvisational theatre group also met there for weekly rehearsals. We had added a few new people, named ourselves Living Story Theatre, and begun performing. Five years later we are still together. We do some public performances and weddings, but most rewarding for us are performances at drug rehabilitation halfway houses. Some of the people we perform for have never seen live theatre. To have their personal stories acted out is both thrilling and deeply healing for them and very satisfying for us.
Because I want to be able to share what I have to offer to people from diverse backgrounds, I decided to join a local Toastmasters club. The feedback that I have received is that I am a gifted natural storyteller.
Holographic Repatterning with my clients, phone sessions
Voice work with Frau Rohmert
Teaching at big Indian
dolphins again fall 99 flew to swam with spotted dolphins in another area of the bahamas-missed heartfriend flying fish in the water at night tiger sharks
Shortly after we moved to town I found a lump on Loplani’s head, just below his ear. The veterinarian diagnosed it an abcess and recommended surgery. I nursed him back to health and then the abcess came back and he had to have another surgery.Caring for him colored my days. Concern for his health became a central focus.
Over the years, I had stayed in touch with Bill, my first husband, and his wife. They had visited us several times, and Michael had stayed with them when he was in Boston. Mostly, we kept in touch by phone. Bill had developed a serious illness and, by the summer, he was in and out of hospitals and not sure how much longer he would live. Since we still followed the same spiritual path, we discussed how I could support him if and when he left his body. In the first week of October, he was hovering at the threshold, often unconscious. Although I was far away physically, I stayed present with him, like a midwife.
On October 7, thirty-two years exactly from the day we married, he died. In the days afterward, I continued staying present with his spirit as he went through his transition. I meditated and also did Holographic Repatterning sessions to help him complete unresolved isssues. Once I felt he was safely home, I deeply felt his absence from this plane. Although we were both married to others and had spent very little time together for the last fourteen years, I felt I had lost one of the most important people in my life. I had known him longer than anyone except my siblings and cousins. With him I shared some of my best memories, my deepest happiness, and my spiritual journey.
Around the time of Bill’s passing, Loplani’s health was deteriorating. I begged him not to leave me too, not right then. Caring for him like a baby, holding him like a baby to feed him antibiotics, homeopathic remedies and vitamins. Michael and I had planned to leave for Italy on Thanksgiving Day. He was teaching in Italy and we had decided to spend time in Florence and Siena before and Assisi after. I had never been to Italy before although I had always had a strong attraction to all things Italian. All my life I have felt as if I have a Mediterranean soul in a Nordic appearing body. In preparation for our trip I was learning Italian and loved the way I felt speaking it. It is my favorite food, and I love the sound of the language.
April 9? , Loplani died Easter???
Loplani’s funeral
Taught at Dao Mt.
when did rafi ask me to do book
fall Dolphins-3nd time???came back to find a letter saying we had to move. Michael was in China so I spent a couple weeks driving all over and found a log home in the mountains near the city. When I walked in and saw the blue sky though the tall windows, my soul said yes. I had always felt that if it was the right place the nature spirits would sing, the land would sing to me. It would hum. Very small piece of land, less than two acres surrounded by woods can’t see any other houses look out at mountains.
The night we moved in we stood outside under the stars. I felt all the nature spirits come and embrace me, welcoming me to the land.
In late December, we bought our house and immediately began a series of home improvement projects. I also did a lot of trainings.
iHolographic Repatterning® with Chloe Wordsworth
iWave Form Optimizing with Tom Stone
iFunctional Voice (3 year training with G. Rohmert, Lichtenberg,
Germany
iSomatic Experiencing-trauma healing
In April in the midst of final plans for a kitchen renovation, I forgot a pot of soup on the stove and caused smoke damage in the upper level of our house. After a very stressful clean-up, we moved ahead not only with the kitchen renovation but several other projects. Just when I felt as though I could not handle one more project, my husband said he wanted us to get the basement painted.
I knew I could not handle anything else, but he pushed and I finally agreed as it was quite ugly in its unfinished state. We moved things around and a worker named C began painting one side. A few days later, I was supervising the young man who was cleaning the wall in preparation for painting the second half of the basement. He had never done anything like that before and was languidly and lazily scrubbing the wall lightly not really getting the muck off like he needed to if the paint was going to stick.
