Susan Feathers

CANNED PEACHES AND WHITE FLOUR © Coming of Age in America

Susan Feathers

For

Tom and Heather

Table of Contents

Introduction Gypsy Girl

Prologue

Chapter 1 Air Force Fly-By

American girl in Kansas

Chapter 2 Journey to the North

I meet myself on the tennis court

Chapter 3 We Take to the Mother Road Again

Westward into the sunset

Chapter 4 Faulkner’s Muse

Hold-up in the hollers of East Tennessee

Chapter 5 White Blizzard, Green Jungle

From the Smoky Mountains to Chu Lai

Chapter 6 Harry Chapin’s Legacy

From Julia Child to Frances Moore Lappé

Chapter 7 A Dark Blue Canvas

Laguna Beach 1985

Chapter 8 Canned Peaches and White Flour

What I learned from Earth and Sky

Chapter 9 White Swan

My children and I are reunited

Chapter 10 Albert Schweitzer, Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi

Following the trail of the Existential Moment

Chapter 11 The Intrepid Intuitives

Following a moral compass in Bear Country

Chapter 12 Rain of Justice

Gestalt

Epilogue

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that, the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

~ Robert Lee Frost

Introduction Gypsy Girl

I grew up on Route 66.

For all practical purposes I was a gypsy girl traveling with my clan: parents, sisters, dogs and cats. Daughter of a career military officer in the United States Air

Force, my gyroscope was set to travel over hill and dale. Before I graduated from high school, I had moved 21 times.

What kind of person can live in motion, on the road, always knowing each place is just for now, not knowing where the road turns until my Dad walks into the kitchen one night and announces, “Take down the wallpaper! We’ve got orders!”

Breathless, petrified, happy and sad, my sisters and I rush to the bookcase for the maps. Plattsburgh? Near the Canadian border, wow! Lake Placid and the Olympic village, skiing and skating! Subzero winters…far from Kansas…and my new found friends…hmmm.

You either go with it or you resist fiercely - no in between. I went with it transforming like a chameleon, blending in wherever I went. Try on the cultural mores, see how they fit!

Somewhere on those dark winding roads, with my arms propped up on the dashboard while all the clan snored, hacked, and wheezed through the cool night, listening to my father drone about his boyhood in rural Tennessee - a theater of stars,

hum of the tires on the asphalt, dad’s low pitched voice and gift of story telling - I fell in love with America.

This big land over which we continued to crisscross became my homeland. And, it included everybody – Southerners, Yankees, Midwesterners, Californians, Hawaiians,

Native Americans, hicks and sophisticated New Yorkers, hillbillies and coalminers, and many religions, sects, and points of view. Places on Rt. 66 became points of navigation on my life’s map.

In my first 18 years on Earth I came to know the people we call Americans. And they all influenced me in some way, truly the melting pot. Yet it left me in search of myself. I was a gypsy girl who knew a lot about other people and little about my self.

How did I feel, what was my way, my rhythm? I hardly knew. So, I began to search for

“me.” That, in part, is what this book is about. It required that I sort out what I cared deeply about and to do so in the life I was living and would lead.

I started out in life as Susan Lee Feathers, a surname that requires a certain kind of steeliness in character as I was called chicken feathers , turkey feathers , and bed feathers in grade school, and when I finally contemplated returning to my maiden name after my divorce, I risked being called a Native American “wannabe”!

The Feathers name derives from Scotch-Irish ancestry. My father’s people came here to farm in the green, rolling hills of Tennessee and Virginia in places that resemble much of rural Ireland today. On my mother’s side of the family, we hail from German farmers and Cherokees who escaped the Trail of Tears- still strong and vibrant in our

family’s homeland today. Ironically, we actually may have Mungeon blood mixed in –

European gypsy ancestry.

Here then is one citizen’s story cast in the larger American odyssey - offered to the reader as a unique reflection of the great diversity and sometimes hilarious incongruities of American life.

I did not always appreciate the great gift of being an American. As much as people say they hate us, still people flood our shores. Yes, it’s to get a better paying job, no doubt. Or, it is to be able to expand into the open space of freedom to pursue happiness. But for me it is about the landscape. This is Turtle Island of the First

Americans, imbued with spirit and liberty. Even with the huge impacts of our consumer driven society, it is still a country that takes your breath away.

Come with me on a sweeping journey from coast to coast, a journey that took me into unseen realities behind the foreground of contemporary life. There, I found the

America that drew me to her breast as a child. It was in a dusty western town in an

American desert that I learned the true nature of Liberty when I reached back in history to the arrival of the first Europeans on the North American continent.

Prologue

“Do you want the truth or a pretty picture?” His face showed no emotion but I thought I caught a gleam of humor in his eyes. The Trickster… I sat across the table from a

Mojave medicine man and an Iroquois artist and teacher.

Denny’s was packed with families that Sunday. Outside the desert sweltered in the hot, dry fore-summer: 112° that May day. A sea of brown faces under straw fedoras in Yuma contrasted with my hometown of San Diego, the gentle ocean breezes, moderate temperatures, and blond-haired surfer-dudes.

I’d traveled in the cool of night up into the Laguna Mountains east of San Diego.

At the Continental Divide I parked my car and stood in the clear night aghast at the millions of stars overhead. The scent of purple sage permeated the air and entered my nostrils, sending me into a trance-like state. The sacred plant of spiritual teachers and healers had become a familiar sensation in my own daily prayer ceremonies.

Then I began the descent into the Imperial Valley and a great American desert.

Knowledge of what lay ahead for me might have prevented my taking that plunge. It’s a good thing, then, because the experiences I would have in the desert would change me forever and strengthen my inner core—though not how I might have imagined.

But I am getting ahead of my story. The first real memories of my life began in the heartland of America: the Prairie.

Chapter 1

Air Force Fly-By An American Girl in Kansas

I bicycled my way down our street in suburban Wichita, Kansas on a sky-blue Schwinn.

1953. Eight years old and the world spanned before me as undiscovered territory! The sound of popping cards, pinned tightly against the spokes. I was a real tomboy. I was free and life was full of adventure.

Snapping Bazooka bubblegum, a bag of marbles in my jean pocket, I felt the cool wind course through my blond hair. I felt safe in my cocoon of endless bounty and a life full of promise. I was a middle-class American girl at a time of my country’s economic expansion and national optimism. Feeling the warm morning sun on my neck, a tanned happy girl, I sped along with no worries at all.

At my family’s ranch-style home, surrounded by Mom’s rose gardens, resplendent with big, fragrant blooms, my sisters and parents were busy preparing to attend another Air Force Day when the power and pomp of military life would be celebrated. Like a punctuated rhythm, this day fused the spirit of people in the United

States Air Force. At McConnell Air Force Base, the Thunderbird precision jet team roared a deep, resonant claim to the skies, soaring in perfect synchrony overhead.

One year, when the new B-52 bomber was on display, I recall standing under a massive wing that towered above me. I felt like an ant in the shadow of King Kong or the largest dinosaur I could imagine. Yet I was not the least bit afraid, only thrilled. So

familiar were the aircraft, missiles, vehicles and artillery dotting my childhood landscape that I felt no fear, but oddly comfort and joy, because in my young mind this was the armature that protected me. I associated the military with my father, whom I adored and respected. He told me who I was: an American, from a country that was a force for good, a keeper of the peace – a people blessed by God.

My dad flew a B-29 called “Three Feathers” in World War II. When I was little, it embarrassed me because the nose of the plane sported paintings of three nude women reclining on three large white feathers - a brunette, a redhead, and a blond beauty. I listened over and over to the stories of my dad almost ditching into the ocean near

Okinawa, a place so foreign to me it was like a tale about King Arthur and the knights. I learned the United States went to war because the “Japs” attacked Pearl Harbor. My country did not want to be in the war but had to go to defend us. That seemed right to me. After all, Americans were for peace.

Through my mother, I observed military life for women, but it did not register with me until I became a wife and mother many years later. Our family moved every year or two for new assignments and at some locations we moved as many as two additional times, relocating from off base to on base or reverse, moving to get a better school situation for one or all of us children. How my mother managed all of that without going insane I still wonder.

The household had to be set up over and over again. Somehow mom always made it feel like home wherever we were. We were like her little crew as she assembled

us children to carry things in or out, unpack and place things where she directed.

Photos, prints, and objects we collected from the many places we lived, lined the bookshelves and cabinets of our new abode like a museum exhibiting the historical journey of a people: shells from Honolulu, a delicate vase from Japan, a brass Aztec calendar from Mexico, and china roosters from Pennsylvania Dutch country. These were also my childhood markers. Where families that stay in one region collect photos and objects from one place, we collected from a whole continent. “So, where are you from?” a new friend might ask. I never really knew how to answer that.

Mom gave birth to three of four children in dad’s absence. Later, when I was a teen-ager, Mom shared with my sisters and me the fear and loneliness she felt enduring a difficult birth without any family to help her. In the early fifties, many hospitals believed that women should not be given water during labor and little pain relief was available. Mom convalesced for months after having a baby. She had four children, all girls, and lost three pregnancies over her reproductive years. In those days there was no “pill,” only abstinence, the diaphragm, or luck.

When the Air Force was a young military, if dad was in uniform, Mom had to carry the packages and babies! The Army Air Corps (as it was first known) cultivated a culture of elitism and pride. Officers and especially pilots like my father were placed on a pedestal. They were discouraged from talking in public to blacks or non- commissioned officers. Not until much later did I truly appreciate the embedded injustices in the system we were so proud to be a part of back then.

In the fifties my parents set-up a bomb shelter in our basement in Kansas because “the Russians might use a nuclear bomb on Americans.” At school I learned to hide under my desk and cover my head for protection from a nuclear bomb blast. I learned to hate the Russians because they were bad. But still I felt safe because I was with the men who could fight them.

Most of the time, I thought about baseball and marbles. My big sister looked down on me because I was a tomboy. I wondered at her ability to stay inside all day and play with paper cut-outs. Some guy named Elvis made my sister and her friends act crazy! Once they started screaming in our living room during an Ed Sullivan show when

Elvis sang “Heart Break Hotel.” My parents became alarmed that a grown man moved his hips in lewd ways on national television. It was not what good Methodists would recommend for their children!

But I was mostly oblivious to this scene. The world was a wondrous place and I loved hanging out with dad. He made me laugh with expressions like “You can go swimming, but don’t get wet!”, or when he thought I was a little big headed about something he would recite Oliver Goldsmith’s “Still they gazed and still their wonder grew, that one small head held all she knew.”

He always wanted a son. After four girls were born he said he gave-up on the idea. He treated me like a son, and I was happy to have such privileged status in the family.

At the base chapel I learned a curious thing. As we arrived for church, a man took down the set of symbols from the Catholic faith, and put up the plain gold cross of

Protestants. When our service was over, the Star of David replaced the cross. Watching this, I concluded that all faiths are welcome in the house of God. But the confusing thing was I was taught that Catholics worship pagan idols called saints. I learned that

Jews missed the boat because they did not believe Jesus was the only son of God. It seemed the Methodists had it figured right.

It was all very confusing. But I was glad to be a Methodist because, of all the groups that were Protestants, we were the most forward-thinking. All in all, at eight years of age I was very happy to be who I was: Air Force, American, Methodist - and a tomboy.

What I Understand Today

My thoughts about the world were shaped by the military life in which we were immersed. My dad was a decorated war hero who had positions of responsibility of which we were very proud. For years after I was married, I still answered the phone military-style: “Williams’ residence, Susan speaking.” After a brief silence at the other end of the line, a caller once asked “Is this the maid?”

Being a part of an American military family in the fifties cast us in a central role: protectors of the nation against a world wide communist threat. When Dad was assigned to the Strategic Air Command (SAC), he would disappear sometimes and later

Mom told us he had been flying on a reconnaissance mission. He and other pilots sat in a “Bull Pin,” waiting to be called on mission. When they took off over Labrador and the

Atlantic, they never knew whether it was a practice run or the real thing: an attack on

U.S.S.R. missile sites.

At one military base my mother and all us daughters had to show-up to exercise on the oval parade field surrounded by Officer’s Row, our base residence. How our physical condition related to national security none of us could figure. But General

Wilson, the base commander, was a somewhat crazed and unpredictable human being.

No one questioned him. My father was terrified of the guy.

I learned to dutifully follow the dictates of authority and to accept the explanations from “on high” without question.

Another stream of influence shaped my early character: Methodism. At base churches, and at my grandparents’ little country church in Watauga, Tennessee, where we visited every summer or Christmas during my youth, I learned to follow the Ten

Commandments to the best of my ability. I contemplated the alternative of burning in hell. I complied.

Over the first dozen years of my life, I was indoctrinated with military interpretations of democracy and religious precepts from my church and parents. These were not bad for a child to learn, but they did not include much about thinking for my self or questioning authority. My spirit began to feel squeezed by these strictures at about age eleven.

In truth, my parents were both freethinkers. I can only imagine how they might have suffered during all those years of military life. Like their peers, they were swept up in a national dream and in the quest of travel to new places when they joined the service in 1941. Later they must have realized the trade-offs.

When I turned twelve, my father gave me a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi , the life story of Paramahansa Yogananda. I learned about Hinduism and the yogis of old.

Dad launched me on a lifetime study of world religions. He also read out loud to the family from Edgar Allen Poe mysteries and classics in literature on winter days by a roaring fire. We listened to Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, and other classical performances on 78 LPs.

Dad bought twin clarinets so the two of us could play duets together. We shared the joys of belting out Phillip Souza marches, a concert of squeaks and shrieks for which

Mom relegated us to the garage!

Our home life was infused with lively discussions about books, poetry, and politics. It was a rich learning community for developing minds.

But come Monday morning, everyone jumped back into their respective roles as if we never considered our own thoughts. Our internal and external landscapes were separate and not congruent at all. My sister Beverly remained more of a freethinker than the rest of us, however. For years she was criticized for it—for not going along with the

“program” —but in the end her skepticism proved correct.

Only in my forties did I grasp a true picture of national and world events and conditions. Prior to entering World War II, the United States did little to protest the persecution of Jews in Europe by Germany. We joined England and France during the thirties to appease Hitler. Roosevelt was unwilling to criticize Hitler’s actions in spite of incontrovertible evidence of widespread violations of human rights. When the Senate introduced a resolution in 1934 to publicly protest the anti-Semitism of Germany’s policies, it was blocked by actions in the State Department.

Later, the U.S. government acted to protect American oil companies by keeping a regular flow of oil to Italy in spite of its invasions in Ethiopia and, later, Spain. Pearl

Harbor was a threat to Asian-Pacific business markets for important resources the U.S. needed: rubber, tin, and oil. These motivations prompted our entry into World War II.

The myth Americans were fed by Roosevelt and other government leaders was that we entered the war to defend the principle of non-intervention in other governments’ business.

The post-war period witnessed the U.S. and Russia – one democratic country and one socialist – building separate empires. The economic surge for American corporations forged a permanent corporate-military alliance in our country’s foreign policy, while American citizens, whose memory still held the horrors of the depression, were satisfied to get a little more of the “American pie.”

Thus, we remained oblivious to the aggressive policies of our government, which began a systematic campaign to intervene wherever revolutionary movements threatened to remove dictators who favored U.S. business interests.

In the U.S., society still tolerated an unequal distribution of wealth because the lowest earning wages were higher than they had been. Most still believed in the prevailing “trickle down” theory that led us to think corporate wealth eventually leads to individual citizen wealth.

In 1953 as I was speeding along on my Schwinn, 1.6 percent of Americans owned 80 percent of the corporate stock and 90% of corporate bonds.

Chapter 2

The Journey North

I meet myself on the tennis court.

We left the waving sea of golden wheat and the odorous stockyards of Kansas to travel far north. Plattsburgh, New York -nestled in the dense hardwood forests of the

Champlain Valley - hugs the shore of the Saranac River which flows into Lake

Champlain. This blue, icy lake divides much of New York and Vermont. With the spine of the Adirondack mountain range to its west, and the Olympic villages at Lake Placid, it invites the outdoorsman, poet, and rugged spirit.

We were amazed at the stockcar and iceboat races on the lake’s solid surface of ice, over twenty feet thick in places. Back then it was common for daytime temperatures to plummet to well below zero on a blustery day. Our front door was often impassable due to four-foot drifts from an overnight blizzard. I loved the energy of the environment but you can imagine what young parents with children must have endured getting us around, clothing us, etc. But from my point of view, I saw the skiing and skating and leapt with joy.

While my dad entered into one of the most difficult assignments of his career— being a B-47 pilot in the Strategic Air Command—my sisters and I blossomed in one of the most entertaining locations of our family’s military career. Plattsburg was a summer and winter playground. I was twelve years old. Adolescence came like a flash, washing

over my body. Every part of me was on fire. I possessed that healthy glow of youthful beauty and was a head taller than the boys.

Beverly, two years my senior, waged the make-up and dating wars with my parents, paving the way for me to double-date with her. We lucked out with the base housing this time. Officer’s Row hosted three-story brick homes built in the early

1900s. Bev and I had our own upstairs pad which had two huge bedrooms and a full- sized kitchen! It was perfect for two sneaky teenagers. We climbed down the outside fire escape on many a night to meet friends for moonlit sorties on the parade field in front of our house. Once, we were sneaking back in, trying not to make noise on the metal steps near my parents’ bedroom window. As we had just stepped above it, the window flew open, scaring us half to death. There stood the visage of my father who said, “Goodnight, girls,” and slammed the window shut!

My interest in sports helped channel much of my sexual energy for the time being. At the base, I met Wolfgang Crescent, a young, handsome U.S.A.F. lieutenant.

Unbeknownst to both of us, he would become one of the most important people on my life’s journey. When my sister and I signed up for his summer tennis class, there were about two dozen base kids enrolled. I started out as the worst player in the group, hitting the ball neatly out of the courts. But I fell in love with tennis - and lieutenant

Crescent.

In 1957 girls were not encouraged to play baseball or any contact sport. As a youngster, I played all kinds of ball games, including football with the neighborhood

boys. When my body began to blossom into that of a young woman, I was told pointblank by my mother that those sports were no longer an option. But she embraced tennis. I wore a skirt and pantaloons underneath, and learned to pick up a ball up by flipping it between my foot and racket head…so I did not have to lean over and, oh my, expose anything! So, I poured my youthful energies into learning tennis.

I practiced every day that summer. Trekking over the marching field to the tennis courts, I slammed the ball into the wooden practice surface with a white line drawn at the level of the net. My mother bought me a wonderful instruction book written by Rod

Laver with pictures of many famous tennis players. One was Althea Gibson (the women’s Wimbledon and U.S. Open Champion that year). She inspired me by breaking race and gender barriers in sports. Her life made me realize no goal is too high.

Laver’s instruction book gave me a routine with specific exercises to follow. One was meant to perfect the toss for the serve. I drew a twelve-inch square with chalk on the basement floor and religiously practiced tossing the ball so it fell into the square.

Another exercise was to practice swinging in front of a mirror. Laver possessed a legendary backhand at the time. I copied his every move and piece of advice.

At the same time, one by one, my tennis classmates dropped out until I was the only remaining student. Lieutenant Crescent offered to meet me on Saturday mornings until the snow and ice shut us down. I think he recognized my passion for tennis. Mom bought me a beautiful oat-colored crewneck sweater to wear over my whites. I felt like a

“real” tennis player. I was also glad to have the full attention of such a gorgeous man.

But I never shared that with my parents.

One Saturday morning, we were rallying together. I kept hitting one or two shots, and then missed. Lieutenant Crescent was a patient man. He kept encouraging me.

Then out of the blue it happened. I grasped the rhythm and timing of the forehand so perfectly that our rallies went on and on, with the ball popping off the sweet spot in the center of my racket, curving across the net in long arcs to the baseline. It was like dancing. Lieutenant Crescent was yelling “Wunderbar! Wunderbar!” with every stroke I hit, as he ran back and forth across the court.

Anyone who has ever experienced their first peak moment as an athlete can tell you this: it is unforgettable! The experience transformed me. My efforts to achieve something prized and deeply desired paid off. Achievement tasted sweet. I realized a sense of my own being in the world. I learned that I could impact events in my life through self-determination.

Thus it was that I met myself for the first time on the tennis courts at Plattsburgh

Air Force Base on Lake Champlain in September 1957. From there on out I began to take control of my life, and that meant asking questions.

But, unforeseen events would once again sweep me into another reality and challenge this new found independence.

Dad was reassigned to a scientific team on Ice Island T3 in the Baltic Ocean. He would be gone for a year. My mother was pregnant with my little sister. Mom was

thirty-seven at the time, a very late age for pregnancy back then. We were moved from our big house on Officer’s Row to a smaller but modern one-level brick home.

Once again, we reorganized our lives for the new realities. I began to realize the huge impact of these military assignments on my family, and gained a little insight into my parents’ sacrifices. Dad spent a full year on an iceberg in the darkness of the arctic seasons, measuring ice flows and meteorological data for SAC. He was miserable most of the time. I hardly recognized him when he returned.

Mom leaned heavily on Bev (sixteen) and me (fourteen), and her friends. Her pregnancy was very difficult, with many complications. For fun and to keep her spirits high, we accompanied her on many visits to get Nitzie Red Hot Chili Dogs, which she craved, and took her to base movies that made us all laugh. I remember fondly the three of us hanging onto each other, doubled over in hysterical laughter during Some

Like It Hot with Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe, and Dean Martin. Our laughter was all the more intense because of our concerns. These were good times but they only temporarily kept back the deep sense of loneliness and fear that pervaded our home.

Mom, a month overdue, suddenly went into labor. A friend whisked her off to the hospital to deliver my youngest sister. I remember being scared because I heard a neighbor talking about how much blood my mother lost delivering a ten-pound baby girl – my sister Kathy.

