Chapter 11 - 1987-88
Fairfax and Petaluma
Living in Fairfax
(Both) With the onset of winter, and more usage of the heating system in our Fairfax apartment, Molly realized that every time the furnace came on she got a headache. She reported this to the manager who took immediate steps to correct the situation–another sign we had rented the right place. The repairman found a leak in the furnace that was venting emissions into the apartment; it was immediately replaced. This was in such marked contrast to previous rentals where we’d had to beg the landlord to take care of problems.
However, we felt cramped in our one bedroom apartment, so when a larger unit came available in the same complex, we moved into it and found it more to our liking. For one thing, the north-facing front window looked out on the hills of Marin across the street, and the side windows to the west looked out on forest, because we were right at the edge of the complex. We had room for an office as well as our bedroom. Our office doubled as a guest room that Cass or Greg could use when either of them came to visit.
Sadly, it became clear as the year progressed that the Creative Health Center was not going to be a source of income for us, as we had hoped. We had thought that it was well established in the community and would refer clients to us, but that turned out not to be the case. The Center only provided a physical place to see whatever clients we could find on our own. Jim was permitted to have a permanent space available for biofeedback sessions, so he could leave his equipment set up there full-time, but it was essentially a storage room off the main meeting room. That soon proved to be too cramped for satisfactory work involving deep relaxation; moreover we often had to walk through a class or meeting to reach the room. We finally persuaded Conrad, the founder of the Center, to give us access to a better consulting space. However, that room was primarily used by another therapist who resented sharing it with us.
Molly’s teaching job in a psychiatric hospital
(Molly) Because of our ongoing financial struggles, when I saw an ad for a teaching job in a nearby city, I applied. The job was at a psychiatric hospital in the adolescent unit. State law required that hospitalized children receive educational instruction, so the local school district hired three teachers to do the job, in two classrooms provided by the hospital. Fortunately, another teacher in this program also lived in Marin county, so I carpooled with him, leaving our only car for Jim’s use.
Another effing learning opportunity! I look back on that four month job as a nightmare. I observed such abusive treatment of the children, under the standard operating assumption that the kids were sick and the so-called caregivers (doctors, nurses, and aids) were the sane ones, always in the right. I remember one of the doctors at our morning staff meeting telling the staff to keep telling one girl patient that she was sick, that she had shoplifted (and done other bad things), and that she needed to obey without question. Not exactly therapeutic! I observed this same doctor, in a “therapy” session with an adolescent boy, playing a pinball game, totally focused on the game, not the patient.
The term “oppositional” was written frequently in patient records, where I was supposed to record notes on the kid’s classroom behavior. It seemed to me that this diagnostic label was routinely applied to children who were simply rebelling against the harsh, unbending rules and expectations imposed on them. I saw kids who were “acting out” being strapped face down to a bed in the “Quiet Room” and left there for hours on end. I overheard one boy crying and begging not to be confined there, while I sat in the staff room next door, feeling helpless to intervene.
I began to wonder how Cassidy would survive if incarcerated in that hospital–and incarcerated is the right word! Then I realized that because of his basic level of mental health, he would soon catch onto the game and play it well enough to be discharged. The problem was that the kids there were mostly from troubled homes and really needed psychological help, but I believe the way they were treated in the hospital probably exacerbated their mental illness.
I don’t recall much about my teaching—I think it was mostly pretty rote, assigning reading with questions to answer, and worksheets. I soon discovered that my experience and training as a counselor/therapist could not be acknowledged or put to use in that setting; I was a classroom teacher and that was that. I did try to encourage some creative writing, and was even asked to work with a young man in the adult ward who wrote poetry in tiny tiny letters. However, he was so heavily drugged with thorazine, he could barely function.
