The creator is larger than her creations.  Our creations may become black scratchings etched on white paper, but the vastness of being lives in the whiteness of space. 

What the public wishes to know about us is subject to trends in power and fashion and social objectives.  The wholeness of our lives, however, is something different than the story told about us, or even the story we tell about ourselves.  We tell a story—consistent and linear—in order to simplify that which is a patchwork of serendipitous occurrences, chance meetings, prayers, moments of indescribable beauty, heartrending passion, poignancy, and pain.

This morning, I arose to the sound of the Pacific Ocean thrashing against the tide pools outside my window.  I looked to the sea, felt wild, pristine thundering mares thrashing in my veins, and yet, even as I climbed from the bed, my hair sweeping over my face, I smelled the powerful scent of jasmine, hibiscus, magnolia, shrimp and grits, alligator swamp and pluff mud.  I did not want to wash my hair; I never wanted to wash it again.  Last night I returned from Charleston, South Carolina, which had mixed its codes and atoms with the ones I already had, until it became me. 

Other places I have lived—Mexico, Korea, Europe, Colorado—have eroded this body also.  The grass and stones and heart of such places shaped me, and shapes me still, like skin and bones and blood.

I was born and raised in the Rocky Mountains, writing from the start.  I submitted my first book to Random House.  A senior editor, amused to receive a submission from a ten year old, sent me a letter that said, ‘Keep writing.’  When I was twenty, I won a gold medal from the State of Colorado for an essay about how I “fell from my mother’s womb to the Colorado dirt.”  My father thought I should use the word ‘soil,’ but, against my young soles, it felt hot, dry and dusty.

I was schooled at the Universidad de las Americas outside of Mexico City, the Cultural Institute of Arts and Languages in Cuernavaca, the University of Colorado, Denver (masters program, Urban Sociology) and the University of Colorado at Boulder (masters degree and doctor of philosophy in sociology).  Early in my career, as a Visiting Sociologist at the Netherlands National Center for Adult Education (the NCVO in Amersfoort, Holland), with the guidance of Dr. Jan de Vries (“Education for Guerillas”), I helped develop many of the original concepts of ‘participatory research,’ and organized the second international conference on the subject.  (The first was in Canada—organized by Dr. Bud Hall.)  Activists for social justice from Africa, India, South America, Canada and Europe all converged in a Dutch castle on the North Sea amid miles and miles of Dutch tulips fully abloom in the cradle of spring.  In the presence of these great beings, I was transformed.  I pinched myself asking, Am I really here?  Am I really doing this? 

For those who have ears to hear and hearts to feel, I was learning that every place one sets one’s foot is sacred ground.  Everyone you meet is the holy one walking.

Post-Europe, I returned to the University of Colorado where I directed the University Counseling Center’s Group Counseling Program, taught the sociology of health and illness, both physical and mental, and conducted research on women’s adult life stages. 

When I was eight months pregnant with my first child, I moved to California with my husband Bernhard (Bernard) Haisch, who had been working at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, and with whom I had gone to Utrecht, Holland.  I was awarded a position at Stanford University’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender where I worked for eleven years.  Together with Dr. Gary Richwald of the UCLA Department of Public Health, I was funded by the State of California’s Department of Maternal and Child Heath to study the medical outcome of ten thousand consecutive out-of-hospital births in California.  I was appointed as Principal Public Policy Analyst at UCLA, and, during those years, I commuted between San Francisco and Los Angeles to work on the project. 

Even as I was fully engaged in the study of birth, my second child came along.  Together with childbirth reformer Suzanne Arms, Dr. Don Creevy of Stanford University Medical Center, and several others, I helped to create The Birth Place in Menlo Park, California.  My baby was born there with obstetrician Don Creevy in attendance.  It was Don who said to me, “If you want your baby, reach down and get it,” and, as a result of Don’s infinite wisdom, I wound up delivering my own baby with my own hands.  I began to understand, then, something about what it means to be truly empowered.  I became Director and President of the Birth Place, President of the California Association of Freestanding Birth Centers, as well as a frequent speaker (and sometimes officer and conference organizer) at the American Sociological Association, the Western Social Science Association, the American College of Nurse Midwives, the National Association of Childbearing Centers, and other professional organizations.  I taught ‘women in medicine’ at Stanford.  At Stanford, I wrote Mothers in Transition, which was based on my doctoral dissertation, and The American Way of Birth.

More importantly, now a single mother, I raised my two children in awe and love. Immersed in the poetics of birth and motherhood, I became part of that long chain of maternal being and becoming, which led me into a deep spiritual quest.  As a spiritual seeker, I entered the International Church of Ageless Wisdom seminary where I studied comparative religion and became an interfaith minister.  In collaboration with my mother, art professor Joyce Eakins, I wrote Tarot of the Spirit (www.tarotofthespirit.com), a guide for conversing with the universe of the soul.  I also wrote Priestess, the story of a woman’s path of self-discovery spanning three millennia of sacred celebration.  I began to teach classes involving spiritual growth, and, to that end, founded Pacific Center in Half Moon Bay, California.  My interest in women’s life stages and women’s biology evolved into an interest in women’s spirituality.  I began to teach ‘women’s rites of passage’ in the first Department of Women’s Spirituality in the United States which was created at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS).  Recently, I taught ‘love, cosmology, and consciousness’ at the same institution in the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness.

Life’s true path is quiltish and labyrinthine.  At one point, I was led into the middle of the Salvadorian War, which led me into teaching refugee health, peace studies, and becoming a community mediator.

In 1999, I made a pilgrimage to India, and fell in love, again, with the sacred cosmos.  I wrote Heart, Breath, and Graceful Movement.

I have spoken now, at length, of many things I have done, all of which have emanated out of who I was made to be.  And yet, every one of these occurrences has been completely dependent on other occurrences and prevailing conditions.  Some things I have desired have come about.  Others have not.  In every life, the Wheel of Fortune ever rises and falls.  I have learned to live by the ‘serenity prayer,’ trying to understand, day by day, what I can control and what I cannot.  As they say, things will get better, or things will get worse, or things will stay the same for awhile—so try not to worry.

Here is what I know:

I am made of atoms formed in stars.  I am shaped of the seeds of my ancestors.  I seed my circle and my descendents, even as I am seeded.  Holding hands with Eternity, I love, give birth, die, and rise to love again. Like all those who have been and will be, I trade breath with trees.

The core of ‘me’ is Earth, awake and sleeping, all the putrefaction and potential that exists in a tide pool—molecules and energies imploding and exploding in newness.  I am electromagnetic universe moving through a field of electromagnetic universe.  I am scarred and anointed—just like your own precious being—by the miracle that is the wonder of life reflecting upon itself.