See "Sitka Spruce Sister" drawing below
Dear Friends of Art and Creativity,
As many of you know, I am four weeks out from a total knee replacement, my second major surgery this year. In June, I had surgery for uterine cancer; and during the summer I underwent radiation treatments to ensure the cancer doesn’t return. In September/October I had to move my home, to a downstairs dwelling in preparation for the knee replacement on November 8th.
It has been quite a year, but like my journey with my Soul Mate Kenyth, companioning him through Alzheimer’s and over the River Styx, I am holding these health issues as a tremendous spiritual learning. The perspective I’ve gained on Death and Life is wonderful.
I had an inkling of this during my ten years of practicing Tantra with Kenyth, where in our dance together we dedicated our experiences to the healing of the culture, but now I know even more clearly the importance of living within a vision of humanity coming into balance with the earth. The more specific the vision, the better.
In May, when I was lying on a gurney in the ER of a remote hospital in New Brunswick, Canada, (visiting my homesteading brothers), I received an intuition that I had cancer – or at least, that maybe my time was up. I mulled it over and saw that I could leave the planet now in terms of the major lessons I need to learn in this lifetime – I have learned them. I still wanted to finish my memoir, but other than that I was “home free.” I saw that I must have a larger-than-my-own-personal-self kind of vision to live into now if I am to continue.
When I returned to Bellingham, I felt thrown into despair, because of the state of our world. The degree of separation, disconnection and lack of trust in this “power-over paradigm” we live in is monumental, especially coming out of the pandemic. It felt like late-stage capitalism is causing a dying culture and taking the planet down with it. It permeates our cells and our ways of thinking – all aspects of our lives. So, I felt hopeless, like there was no reason to continue living.
As you probably know, when someone with cancer no longer has a will to live, they die. But, once again, my Soul Brother Sequoia came to my rescue. (He was the one who connected Kenyth and me and married us.) Sequoia’s young friend Andy had discovered a village in Southern Portugal called Tamera – The Healing Biotope. I believe a biotope is a model for how to live. All Sequoia did was send me its link, www.tamera.org. I jumped on it – I must have sensed into something important, and I trust Sequoia’s suggestions as a pathway to my own spiritual healing. I went onto Tamera’s website and avidly absorbed everything. It was their commitment to radical peace on every level – from healing the planetary crisis to communicating with the natural world in stewardship, to interpersonal transparency and solidarity with the community, to uplifting Eros, that drew me. Everything about it.
After I learned of Tamera, I knew there was a reason to live. I knew that if there is even one community in the world like that – even one village of lovers – that more will come, and we humans will finally turn the tide toward living in harmony.
"Sitka Spruce Sister" graphite drawing, prints available