I felt desperately alone. The only communication we had with Dad was by Hamm radio. What if Mom or Dad didn’t come back? I was very upset and accidentally sliced a

huge gash in my hand while cutting up a water melon for my sisters. A neighbor rushed me to the base hospital where two orderlies held me down as they stitched the wound without any painkillers. In the military you are asked questions like: “Do you want five pricks from the stitches, or ten pricks from the painkiller and the stitches?” Naturally I chose five.

To top it off, that same week a neighbor brought us a copy of Time Magazine where in the lower right-hand corner there was a picture of a polar bear with the caption

“Colonels Wanted”. We read in disbelief about how my dad was nearly killed by a polar bear lurking outside the mess hall trailer on T3. He was saved by a pregnant husky who managed to survive and deliver her pups the next day. This was the constant uncertainty, thrill, and strange world of military families then.

Chapter 3

We Take to the Mother Road Again Westward into the sunset

Our new orders sending us to sunny California were met by a huge sigh of relief, especially from my mother. Plattsburgh had taxed her mental and physical strength greatly. She was ready for the soft, easy climate and culture of California. For my father, the California sun and San Joaquin Valley’s dry warmth revived him. He would soon shed his bear fat to become a slim, tanned tennis buff.

We ripped down the wallpaper this time, crammed into our latest station wagon, gypsies once more, and headed south to Tennessee to touch base with Mamaw and

Granddad Feathers. Mom and my baby sister Kathy flew ahead to Los Angeles where they stayed with my maternal grandmother and uncle until we arrived.

This left my sisters – Beverly, fifteen, Barbara, eight, and me – a very ripe thirteen years old - to adventure with Sir Galahad, our dad! The three of us remember this trip with big grins. We stopped in at the pueblos, canyons, and the Painted Desert without

Mom’s usual complaints about food or accommodations.

Dad was altogether a grand companion. He told stories, made up jokes, and recited his favorite poetry across the country. We stopped at local grills on Route 66 where we slurped up the latest malt shake, greasy burger and fries, and stayed at motels with flashing neon flamingo signs! We stopped at gas stations shaped like

teepees, and bought tourist trinkets at little stores that catered to the many travelers on

Route 66 at its pinnacle.

Unbeknownst to us then, the National Highway Act of 1956 set actions in motion that would eventually disconnect the rural communities on Route 66 from the country’s new system of highways. Route 66 was established in the 1920’s to expressly connect rural and urban areas to facilitate the transportation of goods to market centers

(Chicago to Los Angeles). It was used extensively during WWII as a major artery for transporting goods across the nation to war theaters in Europe. Known as the Main

Street of America, John Steinbeck immortalized it in Grapes of Wrath as “the Mother

Road” - the way to economic opportunity. Nat King Cole emblazoned its spirit in our hearts with his rendition of “Get Your Kicks on Route 66” – which became our family’s anthem.

Ironically, this trip on the Mother Road would lead to a major change in our lives as forces beyond our imagination worked to create a sea change in America. Our family would eventually become awash in the wake of it. When we first headed for California, this was not apparent. We were like a gay band of gypsies singing our way to the land of the setting sun. We had not a care in the world.

We met up with Mom, delighted in my grandmother’s fried chicken, and headed up to the San Joaquin Valley, to a small town called Merced. The area was like a modern- day Euphrates Valley producing substantial amounts of the nation’s produce. With its huge corporate farms and a vestige of small farms clinging for life, it was another great

American contradiction: great wealth was created amid some of the direst poverty in the world. Migrant workers toiled the fields for a pittance.

Castle Air Force Base enjoyed the expanse of clear blue skies in the valley, good for its SAC planes and missions. Each of us settled into a comfortable life style. Dad liked his work, Mom gloried in the weather and the beauty of the land, and each of us children found friends and interesting activities in school. Mom and Dad compared

California to our family’s days in Honolulu, Hawaii many years before on the island of

Oahu. No bugs, mild temps all year, and a lush environment of flowers that grew with no restraint.

I continued to play clarinet, and joined the Merced Community Orchestra in which I eventually achieved first chair. Tennis was a big part of my life, too. I learned from Fred, a seventy-year-old vegetarian, health guru, and legendary tennis coach in the valley. He beat all of his students playing with a warped racket and broken strings just to prove his point that it’s all about attitude, not equipment.

Fred placed me in the Junior Lawn Tennis Circuit and I played in tournaments with moderate success. He helped me refine my strokes and serve. From him I learned all the techniques I would later use as a community tennis instructor.

Dad built and flew model airplanes again. Mom was active in the Officers Wive’s

Club and enjoyed trips to San Francisco to shop and cavort with friends. She decorated our one-story California ranch-style home, making it a lovely place with hibiscus and large green-leafed plants. We barbecued out almost every night. I played tennis all day

long when school was out, leaving home again after dinner to play until midnight sometimes. Dad often met me at the nearby courts to play wild and cutthroat doubles with my peers and high school teachers.

My Indian blood turned me into a dark-skinned beauty. My boyfriends in high school all drove retrofit jalopies, a prerequisite to getting a girl’s attention. We spent hours dragging the local drive-in, then stole away to the dark canals to neck in wild abandon, all our adolescent juices pumping full speed.

I was happier than I can ever remember.

And so the shock wave that came to us was all the more traumatic for our tranquil and happy lives. Eisenhower warned the nation about a strong military- corporate complex left over from World War II. He left the presidency by warning

Americans to be ever vigilant of the marriage of military and corporate power. McCarthy eroded American faith in government. A new movement was felt in the youth and vigor of John Kennedy. He brought our fearful national soul out of the 1950s with its suspicion of intellectuals and the left. He spoke of international treaties, of space exploration, and cast a vision wider than any President before him. He believed we could live in peace with the world of nations.

Kennedy began to downsize the military. My dad had never signed a regular commission, remaining a reserve officer after the war. I believe this was his way of keeping some kind of personal control over his destiny. But now it worked against him.

He was decommissioned in 1960. To our shock, we were suddenly thrust into the civilian world after all of us literally grew up in the military.

While this might seem a stretch in comparison, our experience was like that of a prisoner ending a period of internment he has been in for many, many years and entering a world for which he has no skills or knowledge to navigate. While the Air

Force offered Dad retraining, he could not transition that easily. He thought he would try business, although he had no experience at all.

We moved back home to East Tennessee. There we lingered at my grandparents’ for some time trying to make sense of what had happened and what would be next for all of us. Bev had to return home from expensive Texas Christian University, much to her disappointment. The road ahead was uncertain, just as it was for our nation. While we experienced our greatest challenges and hardships as a family, America suffered a period of great unrest and revolution. In the space of a few years, three of our brightest leaders were assassinated.

Sunny California faded rapidly from our memories.

Chapter 4

Faulkner’s Muse Hold-up in the hollers of East Tennessee

One

1961. My grandparents beautiful farm in Watauga, Tennessee, overlooked a gorge on the Watauga River, where swirling green waters foamed over rounded gray boulders strewn across the river bed. At night the sound of the river served to remind me of the world outside the comfortable interior of Mamaw and granddad’s home. My grandparents’ rosy dispositions, granddad’s country-cured hams and Mamaw’s fluffy biscuits and caramel cakes helped soothe the transition from one world to the next for us kids.

To a “city kid”, the countryside held great mystery. I rambled over green rolling hills and wrote poetry under the shade of towering maples. My sisters and I listened to stories about my dad and his sis, Aunt Marynelle, and about how my grandfather rode one of the first Harley Davidsons in 1912, and my grandmother was the first woman in

Watauga to attend “normal school” (college).

While staying at my grandparents’ home, I attended “Big Betsy” High School in

Elizabethton. I was miles ahead in my education compared to my classmates. Time marched by a slow beat – a rhythm foreign to me. Everything moved in a languid flow like the Watauga River that wound past the farm. I read Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe,

Whitman, Frost, Virginia Woolfe, and Sandburg. Time and space were suspended.

Whatever was going on beyond those green hills never penetrated the Smoky Mountain mist. Only the predictable, haunting blast of freight trains cutting through the gorge awakened me from my reverie.

After my family left military life, we began to undergo a kind of equilibration in thought and culture. Far away from the gray and black world of war machines and patriotic rhetoric, I experienced a way of life so different I thought I was on another planet, in another universe altogether. The “Bible Belt” in Eastern Tennessee generated a nest of fundamental ideas about how to live. Most of this social instruction was not rooted in Biblical text, but rather emanated from Puritanical beliefs—holdovers from previous centuries.

The literal interpretation of the Bible offended my God-given sense of reason. I came gradually to understand that every person can be blinded by his or her own rationale. Eventually, I came to see that an honest person guards against self-serving dogma by a rigorous self-inventory, one based on a set of principles greater than one’s self. But back then, I did not know these jewels of wisdom. And so I suffered great confusion and a continuous sense of guilt for which I did not know why.

Religious life in East Tennessee left much to be examined. The culture had a dark underbelly. Women wore prissy hats with a white organdy veils and spotless white gloves as they sat in the pew with their families at Munsey Memorial Methodist Church.

Peyton Place was being read in closets and under sheets by flashlight. Mom and her daughters were no exception. We lined-up, hats atop, white gloved, legs crossed just

so, still marching to authority’s drumbeat. While the civil rights movement called to believers in Christ’s message to help end unjust laws and practices, and to stop brutality, torture, and the murder of black Americans—life went on as usual, the culture blinded by an interpretation of “God’s word” that blasphemed its true meaning. The deaths of four black youth in the Birmingham bombing did not move the moral lassitude in my hometown.

In the rural South I eventually broke from the church, as it were, to form my own understanding of life. But I was not always conscious of this internal departure from the cultural system that told me what to think and who to be, nor how it was moving me toward true self-determination. I only felt discomfort and a profound sense of not belonging anywhere.

I vacillated back and forth, pulled on the one hand by a deep need for acceptance, and on the other by a developing moral fortitude. For six long, suspended years I soaked in the pickling jar of Southern culture. I became obsessed by the idea of escape.

Two

My family’s experience was traumatic. Barbie, not yet nine years old, suffered the most.

She could not find her place in school, being very shy and timid at the time. I remember crying inside every time we dropped her off at her elementary school. She looked lost and very sad, too little to muster any personal resources.

Mom began to drink more at night. She felt isolated from her Air Force friends, and found few neighbors in East Tennessee who veered much beyond the daily routine they were expected to continue. Most did not have a very broad perspective on the world at large. Gone was the status Mom enjoyed as the wife of a Colonel in the Air

Force. Now we were ordinary citizens, and Dad was an insurance salesman. When Mom returned to her hometown after twenty years of military life, she had little she could show for it except our mail box with its “Retired USAF” after our name. On top of all that, she and Dad were raising four daughters ranging in age from toddler to young adults.

We joined Munsey Memorial Methodist Church in which I became very active as a youth. I joined the local United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR), heading youth committees to raise funds for hunger relief abroad. The church was very wealthy. It harbored an indoor pool and basketball court to keep youth busy and in the church’s purview. I taught swimming and competed on the swim team winning the Munsey

Memorial Athlete of the Year award in 1963. Time went by and each of us struggled to make our own way.

Over time, our family’s financial situation worsened. The military had once provided housing, entertainment, transportation, medical care, and education. In the civilian world we were poor. Bev and I both worked at part time jobs and earned scholarships to help out. But we slid steadily into debt, further injuring my parent’s

pride. They had survived unbearable stresses in the military but were totally unprepared for the challenges of being on their own so abruptly.

To keep our spirits up as a family, we instituted a tradition of monthly “Gourmet

Dinner Nights” on which we would prepare a dish from another country’s cuisine. We used our best china and linens, lit candles and hand-penned little place holders with each of our names, and a menu. These served to hold back dreary days in the cloudy, cold winter season in Johnson City, Tennessee.

Beverly did very well in college, graduating magna cum laude and landing a scholarship to North Western University for a master’s degree. When she left for

Northwestern I missed her terribly. Our home was a dark, sad place with many emotional outbreaks from Mom. Dad worked very hard with little success. He carried the burden of the world on his shoulders. I ached for him.

I dated several men in college but none very seriously until I met Tom Williams.

Tom came from a well- to-do family in nearby Kingsport. He had all brothers, and I all sisters. We had fun together and fell into a comfortable relationship. He provided me with a lot of emotional security, and was generous, graciously installing a new radio in my first car so I would have “vibes” and lavishing clothes and jewelry on me. We water- skied behind his family’s power boat on the TVA lakes that surrounded our hometown.

Tom treated me like a queen. When he asked my father for my hand in marriage one summer night, Dad readily consented.

When I went to our church to arrange for our marriage, I was denied the use of the sanctuary because my family did not tithe - something we could not afford to do. In shock, we arranged for our marriage ceremony to take place in Tom’s home chapel.

Thus, I began to see through the rhetoric and pomp of church and state. Both the church and the military were not there for us when we needed them most.

What I Understand Today

In the 1960s, southern blacks were in full rebellion. Years of oppression and the non- action of government agencies following the 1954 ruling against the idea of “separate but equal” fueled the flames for active resistance to immoral conditions. While my family and I sat in the gold-encrusted sanctuary of Munsey Memorial Methodist Church in

Johnson City, Tennessee, the Civil Rights movement was born in Montgomery, Alabama.

In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. He had appealed to Christian whites to live up to their religious creed. But, he became too powerful for both church and state. So, he was taken out by powers still unidentified but continuously at work in America.

In the meantime, another profound shift was taking place across the world. The military complex left in place after World War II was becoming firmly entrenched within corporate America. We did not heed Eisenhower’s warnings. Nuclear weapons were stockpiled all around the U.S. and in key defense positions around the world. We were the most highly armed and powerful military on Earth.

Young Americans across the land saw through the cultural values of their society to a powerful nation with an eye on worldwide resources to support our way of life. They rebelled. Group after group long repressed by white, corporate culture in America asserted their basic right to pursue happiness. A growing group of citizens challenged the policy of Manifest Destiny upon which our government based its foreign policy.

Vietnam became a stage on which our country encountered the truth about itself: it did not hold the patent on justice.

Chapter 5

White Blizzard, Green Jungle From the Smoky Mountains to Chu Lai

We met at East Tennessee State University and were friends for several years before we started dating. In his senior year, Tom joined the ROTC to postpone a tour in

Vietnam until he could finish college. He chose to fly fixed-wing aircraft, a skill he and my father could share. The circumstance around our marriage—the war and subsequent years of travel from one flight school to another—mirrored my parents’ experience.

They were starry-eyed kids who had married during World War II believing in the right intent of their country but without much knowledge of the realities of the war in which they were taking part. Tom and I were much the same.

There was never any question that Tom would serve his country in Vietnam. He came from families whose roots run deep into the dark soil of South Carolina and red clay of Georgia. During an annual tradition at our college, the Old South Ball, Tom dressed in Confederate uniform as Robert E. Lee and rode horse back across the campus carrying a large confederate flag. Back then, Southern-born men possessed a strong sense of history and deep patriotism when it comes to defending their country and families. Tom would eventually be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and Bronze

Star for his service in Vietnam.

1969. We arrived at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas as fresh-faced newlyweds in a white Volkswagen van crammed full of stereo equipment and Tom’s incredible collection

of soul music. We rocked our way out West to Martha and the Vandellas, the Four Tops, and the Temptations not fully comprehending the horrible war that awaited Tom and his compatriots. Neither of us understood the history of Vietnam nor the impact of waves of occupation on the people there. We were caught up in the adventure of it and living out the expectations of our families and nation.

We married because we were friends. When the time came for graduation, it seemed like a great match. We had both dated other people and met each other “on the rebound” only six months before. Our love was broader than romantic love. Looking back, I can see that it was like the old time match made by parents: love would grow.

Our relationship encompassed friendship, loyalty, long suffering, and many mature qualities some couples never develop or have only later. We were optimistic, gregarious, and generous in spirit. The future looked promising in spite of the war.

Tom flew Huey helicopters, which require the coordination of both hands and both feet as well as split-second decision making. I marveled as he poured over flight manuals at Fort Wolters Primary Helicopter School. We lived in temporary housing literally in the middle of a Texas cow pasture. To accommodate the numbers of men needed for the war, the Army used these large fields for war games and aerial practice.

I waited with other wives in rain-soaked trailer parks for our husbands to come home each night. In the crowded skies of these temporary airfields, at least one or two aircraft would go down each week. South Vietnamese pilots were among the trainees.

Due to cultural beliefs, they would not call in for help and were most often the casualties of the day.

We listened to a local radio channel for reports of accidents while we baked pies and hot rolls. I gained about twenty pounds between the stress, boredom, and French pastries I perfected. After earning a master’s degree, I was bored. The Army “rah, rah sis boom bah ” was hard for me. I remembered my Mother’s sacrifices. I thought to myself, “Hey, wasn’t I supposed to benefit from my education? Wasn’t my degree supposed to set me free from the bondage my mother experienced?” Swept up in the women’s liberation movement, I found little to help me comply with the regimen imposed on wives of military men.

Later we moved to Savannah Beach, Georgia and the Army’s advanced helicopter school. We lived in an old beachside apartment complex, bought a small sailboat we christened “SUTO” after our first names, and partied every weekend with other young couples drawn into the military. Those were days filled with a weird combination of excitement and foreboding.

One clear, starry night on the beach, while Tom was flying a training mission, I breathlessly watched Neil Armstrong step upon the moon. Gazing open-mouthed at the incredible flickering image of the American flag being shoved into the Moon’s dusty surface, it seemed that my country could do anything – absolutely anything – we set our minds to. I could not imagine what lay ahead for Tom in Vietnam - a place where our know-how would fail miserably. Often I’ve experienced these incongruous events in

time, these disconnected human triumphs and failures of the imagination that show our culture’s fractured nature.

Looking back now, I realize how much of my life has been lived out in blindness to the much larger events and causes that directly impacted my life and the lives of those I loved.

Vietnam loomed like a massive, dark cloud over Americans during the late sixties and early seventies. When Tom began his tour of duty, hundreds of American troops were killed each day . In 1968 at the time of our marriage, nearly 50,000 American lives had already been lost. The American public finally exceeded its tolerance of a hopeless and bloody war. Many Americans protested the war, eventually bringing it to an end. At one time there were thousands of American youth who dodged the draft, seeking asylum in other countries who took them in.

Having grown up in military-oriented families, Tom and I had a sense of duty to our country that overcame any questions we might have voiced as to why we were in

Southeast Asia in the first place. Our daily focus was to stay in the present – dealing with the war day in and day out.

For Tom and his fellow pilots, the focus was mere survival! In thousands of rain- drenched hooch’s, soldiers pinned up photos of their families and friends as incentives to endure so they could hopefully return home alive and with all four limbs intact. When

Tom joined the Americal Division in Chu Lai, the life expectancy of a pilot was only three

months. Our families held onto hope. Each communication from Tom was a real celebration.

Anti-war movements raged around the nation and world. Jane Fonda made her way to North Vietnam. But most Americans had little understanding about what was really happening. The larger drama occurring in Vietnamese jungles was unseen for most of us. Tom would occasionally report that he flew “big wigs” to one of the elegant mountain chateaus built during the French occupation of Vietnam. Military brass met for a gourmet dinner by candle light and high-level plotting of the war games. Tom returned to his hooch in the jungle and daily flights in and out of combat zones. I was amazed that he could maintain his sanity.

Later, we learned that Tom took time to photograph the real Viet Nam - the incredible tropical landscape, her rivers and rice paddies. He brought home hundreds of

35-mm slides of the people going about their day, carrying babies, shopping for food or traveling. I believe this was another way he coped - by preferring to see the beauty in all the ugliness of war. This was the part of Tom I loved deeply.

At home in Kingsport, Tennessee, we awaited the birth of our first child. I knew in my heart that the U.S. was wrong to be in Vietnam but I kept silent. My husband was there risking his life. The loss of life on both sides was more than anyone could bear.

There was no clear enemy that threatened us – no good reason to wreak havoc on the youth of our nations or to literally bomb the smithereens out of a tiny country and its families. I was emotionally numb all the time.

In a raging blizzard that blew in on one eventful night, I gave birth to my first child alone, like my mother, as a military bride, joining countless mothers whose husbands and sons were swept away into bloody conflicts across the planet in the name of peace and justice.

During a combat mission, Tom received a communication which he said he would never forget: “Captain Williams, sir, you are the proud father of a seven-pound baby boy!” As his daddy flew over the hot, green jungles of Vietnam, a beautiful baby was born in a white blizzard that blanketed the Smoky Mountains and our hometown that winter. Thomas James Williams was our next generation – the first baby born to any of the Williams brothers.

Tom returned to a country not proud of its participation in Vietnam, a culture in the turmoil of changing values. The Vietnam War made Americans question our leader’s motives. We lost faith in an authority that had led us into immoral acts. We lost our innocence in Vietnam. Tom and thousands of men and women in our military suffered the mental and physical traumas of that misguided war. But they remained silent in fear they would be branded war mongers or baby killers. Tom locked his feelings deep inside himself. This period was one I will never forget, a time when Tom removed his medals of honor from the wall of our first home because he was made to feel there was something wrong about his participation in the war.

Tom’s tour of duty ended at the Presidio in San Francisco—a tranquil end to a rough journey. Our beautiful daughter was born in sunny California. Heather Brooke

Williams joined her sixteen-month old brother in our growing little family. She was the first girl born to the Williams’ side of the family in three generations! Both my children were the first born among my sisters. Tommy and Heather were cherubs. Tom was home safe. We were happy.

