My Sister & Me
Today is Monday, the start of the week, & traditionally, at least in the fulminating environment of an academic setting, the time of the year when it always feels like; to me anyhow, that people; young adult students, graduate students, & faculty at college campuses really begin to settle in. In the northern hemisphere.

The first long three day weekend has come & gone.

At Dartmouth, the first ancient ceremonial lighting of the bonfire & homecoming pilgrimage has happened.

We are here. We have arrived. I got my pad & course load all worked out....

Purposely, in my own maverick world, I had set my own "walk to the beat of my own drummer", graduate student sights & sites on furthering a free lance writing career. This fall of 2005.

One of the priceless teachings I personally have received on the campuses of Dartmouth College, was my introduction to email. Much to the dismay of many of my peers in the same location.

Because, at the insistance of the ever uniquely creative professor of music, Jon Appleton, email when I first began at Dartmouth, was the wave of the future.

He insisted our class in electroacoustic music production at the Breggman studio get "interactive".

His grasp of the APPLICATION of technology to the INSPIRATION of the creative genius, whether musician, poet or scientist of one flavor or another, & the insistance that we engage these two worlds & integrate them in our quest for personal self expression, was the type of exemplary teaching I had signed up for through the M.A.L.S. smorgasbord of course offerings, & the flexibility we could exercise in picking & choosing them.

My own inner drummer beat was a passionate move of Spirit to continue to apply technology to music & healing. For me, I often referred to my course choices layered upon a solid nursing degree from Simmons College in Boston, (in my day we earned also rather uniquely a B.A in nursing, rather than a B.S., reflecting again a deeply resonant understanding theat ultimately nursing is a healing ART) as the "Thoreauian degree".

It was the type of further education one could seek which allowed for a very broad (pun definitely intended, ahem!) transcendentalist perspective on all the ills & suffering of humanity as a WHOLE.

I came to Dartmouth because I had a very ill husband at the time who landed us both there. He in the CCU, I in a hostel. While visiting him back & forth, from the small neighborhood near the Howe library, walking across the campus to the old Mary Hitchock hosiptal, the "Hitch", I kept pondering, in my own internal dialogue with me & my Wise mind...I know what he is doing here, but what is MY higher purpose?

And the walk strolling from one end of Hanover across the green to the Upper Valley Hostel would provide for a walking meditative time, as it still does daily & nightly now for so many.

I had dropped out of Harvard divinity school in 1982, after pursuing a year in the D school as it is called, after spending a year pursuing a Unitarian Universalist degree for ministry.

I got what I wanted there from the school of the prophets, some very interesting courses preparing me for preaching, public speaking & the ability to lead nontraditional worship services such as sacred dance groups & the like... but Harvard really did not have the next layer of what I felt was necessary to complete that which was moving within. That beat of my own inner drummer.

I had gone to Harvard back then also for a purely pragmatic reason as well. It was commuting distance from our own little farm house home in Concord where I was living at the time with a mathematics teacher husband & two cookie crunchers. A boy & girl.

We had done a lot of traveling together as a young family. We are Outward Bound types, loving wilderness trails & the company of "free world travelers", & had completed a tour around the globe while a young son was small enough to stuff in a back pack, & daughter still "in the oven" to return home to a Concordian house-bound for me existence.

Then had our daughter, resulting in a very short time a transition in this small shelter from being a foot loose twosome to a bulging nest of the paired eagles & two eaglets. I felt I needed a bit more stimulation.

So I started going to our local Unitarian church. Mainly to get in a few hours of mentally & spiritually inspiring conversations with fellow & sister transcendalist groupie type seekers. Which our local congregation consisted of then. I could sit for a blessed hour each Sunday morning in a plain meeting house to hear myself think!

And what I was thinking was: the bigger questions.
Why am I here? I mean on the planet? Were we really doomed to "lead lives of quiet desperation?" My then husband & father of my cookie crunchers favorite Thoreauian quote, or was there something more to it than that?

In our free world globe trotting year, we had the chance to meet in person many, many people from all different cultures & races & belief systems of a religious nature, along with different systems of health care delivery. the result of following the directive of one of my favorite classical authors, Mark Twain; that travel was fatal to every form of bigotry & prejudice... a loose paraquote.

Hence our churching ourselves in the plain UU meeting house.

And it was in those days of early motherhood I received some spiritual promptings I could hardly ignore to pursue this transendentalist quest.

