When I read the news today that the poet Adrienne Rich had died, I immediately thought back to my early days at UC Santa Cruz. I majored in Women’s Studies (now Feminist Studies) when the department and the major were still very young. Staffing and funding were precarious, office space was cramped, and the faculty brilliant. [...]
There we stood in a park in San Francisco, about fifteen of us circled around a large ceramic bowl on the ground in which we had written the things we wanted to see increase: more money for this, more power to that, healing for her, a better job for him. Interspersed among the slips of [...]
Yesterday in a Sebastopol parking lot I ran into an old acquaintance who, like me, drives an aging car. I joked with him about the fact that we were still keeping our jalopies going, when he came over to me with a conspiratorial smile. “I don’t know what you believe, but there’s this website…” Oh [...]
If only I had all day to sit here and write about how my life has been influenced by just a handful of trips to Esalen. If only the stories were as interesting to everyone else as they are to me. Ah well, with great restraint I will spare you and focus here on the [...]