Years later, in 1982, when the new Vietnam War Memorial was unveiled in

Washington, D.C., we traveled as a family to the Capitol with thousands of other veterans and their families. When he was near The Wall, Tom fell to his knees and a torrent of pent up emotions poured out of him. Sobbing into our embrace, Tom helped me realize the transforming nature of war on the men and women who fight them. I made a silent resolution that I would oppose war at all costs and work toward peace.

Once a “military brat,” I had come to understand that the men I so implicitly trusted to make good decisions for my nation could not see beyond a vision of continued conflict, military power, and corporate interest as the roads to security. It was finally clear to me that they were wrong.

After leaving the service, Tom accepted a position with Eastman Kodak in New

York City and became a successful businessman in the Big Apple during one of the most economically rich eras of American history. Vietnam faded into the past. Ronald Reagan ascended to power; the social gains of the sixties and the seventies were dismantled in an era characterized by corporate power, the suppression of unions, and the beginnings of a global economy.

The social movements of that colorful era splintered and did not fulfill their promise. Instead, a conservative movement swept our country back into a focus on corporate wealth and the myth of “trickle-down” to the masses. Activists for social progress went underground and waited or tried to “change the system from within” by joining corporations with the hope of influencing the culture. Citizens held onto what they perceived as stability and few questioned the corporate-military structures that dominated U.S. foreign policy and Americans’ lives.

What I Know Now

Over fifty-thousand Americans lost their lives in Vietnam, and over one hundred- thousand Vietnamese died during the campaign for democracy. A small country in

Southeast Asia suffered untold horrors, many of which continue today in the form of genetic disorders passed on to new generations – a terrible legacy of U.S. chemical warfare. Indeed, Vietnam War veterans today suffer from the deadly heritage of Agent

Orange. The U.S. military continues to resist accepting responsibility for these outcomes born by thousands.

Most American citizens, certainly me, did not understand the struggle for sovereignty in which the Vietnamese people were engaged. Once again, the impact of colonial powers weakened Vietnam and set up the U.S. invasion following the political and military vacuum left in the wake of the French withdrawal. Using a policy that portrays a socialist government as a threat to U.S. interests, America tried to force

“democracy” on a culture that had rallied behind Ho Chi Minh’s popular movement. We acted to control that part of the world. We failed because we knew little about the culture and the deep history of Vietnam.

Here in the U. S., citizens knew little about the clandestine mercenaries hired by the U.S. and sent to destabilize popular movements in Vietnam. Much later, when the

Pentagon Papers were made public, we understood the reasons for our actions: access to natural resources and protection of U.S. military bases.

The Pentagon Papers did much to shake public confidence in government. Since that time there has been a steady erosion of patriotism for a government most

Americans consider corrupted by corporate influence. In truth, the American public was waking up to what has always been true of our government: it is a system that promotes corporate power over the populace, one which up until recent decades cleverly cloaked itself in liberation rhetoric.

Chapter 6

Harry Chapin’s Legacy From Julia Child to Frances Moore Lappé

Following a five-year service in the Army, Tom accepted a position in New York City. Our little family moved into a multi-ethnic neighborhood in Croton-On-Hudson, New York a hamlet about an hour north of the city. Our first home in Croton was a two-story, Cape

Cod house on a quarter-acre lot. Our neighbors were first and second generation Irish and Italian immigrants to the New World. Ray and Ann on the one side were Irish. Ray taught me how to properly eat pizza, New York style, after observing my request for a fork and knife (Southern upbringing). “Oh baby,” he roared in a distinctly New Jersey accent, “Let me introduce you to New York!” Whereupon we both folded our slices in two and shoved them in our mouths! With olive oil dripping down my chin, I began to feel the increased energy and vitality of the Northeast right from the start.

Ray was a carpenter by trade and a volunteer with the Croton Fireman’s Brigade.

We occasionally observed him rushing out the door on a moonlit night, pulling on the black fireman’s coat, hardhat askew, and jumping into his truck with the flashing blue light atop as he vanished into the dark.

Ann became a trusted friend and kitchen companion. Her daughter Lisa was six years old when we moved into the neighborhood and she instantly took Heather and

Tommy under her wing. Later, as a young teen, Lisa babysat her protégés.

Both Ann and Ray were known for their fiery tempers – slow to ignite but intense when they did. Whenever Ann and Ray “got into it,” the thirty-foot distance between our houses allowed their earthy expletives to fly into our windows with all their New Jersey charm. I don’t think they ever realized that the whole of the neighborhood knew their most intimate secrets!

Ray helped Tom build the unfinished room upstairs under the dormer, which became our son’s first bedroom. There were two dormer windows and a pitched ceiling that made an enchanting cubby for a boy. I painted scenes from his favorite storybooks on the eves and furniture. Tommy slept in a sleigh-back antique bed. I can still see him climbing over the curved edge in his Dr. Denton’s, snuggling down under the eves on a cold winter’s night. Dr. Doolittle and a cohort of fantasy animals looked over him as he dozed off.

Heather slept downstairs across from us in a small, cozy room overlooking the garden. I made curtains and matching bed skirts in soft pink and blue. We filled it with expensive toys from a shop where I worked one holiday season, spending all my money on my children’s pastimes. This included a set of very special books, published in

Britain, The Adventures of Ant and Bee. They were tiny, charming books a preschooler could hold nestled in their hands. We wore them thin reading night after night, snuggled up in bed together.

Heather later distinguished herself at age three by drawing large enigmatic landscapes on our living room walls with permanent ink. Try as we would, we never

could completely cover it up with base paint. She continued to add to her exhibition over the whole of that year. This was the herald of her life’s work: she is a talented painter today!

Our neighbors on the other side were descendants of Italian stonemasons who came from Italy to build the Croton Dam. Maria was a devout Catholic. During her first few years as our neighbor, she taught me to garden and to grow tomatoes to perfection.

Our garden produced wheelbarrows full of tomatoes, beans, squash, broccoli, and herbs. Tom made a deep strawberry bed, and we grew bumper crops of delicious red berries. At one point in our early years there, we established a routine of inviting friends to play tennis then come back home with us for Quiche Lorraine and strawberry daiquiris. These were our happiest years together.

While I became Mother Earth in Croton, canning beans and tomatoes like my grandmothers, Tom became absorbed in the glitz and corporate world of New York City.

I ate peanut butter and jelly with the kids, and he dined at the Waldorf Astoria with customers. It was a huge divide in our daily worlds. But we were both happy in our respective worlds, unaware that we were beginning to evolve away from each other.

Tom commuted to New York every day on the Hudson Line. The steward announced each hamlet along the Hudson River to the rhythmic clapping of metal wheels on the tracks, racing along the shores of the Hudson River, past towering palisades on the way to the Big Apple: “Ossining… Tarrytown… Spite ‘n Divel…

Queens… 125 th street…”

During the shortened days of winter, Tom often left and returned in the dark, not seeing the children until the weekend. Later, when I traveled on the same line to attend

Columbia University, I gained new appreciation for the wear and tear on Tom and his fellow commuters. My strongest memory of commuter life is the sharp aroma of garlic wafting from the skin of New Yorkers bundled in wool overcoats, packed on crowded cars heated against the cold of winter. The gray landscape blurred by speed felt a cold alienation from the natural. The City however, could be warm and inviting if you had mean. For the poor, it was a dungeon from which there was no escape. A vivid memory of a homeless woman sleeping in the doorway of Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue remains with me.

During our first winter in Croton-on-Hudson, new friends rescued me and my two babies when an old heater broke down during a frigid blizzard that dumped thirty inches of snow in a few hours. While Tom was stranded on a commuter train, the pharmacist made his way through blinding snow to deliver a much needed prescription for our daughter.

Right from the beginning, Croton was a place where we could sink our roots and begin to feel some stability. It has a long history as a refuge for artists and writers.

During the Red Scare its Hessian Hills harbored social activists like Edna St. Vincent

Millay, John Reed and Louise Bryant, Emma Goldman, and Isadora Duncan.

When we moved there in 1972, the descendents of the Italian masons who had constructed the Croton Dam still flourished as craftsmen. It was a diverse community of

people who worked with their hands, business commuters who worked in the city, and intellectuals and artists tucked up in the hills and around the gorge that ran from the base of the dam to the Hudson River.

Pierre van Cortlandt Manor, built in the seventeenth century, stood along the gorge, a testament to early colonial Dutch history. On the Croton gorge the original

Tarzan movies were filmed. During the women’s long-distance running movement, my women friends and I once swung out on ropes to plunge into ice cold water after a long sweaty run – modern-day Jane characters. Thinking back on it, I realize the land’s rich habitats and the gorge and river made our daily life inspired living.

