Spirit Breaking Free Outside school, my mother ensured that I was exposed to all the traditional art forms. There I dared to dream, to explore, to reach out for something more. My introduction to creativity was learning-how rather than listening-to. There were lessons for everything, starting at age six. There was dance—ballet, tumbling and tap—which I adored but did not continue. There were piano lessons with Mrs. Clark—strict, academic and constricted—and the terrible...
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Conformity Comes Home At six years old, because of my mother’s desperate campaign against the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll in public schools, I was sent to a strict parochial school. There my own conditioning began. I acquired the school’s judgments about what was right and what was wrong, and my fear took root there. Seeing the harsh punishments inflicted there on those who ventured out of bounds—forced to stand outside the classroom facing the wall, sent to the...
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Today I swam in the English Channel, and she shared her creative harvest with me. A Day for All Seasons Today is the September Equinox, one of two days each year when the sun spends as much time below the equator as above. Day and night are equal. Like the Solstice, the Equinox marks a change of season on Earth. In the Northern hemisphere it is the gateway to Autumn, and for thousands of years human cultures around the world and have celebrated with harvest festivals. For...
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“Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” (Helen Keller) Helen Keller arrived at her assessment of life through her hands-on exploration of the world around her, and she expressed her experience in a language all her own. Blind and deaf at birth, Keller never saw the sun rise or set. While she might have spent her life institutionalized in sensory isolation, or medicated to control her emotional outbursts, she went on to make unprecedented contributions to the...
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August 1 is my father’s birthday. Today he would have been 100 years old. Cecil Moore Robertson was born August 1, 1910 in a small town in Virginia. His father ran the town grocery store. He went to school on the back of a horse drawn cart. At the age of 17 he left school and home to go north to work on the railroad. My father was what my mother called “a self-made man”. My father always said that our greatest problem as a society is that we are too mobile. He saw the birth...
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