I hung on until the end of the school term, somehow managing a short trip to New Mexico in May to lead a workshop, which confirmed my decision to resign from the hospital job. I had an exit interview with the hospital administrator during which I tried to relate some of my concerns and observations, but he didn’t want to hear them. He was running the best psychiatric hospital in the region, after all! I left with a very jaundiced view of the state of psychiatry in our nation, at least at that time—and an increased respect for psychosynthesis.
Molly explores professional opportunities
(Molly) During this time, I looked into the possibility of qualifying for a Marriage and Family Counseling License, which Jim already had from the 1960s. To my dismay, I soon learned that my M.A. in humanistic and transpersonal psychology and my 10 years of experience counseling (and having authored The Unfolding Self) would not “count” towards the current requirements. I would have to document 3000 hours under the supervision of a licensed person other than my husband, take a number of specific courses, and pass both a written and an oral exam. I wasn’t willing to put myself under the supervision of someone who knew nothing about psychosynthesis and I couldn’t find a qualified psychosynthesis practitioner to work with. After some soul searching, I decided to open a practice anyway, just being very careful what I called myself. This was well before the idea of personal coaching was in the culture. I asked all my clients to sign the following agreement (which I never had to show to any authorities, thank goodness!).
I am undertaking a series of individual consultation sessions with Molly Young Brown, M.A. I understand that she is not a licensed therapist and that our sessions are not psychotherapy. Rather our work together is an educational process–based on the principles and techniques of psychosynthesis–that I may apply to my life as I choose.
I enjoyed the flexibility of working in private practice. It allowed me to take part in various workshops and retreats for both professional and personal growth, as well as continue traveling to lead psychosynthesis workshops and trainings.
One retreat I attended with Christopher Titmus in May 1988 deepened my understanding of Buddhism and moved me to become a vegetarian for the next five years. Because I have always been the primary cook in our household, Jim had to go along with that choice, but he was willing as long as he could have an occasional burger or steak when we went out to eat.
I continued leading psychosynthesis workshops with Vivian King, both at her Pasadena center and in Kansas. And for my own personal and professional growth, I began counseling with Frances Vaughan, who was widely regarded as one of the nation’s foremost transpersonal psychotherapists. I valued my work with her, primarily focused (according to my journals) on feeling inadequate professionally–that I wasn’t somehow “making the grade.” Looking back on that now, I realize I just needed to give myself time!
A Better Office for Private Practice
(Jim) While Molly was unhappily bound to her teaching job at the hospital, I was seeking an office space elsewhere in Marin County to replace the disappointing situation in San Anselmo. After one other short-lived venue, I eventually found a very satisfactory office with a small waiting room on the second story of the Lincoln Avenue Professional Center in San Rafael. Luckily there was an elevator in the building, because one of the first clients I had there was a young paraplegic man who had been shot in the lower back in a road-rage incident. Paralyzed from the waist down, he relied on a wheelchair to get around.
Inhumane violence leading to debilitating trauma was a phenomenon I had not encountered before in my counseling practice–nor have I encountered it since then. My client struggled not only to manage his pervasive anger at the perpetrator, but also the addiction to pain medication that plagued him subsequent to his spinal wounding. Both biofeedback and counseling were shaping up to be useful interventions, but he withdrew–as continuing surgical and rehabilitative interventions sapped his energy and financial resources.
Following Molly’s disturbing tenure with the teaching job in the hospital across the bay, she and I shared the office in San Rafael as she developed her practice of psychosynthesis-related counseling.
New Connections
(Molly) Because of my interest in peace psychology, someone put me in touch with Frank Rubenfeld, a member of the Gestalt Institute of San Francisco, co-founder of Psychotherapists for Social Responsibility, and author of “The Peace Manual: a Guide to Personal-Political Integration.” He suggested that I attend a 5-day gathering of an organization called Interhelp, dedicated to bringing a psychological focus into social activism, so I signed up. This event heralded a new direction for my professional life, although at the time I didn’t realize it.