You don't call Spirit; spirit calls you!

I had sat at the bedside of those being born & those dying, more than a few times by now. Had had the experience of birthing myself. Again in some cross cultural settings; New Zealand & Concord.

It was these experiences that spurred this further questing. That & feeling trapped suddenly with small children that were repetively demanding, with work not being renumerated. Having had the joy of knowing a decent wage for work that was demanding but satisfying, I thought...well is this all there is???

So the restless mind actually occasionally cracked open my old Bible I had been given at a traditional confirmation in a traditional Episcopal church earlier still, when I lived as a young girl in Lincoln, Mass.

Tracing back the journey's path gives insight to the ushers in our lives: those critical searing moments in a life which mark for each of us that moment in time we made important, really important decisions which adjust our course. Usher is a term Carlos Castanedas uses to describe such. Usher events are our spiritual milestones. Soul journey markers.

So these are few of mine, leading me to cross the Hanover green thinking about the meaning of yet another usher event. The sudden & scary & demanding illness of another husband in another chapter of my own fantastic glorious life.

Because see here, two paths diverged in a yellow wood. Mine & the path of my children's father. I did NOT believe we were doomed to a life of quiet desperation & told him so. No! I was a living breathing Pippi Longstocking with my two wanted & beautiful natural child-birthed boy & girl. I had achieved the vision I had actually pictured for myself at that point in my life. And was bored, restless. There had to be more to it than this.

So I sought that answer in books, in meetings, in prayer. And the answers came back from the universe in mystical ways. In the experience of listening to a woman preacher for the first time ever, preaching on the subject of "the wounded healer". In the quiet stirring of the glowing embers of my own wood stove in our little kitchen. Walking distance from Authors Ridge. In communing with nature, walking alone & with my wee ones the very path Thoreau himself had, & attending the same church he had, where I had permission to answer his own directive, spoken from the pages of the 18th century; the disciplined search for Truth.

I had developed my own hypothesis by that point in time about the calling of the healer. Beyond nursing, with the travels of an odyssey under my belt, my theory went like this; people are truly healed of all illness through the POWER OF THEIR BELIEF SYSTEMS.

The placebo effect. Give someone a sugar pill & tell them it is a pain pill & the power of that belief will in more than simply chance occurrences, heal the pain. Believe in the power of the laying on of hands, this too will effect healing.

Music, dance & ritual were likewise powerful modes of healing & of shifting belief systems which in my view were limiting peoples' abilities to heal.

So responding to this calling at this stage of my own life, allowed me to add to the traditional knowledge & experiences of working in hospitals & homes to care for the sick, usher in new life, & compassionately see life leave to the beyond, I did make a disciplined search for that truth Thoreau whispered to me in the winds & natural settings around our creche, to do.

The source of most pain also could be found in those limiting belief systems. This was crucial also for me personally to understand what antidotes were required.

I did not need to espouse the various religions of the world myself so much as UNDERSTAND what they were so I could apply the relevant antidote.

U.U. gatherings always were great forums to find these far broader forums & open places & spaces to do just that.

Now when, as a healer you go about consciously effecting & facilitating change at the deepest, most sacred levels, be prepared for some real shifts in circumstances. This sort of perspective meant questioning for both my husband & myself some deeply cherished dogmas.

To reveal some of the discontent he felt which, being raised a preacher's kid, were attached to his own personal ushers. Tap roots of resentment & bitterness in inheriting a parentage which was constantly out in service to others, & not necessarily attuned to his own needs in that family. To now be faced with a wife who was pursuing this path was painful to him. We split in the process.

I explored a musical calling which likewise was as much a part of the spiritual prompting as was the call to go to Harvard. I traveled to Santa Monica to respond.

And the music carried me eventually into Jon Appletons' class.

As the answer in my walking meditation to "what am I doing here was"..."continue your search for truth & meaning" in your own lay, now, calling within the larger universalist faith.

That is the short version. But what Dartmouth held for ME personally at that particular juncture or usher was; gateways open to being able to play with engineering stuff; the Breggman studio in particular, the creative video studio for another, where I would be able to master the technology to produce the vision for media & music I was receiving in the fertile bed of my very active imagination.

Dartmouth afforded me a wild beautiful, rural place to get what I wanted; this access to the playthings, the toys the guys had in the engineering realm which would allow me total control & mastery over my own unique creative productions. And these productions were my response to fulfilling this sacred calling of Spirit to heal. In the modern era.