Not long after my family settled in Croton, I met artists who led a spiritual group following the Indian teacher Kir Paul Singh. Lala and Jim were well-known potters who lived on a small estate with Doris, their longtime family friend and an intellectual who worked at the nearby Hudson Institute. She was also a gifted painter who helped decorate and glaze Lala and Jim’s pots and platters. They were very spiritual people, deeply connected to the Earth. At their studio, I often would sit and chat with them about philosophy and life as they worked. Outside, I could hear the gurgling of water in the Croton River on its way to the Hudson. I began to read Hindu and Sufi literature. I reread Siddhartha, Herman Hesse’s brilliant story of the Buddha in which the river is a unifying symbol of life.

~~~~~~~~~

When my children were toddlers, I became the tennis instructor for the Town of

Cortlandt. Through this job I met life-long friends—people from all over the country and the world. Talking and spending time with them, my perspective on religion, history, and the nature of political systems evolved. It was the most exciting period of my life. I wanted to share this with Tom, but to my dismay he seemed uncomfortable and even annoyed. On one afternoon he accused me of being an infidel because I considered religions other than Christianity, in which Jesus was not the central figure. These matters affected us both deeply. For me, the freedom to search for myself, to explore a broader picture of history and world culture, was compelling. For Tom, it was a matter of staying with the religious and philosophical paradigm he personally felt was right and justified. He was feeling a loss of control. I was having thoughts of my own, thoughts that were outside of the paradigm we had both grown up with.

But it was useless for him to try to suppress my explorations. I was in the great melting pot of ideas, people and culture. I was becoming a freethinker. The women’s movement exerted a strong current of influence in the New York metropolitan area. I attended lectures at Sarah Lawrence College, Barnard College, and eventually went back to school at Columbia University.

My understanding about the oppression of women by patriarchal culture deepened. I discovered that the matrilineal cultures of Europe were the norm for nearly thirty-five thousand years of human civilization until they were crushed by invaders.

Matrilineal cultures affirmed the sacred nature of the Earth’s renewing processes in

contrast to a cultural paradigm that used technology to control the Earth. For the first time I began to reflect on these two very different ways of organizing human culture, each with its own set of core values.

In Croton, the Seeker in me emerged. A Seeker looks underneath the narrative to ask, “Who is talking?” In essence, a Seeker follows a storyline, digs to uncover a common thread in places far and wide – as if to satisfy something already known or sensed. I was beginning to become aware of my intuition that force laid aside during my early life.

Living in Croton-on-Hudson afforded me the time to explore ideas, to write, and to experiment outside the roles I played so well but without true authenticity. I had always been the ebullient good daughter, the cooperative schoolgirl who always did her homework, and the wife and mother who made a home, birthed and raised our children.

I longed for “a room of [my] own” – the space and independent income to listen to my own heart, my own thoughts. I desperately wanted that autonomy every man is handed by our culture.

Even though I was gaining the psychic energy I needed to affirm my path, I would only take baby steps because I was still dependent on acceptance from my husband and the culture at large to feel legitimate. Whenever I tried to assert my rights to independence, Tom would call me a “feminist” or “women’s libber” – which carried very negative meaning in southern religious cultural roots of our respective families. It meant

“traitor ” (to the values that held men’s superiority to women in place), it meant “lesbian ”

(because any woman who asserts her independence from her husband must be suspect,

must be frigid or homosexual); it meant “communist ” (because it threatened the white male stronghold on an economic system parading as democracy).

With little internal strength, I would fold with Tom’s criticism, often indirectly communicated with looks, omissions, or pressure for sex. But I was not alone, I discovered. Women all around me were struggling for equal rights with men. The emerging women writers of that time began to help show me that contrary to what I was being told or personally believed about myself, I was not an aberrant women but a woman in social bondage.

Slowly the social liberation movements of the sixties and seventies deconstructed the strictures of attitude, convention, and law to release women to find themselves, to know our bodies again – to shed light on the suppression of the feminine spirit (at least half of the human experience) that began with the rise of patriarchal cultures in the West. The Chalice and the Blade (Glenna Mcreynolds), In A Different Voice

(Carol Gilligan) and The Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan) all awakened Western women to our natural birthright and power as a gender. We began to understand the historical shift in values that caused us to be subjugated to men.

Ownership of land had once been handed down to generations through matrilineal lines. By virtue of their life-carrying capacity - the womb that nourishes life into being - women at one time were honored as beings close to the Earth. Matrilineal cultures in Africa, Asia, America and Europe worshipped the Goddess. She is the renewing capacity of the Earth—the processes that support life. The sacred renewing

capacity of the Goddess to bring new life from death was once revered by men and women alike.

Thus, people living in those times and cultures thought of themselves as a part of a large natural system, guarded over by a Mother of Life. All of nature was seen as imbued with sacredness by the Creator of Life. Archeologists studying these ancient matrilineal societies find no evidence of warfare other than tools necessary for taking life when food or clothing was necessary. The seasons, cycles of life and development were highly ritualized and honored. People lived as close as they could to the natural rhythms of the Earth.

It was these societies that invading hordes suppressed as pagan because they were attuned to the reproductive processes of life, and because their rituals involved sacred mating rights that were symbolic of nature’s fertility. Women in goddess society had complete control over their own bodies and were protected by men for their special nurturing qualities. Art from goddess cultures shows women in the fullness of their sexuality with abundant breasts and prominent vulvae. Western cultures, on the other hand, banned such displays as vulgar and wrong, eventually incarcerating the feminine within present-day forms.

The struggle of the religious Protestant right which currently grips our country in its Puritanical hold, is an example of the degrading and suppressive forces of Western ideology that fears and prostitutes the natural, and seeks to control it through legislation and technology. This is done under the guise of a “culture of life.”

When I became aware of the connection between the rise of patriarchies, and the broad scale harnessing of the Earth’s reproductive capacities for profit, I understood, too, that women’s condition and the Earth’s condition are linked. I finally began to unravel the knot of misunderstanding about my culture that had eluded me until age thirty-five.

In 1978 I joined the running movement, and began a decade of marathon training and participation in the women’s running circuit at the Avon and Legg’s running events in Central Park. Developing my body to a state of strength I never thought possible helped to solidify my growing self-confidence. Fitness and its companion, clarity of mind, helped me realize I could create a life for myself that was not directly tied to my husband’s image and life goals. Until that point, either my father or husband had been the descriptor of my life, the circle in which I danced. I was either the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Feathers or Mrs. Thomas E. Williams. Now the world opened up for me and I could decide what I would choose to believe and strive to have for myself and for my family. This journal entry from 1979, just before I ran my first marathon, is a window into my personal transformation:

Awakening from a dead sleep, my eyes wander about the bedroom. In a neat stack on the sweater chest are my warm-ups, several t-shirts, and running shorts, and some rumpled-up socks are on the floor. My eyes settle on a sight which reflects my current life situation so well I have to chuckle to myself: a pair of sleek, Papa Gallo heels next to a mud-spotted pair of Tigers. This juxtaposition of two worlds pleases me. The alarm

is going off! Today I will run fifteen miles before breakfast. Because of a threatening knee problem I plan to run down the grass-covered median of a nearby highway.

Yesterday I ran on the back nine of a golf course, two loops, dropping my warm-ups at the 15 th hole. As I walked to the car, I was overcome by the same feeling of well-being and vitality I always get after a run. Plopping in the driver’s seat, I reached for a can of grapefruit juice which soon joined the other empties rolling about the car floor.

In two weeks I will run the Long Island Marathon – my first. Reflecting back to my very first racing experience, a five-miler in Greenwich, I recall how exhausted I was afterward. Then came a succession of memorable races with other running buddies – the Legg’s Mini Marathon, the New York Road Runner’s Club Women’s Half-Marathon

(when my girlfriends and I were frozen in our seating positions after the ride home!)

The summer finds me running at dawn when the coolness still wraps the air and the dew wets my feet. Although the increase in my energy level was a dramatic result, running is beginning to make subtle but important changes in my personality, too. I have always been an “up-and-down” person. All my life I have suffered from a “fall-out” syndrome: going great guns for weeks on end, positive and creative, filled with energy; then the blues, the negative thoughts, tiredness, and a feeling of being no where, and going no where. Then, the gradual climb back to great guns again. Naturally these tumultuous behavior changes caused stress not only for me but my family, too. Running has gradually evened me out. There are no more real blues, and I am more relaxed at everything I do.

Later…Well, running the marathon was as miserable and as wonderful as I anticipated it would be! Even at 26 miles I still doubted being able to make the last agonizing 385 yards! Threatening muscle cramps in my calves were a big worry. I stopped and stretched at least five times in the last six miles. Still, I was near four hours for my first marathon. I ran the marathon without killing myself! I have reached a fitness level where running that once impossible distance (26.2 miles) has become a reasonable goal. That fact—the realization of a new physical potential—is the overpowering joy that has come for me in the ensuing hours and days. Not the fact that

I had managed to get through twenty-six miles, but that I reached a new and higher plateau in strength and personal will. This experience will stay with me as a milestone in my development for as long as I live, and, a dynamic factor in my being able to achieve heretofore “impossible goals.”

In the spring of 1981, the pastor of our Methodist church asked me to head up a project to raise money for hunger and poverty relief. I talked to the wonderful group of friends I ran with, representing every faith and philosophy including agnostics and atheists. They were professors, businessmen and businesswomen, mothers, and artists.

But we were all crazed about running. One of them suggested a 10K road race for the town which we had always dreamed about developing. The dam and the deeply-cut gorge provided a picturesque and challenging racecourse. Luckily, our pastor was a woman who was open to making this an ecumenical event. She proposed that we

develop a race and call it the Run Against Hunger and form the committee from the entire community.

During this same time, Harry Chapin (a popular folksinger, activist, and Jimmy

Carter’s Chair of the Presidential Commission on Hunger and Poverty) was tragically killed in a car accident on Long Island. His record agent, who lived in Croton, asked that the race be made a memorial to Chapin and donated money for t-shirts. That was twenty-six years ago and the race is still held each fall in Croton as the Harry Chapin

Memorial Run against Hunger. (This small community raised more than $350,000 for hunger relief.)

What happened to me through the formation of this event changed the course of my life. I began to read liberation theology texts ( Pedagogy of the Oppressed , Black Elk

Speaks ), hunger and poverty literature ( Small Is Beautiful , Diet for a Small Planet , Food

First ), and the writings of the National Council of Churches and the United Nations about root causes of hunger. I began to correspond with Oxfam, Bread for the World, World

Hunger Year, the Heifer Project and other national groups working to solve the problems of hunger at home and internationally.

During the race I developed a concurrent Education Fair to engage runners, spectators and their friends and family with the literature I was reading. I wanted the race to be more than a running event. I wanted it to make social change.

As I became more knowledgeable about how my own way of life was a direct part of creating and sustaining hunger and poverty, I entered into a crucible of conflicting

values and ideas: By then my husband was making more money. We had moved to a gorgeous home and had all the comforts money could buy. But I now understood that the system that provided this wealth was the system that results in poverty and injustice for women, children, and citizens in the U.S. and in poor countries worldwide. I tried to talk to my husband about this but he was numb to it. Because of his good nature, he did not discount my pleading, but at the same time, he was unmoved.

Tom was firmly indoctrinated in the rationale that white middle - and upper- class people in America use to defend a way of life: the trickle-down theory of economics. “By promoting wealth everyone benefits” is the general idea. Yet, the steady growth in the economic gap between rich and poor is an ever present fact in our 232 years of history. The number of working poor in the U.S. has reached an all-time high.

The top 10% of Americans have a net worth of almost $900,000 while the bottom twenty percent have a net worth of about $7,800, according to David K. Shipler in The Working

Poor (2004). And now, in 2008, the middle class has joined “the poor” in the collapse of a system based on greed, their retirements wrecked, their mortgages lost. Record numbers of Americans are out of work as the companies that caused the collapse downsize, letting their faithful, hardworking employees go, most without a separation package or much notice—turned out to pasture by the rich landowners.

Back in 1981, I think Tom tried to see my view, but our livelihood was deeply connected to the paradigm I was beginning to criticize. Like so many of us, the stark reality of our true system—undemocratic at its roots—was too hard to accept.

I remember one outstanding day when something inside of me broke free and I became willing to let go of trying to reconcile the conflict between us. We entertained customers in New York City at a famous Italian restaurant which was located in lower

Manhattan. That day we drove through poor neighborhoods to get there to avoid a traffic jam elsewhere. It was a hot day and typically families were out on the stoops of their row houses to escape the stifling heat inside. Their kids had opened the fire hydrants to get cool.

There I was in our Mercedes in perfect comfort, peering out at impoverished people trapped in urban slums. Later we dropped hundreds of dollars on a couple of bottles of wine and dined on a sumptuous meal costing hundreds more. I could no longer dwell with the insanity these kinds of disparate experiences caused in me. I felt it was morally wrong to continue to engage in a lifestyle that I knew was part of the problems I felt compelled to do something about. This was an epiphany for me. From then on I set my sails away from that lifestyle and, unfortunately, from my husband.

What I Understand Today

In 1981 as my friends and I developed the Harry Chapin race, world hunger and poverty rates were at an all-time high. Mass starvation in West Africa and the high infant mortality rates in developing countries resulted in about forty-thousand deaths per day from hunger-related illnesses. Millions then and now go to bed hungry. In America a

shocking five percent infant mortality rate for ages birth to five years old was on par with third-world nations as reported by the World Watch Institute.

In the 1980s Americans witnessed a reversing of the social and economic gains made in the sixties and seventies. A worldwide shift to a free-market economy began to dismantle government control of market dynamics, instituted to protect the most vulnerable among us. Funding for health care and nutrition programs was slashed while military budgets grew. A national commitment to protecting fragmented ecosystems found new resistance in Washington. Legislation that narrowed the gaps in income and security between corporate America and disenfranchised citizens (women, minorities, the disabled, and children) was gradually placed on the back burner. Tax cuts to the wealthy, repopulating the court system with conservative judges, and larger contributions to political campaigns swung the national pendulum back to the old mercantile system. During this decade global corporate trade and military pressure evolved in a way that strengthened a persistent colonial system that secured rights to lucrative resources world-wide through domination.

Important activist movements formed as Americans concerned about the militarization of the world voiced opposition to nuclear weapons proliferation. In 1982,

Heather (aged ten), my sister Barbara and I participated with over a million protestors in the March to End Nuclear War. On Fifth Avenue for as far as the eye could see, ahead of us and behind us, a wave of peacemakers of all ages and political orientations sang “ All

we are saying is give peace a chance.” In harmony the chorus echoed down the famous avenue, floating above the crowd.

My daughter and I relived this experience recently in Washington, D.C. at the

March for Women’s Lives in 2003. Twenty years later we marched hand in hand with over a million men, women, and children to protect the rights of women over their own bodies. We formed a pink blanket that filled the Washington Mall. I observed that when movements coalesce around basic ideals, people cross over personal barriers and stand together for the truth.

Nuclear proliferation and human rights violations against Americans and citizens worldwide caused ordinary citizens to organize social justice work like the Sanctuary

Movement in Tucson, Arizona, where refugees from Central America were given safe harbor. All held testimony to an American public that was growing tired of its government’s lies and secret activities.

This period chronicles the Iran Contra Affair, the war in Grenada, our hot-and- cold relationship with Manuel Noriega, destabilization of the democratically elected

Nicaraguan government, and the move to use Iraq’s war on Kurds as an excuse to enter a larger war. In 2008 we have now experienced Afghanistan, Iraq, Peru, and Haiti and the American public was not given honest information about our involvement in any of these conflicts nor the coups affecting people far from our shores. As I finish this book, the U.S. not only has lost any remaining moral authority the world community previously granted us, but we are also hated by more people and nations than at any time I can

remember. At a time that called for a leadership to unite us with all of humanity, we slid backward into divisive nationalism and polarization of people based on religion and political parties.

The elements of a pattern emerge over and over again: 1) tax cuts for the rich and for corporations with political party contributions in return; 2) creation of fearful scenarios about security risks to control the popular vote and mood; 3) deceit about what our government actually does in both domestic and foreign affairs to move government objectives ahead; 4) persistent focus on business interests to support corporate capitalism; and 5) nearly total denial of the worldwide ecological changes that imperil the human community.

As I became more knowledgeable about ecology, I began to connect its demise to the processes that also create poverty and hunger. Over this period of time, the framework of the contemporary system of political and economic policies that result in poverty, hunger, and the destruction of ecosystems became apparent to me. Free- market capitalism. At its roots are basic assumptions that natural resources must be owned and exploited for profit. And, that the profit depends on a significant number of workers living at the edge of poverty. Blind indifference to the most vulnerable people in society displaces responsibility from people’s welfare to market dynamics alone. Greed and indifference become forms of violence against humanity.

Why had I not seen it before? Greed and violence are hidden in rhetoric so old that it reaches back in time and to another continent to the advent of what westerners

call “civilization.” This marked the time when Western culture began to harness the reproductive capacity of the Earth for profit. So convoluted and thickly woven are the explanations and justifications that they appear as their opposites: greed and violence became dressed up as enterprise and national security!

I realized I was part of one of the world’s grand historical scams. Capitalism has little to do with true democracy unless we as a people make it responsive to the basic rights of all people to have medical care, nutritious food, and opportunities for education. These realizations came over a period of time, layer by layer, as I reconsidered what I knew and had been taught. I began to discern government as something much more complex than a liberal or a conservative viewpoint. I realized government should be about individuals creating the national will to protect the basic rights of humans and conserve the Earth’s renewing capacity to support life. The latter also concerns granting rights to other living species.

A kind of fog began to lift as I could see the most basic idea of democracy: the responsibility of individuals working together to affirm and work for the rights of all members of society to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This means that individuals possess the character and moral standard to answer questions like “How much is enough?” and “What is my obligation to society for the abundance I may achieve?”

Chapter 7

A Dark Blue Canvas Laguna Beach 1985

In 1985, I sat in the expansive living room of our newly purchased, three-story home in

Laguna Beach, California. A panoramic view of a tranquil, blue Pacific ocean stretched before me. I watched a distant sailboat beating before the wind, a metaphor for my coming journey. I spent my days walking the beaches, soaking in our hot tub, going to therapy—and being miserable. The old adage that you can’t buy happiness proved true for me. After my epiphany in New York I had gone back to school and worked, struggled in a failing marriage, denying the inevitable, recommitting, giving up… My husband buried himself in work, was promoted and given the opportunity to open a

West Coast office for his company. We were definitely moving apart. Maybe we hoped the move would solve our differences. But, the problems were not from lack of effort or even lack of caring for each other. They were bedrock: I was not the person he married.

I had grown and changed. Our values were 180 degrees from each other.

At the time our children were young adolescents. Besides being uprooted from the hometown where they spent their entire childhood, Southern California culture offered them little structure or affirmation. If you weren’t a bronzed sex goddess or muscled surf king you were relegated to “other” status. With the imminent demise of our marriage, they also faced uncertain futures.

I was so naïve when we separated. In my mind our loyalties to each other would remain predictable and there would be a safety net maintained between us for our children. From almost the first week nothing went as planned. It is too painful to write about, even after twenty years, plus the need to protect my children from public disclosure of details of those difficult years. I can only describe them as exquisite agony.

During the time period of 1985 to 1995, I struggled to survive economically, emotionally, and spiritually. During these ten years, my son and daughter were separated from each other, reunited, and separated again. Their stories are their own.

We each have our perspective. I can only hope they may now understand my deep conflict and the values on which I decided to base my life and work. They tell me today it has given them another set of values to consider. Moral decisions never come without accepting that life cannot just go on as usual. I learned I could not control the actions or decisions of anyone other than myself.

On a dark blue canvas I wandered alone toward a distant point – its form barely discernible. I searched for signposts to help me get there.

I turned to nature, as I was accustomed to do when my family or mental life was topsy-turvy. Leaving a curving path of footprints along the edge of the sea, I explored marine life clinging to rock slabs whose subterranean forms waved below. In the towering gold cliffs of the California shoreline, I discovered fossilized remains of prehistoric shellfish and tried to imagine what explorers in the 18 th century may have seen here. Early accounts record an abundance of wildlife, vast stretches of marshland

supporting hundreds of species of birds, and tidal shelves lined with dark green abalone

, the shells big as platters. These accounts describe a sea of otters and dolphins near the shoreline and small groups of men and women fishing with handmade nets. The changed landscape of these beaches in 1985 told a story about loss of biodiversity due to the progress of humankind. That loss and my loss melded.

When Tom and I finally separated, I was working at the Orange County Marine

Institute in Dana Point as an instructor. I learned marine ecology from the biologists there. All the instructors played a part in the living history presentation of Henry Dana’s classic voyage on the brig, the Pilgrim . An exact replica of the ship was moored in the

Institute’s harbor on which school children, teachers, and we swash -buckling instructors played out the drama of his voyage Two Years before the Mast .

We were also trained to lead hikes in the Santa Rosa Mountains where oak woodland, chaparral, and riparian ecosystems blended together, and where Chumash people lived in the winters ages ago. We began at San Juan Capistrano Mission with the real story of what happened to California Indians there. At the Lazy W Ranch in the mountains, we spent three days exploring and hiking.

These experiences healed my soul and awakened me to the magnificent ecology of Southern California and the marine communities along the shore. I began a long time career in environmental education, which continues to this very day.

From my journal in 1986

The Pacific Ocean along Southern California’s coast is a wildly beautiful place. The waters form a lattice-work of aquamarine, royal and deep blue colors undulating from shore to open sea. Under my bare feet the golden sand is flecked with iron from crumbling cliffs that meander along the shoreline. The water is deep, icy cold, and thick.

In these coves and rocky reefs, a tiny hermit crab maneuvers its shell-house in a teacup tide pool. I try to imagine this place a hundred years ago – how richly crowded these tide pools might have been, how migrating whales and playful dolphins could be seen not far offshore… large green abalone under shallow lagoons, and otters twirling among waving kelp forests. In my vision now, the cliffs are planed by construction and new homes, the beaches lined by business, traffic, and teaming numbers of my species.

Little life is visible along the shore and out to sea where surfers plunge in the waves. An oil rig is all I see beyond the crashing surf.

For most of my life nature has provided the stage on which I sort through the scenes: the loss, the gain, the aching heart, the joys, and the questions. Who am I and the whys and wherefores. Nature has always taken my confusion and reorganized it into understanding.

Two weeks ago, I moved out of our three-story penthouse into a one-bedroom garage apartment. I am sleeping on the antique bed my children slept on as youngsters.

I took only a few things when I left: a representative number of photos spanning my children’s birth to their teens… my writing desk and journals; a few pots, pans, dishes,

sheets. I bought a pull-out couch for the kids when they visit, and I am eating off the first kitchen table and chairs my husband and I bought eighteen years ago. All this I managed by hocking my diamond engagement ring and a few pieces of gold jewelry. As with my African sisters across these waters, all my worth is in my jewelry.

A year after I wrote this journal entry, I moved to Los Angeles to direct an outdoor education program at the William O. Douglas Outdoor Classroom (WODOC). It was located in Franklin Canyon—a six-hundred acre stretch of California oak woodland, completely surrounded by an urban sea, with Beverly Hills at the southern end and Cold

Water Canyon Drive at the north. Rich socialites as well as valley people were trained as docents, and passionately defended the little island of semi-wild land as if it were the last on Earth. Indeed, in L.A. it was precious. At WODOC I was absorbed into a big family of wonderful, joyful people who applied love to the gaping wounds in my heart. I continued to learn more about ecology and natural history. I barely could pay my bills.

I saw my children infrequently. Our house was sold and Tom moved into his new wife’s house, where my children became inaccessible to me.

Enrolling in an executive placement program, I learned how to market myself. It was inauthentic but I needed to survive. In 1987 I became the program director for preventive medicine education programs at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in

San Diego. Though not directly involved in environmental education, I led hikes for people in the center’s weight loss and stress management programs. In this, and during personal time, I continued to learn about the ocean and chaparral ecology of southern

California. The land and ocean there were among the most beautiful in the world.

Nature was the life-line that kept me from expiring from the gnawing doubt and sadness I felt in every cell of my body.

During my work at Scripps Clinic, I began to explore spiritual methods of self- understanding and empowerment. My self-esteem took a beating during the divorce and a subsequent financial tragedy. I unknowingly invested the bulk of my share of the sale of our home (essentially all my life’s savings I had earned) in a savings and loan

(S&L) scam: Southmark Corporation, funded through Lincoln Savings and Loan. Because I was inexperienced with investing, I consulted an accountant with Merrill Lynch

Corporation. He suggested I invest in Southmark at eleven percent over two years. One month before the note matured, my broker called to tell me I had lost all of it but $703, and I owed him $500. I was sitting at my desk in the Clinic office overlooking the ocean with a doctor colleague of mine. She opened her pocketbook and wrote out a check to be returned whenever I could. I will never forget her generosity. But the loss of all my financial security was devastating. Friends said it was a “spiritual cleansing of the money

I earned in the marriage” but I say it was just plain bad luck. I tried, with the help of several pro bono attorneys to file as part of a class-action suit, but was never able to sustain the legal work to be accepted into the suits being filed. The money was gone. I had to accept that and move on.

I entered a totally new psychological landscape almost overnight. Both my children later lived on the other side of the continent when, unknown to me, Tom moved

and took them with him – a plan, I believe, to reduce the chance of our visitations to a minimum.

Now I had no financial savings. Everything seemed lost and crushed. For more time than I want to admit, part of me believed I was being punished for leaving the marriage. I became confused. Family and close friends reminded me of my choice to live a life aligned with my own personal values and convictions, and that that life comes with risks and consequences. So, I searched for new meanings, new ways to understand the geography of my heart.

Through the vibrant health and wellness community in San Diego I found a person who taught shield-making in the Native American tradition as a means to self- understanding. In this ancient tradition, the personal shield is akin to a personal mandala, a spiritual map of where we come from, who we are, and how we fit into a larger cosmology of life. There are traditional stories about the four directions and their symbols and meanings. The east, south, west, and north all are imbued with meaning, give spiritual guidance, and relate to various stages of development in the human path of life. Father Sky (the Creator of All Things) and Mother Earth (the source of material life and sustenance) complete the Circle of Life.

Louise and I spent several wonderful sessions together as she guided me to explore elements of my personality, my family, and my work. She helped me make the first shield, providing the materials and making sure that I understood the significance of the prayers for each direction, and the respectful manner in which to engage in this

process. I experienced another dimension around me, becoming more sensitive to color, sound, location, and the seemingly coincidental juxtaposition of events. I became aware that synchronicity is a real thing, and it is at work in our lives continuously. It has something to do with energy, and is akin to pulling on a single thread in the universe and seeing a response ripple throughout. The experience brought me the realization that I am not living individually in this world, but my whole life is connected to everyone and everything else.

As I practiced making other shields, following the protocol of prayer and respect for the directions, I began to realize that help and guidance are everywhere if only we are “tuned in.” Gradually, a layer of confusion cleared away. I formed a sense of myself that stayed with me throughout the day.

Not long after I completed my studies of shield-making, I was introduced to a spiritual counselor in San Diego who practiced shamanic journey meditation. Alicia followed a spiritual path all her life, beginning in her teens as a nun working with the

Yaqui Indians in Mexico.

Alicia helped me with further self-understanding through prayer, drumming, and a method of visualization. During these internal “journeys” I asked to meet my spiritual guides. The animal guides that came for me remained the same on all subsequent journeys. I came to realize that each embodied different qualities that I needed to strengthen in my self. For example, the black jaguar I believe embodied the spirit of quiet courage that I lacked at the time. There was a white river dolphin that met me at a

designated “place” and took me into the experience. I believe the dolphin was an angel of some kind.

Shamanic journeying utilizes a drum or rattle for a rhythmic background. Much like ancient people dancing to a drumbeat and sacred chants, I was transported into deeper awareness by the constant beat of the drum that resonates with wave frequencies in the brain, and can lead to heightened awareness with guidance and practice. Through this counseling, I learned more about myself and spirit, and began to trust my intuition.

I began to read Native American literature and studied the land ethic of first people in North America. Just reading the words of these men and women brought a kind of sanity that righted my world. It made such good sense to live moderately and with regard for the very things that provide everything humans need to live. I heard a sound emanating from the words… not the words themselves, but a sound behind the words that beckoned my soul.

One afternoon in 1990, I sat at my desk in the corporate office envied for its view. The cushioned track at the Shiley Sports and Health Center, Torrey Pines Golf

Course below it, and beyond the cliff’s edge, a royal blue ocean formed a youthful and ordered panorama. In spite of these beautiful surroundings, my internal landscape was untouched by the playful activity before me, or even the awesome beauty of the Pacific.

Nothing could soothe the pit of longing for my children and the sense that I had failed at the most important things in life.

Following my intuition, I left Scripps Clinic in the spring of 1990 and traveled over the Laguna Mountains to begin study with Native American teachers in Arizona. I left behind a way of living and a way of knowing to find something entirely new.

Chapter 8

Canned Peaches and White Flour What I learned from Earth and Sky

That day—that day when I left San Diego to meet my spiritual guides—remains vivid in my mind and body. Only a month before, I was taking a nap when the phone rang me out of a drugged sleep. A man’s voice was speaking: “Hello… I am calling Susan

Feathers. This is Gabe Sharp… you wrote me a letter…”

I shot up out of bed like a rocket! Oh my god, I thought. Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it… was running through my mind. I had written a letter three months prior at the encouragement of a friend who knew Gabe and his spiritual work with white students. After all that time, I figured they did not want to take on a student.

I forgot all about it until the call that came like a bolt of lightening into my condo.

I was too scared to answer, so I just listened. “Your letter says you want to follow the Red Road...” I cringed and thought how it must have seemed to them – my using terms for which I had virtually no real understanding. Ohhhh, did I really write that? I couldn’t tell if he was smiling when he said it, but his voice had a little edge of laughter to it. “I am very busy now for a student, but my partner may be able to help you.”

That was when I first heard Sundance’s voice. It was a full-throated yet soft female voice that communicated dignity and thoughtfulness. “Hello, Susan. Call us back, we would like to talk to you about your letter.”

Later I would reflect on the sanctity of a teacher-student relationship but in the old sense of it, the sage and the apprentice when the student drops all notion of their personal understanding to stand before a teacher in trust as a blank tableau.