Most people at the gathering seemed to already know each other and were engaged in something called “despair work.” I would see groups of people sitting together on the lawn, weeping and wailing—it seemed very odd to me at the time, although I was intrigued. On the afternoon of the second day, I offered a short psychosynthesis workshop, using the old favorite “Four Drawings” exercise, and apparently had a good response. On the last night of the gathering, a founder and beloved teacher of the group paid a visit: Joanna Macy, who a couple of years later would become my mentor and friend. I only saw her from afar that evening, with no intimation of the significant role she would play in my life.
What a busy summer this was! The following weekend I attended a conference of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. There I continued exploring world events and the future of humanity from the perspective of humanistic and transpersonal psychology.
(Both) An historic event in the New Age community occurred that summer as well: the Harmonic Convergence, the world's first synchronized global peace meditation organized by José and Lloydine Burris Argüelles to coincide with an exceptional alignment of planets on August 16–17, 1987.
On that occasion we visited Edith Stauffer (whom we had originally met in Capalona during our time there with Assagioli in 1973) at her home in the Sierra foothills, getting up at 5 am to meditate together. Jim remembers a meditative gathering at the Creative Health Center as well; maybe that happened the following evening–the Convergence took place over two days.
At any rate, the meeting with Edith Stauffer began another short chapter in our lives: both of us worked briefly for her Psychosynthesis International correspondence program. We each took on one of her students, responding in writing–by snail mail no less—to the lessons they submitted. Edith may have reviewed and critiqued our responses—our memory is not clear on this, but that role was short lived in any case. Edith also arranged for us to offer psychosynthesis consultation to a group of people providing counseling to the homeless population in San Francisco. That was a minor disaster because those people were not really interested in psychosynthesis per se. We had the feeling that bringing us into the arrangement had been imposed on them by Edith. To this day, we’re not at all clear on how that consultation came about—and we were happy when it ended.
Family
(Both) We both flew back to New Mexico in late May 1987, Jim to attend and celebrate Cassidy’s high school graduation while Molly led a workshop in Taos (feeling very sad to miss the graduation).
When we returned to Fairfax after that brief journey, Cassidy and his long-time Los Alamos friend Jeff Martz accompanied us and stayed with us in Fairfax for the summer of 1987. They traveled nearly every day into San Francisco, where they did comedic street juggling for tips
When summer break ended, Jeff went off to Utah to begin his undergraduate journey toward a teaching credentia. Cass paid a short visit to New Mexico in August, as this letter from his doting grandfather recounts.
Cass enrolled at Sonoma State University in the fall semester (majoring in Theater Arts) and moved into a student dorm. The following spring, to our great delight, he was cast in a grand Theater Arts Department performance of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical. He grew out his curly hair into a huge blond “Afro” for the role. We all have beautiful and vivid memories of that historic show and nearly all the songs still play in our heads–and sometimes on the radio.
Fortuitously, Cassidy encountered Surya Singer one day in the Sonoma State library, who recognized Cassidy from Camp Winnarainbow in New Mexico where Cass had been a camper and Surya co-director. Surya told Cassidy that Camp Winnarainbow, now located near Laytonville in Mendocino county, needed a juggling instructor. When Cass applied for the job, camp founder and director Wavy Gravy remembered him, which no doubt helped him get the job. Jeff was also hired as a camp counselor and juggling teacher. Cass and Jeff spent the following few summers working there in various positions. Eventually Cassidy was promoted to the position of Performance Coordinator, working closely with Wavy and his wife Jahanara (who was the actual director of the camp in every practical way).
This connection to camp was an inflection point in Cassidy's life: it enabled him to meet his future spouse Rami Margron (who shared the Performance Coordinator position with him), as well as forming friendships that would become lifelong family and community, while also setting the course for his future as a performing artist and teacher.