Several times I showed him how to do it right then went back in my office where I was trying to get some work done. I felt frustrated. I had spent most of my time for the last year and a half moving and doing house stuff. I felt like a slave to the house. I went back out to the basement. C still wasn’t doing the job right. C said I feel like no matter what I do I can’t please you. The fact is that I like the end result of the house projects with Michael, but I don’t like the process at all. I find it stressful. Does that mean I should finally run away for good? All my life I have been thinking of running away from home, a very deep pattern.
smoke/renovations
ladder broke //broke arm-first thing I thought of my birth/descent; women in Pakistan; friend with shoulder
terrible pain-seemed out of proportion to what was happening…went into it –strychnine-rhoda killing herself, my accidental childhood fall in pool, my father picks me up lovingly & first time I can remember it.
5 heart attacks triggered by breaking my shoulder in the fall from basement ladder onto hard cement floor….very near death several times. Somehow I recover without getting surgery and taking drugs that heart doctor recommends. Instead, I use EECP, Chinese-invention that pumps around your legs, sending new blood up to the heart. After 45 treatments I feel strong enough to walk without straining my heart.
summer-difficulty/one armed gardening
trauma healing/hr
writing/geneology
ocean, caribean, taoism, somatic, presence spiritual awareness, consciousness more important than events, letting go of habits. beliefs, stories 2nd saturn return/ first 60 year return of my water horse year in Chinese astrology.
China-fall 2002
a group of Taoists
Huashan in Chinese means flower mountain. I climb the peak, feel myself in the center of a flower, a phoenix reborn.
buff cochins and rabbits on hua shan. Qingchengshan ancient gingko immortal tree loguantai connie punching me, re-activates my shoulder pain for months, very depressing…I’m fed up, had enough pain for multiple lifetimes…
saw buff cochins and rabbits on Huashan
trauma healing
world on verge of war
being reborn once again, this time in the now, free of personal history???
finding my relationship to charan singh and gurinder singh, my Sant Mat gurus & My sense of god is finally centered within, not projected out onto a male figure…
appreciating my ancestors and their mountain ways/ claiming heritage storytelling, music, hardy independance
gifts: mother-virtue and sensitivity/daddy-looks, teeth vitality, drive both intelligence
Peter Levine’s somatic experiencing trauma healing
tell story/end of story
gardening-what my 80 year old self had to say
presence being awareness compassion harmony simplicity/enjoying the process of my life-connection with the life in all
writing this: secrets hiding, revealing conflicts
Losing one’s anonymity is perhaps the most stressful thing a human being can endure. There is something about being constantly watched and measured that raises tension in a person. It is impossible to relax knowing that every move you make and every word you say is the subject of scrutiny and comment. Sleep abandoned Presley early on as it does many famous people. That’s why so many stars numb themselves with intoxicants, and that is what Elvis eventually did. He also, according to eyewitness accounts, became paranoid.
We human beings have an innate tendency to find beauty in symmetry, balance and harmony. The faces universally considered beautiful are symmetrical and balanced in all their features and come together into a harmonious whole. We also seem to have an innate desire for our lives to have this same balance. We want them to begin, progress and end smoothly without bumps and jolts along the way.
However, in Japan, where the art of pottery has reached sublime heights, the pot that is most prized is not the flawless, uniform, symmetrical one but the one with character, the one in which blemishes, unusual shapes and even cracks somehow come together in a unique beauty.
I think perhaps that pot is treasured because in its own unique way, it balances two great opposites, chaos and harmony.This is beauty of another magnitude, a deep mysterious beauty. This is the kind of beauty we can create in our lives.
A life well lived is a work of art. Sometimes we are able to create a beautiful life, a coherent, harmonious life out of chaotic, terrible things: pain, destruction, terror, loss.
I have always felt inspired by the stories of people who, in the face of great challenges, found inside themselves the strength to go on, who created meaning and beauty from chaos. The example of their lives has helped me in summoning the courage to face my own challenges and to create meaning in my life.
We all have our own stories and our challenges in life. Terrible things sometimes happen to us or to those we love. Our lives aren’t always perfect and sometimes we feel almost destroyed by events beyond our control. But within us always is the Source of all the strength and wisdom we need to return from chaos to greater harmony and wholeness. Like the rare and beautiful pot, our flaws, scars, and cracks can come together wondrously in a unique beauty. Whatever the circumstances, this is the kind of beauty we can create in our lives.
Every day I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to live and love, to create beauty and meaning, to celebrate with joy.