A few minutes later, I breathlessly called them back. We discussed what I wanted:

“To find the truth”, I told them. They explained to me that they worked with spiritual guides. They asked permission to consult these guides, spiritual beings who exist in other dimensions (akin to angels), to learn if I would be able to undertake this kind of study and personal work. I gave them permission.

They called me back several days later and said they would agree to meet with me to discuss my becoming a student. So that I would have confidence in the authenticity of their work, they described three pictures hanging on a wall in my study. I was dumbfounded and a little fearful. Sundance offered to prepare a course of study based on the spiritual guidance they received in regards to my spiritual path. I agreed to meet them in Yuma a couple of weeks later.

For the next two weeks, I tried to stay calm and to prepare for the meeting.

Following my intuition, I bought each of them a gift: Gabe a beautiful South American sash of red, turquoise, yellow, green and black cotton; Sundance a large polished clamshell that shone like mother-of-pearl.

Deciding what to wear took preoccupied me for some reason. I wore a long skirt and matching cotton jersey blouse and jacket, colors of the ocean, with a pearl necklace.

To me this was an official meeting of the highest order, a coming together of cultures.

Later Sundance called each of these kinds of meetings The International Table of Peace.

By the time I rode across the hot Imperial Valley with its humid irrigation field that stretched as far as I could see, in my un-air-conditioned San Diego car, I was exhausted. My heart—beating in anticipation—did not help either. I felt a mix of excitement and fear that made me feel slightly faint. In my despair I had reached out to the First Peoples of America – and they responded. Now, how was I to be or to know how to proceed? I had never known a real Indian person in all my life even though my great- grandmother was a Cherokee Indian from Virginia. Her memory in my family was a distant and indistinct story about my mother’s grandmother.

I found the Denny’s restaurant on the outskirts of Yuma across the highway from the Quechan Indian Reservation where I learned Gabe was a social worker. Compared to

Laguna Beach and San Diego, Yuma seemed a dusty, strung-out town with no endearing qualities whatsoever. It would take years to gain full appreciation for the hidden story in the landscape I was tiredly considering as I waited for Sundance and Gabe.

Finally they walked through the double doors. Gabe was dressed in what I learned was his usual short-sleeved, checked shirt and dark slacks, his shining black and silver hair pulled back in a pony-tail. His dark eyes shone as he smiled warmly. He appeared to be about sixty years old. Sundance, I believe, came with spirit guides around her because her presence filled the room so much that people all over the

restaurant turned to examine this beautiful woman with long black hair falling over her shoulders and down her back.

I stood up to meet them. It was a meeting of nations but I did not understand it then. I sat down awkwardly. I was now on automatic pilot due to excitement and anxiety. I thanked them for the opportunity to meet with them. Gabe suggested we go to another restaurant called The Garden where we could sit outside under shady trees, and which was less busy.

Gabe stared at me in the driver’s mirror. He kept a minimal conversation going, asking about the drive and weather. But Sundance remained silent and immobile in the front seat. I could not read her thoughts or emotions at all.

The Garden is a small oasis in Yuma. It is known mostly by the locals. It closes in late May as the summer temperatures rise. It was indeed shady and cool. Gabe and

Sundance told me how they met and about the work they did together to teach people the principles of Indian medicine and they told me the name of their organization: the

Institute for Traditional Indian Medicine for Peace. I learned that Gabe was born on the

Mojave Indian Reservation and that Sundance came from Canada originally, the daughter of Iroquois parents. I can remember nothing of what I told them about me. But I remember thinking I was chattering aimlessly.

We left from there to go to Gabe’s office on the reservation to discuss the spiritual reading they did for me. When we arrived there, I gave both of them my gift.

They both watched the other open their gift, and then exchanged unfinished sentences

that seemed like they were discussing the objects themselves in relation to my coming there. This was the beginning of the time when I would have to suspend the paradigm I used to understand my world. Everything now would have a different meaning. Spirit would be present and working in these meetings and later sessions.

My personal guides were introduced, and a three-year course of study explained—in what was all metaphor, it seemed. I understood little. I confess I was swept up in the mystery and adventure of it all. I decided to enter into study with them.

That was the first gift of trust. Later, I would be asked why I would trust them. They did not trust me. I was forced into discernment immediately, and never allowed to slip into complacency.

About three years before, my mother had given me a paperback book at

Christmas: Medicine Woman by Lynn Andrews. This was the beginning of my exploration of Native American spirituality, and perhaps, passing-down something along the maternal line in her family. Even though Lynn Andrews is not a native person, her fictionalized story about Ruby Plenty Chiefs catalyzed a deep memory in me which I did not recognize at first. As it played out over the next few years, however, I believe it opened a part of my psyche to learn anew all I had ever been taught. To this I owe my mother great gratitude.

The following is my attempt to reconstruct the most important lessons I learned from native people. It is, at best, a sketch of a more colorful and richly-textured experience—an encounter with the spirit of the Earth and Sky.

I dedicate this summary of my experience to my teachers - Sundance Aquero and Gabriel Sharp - with gratitude and love. My hope is that it accurately tells the story of my education at the Institute for Traditional Indian Medicine for Peace.

THE LITTLE BOOK OF WISDOM Coming of Age in America

When I began my exploration of truth and justice in Yuma with native people, I began by examining the nature of these principles in my own life. This is the story of how I came to face the truth about my life and discover the reality of the nature of “progress” in

Western culture.

INTENT

My education began simply with a leading question, asked repeatedly during the four years I studied with Native American teachers: “What is your intent?”

My first responses were a cloud of ideas spewed out to cover most acceptable responses: I wanted to gain clarity; I wanted to learn the indigenous North America worldview; I wanted to live a more committed life. As I worked with my Iroquois teacher, layer upon layer of what I thought I intended peeled away. (A spiritual path will never be a Hollywood movie. There is nothing glamorous about it, I learned. But, something much finer awaits the student willing to gut it out.)

We began by examining my behavior and attitudes about seemingly simple things: how I greeted my teacher (even how I knocked on her door—which she found loud and impatient); how I interacted with other people, especially native people

(looking them directly in the eye, addressing the man before the woman); how I

responded to assignments from her (questioning, probing); and even how I drove my car!

She might suggest an excursion - let’s say to visit Gabe at the rez. From the moment I turned the car key, Sundance made observations. Noting my “California stop,” she remarked, “You didn’t come to a full stop. Do you think the laws were not made for you too?” Other lessons were about acting with a group consciousness when, for example, we drove more than one car to a location. It was true; I often lost concentration and sped ahead in traffic.

Though these were simple “car lessons,” Sundance used them to expose ingrained cultural behaviors I otherwise considered “normal.” I did not realize these were dynamic lessons. At times I thought she was picking on me. She kept me in a state of anticipation until I began to slow down. Her mantra for me was “Stop, wait, consider.”

Also, “Impatience is the first form of violence.”

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My Indian teachers always reminded me that intent is the determining factor in whatever one does or does not do. Their wisdom has proven true. Whenever I have followed ambition for selfish motives, I have ended up in a blind alley with little joy. But, when

I’ve slipped out of my normal culturally engrained patterns, the unexpected and synchronous has always occurred… like I am aligned with a universal wave of energy that has a deeper wisdom I cannot fathom.

When a person works from a principle or an ethic, rather than just “self”, there is a universal harmony that brings people and resources together. I saw this in my classroom when I was not intent on controlling outcomes that made me look good (such as the test scores of my students, or criteria set by the state or school board.) A dramatic example that occurred in my science class comes to mind. It concerns a young man who was considered severely learning disabled. He claimed he could not read.

When we first met he was passive, yet polite. I guess he had been passed along with his labels. In his classroom were a group of students described a “low achievers.” These are the kids I adored because I knew there is potential there, and I felt challenged to bring it forward.

The school board supported me with the resources I requested. I allowed students to work in small groups or individually on research projects. The young man in question decided he would repeat the original experiment by Fleming when he discovered the antibiotic action of penicillin. I ordered him a student laboratory kit to reproduce Fleming’s famous experiment with bread mold.

We cleaned a lab space where he could set it up, take daily readings, and follow the progression in streak plates. My colleagues thought I was wasting money, and setting the student up for failure. I knew he would struggle, yet I refused to read anything to him. First, he had never had any space or equipment of his own. He was thrilled and, to my surprise, set up a professional technical space according to

directions in the science kit. He not only managed to read the instructions, but kept an excellent lab notebook.

Other students became interested and he began to talk to them, explaining his experimental process. Eventually he achieved a kind of special status in our classroom community. It was a gamble that worked out. Or was it? Are the principles of trust, self-determination, and justice a gamble? Somehow he found within himself, the resources to read rather technical material, personal resources not previously available.

Now motivated by curiosity and the time and tools to investigate, he drew on them, and they became manifest. This is what I mean by following true intent.

At one point early in my studies, my teacher decided to put an abrupt end to what she saw as a wrong intent in me. She keyed in on my ambition to learn everything I could about Native American philosophy and history, and then turn around and be “Miss

Expert,” as she described me. Luckily, she could also discern a greater intent to understand myself and my culture. Her solution was to stop all reading. There would be no writing or formal study. Instead I was to collect rose petals fallen from our neighbor’s prolific rose-garden, dry them, and use them to fill sachets, which she also blessed with sage and a small turquoise stone. (These were given to weekend students who took classes from my teachers.)

You can imagine how I felt. I thought I was being belittled and denied the greater teaching. I was a professional, after all! But I dutifully followed her directions.

My neighbor graciously consented to let me collect from his prize-winning garden: I picked up yellow, ruby, fuchsia, peach, white, and variegated petals, each a velvet dollop from one of nature’s true masterpieces. My little trailer was filled with the heady fragrance of rose petals. They carpeted the tables and furniture, lay drying on the windowsills. I sat and sewed each small bag, making the seams as straight as possible, each stitch a regular length.

Over the weeks I was engaged in these activities, I was transformed from an anxious, ambitious woman to a relaxed and more appreciative human being, grateful for the simple yet profound beauty of each day. Sundance disconnected me from a world bent on accomplishment and connected me to the heartbeat found in gardens, always there under our feet, and bringing forth new generations of life. For the first time in my life, I felt the deep joy of being aligned with unseen forces around me. I released one long, deep sigh of relief over these months.

Eventually, Sundance allowed me to get on with my studies from books and discussions – the way I had learned just about everything I knew. But I will never forget the window in time she opened for me to glimpse a greater way of being, a truer way of knowing. Now, twelve years later, I still find rose petals from that time when I got off the merry-go-round to consider my life. Hopefully, I am contributing less to my culture’s drive for power, money, and fame, and joining with the thousands of people who are trying to live more sustainably – through a new kind of “group think. “

A CALL TO CONSCIOUSNESS

My studies with Sundance were very formal for about a year and a half, taking place in the afternoon over coffee or on the weekends and during holidays from my teaching position. She occasionally asked me to read from texts or manuscripts. The most profound book I read was Basic Call to Consciousness by the Haudenosanee, or Iroquois

Nation. It is written to the people of Western culture, and includes an introduction to the principles of the Great Law of Peace. When Sundance assigned this book, I was still living in San Diego and traveled to Yuma two weekends per month for study. I think it was a test to see how serious I was as a student. The book had not been in print for a while in 1991. She told me that she and Gabe recommended it to other students but none of them had read it. I found it at the Bohdi Tree Bookstore in Los Angeles.

Basic Call to Consciousness is a book written with great clarity, honesty, and hope that members of Western culture might gain new understanding of the consequences of its values regarding nature and other cultures. (I highly recommend this book to the reader and have included resources in the appendices where it can be obtained. It is back in print today.)

The core of my education came through sharing the daily lives of my teachers, observing the injustices and obstacles for native people in everyday things like asking to use a phone, getting an appliance repaired at a fair price, and the dangers of travel on the open highway. Once, I arranged to use my classroom for a workshop by my teachers for friends of mine in San Diego, and for previous students. Sundance

emphasized that I must make sure all the authorities at the school were in agreement about this. I thought she was overly cautious, but I soon learned a hard lesson. On the day of the workshop, we arranged my classroom in a circle, and brought in Indian blankets and objects for meditation and teaching. Sundance and Gabe were dressed in traditional clothing for the workshop. I left the room to copy some handouts for students. When I returned, there were police in the classroom! Apparently a colleague of mine, who came in on Saturday to work in her classroom, saw Sundance and Gabe in my room, and immediately jumped to the conclusion that there was a break-in and they were stealing from me! The police were very suspicious, and very aggressive in their attitude. They lightened up a bit when I explained that we had written permission to use the room. The colleague later demonstrated her racist attitude when I asked her why she just didn’t ask them what they were doing. She replied “Because they’re

Indians! Can you blame me?”

I also learned a great deal by just listening to Sundance and Gabe tell the stories of their lives, how they as Indian people tried to reconcile traditional values with living in

European culture. Gabe had been a Marine in the Korean War, a tribal policeman, and a college professor at Arizona State University, and he was then serving as a social worker. He grew up in a one-room adobe house on the Mojave reservation. His life- long quest was to get his education (an MS in social work), and return to help members of his tribe out of extreme poverty and poor health conditions. Gabe moved easily between his native culture and the dominant Euro-American cultural paradigm through

a well-developed sense of humor. He often acted as a liaison for tribal people either unwilling or unable to make those same transitions.

Sundance, on the other hand, chose not to assimilate but to follow the spiritual guidance she received from her grandfather and other spiritual guides. While attending a Catholic boarding school in Canada, she rebelled against the Catholic belief that un- baptized children were excluded from Heaven. On principal she challenged her teachers. Sundance was punished and labeled a trouble-maker by her teachers.

Her parents assimilated into French/Canadian culture in Montreal. They tried to help their daughter find a place in mainstream society. But for Sundance, that was not an option. She endured years of conflict, and was eventually sent for counseling. Her psychiatrist found nothing wrong with her, to everyone’s dismay. The “problems” she purportedly had were those of a culture that tolerated little diversity, and feared native people.

Sundance pursued art training, and taught at schools in New York City. She became involved in the peace movement in the eighties, and tried to stay true to her

Iroquois heritage. Gabe and Sundance met at a conference, a meeting that resulted later in spiritual work together, and finally marriage.

I attended pow wows and performances by a youth group formed to introduce

Indian youth to traditional dances. Gabe was a singer of Bird Songs, songs that reached back thousands of years in origin. I simply listened or helped bring in sodas and distribute flyers. Both teachers and several other tribal members dressed in regalia to

perform with the children. I never took pictures, due to the wishes of my teachers.

Images on film are thought to take something of a person’s spirit with them. How they would be used by whites, who exploited tribes continually, could not be determined— they could not trust even me.

In fact, there was very little trust of me during my entire time in native country. I gave up finally trying to earn it when I realized one person could not make up for the mistakes and misguided Euro-Western policies of the last five hundred years. But, the images of my teachers in a satin ribbon shirt, or a flowing dress with bold geometric designs in red, white, and black – a beaded crown on her head - will stay with me forever.

One moonlit night, in the sand dunes along the Colorado River, when my teachers were singing and dancing under a pitch-black sky, full of stars, is a vivid memory engraved on my mind eye forever. Their faces glowed in a large campfire, encircled by spellbound youth. The steady beat of stones in a painted gourd rattle, and the high-pitched chant of the song, filled the circle. I realized then how much we as a nation have lost. I began to understand the irrepressible spirit that loves the Earth.

I LEARN ALL RELIGIONS ARE ONE - AGAIN

On another memorable day, Sundance came over with gifts for me. Among them were a rosary and a small book of instructions.. Sundance was a very spiritual human being, and incorporated many religious and spiritual traditions into her faith. For some time I

wondered at the demonstrative love native people show for Jesus and for Guadalupe (the manifestation of Mary to Juan Diego in the 1500s in Mexico). Later, I realized that spiritual teachers see the same spirit moving through all our great teachers, whether

Native American, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Bahai, Hindu, or other faiths. This spirit is what I had intuited as a child in the Air Force’s interfaith chapels.

So, Sundance and I got on our knees together in front of an altar I made in the trailer. She taught me one of the greatest mantras of the world:

Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.

Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us

sinners now and forevermore. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is….

Later, when my daughter moved to Yuma to live with me, Heather found rose- petal rosary beads made by nuns at a Carmelite church in nearby San Luis, Mexico. She bought a rosary for me and Sundance. Mine still exudes the sweet, heavy scent of roses that pulls me into a state of consciousness deeply traced on my soul. Native people taught me the depths of Western culture’s religious traditions.

My education with native people was not a smooth process by any means. I frequently made “escapes,” believing my Iroquois teacher was abusing me emotionally.

She was Métis (of the Mohawk clan) and often portrayed her style of teaching as “an iron fist in a velvet glove.” Facing people oppressed by white culture can be frightening and it takes nerves of steel; yet at the time I believed my soul’s liberation depended on being able to stay with my studies to their completion.

On my first break from the teaching, I drove to San Diego to stay with friends from my work days at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation. At that time, the clinic gave health and wellness classes at Rancho la Puerto, a spa and retreat center near

Tecaté, Baja California. My friends arranged for three days of rest and contemplation. I was exhausted, and confused about whether to continue my education in Yuma.

The resort was on the grounds of a previous Essene community established in the 1920s. The library still shelved many of the community’s books. I wandered in there one evening, not knowing the background of the ranch, and found a history of how the community was founded by Edmond Bordeau Szekely, an internationally known translator and student of world religions. The American Essene Community flourished for over fifty years, and gradually evolved into the present-day spa as more and more people wanted to experience the Essene quietude, exercise, vegetarian food, and spiritual practice.

Szekely is the scholar who translated the Essene Gospel of Peace from the original Aramaic, the native language of Jesus. He was given permission to translate the texts that were kept under lock and key in the Vatican. Szekely later discovered he followed on the path of St. Benedict and the monks of the Monte Cassino Monastery who protected these documents through the ages.

The texts had been originally translated by St. Jerome in the fourth century. He found fragments of the original texts in many small communities in the desert. Many of

the residents who harbored the document fragments were descendents of the original

Essenes.

These ancient documents precede the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran, and represent ancient teachings as old as eight thousand years B.C.E. (all the way back to

Zarathrustra). They describe The Law. It is the same Law to which Moses referred. When

St. Jerome was made the Secretary to Pope Damascus, who established a Papal Library, he was allowed to translate the ancient writings of the Essenes.

However, the translations caused a storm of criticism. The basic principles of the teaching emanated from natural law, not the laws of man. This body of knowledge made it impossible to follow while promoting the ownership of land and the suppression of women and children to the rule of men (i.e. patriarchal government). The Essene

Gospel was the original ecological literature of the west, binding human beings to the

Earth and her natural rhythms in a cosmology connecting Mother Earth and Father Sky, the feminine and masculine principles.

When Pope Damascus died, his successor St. Augustine made sure these documents were suppressed. Jerome fled for his life to the desert. There he continued to search for more fragments of the ancient knowledge. After his death, Jerome’s manuscripts were scattered, but eventually many found their way into the Secret

Archives of the Vatican, where they remained under lock and key.

The Essenes were a peace-loving sect that believed in the sacredness of all life, practiced vegetarianism, and held that there are spiritual manifestations for all physical

phenomena. In this, they were the first quantum physicists: all matter exists in two forms, particle and wave – flesh and spirit.

They understood all of life in the universe as the Ocean of Life, and all thought in the universe as constituting the Ocean of Consciousness. It was their experience that angels connected these two realities. The Essenes believed that Moses understood this through the vision of his ancestor, Jacob, who saw angels ascending and descending a ladder connecting Heaven and Earth.

Essenes practiced self-improvement, which they deemed a life-long process.

Achievement of harmony required a balance between earthly and cosmic forces. The heavenly father (cosmic) and the earthly mother (earth) are balanced: eternal life with earth; creative work with life; peace with joy; power with sun; love with water; wisdom with air. These correlations remind us that whenever we contact earthly forces, we are in contact with heavenly forces.

I eagerly read these teachings, and I was encouraged to learn that the principles and cosmology taught to me in Yuma were the same described in the Essene teachings.

Here was an Earth-based spirituality making the connection between the material world and the world of thought at a universal consciousness level.

The Teacher of Righteousness in the Essene texts is believed by some to be

Jesus, when he was between eighteen and thirty years of age. During this time, his whereabouts are not mentioned in the Biblical texts we have today. Jesus and his family were Essenes, the ancient Jewish sect, existing from 250 B.C. to 60 A.D in Palestine. The

community lived and taught a way of life consistent with Native American spirituality in which all things are imbued with the spirit of the Creator – rocks, water, air, plants, animals, and people. The philosophy of non-violence extended to animals, invoking a deep reverence for the living creatures of our planet. The last and most famous Essene- in-spirit was St. Francis. He lived and believed exactly as the Essenes, and his own writings are nearly identical to Essene texts.

So, I took this discovery of Szekely’s community, at the time I was questioning whether to stay with my Indian teachers, as an affirmation of the integrity of the work. I returned to Yuma.

DEEPENING UNDERSTANDING

That was the year my teacher found several volumes of The Hudson’s Bay

Company Stockholders Board Meetings—historical records that graphically outlined plots to seize native lands in the wooded lands of the Iroquois Confederacy and create a legacy repeated over and over again across the face of North America. They were covered with dust on a rusty metal book shelf in a rundown thrift store in Winterhaven,

California. The Colorado River cuts a blue border between Arizona and California there.

The Quéchan Indian Reservation, with its white Methodist and Catholic church spires, overlooks the river from its hilltop. The Imperial Valley stretches beyond, cut through by a curving silver line of water—the Gila River—that spills into the Colorado.

In the rundown, dusty town of Winterhaven, in a disheveled second-hand store, we touched back in time to the sixteen-hundreds on Turtle Island.

At times like those, I often felt as if I entered another reality in which my teacher and I traveled time channels to the past. There we sat in her trailer or mine, carefully reading these documents out loud, and making runs to a local library or consulting texts from her wonderful library, to learn more about the history of colonization in North

America. There it was in black and white and without any reservation – the blatant conniving of grown men who recorded their reservations, knowing it was wrong to outright seize land from people who had done nothing other than welcome them to their country.

European culture would impose a world view so different—with grave consequences—on the natural world and a way of life that would later inspire our fledgling republic? The shaking of the Earth is still reverberating. Today in Canada native people are still resisting the “progress ” of European-derived cultural values. Trees are felled, waters dammed, people uprooted and enclosed on reservations of inferior landscape and resources. The process continues unfolding with little to check its course to this very day.

Sundance and I were shocked by the recorded discussions between original board members who felt some tinge of guilt about seizing ownership in the name of the

King. In fact, they feared he would not go along with it, so they planned a scheme to get Prince Rupert to make the declarations. We laughed to read the names of these men,

including one Richard Nixon! Though both of us, my teacher and I, knew about the facts of this early colonial period in what is now Canada and northern New York State, we were incredulous to read the actual discussions and plans by a small group of men who would crush nations to get at trees and animal fur.

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It was during my second and third years of study that I began to investigate the lives of saints. Through my education, I was introduced to the life story of Kateri Tekakwitha, a young Mohawk woman who lived in the mid-to late 1600s in what is now upstate New

York. She was the daughter of a Mohawk chief and Algonquin mother of Catholic faith.

At age four her parents and brother all died of smallpox. Kateri survived but was left nearly blind, with facial scars, and physically weakened.

Her uncle, also a Mohawk chief, took her into his family. Kateri lived among her people at Caughnauaga. When a Jesuit priest established a chapel there, she remembered her mother’s devotion to the Holy Mother and Jesus. Kateri sought out the new Catholic community where she was profoundly affected by her study and prayer.

Kateri was baptized at age twenty, much to the protest of her uncle and Mohawk community, who did not trust the Black Robes. She had to flee for her life to a Catholic mission near Montreal to follow the spiritual path that called her so strongly.

Kateri’s short but deeply devoted life continues to inspire millions of people today. Upon her death at age twenty-four, the deep scars on her face disappeared and her face glowed with light. Two priests bore witness to this miracle. Kateri Tekakwitha is

today Blessed Kateri. Her followers await her canonization as the first Native American to gain sainthood in the Catholic Church.

My teacher is deeply devoted to Kateri – called the Lily of the Mohawks. When I studied with Sundance, I joined the Kateri Society in Caughnauaga and ordered a small, white plaster statue that I put on my altar. I collected religious cards and books about her short life. The spirit of Kateri is sweet and pure. Many people have received divine intervention for loved ones through prayers of intercession to Kateri.

During this period, I made two personal shields with white lilies prominent in the design. Kateri’s relationship to Christ, the Lily of the Valley, was not lost on me. At one point I asked Sundance: “Why would Kateri become so devoted to Christ when she had her own spiritual tradition through the Iroquois?” Sundance only replied: “That is your koan.” I learned this meant a question that cannot be easily answered, one that an aspirant may attempt to answer over a lifetime.

Through Kateri I have come to understand that spirit is a bridge across religions through the principle of love.

While visiting my daughter at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff in 1992, I found a copy of Interior Castles , St. Teresa of Avila’s description of her spiritual development. She details her spiritual experiences in altered states of consciousness that occurred often during deep prayer. Numerous eye witnesses record St. Teresa’s levitation during prayer. As I read her personal testimony, I was reminded of Jesus’ remark, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.”

I felt a certain kinship with her as she described her personal attempts to purify her mind to reach states of ever more pure forms of love and compassion. Interior

Castles dramatically outlines the fire of will it takes to purify one’s thoughts and feelings to achieve a natural state of loving kindness. Much of my training in Yuma dealt with identifying and working through personal weaknesses such as jealousy, ambition, dishonesty, and attachments. Finding her spiritual journal acted as an affirmation of my work like so many other experiences during this spiritual journey. Trusting the process of this kind of work is essential to open mindedness. When there is no attempt to control what spirit might bring, the blessings truly flow.

St. Francis of Assisi’s life also influenced my thinking and continued recommitment to spiritual discipline. I related strongly to his recognition that wealth lay not in one’s possessions, but in the Creation. St. Francis truly embraced the Bill of

Rights that includes animals and plants and the Earth as well as humans.

St. Francis struggled with his own human failings. He was so human, yet able to achieve spiritual heights. I love him for that. His life continues to inspire me. In his lifetime, he ranged from being the “belle of the ball” in the opulent world of his influential family to running away from the battlefield when he first confronted his inability to kill in the name of God. He endured a dark time of terrible depression for failing to fit into the roles his family and society expected him to fill, and he became dangerously ill. He finally revoked the wealth of his heritage to adopt the life of poverty and service. But far from being the inwardly focused ascetic, he engaged in life with an

ebullient spirit that drew devoted followers to him. His special compassion and affection for animals is celebrated by millions of people in festivals to bless and honor pets, livestock, and wild animals.

As I studied the biographies and journals of saints across the ages, I realized that following a spiritual path is to swim upstream against a world lost from the truth.

During the time of my education in Yuma, the lives of these holy women and men encouraged me to follow my own intuition. I felt surrounded by gentle and loving spirits as their life stories came alive in my imagination.

THE LITTLE THINGS OF SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

At one point, my teacher began to give me her empty cigarette boxes. One day we mused over how they could be recycled and put to good use. She suggested to me that I decorate these little containers and devote each one to a quality or value I was working to perfect in myself.

This proved to be a powerful and very personal process for me – a psychological return to the womb, a deep, interior reworking of my relationship with myself and with the world of which I was a part. Inside each little box I placed affirmations or objects that symbolized the virtue I was studying. Eventually, I made about twenty golden boxes focusing on love, honor, will, honesty, determination and intent—among other values. Each was a little masterpiece. I kept them in a special larger box, my treasures of the heart.

Much of my work was conducted in this manner: it was quiet and personal, invisible to an observer. My teacher was a master at guiding me through this time.

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I remember how Sundance tapped the bottom of her menthol Benson and Hedges, the ritual lighting of her cigarette before our morning lesson began. Tucked away in a cool and darkened trailer in the sweltering heat of Yuma, Arizona, we sat on furniture draped with brightly colored Mexican rugs purchased at a bargain price in nearby San Luis.

Around us hung gourd rattles, painted with traditional designs or some just as they came from Mexico – bright green orbs with pink and white roses. Portraits of Jesus and

Guadalupe hung next to Sundance’s paintings from her Iroquois traditions. In the middle of the narrow living room, a tampura—a long-necked lute— lay draped in white leather, its smooth round belly filling one corner. Years before, an Indian Sufi in New

York City taught Sundance to play the instrument as part of her spiritual training. She occasionally played it and sang for me.

Sundance painted often. She did not always have the funds to buy canvas so one day she began painting what she called recycled art using a box top as a frame.

Sundance gave me a portrait of Guadalupe which I treasured and kept on my home altar.

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Sundance never wasted words. On many occasions, she had little to say. Other times she would tell long stories that lasted half a day. Once she told me the story of her life in

Canada near the Mohawk reservation at Caughnauaga and of her education in Catholic schools where she was ostracized for her Indian heritage. We sat together drinking coffee a whole morning while she described her struggle to live by her Iroquois tradition in a society opposed to its perspective at almost every point.

Her demeanor was very serious, but she could be silly too. Once, we were buying a tea set at Factory 2 U (which we frequented because we had little money). Something tickled us at the register, where we laughed so uncontrollably that we could barely pay for our purchase. It felt like we were sisters then, and I think she was enjoying my company as much as I enjoyed hers at moments like that one. But truly Sundance was very wary of me as a white woman. She had not assimilated to white culture at all and I represented the enemy. Still, she was willing to try to expand my understanding so I could be an ambassador for native people. This was her hope. In the meantime, our relationship was volatile at any moment.

The Iroquois traditions place great emphasis on language. Theirs is a rich lexicon of words for many nuances of human thought and feeling. When Sundance was born, her father bought her two excellent dictionaries, one in English and the other in French.

Sundance told me there are over two hundred words in Iroquois language to express all the facets of love.

Therefore, during my study she always worked with a dictionary and required me to look up the meaning for many of the words or expressions widely used: Kill two

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birds with one stone, penetrate the market, devour the book, all-consuming interest, strike while the iron is hot, and collateral damage , to name a few.

I was amazed at how I used words without a real understanding of their full portent. In my second year of study, I wrote a small book about Western language and common words that reflect consumerism and domination. The little book was hand- written with almost perfect penmanship. Even the act of writing became a spiritual path for me back then, when I got off the merry-go-round of life and stepped into another world.