Now, you see the fruition today. Jon's insistence that we get comfortable with email, & staying in touch was the usher into an explosively growing last wild frontier: cyberspace. Also a very practical tool to send messages, from simple text to eventually what we see today, broadband video productions engineered in the language of zeros & ones.

The frontier where the visionary could marry the old, the ancient, with the new, the cyber pulpit, theater, syndicated press.

That journey from then to now was an adventure. Filled with all the high drama of the arts & explosive scientific findings in the expanding & evolving frontiers Dartmouth was pioneering out ahead of the other Ivy leagues in my humble opinion. It afforded creative & visionary teachers to "reach out & touch" millions & millions from the safety & familiar security of home; wherever one chose to call home. Marvelous!

But NOT without pitfalls. In times of fulminating change great passions are stirred, deep memories shaken to the surface of consciousness. Accepting the creative calling of simply "change agent, mediatrix", was my own true spiritual call. And this has led to an encounter in the wilderness, with the greatest passions of human nature, the ultimate titanic struggle for wresting with the value of life & death with one of my intimate partners in this journey. The fulfillment of, for me, what the crest of Dartmouth says; voice crying in the wilderness.

My hybrid education led me across the country several times, criss-crossing from old style Ivy league to southern California to an enclave of media producers, actors, writers of this modern age. Through a class in screenwriting with Maury Rapf, to attempting to apply his teaching sitting on a Santa Monica bay shore.

Finally realizing MY voice was one mainly, as he told me in his course evaluation, as a writer of prose. A journalist. an author, a writer, a musician from Concord, the town of the transcendentalist writers.

So, to finally wing back around to the title of this post, my sister & me. Jen picked me up today to have a little outing together.

By now all our far flung traveling family remains in touch primarily through emails. It is more precise in some ways. Certainly more flexible. And QUIETER. I have learned to "yell at them" when moved with large fonts. And as many of my peers will tell you at Dartmouth, I certainly have learned to yell at THEM too with large fonts. Creative cyber yelling.

Jen says; "hey Mon, I got this email, with the address from you, but with a message to Suzanne. I'm confused. Did I get it on purpose, or by accident?"

So thinking her response is most likely a typical one you all have too, the answer is;
yes, Jen, that most personal letter, to my dear friend in California, Suzanne, the friend who inspired the song "Suzanne" by Leonard Cohen, one of my all time favorite folk song writers, was purposely sent to you.

Likewise to all of you too.

I have been gorging myself on New York Times best selling murder MYSTERIES.

To study this style, this genre of writing. And to emulate it.

One of the literary devices I find to be so effective in getting ME to turn a page in one that truly grabs my attention is this style of switching back & forth from perspective to perspective; teasing the brain to wonder what I missed in the tantalizing gaps.

My letter, my now open & publicly published letter to Suzanne contains the content, the stuffing, the meat stuffing of a saga that has involved me, my travels to & from Dartmouth in the context of a larger journey, which Suzanne is an integral part of. A dear, cherished highly creative, passionate, loving friend. Whose home has been my roost when I perch on the cliffs of the Pacific Palisades to contemplate the magnificent awsome beauty of this particular wild part of Santa Monica bay.

Suzanne, also a homemaker & devoted mother to a highly unique & creative son who has actually come to sit for one memorable & I am sure trying for Jon, class where he indulged my request to allow me to troop in my own little brat pack of three to have a glimpse at these incredible technological inventions. A little cloud of three irreverent, farting preteens for one day to get a glimpse of the life of "higher education", to let them see what Mommy is doing here.

This same threesome was also indulged by Michael Hanitchak in his own creative video class. Were allowed later to run rampant in the computer labs. And with later still their own video cams & 4 track studio equipment to write their own productions & stories as they too evolved.

Now you know a bit more about "the rest of the story" as Paul Harvey, a favorite master story teller of mine used to say in his weekly broadcasts.

Bless you both gentlemen for the longsuffering. I believe it has paid off. That brat pack survived into their midtwenties now, as has Mom, & we all weave a part of the outposts offered on the world wide web. Along side, interconnected with all of you; still.

Bless you all with an abundant peace. Monica

P.S.- Mom's cyberoutpost, INEDA, is where I weave my cyber first aid station for these times & my globtrotting family.

It is a free cyber resource we offer you too; as you follow the beat of your own inner drummer. I think it is nice to have a map.