The most important thing I learned about being bad from Loplani, my pet rabbit, is to totally enjoy whatever you do. Break a few rules! You are probably going to get in trouble. Make it all worthwhile. Feel what it is you want to do and do it with your whole body, heart and soul. Enjoy! Savor every moment! Kick up your heels and spring through life. People will appreciate your zest, your vitality, your daring and loving nature, your enthusiasm for life.
writing this I am digesting and assimilating my whole life-integrating
sept 21 after writing about the baby lamb in Peru, appeared as a healing image for me in somatic emperiencing session
procrastination-writer’s block–what I needed to write-the pain of my life ages 9-17–one of the hardest things I have ever done.
paradoxical to write bio now when deconstructing story, beliefs, old patterns
—————-
My Flaws: I sometimes worry, lack confidence, or talk too much. I tend to be a perfectionist and self-critical. I can be controlling or demanding. I tend to over effort and overwork. Sometimes I can be shy, so quiet as to be invisible. I am both cautious and impulsive. I have been more prone to resentment than to anger. When I was in my twenties, I was vain about my appearance. I was bossy with my younger siblings as a child.
My talents and skills: I am a teacher and an alchemist. I facilitate learning, growth, healing and transformation. I have a healing touch. I am able to be aware of and do alchemy with large fields of consciousness. I can communicate with Sun, Earth, Moon, stars, planets, animals and trees, and tune into the intelligence and awareness in all life forms, I can work with people and animals long distance and help shift cultural and global patterns. I am very creative, have a good sense of color and pattern, direction and space. Babies and animals generally like and trust me. I am gifted and skilled at gardening and many domestic arts. I’m an excellent cook. I have some natural ability as a speaker and storyteller.
Best qualities: loving, joyful, creative, spontaneous, open, gentle, perceptive, sensitive, kind, fair, compassionate, honest, strong, persevering, skillful, capable, hard-working, calm in a crisis, playful, very good hugger and kisser, generous, radiant, warm-hearted, nice smile and eyes, silky skin.
More and more able to be present in peace, joy, love, truth, and wisdom.
I aspire to be a worthy planetary elder, a rainmaker, one who brings awareness and harmony.
Over the years I have mentored five younger people.(jeanie obloy,Heide, lydia, kelly, charles)
What I’m not very good at: I have not really learned to play a musical instrument, read music, or always hear notes accurately. I can fix a lot of things but not cars.
START with this in italics at beginning: distill the essence of my whole life story into a paragraph…
What I enjoy least: pain, cold, winter, murky, dull or muted colors, overcast skies, dirty bathrooms, mold and mildew, arguing, disharmony,
Challenging Issues:
trauma and shock
boundaries being invaded, physical injury
feeling burdened with too much responsibility
intimate relationships with men -needing to see and embrace my own shadow; balance internal yin and yang, develop personal will
———————–OUTTAKES
September, I started Catholic school. My teacher was very upset with my mother because I could already read and write well.
Age 11: March, We moved ten miles away to a cabin on my father’s business property, and I went to a new school. By May, we had moved again on the same property to a big boarding house with forty men.
We lived only a half mile from the newly active nuclear plant. What they did there was top-secret, but I could feel a different energy in the atmosphere. I also began to have strange alien visitors. At night in a waking state I would see short grey humanoid creatures surround my bed watching me.
——————
We were soon deeply in love. He got me a job working in the same oceanfront restaurant where he worked. I was in heaven: being in love, being together, being on the water. I felt a profound connection with him. The first four weeks I continued to attend Sunday Mass while struggling with the conflict between my religion and my desire for my beloved. Then I decided that any religion that made sex with a loved partner a sin was not in alignment with the truth as I knew it. I left the church and began discovering my own way to meditate and connect with God.
With sex came the possibility of pregnancy. Mike wanted to go to medical school and was determined that we take absolutely no chances on my getting pregnant. He was extremely cautious because his high school girfriend had gotten pregnant. He felt she had tricked him because she was afraid she would lose him when he went off to college. He had married her just before the baby was born so that it would be legitimate, then divorced her shortly after. His parents were paying child-support for him until he could finish medical school and repay them. I was equally determined not to lose my freedom, independance and chance for an education. I also felt a deep longing to abandon myself to love, give up everything, live with him and bear his child. At the end of the summer we each returned to our colleges on almost opposite sides of the country. We both felt that our love was deep and eternal, much more than a summer romance. We wrote frequent letters but we could not afford to see each other again until Christmas.
always been faithful to his wife. Once he called me very late on a Saturday night and asked me to meet him on campus. Once he crazily arranged to meet by apparent accident when I was on a date with a psychology graduate student and he was out with his wife. Other than those times, I only saw him in his office. He said he didn’t trust his self control if he went anywhere else with me.