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From Gabe I learned about diabetes and the impact of poverty and illness on native people. Sundance helped Gabe overcome severe diabetes. She is what is known as a shaman. Working with a local physician in Yuma, Sundance charted the progress of her husband’s recovery from diabetes on graph paper using blood chemistry measures as the coordinates. She drew the figure that appeared: it was a fire-breathing dragon that shrank down over time to a mouse-like, tiny figure as Gabe’s blood sugar came into balance. This was an exciting project for the doctor, traditionally trained in Western medicine, to see the embodiment of dis-ease and its subdued nature in visual form.

I learned from my teachers how Indian people have become sick and weakened on a diet of refined food from modern-day American agribusiness. In the Sonoran

Desert of southern Arizona, tribal communities have cultivated native seed crops for millennia. By today’s standards, these crops would be classified as wonder foods. For

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example, think about a corn variety that matures in sixty days, and thrives in 112- degree heat with less than nine inches of rain per year! These are characteristics of many indigenous seeds of the Americas.

Around the start of the Second World War, many native people who joined the service or moved off their reservation became accustomed to the convenience of fast food chains, refined white sugar and flour products found in grocery stores, and a diet much higher in fat than the traditional food of native culture. In addition to these changes, traditional farming on reservations and in small communities was gradually replaced by large-scale, industrial farming. At the time, native people did not recognize the life-saving nature of their native diet. For tribes in our region this has had a devastating effect. In just fifty years, the incidence of adult-onset diabetes rose to over eighty percent of the population in tribal communities in the Southwest. Today is the number-one health risk for many tribes here. We know now that a gene called “the thrifty gene,” which is programmed to efficiently turn excess sugar into fat, is active in cultures with a feast-or-famine seasonal diet history. In native people, the thrifty gene turns excess sugar from refined foods—which “dump” high amounts of glucose into the bloodstream almost instantly—into fat. Obesity in native people skyrocketed from the

1940s to the 1990s. There is a high correlation between adult-onset, non-insulin dependent diabetes and obesity.

With research and the recovery of native ways of living, tribal communities are coming to understand that the native seeds and native farming practices developed by

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their ancestors are nutritious, efficient in terms of the environmental conditions for farming, and life-saving when it comes to their health. Refined and processed foods of the modern American food industry are deadly to native populations, and, are now understanding to the American public.

CANNED PEACHES AND WHITE FLOUR

One day, my teachers arrived at my front door with sheepish grins on their faces. In her hands Sundance carried a cardboard box. She sat it down on the kitchen table and asked me to open it. It was their regular monthly allotment of surplus food from the

U.S. government Indian Health Service. Inside were large cans of peaches in heavy syrup, refined white flour, and other boxed or canned items with high fat or sugar content. I looked at them and realized how destructive these foods are to indigenous people, that they in fact weaken the people supposedly being helped. It was incredible that in 1990 our government knew about the link between refined foods and the high incidence of diabetes among native people, yet here they doled out what amounted to poison. This was an experience I would have over and over again during my studentship.

The assault on Native Americans continues unabated today.

Sundance smiled at me when I realized what the box actually represented and said, “Now Susan has come full circle… from a pent house in Laguna Beach to her trailer in Yuma—and a government handout. Welcome to Indian Country!”

This was how I learned about the Other America.

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IN FIELDS OF BROCCOLI

During the four years I spent studying with native people in Yuma, Arizona I also taught life science to junior high school students – many of whom were the sons and daughters of migrant farm workers and Indian parents. I was encouraged to apply the principles of democracy I was learning from my teachers in my classroom with students whose families suffered the inequities of American society on a daily basis. While at Crane

Junior High School I was given a homeroom of what my administrators called

“incorrigibles.” These students were in gangs, had poor attendance records, and generally, “bad” attitudes.

The school was located in the middle of farm fields where we were regularly subjected to pesticide spraying on thousands of acres of lettuce, broccoli, and sesame seed crops surrounding our campus. Canals of blue water radiated in all directions from the schoolyard. Not far from us was the small town of Somerton and the nearby

Cocopah Indian Reservation, and farther south, the border town of San Luis. Drugs flowed into the country and many of our students were involved in the marketing of drugs with their families. During my tenure, three of my students lost family members in drug related murders. We endured regular school lock-downs from threats made on students whose families were in the drug business.

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Our principal and vice principal were ex-Marines. They strode about the zero- tolerance campus with walkie-talkies and a military stance. The principal was a tall muscular ex-football star whose imposing figure held in check a sea of cultural and social turmoil. His motto: “Mess with the bull, get the horns!” This was the environment in which my colleagues and I attempted to teach math, science, and language arts to our students.

With my Iroquois teacher’s guidance I established a democratic system of governance in my homeroom of “incorrigibles.” On our first day I draped an American flag over a table in the center of a circle of chairs. Nearby on a special table we had prepared a beautifully painted wooden chest (formerly an ammo box from K-Mart). On it

I glued brass eagles and regalia from the U.S. emblem. Inside was a copy of the U.S.

Constitution, Robert’s Rules of Order, and some readings from the Iroquois Great Law of

Peace.

When my students entered the room on that day, they were incensed by the U.S. flag. Many blurted out “That’s not MY flag!” or, “You should have a Mexican flag.” This was the starting place for establishing an International Table of Peace… and there I stood, a white woman from the very group of people who systematically suppress any culture other than Western European culture - or, as my Indian teachers portrayed me – a nice white lady!

Nice white ladies and gentlemen made children in Indian boarding schools deny their cultural heritage as “savage,” and forced them to assimilate into “civilized” society.

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In 1990, nice white teachers in Yuma forbade students the freedom of speaking Spanish in class, I think mainly because none of us spoke much Spanish. When I was a teacher there, practically no acknowledgement of Hispanic or Indian culture was present in school activities or curriculum. Anglo cultural traditions and values predominated.

I began that first day by reading the Bill of Rights. When I emphasized that this

Bill pertained to every U.S. citizen and that these were constitutional laws protecting and ensuring their rights, responsibilities and privileges, it fell on deaf ears—or so it seemed. But the group was, on the whole, very curious about this approach and the teacher. They were polite and listened that first day.

We were supposed to watch Channel One – the piped-in national and international news channels for schools. Advertisers used this outlet to market everything from Pepsi Cola to surfing gear to a captive audience of millions of American schoolchildren under the guise of current events education. After observing that the students only paid attention to the ads – which were masterfully engaging – I decided not to participate in it, even though I was told that every student must listen. Instead we took the brief thirty minutes a day allocated for homeroom to establish democratic governance in our group. We discussed the ideas of direct democracy and the responsibility it carries for participants. Elections were eventually held to choose a classroom president, secretary and treasurer. A system of laws was developed by the students to handle poor behavior. They were very inventive: the worst punishment was being made to stand in front of the class and sing something stupid like “Old

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MacDonald” which shattered any machismo a student might have carefully crafted for himself. It fascinated me that students abided by the laws they had a part in creating, no matter what they were.

Because the students were in charge of themselves, and we followed Robert’s

Rules of Order and several principles of the “talking circle,” which protects freedom of speech, I had no trouble with my “incorrigible” students who were of course good kids.

In the latter part of the year, $120 was stolen from my desk after a science club fund raiser. My homeroom knew they would be accused by administration. So, by the next day they collected $125 from each other to replace the stolen money. The culprit was later found – a kid not from my homeroom.

We began to study the Iroquois Confederacy and the Great Law of Peace which is its central guidance. My homeroom responded positively to it as it encompassed many similar indigenous values with which they were familiar (Yuman, Yaqui, and Piman.) The following is my attempt to summarize the principles of the Great Law. But, I warn the reader that the Great Law of Peace, like our Constitution, is a vast body of law with many interpretations and aspects that I do not know. However, as an introduction to it, I offer my best shot at the major points of the Great Law and refer the reader to Basic Call to

Consciousness , or The White Roots of Peace , both referenced at the end of this book.

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THE GREAT LAW OF PEACE

The Iroquois Great Law of Peace was studied by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson when our U.S. Constitution was being formed. I found it enlightening to see how our forefathers took from it ideas about structure but left out the basic principles that form the Great Law. Two of these principles are crucial for true democratic governance: 1) respect for all life; 2) the give-away or placing value on non-accumulation of wealth for individuals. The Iroquois also give women a central role in government: women choose the leaders and can remove them if they did not follow the principles they are expected to uphold.

The Great Law holds that humans are totally dependent on the whole of living communities in order to live. Because of this vulnerability humans ought to hold plant and animal life in great reverence, taking only what is necessary for living. And further, humans owe much to the Creator of All Things for the beauty and abundance in the natural world and should participate in protecting it. The Great Law weaves humans into a web of relationships as a part of a whole the integrity of which must be sustained to have life abundantly. This relationship is a fundamental difference between the Great

Law of Peace of the Iroquois and the U.S. Constitution. The former sets the nation’s laws in a greater cosmology than the latter which deals only with human relationships.

The economic systems of the Iroquois and modern American cultures are completely opposite: Iroquois principles place value on competence and hard work, but always in the context of the community. One is expected to contribute fully and

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creatively in the business of feeding, clothing, protecting, and enriching community life.

Individuals are expected to develop originality and excellence in a useful skill as each person is capable. But the fruits of this labor are to be shared, not accumulated.

Individuals who hoard resources are not revered but marginalized. Freedom of choice was respected but shaped by a shared community ethic to promote the good of all.

Everyone is expected, for example, to participate in the raising of each child in the tribe, not just the parents. It is the responsibility of each person to participate in the maintenance of social health.

In contrast, contemporary American culture allows individuals and corporations to accumulate vast sums of money and resources while millions go hungry and are marginalized from the wealth, comfort, safety, and opportunity we could provide them.

In contemporary American culture we worship the rich and famous under the myth of a free-market system. It is “free” of course to the privileged few who control it. Therefore, all the high ideals of the Bill of Rights get shipwrecked on a sea of injustice perpetrated by values based on greed and power over the weakened groups of people – children, the elderly, the disabled, women, and non-Anglos. This is nothing new. Historians, religious leaders, philosophers, and social activists have been writing and struggling against this for years.

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OUTSIDE THE PRISON WALLS

On one outstanding day my home room and I were granted the gift of two and a half hours of free time, during which the seventh grade was being tested. We decided to take a hike back into the citrus groves along the sparkling canals of flowing Colorado

River water. We headed out in a very jovial manner which continued. Walking arm in arm with many of my female students who had begun to grace me with their trust, we sang songs, picked juicy oranges to eat, and discussed the many interests of students.

No one misbehaved – I had about twenty students. We all enjoyed the fresh air, exercise, and beauty in the fields. Students talked about their families, the migrant farmer life and hardships. Cesar Chavez (born in Yuma) was a hero to these students. We began talking about civil rights. Our class president was a tall, strongly built Mexican girl – a real beauty. Everyone respected her because she was outspoken but fair. She knew the art of negotiation. I got to know her mother and learned about her daughter’s struggle to feel “good enough” in Anglo schools and culture. As we were sitting, peeling oranges for each other, she reflected out loud, “Isn’t it great to be outside of the school walls…like escaping from a prison!” Everyone laughed and nodded in agreement. I have to confess that I too felt a little that way. The jarhead administration marching about campus with their “zero-tolerance” policies and suspicious attitudes flashed before me.

Then she went on to say, “And we are so friendly out here – just people together – outside that building.” Even though I tried to facilitate democratic principles in my classroom, I still represented the same authority that acted on multiple levels to

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suppress Mexican and Indian culture in our school and community. I was a “nice white lady” in that building.

That experience with my homeroom would not have been possible for me if I had not had the chance and guidance to examine in myself the prejudices and fears I held about “other” cultural views and people of color. The fact that I was aware of whom and what I represented to my students, and that I had achieved at least some personal honesty about how I perpetuate cultural dominance, allowed me to be there with my students in open discussions without being fearful or defensive. I could see their worldview. I could see the positive contributions and superior values their cultural traditions could offer American society if only there was the opportunity to do so. We are missing so much beauty and richness by not being inclusive and welcoming to a diversity of traditions. My education with native teachers helped me develop a sense of humility at last.

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THE INDIAN WOMAN AND THE PIONEER WOMAN

I often traveled with my teachers. Once, we put on a workshop at a remote retreat center. This was in my second year of study, and by then a unique event had occurred that in many ways portrays the relationship between my Iroquois teacher and me, and that between the Indian nations of North America and Anglo-Europeans.

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Months before I accompanied my teachers to the workshop, Sundance decided to write a two-woman play about an Indian woman and a pioneer woman. She had a playful personality at times and for this play, in which she and yours truly would be the stars, I needed a costume. Now, I knew nothing of these plans when one morning she casually asked me to accompany her to Old Downtown in Yuma where there are craft and arts stores. It was a beautiful sunny winter day in the desert. We were in a gay mood and enjoyed exploring the shops. Finally we came to a sewing shop. The women there specialized in quilting and making pioneer costumes for the volunteers and docents at the Yuma Crossing Historical Park.

Suddenly I felt a bonnet plopped on my head, and into my view came the beautiful face of my teacher, her blue-green eyes sparkling and a broad grin spreading into chuckles as she tied the bow under my chin and stood back to view her new creation. “What is this?” I asked, abashed. She only replied, “Looks like it was made for you!” I followed her over to bolts of fabric, then on to some of the dresses. I finally gave into the moment with her. We picked a matching pioneer apron. I remembered I had a dress at home I could wear underneath it.

When we returned to our little trailer park, she went home to make Gabe lunch and asked me to come over and join them. Although it was unknown to me, she and

Gabe had a bet going about whether I would wear my new costume. Gabe bet I would not, and he was right. There was something about putting that bonnet on that made me angry. It put me into a historical role I felt apart from, and that I sought to distance

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myself from. I wanted to go beyond the historical legacy of my culture in my own life and personal ethic.

One of my own personal weaknesses at that time, and for some time afterward, was a lack of knowledge and appreciation for my own kind. I knew little about my ancestors on my immigrant side, who they were, what they wanted or struggled to overcome. I had ambivalent feelings about the immigrant people who settled the West. I was not emotionally or intellectually mature then so I could not enter into this exercise to truly learn from it. I felt like on some level Sundance was mocking me. Yet she was determined this would be my next learning experience.

We began rehearsing her play the next day. At first, I felt it would be beneficial and enjoyed reading the script with her as she polished it over the next couple of weeks.

Then we began to rehearse the parts. She was frustrated that I did not seem natural. It was true, I just felt stupid and I was still feeling anger and shame about it all. In the play, we are supposed to meet each other in town where Indians and pioneers live together. I cannot remember the exact plot, but somehow the two characters meet and strike up a friendship. There is a mutual respect between them. Then the pioneer woman begins to ask her Indian friend about her Iroquois beliefs and cultural customs.

Throughout the play, Sundance attempts to contrast the two cultural perspectives in a way that an audience of women might enjoy, and, that would help them be open to learning about Indian ways of being and thinking. It had great merit.

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We intended to perform the play locally where there was still much cultural misunderstanding.

So, when we went to the workshop retreat, Sundance intended that we would perform a portion of this play for the participants. The people who signed up for Gabe’s and Sundance’s workshop were spiritual seekers who were part of a group of artists and creative people - all friends of the woman who set up the weekend at her beautiful home.

When they began arriving, the participants were each taken aback at a white woman dressed up like a pioneer woman. Looking back on it now I think I must have looked ridiculous. But, when we later gave our performance, there was increased understanding. Yet I could not but think that “my people” thought I was somehow a little off my rocker to do this kind of work. Was I? I wondered. Why would I put up with what some might call abuse?

I do not know the exact answer to that question except I have always had this quality of openness to other ways of knowing. Also, Sundance and I had entered a new level of the teacher-student relationship in which we were both invested in a process that was healing on both sides of the international table of peace. It was a kind of sacred dance. That is my opinion and I am sure Sundance would never have admitted that was true. But I had the strong feeling she was working something out for herself in the process.

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One time, we were working on an application for a scholarship for her work and I was concentrating on typing it up. She had been looking at me and said, “Sometimes you are very beautiful.” When I smiled and thanked her, she said, “Now don’t let that go to your head!”

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On one occasion in my automobile “classroom,” Sundance gave me no information on our destination. I was told where to turn only as we came near an intersection. This kept me alert and totally in the moment. She accused me of speeding – she was right. Again she pointed out that I acted like the laws were not made for me.

Eventually we came to an ashram! It was out on a dusty road and was in a disheveled condition. There were four structures, small buildings with spinnerets. My teacher explained that a caretaker lived in the nearby trailer to prevent vandalism. When

“the guru comes to town,” a community of followers clean and paint the ashram, and it comes to life again. I found this intriguing in a town like Yuma in the middle of a desert.

My teacher asked me to remove my shoes and step inside a particular building. She gave me no instructions, and did not accompany me.

The little ashram was only about fifty feet by fifty feet. Its interior was one open room with a vaulted ceiling and a skylight. Around the wall’s perimeter raised altars

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supported numerous statues of a deity. They were gray stone and draped with white filaments of spider webbing. A thick layer of dust covered all.

In the center of the room a broad rectangular altar box formed the interior perimeter, creating a walkway along its borders. Some figures were as large as 3’ high and others were small figurines of the deity, monkeys, birds, snakes, and elephants.

Each statue of the deity portrayed a different pose. Many had multiple arms and hands holding objects I could not readily discern. I was puzzled about the ashram itself, these statues, my being barefoot where scorpions and spiders most certainly were lurking in crevices – and mostly I was puzzled why I was there!

After a period of about fifteen minutes, I emerged from the building. When I began to chatter about what I saw, and inquire into the nature of the visit, I was gently signaled to be silent. I strolled on the rest of the grounds in silence with my teacher. We eventually returned to the car and drove away slowly.

I never returned to this place during my education, but I heard several years later that the guru was in town. When I left Yuma at the culmination of my studies, four years later, I drove by. The buildings were colorfully painted with golden spinnerets on the tops, and roses grew in the gardens out front.

Years later when I was reading about Vedic and Hindu philosophy, I realized that my teacher had introduced me to the female incarnations of Shakdi, Mother of the

Universe.

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~~~~~~~~~

The last time I saw my teacher, Sundance Aquero, was at the door of my middle school science classroom. I had my back to the door, listening to my students discuss the concept of the web of life in terms of food chains and food webs. Something made me turn around.

My teacher stood centered in the doorway with a smile on her face. She was dressed in the most elaborate regalia I had yet seen her wear. It was all in green and white colors including the beaded crown on her head. Her jewelry and beaded necklaces and earrings were green and white patterns, with many roses and geometric designs – it all took my breath away.

I was also scared. In my usual fashion, I left the teaching abruptly after many misunderstandings and complexities in the last year of work. I felt that I had learned all I was capable of learning at the time and that to remain in the relationship was no longer beneficial. I had moved away from my trailer to another house, and then finally I spent the last few weeks of the school year with a teacher friend of mine as I moved my things to Phoenix. At the moment my teacher appeared, I had not talked to her for over four months.

My heart beat quickly as I did not know what to expect. She motioned for me to step outside. I asked the class to read from their texts and stepped outside with

Sundance. There was a formality wrought from mutual respect between us. It was much

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like the very first meeting in Denny’s on that momentous day in my life, with my heart beating like the wings of a bird trying to land on a branch.

Two worlds came together for discourse and perhaps understanding... White

Swan sailed back and forth.

“This is for you from all of us,” she said, handing me a card. It was green and white with a beautiful rose on it, and signed by Sundance and Gabe, and their sons. It read: Thank you. You have done well. We love you.

I was stunned. There was never any recognition of how they perceived my progress as a student. I looked at her and thanked her from my heart. She said that she hoped I would call her, that she wanted to talk to me. I told her that I would.

But I realized later that this door was closing, at least for the time being. I could not continue the conversation if my life depended on it. One thing I learned: there are windows in time that open and then close. One never knows why or when they open or close. It is something perhaps explained by spiritual law. My path was turning away from Yuma.

What I Understand Today

Long after completing my studies, the truth continues to reveal itself to me at many levels. Yet, I know that the majority of Americans are not aware of the continued injustices U.S. policies perpetuate on Native American people nor how these same policies impact low-income and middle-class Americans. Awakening to these realities

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is life-shaking, as I experienced in the deserts of southwestern Arizona. The realizations turn a world so familiar and sure into a chaotic insanity – a glimpse into the shattered world of cultures the U.S. government has attempted to destroy or dominate.

In the meantime, for Western societies, the reaches of corporate capitalism spreading world-wide under the guise of democracy have come home to roost.

American citizens are losing jobs and civil rights under the myth of national security.

Our choices have become homogenized by global corporate trade, as a few mega- corporations monopolize a product or industry. As a citizenry, we are anesthetized by our addictions to food, things, and television, skillfully manipulated by corporate advertising.

Today, the most radical activism is to throw out our TVs. Our way out is a return to self-determination and freedom of thought – two of the basic principles upon which our nation was originally founded.

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Chapter 9

White Swan My Children and I are Re-united

During my studies in Yuma, both Tom and Heather struggled to put together a life for themselves. Heather moved to Yuma in 1992. She came at Christmas to the womb of my little trailer from the rich environment of her father’s home. I worried she would be shocked by the abrupt change. She was only nineteen years old and a stunning beauty.

Using her internal strength of character, Heather walked away from the wealth and dysfunction that had been her world at her father’s house to find some sense of emotional security and meaning. Later she shared that she was not at all sure she could find that with me. Naturally, my lifestyle left much to be desired in the eyes of her father; he and his new wife considered me, at best, crazy. When I think of her decision to get on a plane (a house butler with a big heart has actually helped her “escape” to the airport) and fly to an unknown circumstance – I am struck by her courage.

I wasn’t sure Heather would understand what I was doing in Yuma. Our reunion was poignant and bitter-sweet. Standing in the middle of the Phoenix airport, we sobbed in each other’s arms, letting years of anger, doubt, and sadness pour out. We put her few things in Tommy’s maroon El Camino, and headed for Yuma.

Along the way Heather reflected on the fact that she had passed eighteen and was not legally independent. That simmered with her as we drove along the desert landscape.

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Sundance and Gabe fell in love with Heather. They treated her like a jewel and even helped her find her first job at The Landing, a local restaurant. She and I were like roommates in college and found much to laugh about, comparing the worlds from which we had both fled to find sort out the truth of our lives.

Heather soon moved in with girl friends who became sisters. Over the next six years Soila, Christine, and Shelly were Heather’s closest family. They had a riotous time together, dancing till the wee hours of the morning across the border in Alcadonas and throwing their own parties. Heather gained the freedom she sought in a world far from

Croton where she had spent her entire childhood. But, deep inside, she was very frightened and confused. She missed her father and did not know how to be with him without returning to a world she found to be topsy-turvy, with values alien to her. I learned that she had been physically abused by her step-mother who was suffering from alcoholism and other illnesses. I entered a new dark period as the full consequences of the divorce became real to me.

Eventually, Heather got back to her college education. She enrolled at Northern

Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she studied art history until they dismantled the program due to budget cuts. In 1996, Heather moved to Phoenix and began a fine arts degree at Arizona State University, graduating in 1998. She moved into a large home with a pool with her same Yuma Sisters who by then had all moved to

Phoenix, too, to attend ASU. And so, Heather made a family for herself. We remained close, lending each other money when there were cash flow problems. Heather

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waitressed and bar-tended to support her self through college. I was her most generous customer faithfully eating at most of the places where she worked and leaving her twenty-dollar tips. This period of time for Heather was multi-colored with the bright flames of good friends and the blue notes of family struggles. She painted into the wee hours of the morning.

In 1998 Heather won Best of Show for the first public exhibition of her paintings at the ASU student gallery. Her work is bold and powerful. The exhibition was called Put on your face – a self-portrait show. She portrayed many social themes, launching a career as an artist who paints to change the world. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, Heather earned a two-year Associates Degree at the Art Institute in

Phoenix in web design. Today, she lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area as an artist and web manager. She and her father are reunited through attending Rolling

Thunder together on the Washington Mall. Heather rides on the back of her dad’s Harley and shares the day with him and millions of other Vietnam War veterans. She has witnessed the healing of these yearly commemorations and she had drawn closer to her father through it all.

Tommy remained in Tennessee. He too attended David Lipscomb University while living at his father’s home. It was a very hard time. After Heather left for Arizona, Tom moved out to find his independence and meaning. He struggled to pay his bills.

Tom felt insecure with our family so far apart now. He spent time in nature spelunking in Tennessee’s numerous limestone caves and tried to figure out what the

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next step would be. He attended community college and finally went back to Lipscomb to finish his degree over the next four years. It was a very expensive university; he struggled to finish but eventually earned a bachelor’s in business management and marketing with a minor in art.

Meanwhile, Tom earned a living working as a network manager at a local health care company that he thought would just be a means to earning a living until he finished his degree. He was apparently very good at it and was promoted to positions of greater responsibility. About eight years ago, he joined Community Health Systems, where he has established an exciting career recruiting executives for small hospitals around the country.

Tommy’s spiritual practice stood him in good stead. While he struggled to maintain a relationship with his father and me, he managed somehow to keep a sense of humor and develop hobbies that satisfied his sense of adventure and rooted him to the land where he lived.

He took up civil war history and metal-detecting and has become an expert on military hardware and battles in the Nashville area, of which there are literally hundreds.

Last year he accompanied a group of archeologists to Shiloh Battleground to hunt for more relics. He found a valuable and rare belt buckle now in the archives of the museum.

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At Lipscomb, Tom met Amy, a friend of both his and Heather’s. All three were art majors. Tom and Amy married in 1998 and bought a home in Murfreesboro. They are dyed-in-the-wool Tennesseans, and Tom a stalwart Titans fan.

During the period of 1992 to 2001 Tommy, Heather and I found a very special place where we vacationed together numerous times. Deer Springs Inn in the White

Mountains of Northeast Arizona is a privately owned respite known primarily by families who guard its location carefully. I learned about it from a colleague of mine whose family had been going there for years.

Deer Springs Inn is tucked away on forty acres near the Mogollon Rim, a natural high plateau that runs for two-hundred miles, forming the southern border of ponderosa pine country in four national forests. From the main highway we drive fourteen miles on unpaved forest service roads to a circle of five log cabins powered by solar generators. The White Mountain Apache reservation is the eastern border of their property. There are no phones or TVs. There, one can find silence.

At Deer Springs Inn, my children and I were reunited in spirit. Much healing took place under the canopy of towering pines and in the bright glow of many campfires under the stars.

But, in 2003, Deer Springs Inn was inundated by the Chediski Fire (a 75,000-acre fire in the White Mountains) destroying all four guest cabins. Reduced to ashes were the cabin journals kept by each family on their visits. Tom and Heather contributed many fine sketches and poems that now exist in other dimensions. I like to think that that

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special place which received our broken spirits and healed our relationships was rendered into spirit in the flames of the fire that consumed it that summer.

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Chapter 10

Albert Schweitzer, Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi Following the Trail of the Existential Moment

The two years after I left Yuma were transition years for me… transitioning back into the

Western culture I “left” to learn another point of view in Indian country. It was a dramatic transition, like that of a new seedling grown in a warm, protected environment that is suddenly planted in the ground outside and goes through a “hardening-up” period before it can withstand the stresses of the world at large. It is a vulnerable period. My subconscious was deeply engaged in reintegrating into Western cultural life with the new understanding about myself and my culture.

In 1994, I accepted a position as a biology teacher at a rural high school outside of Phoenix. I worked hard at being a competent teacher and chaired the science department there.

At the school there were many ranchers’ and farmers’ children. Through them and their families I learned about ranch and farm life in Arizona and gained renewed respect for people who live close to the land. I felt a deep sense of sadness and curiosity about the huge chasm between the indigenous peoples of North America and the families of pioneers and ranchers who settled on native lands. I found myself interviewing my students’ families to try to understand their relationship to the land and waters upon which their family security depended.

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In this process I learned that many of the ranching and farm families, who have worked for generations on their land, show great respect for it and share similar ethics about animals, plants and land with Native Americans. The huge difference is the economic system that drives each of the cultural traditions. One subscribes to the Earth as not owned but rather a gift to use for the benefit of all. The other views the Earth as own-able but stewarded by the owner for the economic benefit of its owners and for the benefit of those who buy their produce. But, on the level of the heart and soul, I found the love of land and respect for life shown by Indian people and American ranchers and farmers to be similar. Some will find that a controversial view.

Two years later, I was offered an opportunity to work at Arizona State University in the Disabilities Resource Center as a Program Director. I jumped at the chance because Heather was enrolling there in the fall semester and my position on the staff would give her a tuition break. My two years in Buckeye were brief but beautiful years working with great students who deserve the very best teachers. I will always treasure the staff at Buckeye as well. They heralded from local families. It confirmed my belief that the heartland of any nation is on its farms and ranches. The loss of small farms in

America is a loss of our character.

~~~~~~~~~

I began work at ASU in 1996. Managing a program for college students with disabilities and later a university-sponsored environmental education program, I became part of a

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vibrant academic community. For three years, I shared a house with a friend. Then, in

1999 I moved into a tiny house in the old part of Tempe, the university town of ASU. I had few possessions and, most importantly, no TV except for video use.

On summer nights, the heat radiated from the cement driveway that encircled my house. I would stand in my pajamas in the white moonlight gazing up at twinkling stars.

The dark outline of tall trees and rooftops formed a stage-drop where the city glow broke the blackness of night. This became my summer ritual—star-gazing in my pajamas. I awakened out of some consciousness that let my snoozing brain know I could open the doors and go out to a cool eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit.

My little house sat behind a friend’s large art studio. It had been newly renovated into a sweet bungalow by an artist with exquisite taste. It was only a short walk or bike ride to my workplace at ASU. On hot afternoons I swam in the University’s Olympic-size pool along with bronzed co-eds and swim team athletes.

And so I settled into an idyllic time. I set up a big writing desk in my oversized bedroom with windows shaded by swooping pine boughs.

Going to the main Phoenix Metropolitan Library became a regular routine on weekends. The library contains an excellent collection of social justice literature and documentaries on social movements. Living on my own in my house under tall pines and eucalyptus trees, a ten minute walk from work, I began an adventure in reading and a daily writing practice that became one of the greatest periods of learning I have yet experienced.

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I see this period as one when I began teaching myself. From my training and experience in Yuma I now had the tools to continue the teaching as student and guide.

Somewhere along the way, I became a free-thinker. I no longer needed the advice or guidance of the “expert” or the professor. I trusted my own capacity to judge for myself.

The following essay comes from this time in Tempe. It represents the point at which I began to draw associations among many ideas and historical events. As I explored the stacks of books, I rediscovered Albert Schweitzer. As a young Methodist I had read missionary literature at the church. One was a little biography about

Schweitzer the missionary doctor: All Men are My Brothers . It seized my imagination when I was about thirteen years old. But it was not until 1998 in Tempe that I learned of

Schweitzer’s personal struggle as a minister in Austria, before he became a doctor. Then he searched to know “the historical Jesus. “

Albert Schweitzer struggled over a long period of his professional and personal life to understand the foundation of what we call “civilization.” How could Christian nations wage war on other nations? In Out of My Life and Thought , Schweitzer described how he came to discover that reverence for all living things is the root principle underlying what it means to be civilized.

“The most immediate fact of man’s consciousness is the assertion ‘I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live’” he wrote. Schweitzer thought that even as he valued the life given him by the Creator so must every living thing value its life— whether able to express it or not.

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Schweitzer (1875 – 1965) lived through two world wars. When he turned thirty he fulfilled a promise to himself that he would devote the rest of his life to service of humankind. He left the ministry to attend medical school.

In 1915 he left Austria for Lambaréné, a missionary medical post established on the Ogowe River in the Gaboon in Africa. It was under French control at the time, but was originally established by American missionaries. There Schweitzer would work for fifty years in earnest, except during world wars when he and his wife were held as prisoners of war due to their Alsatian nationality.

His search for the basis of ethical thought continued at Lambaréné. Schweitzer was not satisfied with more traditional interpretations of Biblical history that set man in the center of the Universe. “How could religious doctrines such as Love Thy Neighbor and Thou Shall Not Kill be conditional,” he queried as the world wars raged on.

Schweitzer did not have current benefit of scientific knowledge about the evolution of the human consciousness that we have today. Recent neurobiological research points to selective control over how we perceive “the world”. In other words, we can choose to experience the world in any way we determine—not how it may be portrayed to us.

My father is a great humorist. Years ago he made a statement which, while funny, increasingly seems to prove true: “The human cortex only introduced the possibility of being confused! Look around, you don’t see any animals confused about who they are or what to do with their lives, do you?”

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While humorous, my father’s observation points to a defining human characteristic: humans possess free will. Are we witnessing the demise of our species on a path toward self-destruction, or, is there another possibility—that a higher consciousness in enough people world-wide could and probably is affecting a change toward a new and sustainable way of life?

Schweitzer, like Gandhi, believed that improvements in the human condition will come through personal moral transformation and commitment to truth and justice.

Thus, it will come through choice, through self-determination—through imagination !

Through my studies, I saw these central principles expressed by all religions:

Harm no thing.

Love your enemy.

Compassion toward all sentient beings.

Respect for life.

Along with these expressions of the basic life principles are extensive teachings for the Seeker. In my Tempe house under the big trees, I composed a collage of faces of great teachers and thinkers whose lives and work I turned to for guidance during that wonderful summer. Siddhartha Gautauma (the Buddha), Jesus of Nazareth, The

Peacemaker of the Iroquois, Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Henry

Thoreau, Helen Caldicott, Rachel Carson, Albert Schweitzer, and Thomas Berry.

Following an inner impulse, I made a timeline of their births and deaths. It showed graphically how each was in some way a mentor for those who came after.

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Leo Tolstoy was born into an aristocratic Russian family. At age 50 he renounced his privilege and became one of the world’s great writers about economic and political injustice. Tolstoy challenged Christian societies to recognize the essential contradiction of purporting to follow Christ’s message of Love while condoning violence in specific cases (war and national defense).

Before Tolstoy died in 1910, Mahatma Gandhi wrote to the old titan. Gandhi was a young lawyer in South Africa, bristling over the yet unnamed policy of Apartied. In their correspondence, Tolstoy, a Christian, delivered a powerful indictment on Christian societies whose use of power and privilege negates the moral principles that are central to Christ’s teaching.

Discovering the little book of their correspondence at the Phoenix Public Library in 1999 remains one of the epiphanies of my life. I understood more clearly how the baton of enlightenment is passed between generations, and how its entrance into the next generation provides a moral light in times of darkness for those who follow.

Schweitzer was inspired by Gandhi as was Martin Luther King, Jr. Rachel Carson was inspired by Schweitzer and so on… the period of time shrinking between the births of men and women of conscience on my timeline as we move into the current century.

Is human enlightenment rising faster in our time as wisdom is acquired by more and more people in each generation? Are we near a threshold?

What became apparent to me over that golden year of intense study and reflection is the importance of seriously devoting one’s self try to be the best we can be

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and to seek to understand our part and responsibility in creating a safe, beautiful world in which each life is a miracle and sacred.

I realized that each life provides a stepping stone for the next generation, and that it is our sacred duty to inspire those around us, and to nurture a desire to activate the principles of love, fairness, and compassion in the young people coming behind us.

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Chapter 11

The Intrepid Intuitives Reading our moral compass in Bear Country

In October of 2003, four friends and I arrived in Anchorage, Alaska for a five-day backcountry trek before attending the North American Association for Environmental

Education Annual Conference. Stepping from the plane, we were greeted by balmy fifty- five degree air! A burly-faced Alaskan later explained that the Pineapple Express, a trade-wind from the Hawaiian Islands, takes a hard left after bumping into the Pacific coast and blows tropical breezes up the Alaskan archipelago.

We rented a van in Anchorage. Leaving behind the confining spaces of our respective workplaces, our female energy, like water, ran free, gurgling here and there.

We began a woman’s journey as rich and multilayered as an ancient Tell with its visible present and deeper layers of forgotten pasts. Over five days we melded into a mobile community, sharing deeper aspects of our lives in a natural setting like no other. Along the way other women crossed our path whose life stories fit like colorful pieces in a hologram.

Journal Entry :

Rain makes popping sounds on our water proof gear, spills down slender Aspen trunks, and makes rivulets between tangled roots that crisscross the trail. Our voices like wood winds – a light rolling melody – play in the silent woods.

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Around us streams and rivers pour forth pewter-gray waters. Earlier the ranger explained that Alaska’s glaciers are retreating in the global warming of the Earth, the glacial silt freed in heavy liquid flows.

Our jackets make colorful splashes of orange, aqua, and sky-blue in the misty green of the forest. White-trunked beech with fall’s last yellow leaves still clinging to their branches, drop a soft, yellow carpet on the earth. We are alert to the presence of grizzlies. One giant bear fished red salmon out the gurgling river adjacent to the trail we followed. We came upon a steamy pile of grizzly scat. I am looking behind me often.

The ranger at the nature center had reflected that as far as he knew grizzlies had never attacked a group of five or more. Grrreeeaat.

We look for velvet brown moose passing behind dense trees and chatted excitedly like kids let out of a school house for recess. Far from our desks piled—high with projects, notes, and timelines, far from incessant e-mail and the glow of computer screens — we begin a new rhythm. Up from black stones, Alaska’s bones, emanates a deep vibration, slow and strong, retraining our erratic energies. With the gentle wash of a steady light rain, our false identities drain away. We are swept away in the beauty and rawness.

We first traveled to Hatcher’s Pass northeast of Palmer where the Talkeetna

Mountains are snow-capped, with pale blue glaciers that fill deeply cut valleys between dark ridges. As environmental educators and naturalists, we studied maps and guides, watched for bald eagles and studied the stories in the landscapes. For nearly a whole

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day we debated how one defines glacial moraine only ending the conversation when someone read the official word at a national park kiosk the following day.

We passed over “Deception Creek” and past “North Star Bible Camp” and “Mother

Lode Lodge.” These names and places afforded some hilarious versions of an imaginary story we began to weave on my digital tape recorder, each person adding the next convoluted segment of the tale.

Throughout the trip to Denali Park our playful interchanges were permeated by the indescribable beauty of Alaska, a land still in control of itself, keeping homo sapien in check with big sky, big waters, and big bear. While we were there two people were devoured by grizzlies. That got our attention! Respect nature or die! Alaska’s wilderness, while diminished by development, is still pervasive.

After a few days there I started to feel the vigor of the land move up my legs, and its spirit enter my chest as I breathed in the cool, moist air. Color returned to my cheeks.

Our little band of women meandered across the land. Along the way we met remarkable women—one whose legendary life we came to know through stories other women. That’s how we met Jackie.