At the end of the summer I only needed one more semester of school to graduate. I assumed I would fill out the next year with courses that interested me and graduate with multiple majors. Then suddenly the whole situation with Matt exploded into a drama. The department chairman noticed my frequent visits and told his wife who told Matt’s wife. Matt felt very remorseful about hurting his wife. The department chairman told him that unless he stopped seeing me he would lose his job.
The only place I had been able to afford to live was at the YWCA. There I had met many interesting working class women. I was interested in their lives and wrote short stories inspired by them.
My father said he was too busy, but my mother insisted my family be present for my college graduation in January. They rented a car and came for the day.
With an affinity for metaphor myself and a perception always tuned to synchronicity, and pattern
layers of resonance, image,
character, fate, motivation, meaning
why how symbolism mythology
theme pattern thread tapestry
evolution of language-how we express our inner richness, share it with others
We decided to get married in three weeks and live together in the small apartment I had rented for the year. Meanwhile, I was receiving love letters and gifts from men I had met in Europe. Bill was quite jealous, but since I hadn’t had sex with any of them and was writing them all to tell them of my impending marriage, he felt triumphant.
Bill met my parents for the first time and I met his father, a lovely man. We immediately liked each other immensely.
Expanded my doctoral work to include multidisciplinary americqn Studies
took Ph.D. qualifying exams
June 10, received M.A.
After l0 days, body cast and all, we took the train to Machu Picchu and climbed Huaynu Picchu. I felt like a flower with a broken stem.
While we were gone, our cat Tupac ran away from his caretakers. I spent days looking for him, putting flyers in rural mailboxes for miles around. Finally, six weeks later, someone five miles away found him, scrawny and starving, in a tree. We brought him home and nursed him back to health, but he never regained his old spirit.
As time went on, I grew more and more frustrated.
After being turned primarily outward for years, my attention was being drawn inward. by members of Ananda Marga,
Alien experience:
In October I began to have a very strange experience. Every morning I would be awakened around 4 A.M. by a very high pitched whirring sound coming from outside our house. Falling asleep again, I would wake about six to feed and milk the goats, then lie down for a brief rest. Every day for about ten days just as I lay down and relaxed, I would see beings in white come floating in through the bedroom door. In that moment I would know exactly what was going to happen and remember that this same thing was happening every day. I was not afraid and felt that the beings had my best interests at heart, but I dreaded the pain. They would hover over me like a surgical team and begin drilling into my third eye. When the pain became too intense, I would become unconscious. When I woke later I would have no memory of the whirring sound or the visitors until the whole sequence began again the next day. One day I could hear the sound all day as it moved from place to place around our house. As I followed it around, unable to see anything that could be causing it, I remembered the morning drilling. In late afternoon, a friend stopped by for tea. She also could hear the sound and was equally mystified but thought my experience might be connected to a spaceship her friends had been seeing over their field in the evenings. She told me she had heard on the news about two fishermen in Louisiana who reported being abducted by aliens in a spacecraft. I did not know what my experience was, but it seemed to coincide with my renewed interest in meditation.
We were also in the midst of a sibling conflict. During her last days, my mother wrote me a letter giving me access to her safety deposit box . She kept insisting that I go get her will so that she could rewrite it. She wanted to change her will, which gave my youngest sister, who had been fourteen when she wrote the will, twice as large a share as that of the other three. She wanted to change it so that all the shares would be equal. I was so busy, and she died before I went, so the will was never changed, but all four of us knew of her wishes. Finally, my little sister agreed to divide the estate equally. My father compensated her for the amount that she gave up.
My father died, actually poisoned by my stepmother to get his money. He begged us to take him away, but we had no legal rights. His second wife illegally took all his assets. It was a long process to recover our share for my siblings and me. I would not say that I grieved for him. I was actually relieved in some way as he had been verbally and physically abusive and I had always feared him and felt unsafe. I did not enjoy being with him and now I was freed of the obligation to visit him and call him.
————————
Editorial note: There is no biographical material for the last few years of her life, once the book is published she stops writing. Joyce dies of breast cancer on Feb. 29, 2008. She heals the breast tumor, but it spreads to her liver and brain. See other articles for what transpires after her “death”.