She came sloshing up the trail that led down to Kachemak Bay, high rubber boots covered with glistening mud. She had just fed the pigs and chickens. Her cheeks were aglow with the cool morning temps, and there was a big smile on her lovely face, framed in thick, black waves of hair. Her smile gave testament to a decision she made six

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months earlier. Jackie explained that she came to the Homer Spit on a journey to find her “moral compass”.

“That’s when I found Mossey!” she laughed. “Mossey looked in my eyes and said

‘You look like a fun person!’ and I replied ‘And you look like a trouble-maker!’ and we just hugged! It was love at first sight!”

That began a partnership between two high-spirited women at Seaside Farm, a working farm on the spit that juts out into the bay on the Cook Inlet. We never got to meet Mossey in the flesh but her presence was felt in many places we visited. She is one of the original landowners and a tour de force for the environment. In the 1950s Mossey applied for a grant of land when Alaska achieved statehood. All one had to do was promise to farm the land. Since then she single-handedly kept a farm going, later sponsored a ‘60s commune to keep bread and board going, and now ran a hostel for people like us wanting a cheap night’s stay in a beautiful place.

When Mossey met Jackie it was at a critical juncture in the younger woman’s life.

After their last child left home for college, Jackie planned to go on a “sabbatical” from their marriage, from the cushy life of a suburban wife in Napa Valley, California. After years awash in a cultural paradigm based on consumerism, during which she watched the beauty of the California countryside diminish with increasing human demands upon it, Jackie told us how she and her women friends promised themselves that they would somehow find the moral compass for their families again.

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“We women are like the needles on that compass,” she explained. “I just knew if I could get away from all the development and focus on things, I could find myself again and help my husband and family get back to the important things in life.”

We were surprised when a well-dressed businessman emerged from the rickety confines of the hostel, Mossey’s original house. His tasseled-loafers were soon rimmed by a ring gooey mud. But he didn’t seem to mind. He was Jackie’s husband! He had come to check on her. Had she found her new direction?

Jackie slopped hogs and fed chickens along with Mossey, was managing the hostel, and when we were there, was baking delicious cakes and pies in her spare time for a busy catering business on the Spit. She certainly had found her rhythm in the big sky, big waters of Alaska. We did not know whether she was going back to Napa Valley or not, but we understood that whatever she was gaining at Mossey’s farm should be bottled and sold to society.

Her metaphor of women as moral compass stayed with us throughout the trip.

During our travels we tagged our group with the name The Intrepid Intuitives . It evolved from Jewel’s popular song “Intuition.” When we discovered that Jewel is Mossey’s niece, it began to feel like we had entered another dimension. The song’s refrain “ Follow your heart, your intuition. It will lead you in the right direction ” seemed to sum up an important realization we were all making together. If women get lost, then society goes awry. It reminded me of the Native American belief that a tribe was finished when its women’s hearts were on the ground.

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These experiences with the women we met on our journey, paralleled a group conversation that started on the first day of our journey and continued for as we drove past moose foraging in the marshes along the highways, past towering blue Kenai

Mountains, and on the aquamarine waters lapping the fjords near Harris Bay.

Surrounded by the natural wonders of this environment, we asked ourselves if women have a special role to play in bringing society to a more ecologically sustainable way of life.

KarenKaren: Yes, women are the nurturers. They bring sustenance. Indigenous cultures are a good example: women wash clothing on the rocks in streams and rivers, prepare the food, birth children, and keep the hearth. Women have always been close to the earth.

JillJillJill: Jill When we talk about the condition of the Earth and the condition of women as being closely related, it refers to the natural systems of the Earth, and the natural rhythms of women’s bodies. It suggests that women’s natural tendencies are not destructive but in synch with Earth’s rhythms.

KarenKaren: Throughout most of European history men have been in charge. Greed is mostly mediated by men if you study history. They blade-clear the land for profits.

When they replant, they put in exotics! We have a male-dominated industry. Women, I believe, try to work with a landscape.

TricaTrica: This is not just a U.S. phenomenon. It is probably global. Men have the Big

Picture approach. They go in to change the world – to alter it to suit their own needs.

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They are less sensitive. If we brought more feminine input to cultural practices, we would have a more sustainable way of life… we could help society make a shift to a more feminine approach (which is becoming stronger in recent human consciousness).

This would bring more balance. I believe this shift is already happening, and that it is coming through both men and women. It is bringing a more thoughtful, balanced approach. It is the new movement.

These conversations worked deeply in our collective subconscious. At one point we realized we’d spontaneously formed a community among us. Leaving behind our urban lives, getting away together to indescribable beauty, we began to feel the deep concern we shared about the condition of the Earth:

What is being lost? What will it mean for our families and children to come? How can we let something so magnificent go to what amounts to short term satisfactions?

What do we risk if Earth’s natural systems collapse or rapidly change from human pressures?

At the end of the week we put away our hiking boots and parkas for conference dress and spent the next four days with thousands of environmental educators from

Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. Together we represented people who teach children and adults about the wonders of the Earth; interpret the natural treasures of her magnificent places, and work to influence culture toward an ethic that balances human need with preservation of Earth’s resources.

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Environmental educators are passionate people. If you sit down and talk with us about how that passion came to be central to our life’s work, you will always find early experiences with a parent or important caregiver who taught us to appreciate and conserve the wonders of land, air, and water.

If we follow Trica’s belief that feminine energy manifests a greater sensitivity toward the Earth, and that both men and women tare bringing that energy forward into our cultural paradigm today, then we can each join-in by expressing the deep love we have for birds, animals of all kinds, plants and forests, rivers and oceans. The more we raise this voice the more in touch we become with the truth about life. We are part of something so large and wondrous we could never truly grasp its meaning.

As we learned about how the Earth systems are failing, how the temperature of the atmosphere was warming—melting the Alaskan landscape as we sat in conference— each of us was recommitting to our work, realizing our compass was pointing in the right direction.

When The Intrepid Intuitives peered down at metropolitan Phoenix, sprawling under the banking trajectory of our aircraft, our voices went silent. For a brief time we had reenergized in the Alaskan wilderness, in each other’s love of nature. Now we would drive-off in all directions to ply our passions on the moral compass of the American public hopefully correcting its coordinates toward a sustainable future.

It felt lonely and daunting as we hugged and said our farewells in the busy airport terminal. We pledged that we would reconvene for another trek soon.

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But that never happened. Today each of us is still working for the environment, fulfilling our responsibilities to our children and husbands, our communities, and all that life serves up to womankind.

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Chapter 12

Rain of Justice Gestalt

As I study my family roots and revisit American history, I realize more deeply that U.S. history is defined by a response to injustice . For centuries most of our ancestors knew poverty, oppression, and hopelessness in their country of origin. They escaped riding on the waves of colonialism. The forces bearing them across the sea were those from which they fled. One visit to the Genealogy Room at the Library of Congress to read the lists of indentured servants and supposed felons to understand how they provided cheap labor for European profiteers.

My ancestors arrived on the shores of the North American continent where unknown to them a nation of people had already achieved a high form of social governance and a lasting peace of over seven hundred years. The Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy was wrought out of a violent history of civil war among their tribes. The Great Law of Peace emerged among The Iroquois as the first constitution based on natural law in the New World.

This body of natural law came to the people known today as the Six Nations

Confederacy through a man referred to as the Peacemaker. His teaching, based on principles called the Good Mind, was so powerful that even the most violent men in the tribes were reconciled with their enemies. Both the principles on which it is founded

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and the structure of its government make it one of the finest systems of governance in the world today.

Like Christ, the Peacemaker used powerful metaphors and symbols to help people understand his teaching. The Flowering Tree represents the Great Law under which the people and all living things are protected. Four great White Roots of Peace extend to all nations who would follow these precepts. Harbored within the roots are the buried war clubs of fighting men, no longer to see the light of day as long as the

Great Tree remains strong—a living body of law.

The principles of the Great Law are the same root truths brought forth in different cultures from antiquity , and thus comprise the key for living well. The Great

Law of Peace is an extensive body of natural law passed by oral tradition passed from orator to orator - a living word remembered and revitalized with each new generation.

The Peacemaker reflected upon the Creation and how humans abuse one another. He reasoned that a healthy mind naturally seeks peace. He sought to

“straighten the minds” of men with principles that prevent these abuses. The

Peacemaker held that government is established to prevent humans from abusing one another by “cultivating a spiritually healthy society.” But, his teaching was not simply about law and order. He went further to establish a society and government where individuals “actively strive for justice.” He established “spiritualism as the highest form of politics.”

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The Good Mind is a mind that recognizes the equality of all forms of life, and one which recognizes that the Creation belongs to no one person or creature. All living beings have a fundamental right to the things that they need to survive. Therefore, no people have the right to prevent anyone from access to these gifts of the Creator. The government which evolved from these great principles is active today on our continent in the Six Nations Confederacy. It is a government based on spirituality.

As I reflected on what I learned during my studies in Yuma, I realized that the earliest documents from the time of Christ espouse the same doctrines of universal rights to water, land, food and freedom as do all the other Great Teachings on Earth. In these ancient writings in the original tongue of Jesus - Aramaic - are references to

Mother Earth, Father Sky, and angels of all the elements (water, earth, wind, and fire).

These teachings do not support ownership of land, or dominance and superiority over any living thing. But the documents that explained them were hidden from the public at the time of the beginning of Western civilization. Those in power began to twist these original teachings of Jesus to conform to the political and economic forces in early consumer societies.

These forces led to the crucifixion of Jesus and have continued their violence on people and plants and animals of the Earth. The American policy known as Manifest

Destiny is the clearest example of the purposeful misuse of the Truth.

My intense study at this time revolved around the obvious contradiction in

Christian nations: that we go to war (especially when we do so preemptively.)

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Are Americans fully aware of what our policies truly mean—that “love your enemy ” stops at war, and that our nation considers war a special condition when violence is allowable?

I had never seen this clearly until now. If we follow the principles taught in the

New Testament, we could not go to war, nor could any nation following a teaching with

“love your neighbor ” as its central truth.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “There comes a time in everyman’s life – an existential moment – to speak for your self and let no one else speak for you…” There is a need now – at this moment in history – to withdraw from the excesses of materialism and take a stand against justifications for continued consumption of world resources and oppression of people.

Though we pretend that everyone in our nation has inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, thirteen million American children live in poverty.

Why do we tolerate these conditions? How can they exist in a country whose constitutional history supposedly arises from Christian principles as our current administration continues to remind us?

Many Americans now recognize the truth. There is a gaping chasm between who we say we are and how we really live. For us now, there can be no greater act than to recognize a wrong and seek to right it.

There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but he must do it because his conscience tells him it is right. – MLK, Jr.

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Today more than ever the American citizen is called to his and her highest role – that of a true patriot. With all the media and government ‘spin’ that being a patriot means compliance and complacency toward government policies, we are losing historic memory.

A hallmark of a patriot is protest, dissent, and questioning within a fair and healthy debate of ideas and beliefs. Patriotic debate today can be found in virtual reality on the Internet. Tune in at sites like Common Cause and Move-On.org for citizen-driven action and discourse. Dive into the personal blogs of Americans and listen to the real

American Soul.

Yet in newsprint, magazines, and most glaringly on television, there is little evidence of our political heritage of dissent. Popular culture is presented as a flattened, homogenous landscape without distinctive voices. Group Think rules the airways. But, this is not the true national voice! You can find our true voice in the dissenters—the people often portrayed by politicos and religious institutions as problematic, the “flies in the ointment”, the “squeaky wheels.” They are our true patriots.

I offer this challenge to the reader. Watch no TV for one solid week. During that time strike up conversations with family members, neighbours, and friends about issues that are in your heart. Listen to all views – especially those you most disagree with. Try to promote your own view to that person whose view is far from your own. Do it with respect and good humour. While you are on vacation from the Group Hype of TV, notice

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how you feel - the clarity of your own convictions coming forward. That experience is what is missing in contemporary American life.

The basic idea through which we were formed – Rule by the People – comes from what you are feeling and doing in this democratic “time out” from a popular culture not created by us, but rather by corporations.

Vanity Fair magazine sponsored a nationwide contest in 2004 for an essay on

The True American Character. As I prepared to write an essay and enter the competition,

I spent about six weeks thinking about it, studying history, interviewing family and friends, and allowing thoughts to distill over time. Then, one morning I awoke with the intent of writing it. I had no preconceived idea of what I would write. I just sat down and it flowed out exactly as it is printed below. Its poetic nature surprised me, its metaphor. I realized how passionate I feel about my country, and I bet you feel it, too.

America has existed as a beacon of hope in the world, ever since our founding.

But, we are teetering on the brink of losing the confidence of people world-wide that we can live-up to the principles our constitution requires of us.

Will we be the first generation of Americans who forget what being an American truly means? The world views most Americans as supreme shoppers, comprising a self- centered culture uninformed about the world community. What does it mean to be an

American today, in the 21 st century? Here is what I wrote that morning when my heart was so full of love for my country:

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THE TRUE AMERICAN CHARACTER

Some people believe that America exists in forever spacious skies, purple mountain majesty, and the fruited plain. America is not a place. America exists within the mind. It is an ideal that ignited into its brightest flame on the North American continent, thousands of years before colonists settled on its Eastern shores.

It was an idea whose time had come.

Birthed from the loins of Liberty, it came like a bright light in the midst of human strife.

It came like a gentle rain on hardened soil, loosening each grain of rock for a seed to grow. The idea that all could be free... it was present on this continent.

The American mind was here when Europeans first stepped upon these shores.

As pilgrims felled trees, and the air was filled with the sharp sound of the ax and saw and the heavy scent of hardwood, Liberty gazed through dark eyes in the green of thick woods. Liberty was bronze, bedecked in eagle feathers and soft hide. Liberty was sleek, bounding in a sunlit meadow, and silk-haired diving below blue waters. Liberty was vigorous.

It set minds to dreaming.

America is a belief, a principal of life - that all beings are free and self-determined.

America means harm no thing. America means respect for all life. That is what America is and what a true American lives by. To live otherwise is to diminish it.

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Those who came and still come to America are changed by Liberty. Immigrants think they made America. They think they thought of her. But Liberty made them think

America. It was she who changed their minds and made their thoughts go to dreaming.

She was already here among the people and the animals and all throughout the land. A true American understands this.

Liberty whispers in the ear: Let them all be free! Take only what you need and share the rest. Glory in the abundance therein. See the sunrise and the sunset, swim the clear lakes, and eat the flesh of my fruit.

Liberty is a shimmering light on the rounded lip of water spilling over stones.

Liberty is the glint in the eye of a child. Her voice is the high pitched scream of a hawk soaring off its prominence. Liberty is the cry of a man to be free at last!

America is an impulse. Americans are animated by it and driven to play out its creed. America’s elixir is Liberty, and once it is tasted, nothing will ever satisfy the soul again.

Liberty stalks the dark places.

Liberty walks the land with sure feet and white garments that dazzle the eye. She has a voice like a bell ringing. Americans listen for her coming. Sometimes she awakens them from their sleep. Liberty stalks the dark places in peoples’ hearts and minds. She says firmly: Let them all be free!

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Americans like the sight and sound of Liberty. She is their beacon of hope and great teacher. When confusion comes and when strife and conflict arise, true Americans look for Liberty. They listen for her voice across the land and through the woods. When they hear it - the bell that rings so clearly - they can go on… they can endure anything.

A true American is ever vigilant. An American dissents if Liberty is threatened. An

American has a certain kind of angst when told what to think or do: call it “democratic irritability.” It is the sign of true Americans. Listen to their voices:

Is there not something worthy of perpetuation in our Indian spirit of democracy, where

Earth, our mother, was free to all, and no one sought to impoverish or enslave his neighbor? ~ Ohiyesa, Santee Sioux (1858 – 1939)

Yes, your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. ~ Susan B.

Anthony, women’s rights leader (1820 – 1906)

When I first decided to take a firm stand against the war in Vietnam, I was subjected to the bitterest criticism, by the press, by individuals, and even by some fellow civil rights leaders. There were those who said that I should stay in my place, that these two issues did not mix and I should stick with civil rights. Well I had only one answer for that and it

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was simply the fact that I have struggled too long and too hard now to get rid of segregation in public accommodations to end up at this point in my life segregating my moral concerns. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader (1929 – 1968)

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us as well at last as the truth. This alone wears well…. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. ~ Henry David Thoreau, American dissenter

(1817 – 1862)

Because we have suffered, and we are not afraid to suffer in order to survive, we are ready to give up everything - even our lives - in our struggle for justice.

~ Cesar Chavez, leader of the farm workers’ civil rights movement (1927 – 1993)

The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives… is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women’s rights leader (1815 – 1902)

Liberty presses on the American mind.

A true American cannot be moved from his or her conviction about Liberty. No eloquent speaker, powerful force, mind-altering influence; no bribe, or set of tragic

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circumstances, no ideology can shake an American from the knowledge that Liberty is at the heart of America:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of

Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. ~ Declaration of

Independence, 1776

Liberty caused these thoughts to be written when minds were shaped by an

America present long before the Europeans walked upon our shores. Liberty presses on the American mind still: Let them all be free - black, brown, red, yellow, woman, child, plant and animal!

Liberty stands firm on this. True Americans understand it.

Americans believe all people should know Liberty. A true American will not participate in, or support, anyone or any nation (even her own nation) that would deny

Liberty to another human being. Americans look across the globe with the hope of

Liberty’s promise for all. A true American is generous and long-suffering for just causes. Listen:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,

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Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed… ~

Declaration of Independence, 1776

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it. ~ Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States (1809

– 1865)

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. ~

Thomas Paine, American patriot (1737 – 1809)

Americans raise their flag to honor Liberty and burn their flag when Liberty is in jeopardy. Liberty for All is the creed of true Americans. They cannot be swayed. They have tasted her intoxicating liberation. No government, no religious doctrine or person can deter true Americans from their pursuit of freedom.

Liberty is their only religion, their only banner. True Americans are free to think and free to live. Liberty whispers in their ears throughout the land.

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Epilogue

Thirteen years have passed since I began to write this story about my journey. And while I sat down and wrote most of the story in the last five years, it represents an evolution of thinking and experiences, reworking and folding in new ideas with emerging political, ecological, and personal realities.

I have recognized that the irrepressible spirit of community among human beings—a rose-colored social glue—that is the feminine energy of the universe. This can be found in both women and men. Indeed, this energy can be cultivated to come forth in our culture, bringing balance to its masculine aspect. Jesus of Nazareth often referred to the love of God as a mothering spirit. Men and women alike have the potential to cultivate the feminine to balance their masculine nature. Haven’t we had enough war?

Aren’t we tired of accusing each other for problems in which we are all complicit? It’s time to “come clean.”

The Iraq War is still raging in local street battles where insurgents resist the

“infidel” Americans. The world political and economic power structure is shifting as

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America’s moral influence, squandered by wrong intent, has waned globally and nations form new alliances. The economy of the United States has been shattered on the cresting wave of consumption and greed, an economy led by no conscience.

The U.S. Presidential Election of 2004 came and went during the writing of the book leaving a politically and socially divided nation in its wake. A new surge of conservatism driven by fear of invasion and loss of our political power gave rise to fundamentalism, parading unabashedly in all sectors of American life. We became less tolerant, less compassionate, and less imaginative.

Yet there is hope for the future in the recognition of our common dependence on the natural world, the environment, for virtually one hundred percent of our lives. In this

Decade of Sustainable Development (2005-2014), declared by the United Nations

Assembly in 2004, we have the chance to “get it right” for clean air, clean water, dependable and safe food production, and a new era of energy production.

And, now a new, young American President has come to power in the wake of unprecedented problems for our country. Barack Obama is looked to by citizen and nation alike to save our country and world from disaster. Obama is pointing the way, however; it will be saved by each one of us rising to our highest calling. We must become better people.

In this decade, values will be tested in the light of the global commons : Do our economic, political, and social values support a sustainable future? Can we as local

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communities, nations, and a worldwide community learn to live in balance with the

Earth’s living communities and natural resources?

Collectively, we are influencing the biosphere of the planet, our only source of life. Moreover, we are altering the conditions of life for our grandchildren and many children to come, for plants and animals and all life on Earth. Our way of life is determining their future quality of life now .

There is an urgent need for the average citizen to become literate about the environment. Without a basic understanding of how the Earth works, citizens will continue to be influenced by interest groups and politicians who want to continue as usual, like ostriches with their heads buried. It is not about economics versus environment! The environment is the sole reason we have economic potential. Natural capital is the basis of every economic system. The marriage of economic policies with ecological imperatives will define this new period in human history.

This is where we are now. Can we create the will to make the changes in time?

This will not really come from governmental organizations although they can provide some tools for us in terms of education. No, it will come from us, the blades of grass on the hills. Only by a mass consensus to forever alter the way we think about the Earth - from societies that use resources to ones that live and work in concert with the Earth’s natural processes – can we find ways to live and prosper that sustain and even enhance ecological processes. As Aldo Leopold wisely reflected a half-century ago, the highest

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task of civilization is to learn how to live on a piece of land without destroying it (A Sand

County Almanac . Aldo Leopold. NY: Oxford University Press, 1947.)

Can we make the turn toward a sustainable future?

The environment—nature, the Creation—could be the unifying element that will finally bring us together as national and international communities with a renewed appreciation for the life we have been given and a commitment to quality of life for all creatures on earth. Can we act for our children and grandchildren and generations yet to come?

What an exciting time to be alive on Earth. Each one of us can choose to add to the possibility of achieving our highest potential as a human community.

I am betting on the ingenuity and basic generosity of the American public to rise to the challenge of our time.

For myself, I will not fail my children in this. No matter what happens now, they can at least say of me that I searched for the truth and did my level best to act on it.

Susan Feathers Pensacola, Florida Winter of 2008

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