Greg was engaged with Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz, taking full advantage of the program that offered opportunities to take a quarter of study each year away from the campus. In spring, 1986, while we were still living in Los Alamos, Greg spent a quarter in Mexico to improve his Spanish. A year later, in the spring quarter of 1987 when we were in Fairfax, he was enjoying an extended quarter in Hawaii, backpacking and studying the feral pig problem there. He wrote a major paper on his study (and sturdily resisted his parents’ urges for him to submit it to a professional journal for publication).
Then during the spring quarter 1988, Greg studied at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve in Costa Rica–likely the most impactful quarter of his undergraduate life. At the end of the quarter, he decided to make his way home by hitchhiking and taking local buses through Central America. He wanted to really immerse himself in the land and culture, and by then had a good enough command of Spanish to get along. We wanted to support him in this adventure, so as parents we made a conscious decision to trust he would be okay, and (to try) not worry. He checked in by phone whenever he was able. For the first part of his journey, he traveled with fellow students from Monteverde, so that felt fairly safe. He celebrated his birthday, June 19, with these friends in Nicaragua, which was still embroiled in civil war with the Contras (supported by the US government) frequently attacking the Sandinista government. Naturally, this made us more than a little nervous, but Greg encountered no major problems.
After that, he traveled on his own, making his way through Honduras, into Guatemala, and eventually into Mexico, hitchhiking, traveling by bus, and even once making his way through the jungle across a remote section of the Guatemalan border, accompanied by a local guide and a father bringing his son for medical care—hiking. boating, and traveling by rail on a handcar.
However, Greg was unable to contact us after he called us from Nicaragua until he arrived in Mexico on July 4. We became increasingly worried and tried to figure out what we could do if we didn’t hear from him soon. Contact the State Department to try to track his border crossings? Would they even have access to that information? So it was an enormous relief when he called us on July 4 to tell us he was in Mexico City. After he made his way across the US-Mexico border to San Diego, we sent him money to fly the rest of the way home–for a very welcome reunion.
Friendships
Two dear friends from New Mexico, Michael Fiddes and Deva Kelly, moved out to the Bay Area a few months after we did, much to our delight. Deva’s daughter Deanna joined them at the end of the school year, and when Mike and Deva took up residence on their boat in the Sausalito marina, Deanna came to stay in our spare room in Fairfax. We thoroughly enjoyed her company. We also spent many delightful hours on Mike and Deva’s boat, mostly in harbor. Later, following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, they moved to San Francisco to manage an apartment building in the Marina district. Visiting them there gave us more opportunities to get acquainted with that vibrant part of San Francisco
We also renewed our friendship with Al and Sharon Lowry, who lived at that time in a townhouse in Santa Cruz–with a backyard overlooking a wildlife sanctuary! We took several trips with them out to Point Reyes National Seashore, where unbeknownst to us, Al–a hard-working protege of the famous nature photographer Ansel Adams–took this iconic photo that hangs on our wall to this day. (The photo had also appeared in a juried exhibit in the Bay Area.)
Decades later we would follow the Lowrys to Mt Shasta–but that story must wait.
(Molly) My dear friend Joyce Jarmie died of metastatic breast cancer in October 1987. Her son Eric sat at her bedside in her final hours, playing flamenco guitar in the best performance of his life. The morning she died, I awakened to a strong sense of her presence and sent her love, only later discovering that this was likely close to the moment of her passing.
Then in the spring of 1988, I learned that my beloved guide and teacher at the Psychosynthesis Institute, Harry Sloan, had died of cancer. I had continued to connect with Harry after he left the Institute, including a couple of guiding sessions with him. He had also attended a meeting of colleagues to support my work on The Unfolding Self. Soon after we moved back to the Bay Area, he had asked to meet with me but we hadn’t been able to find a time. I think he would have told me then about his terminal illness. After attending a memorial gathering of his friends and colleagues in Muir Beach, I walked alone on the beach itself, once again the rise and fall of the surf consoling me for a loss.
On a happier note, my parents, John and Emma Lou, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on March 19, 1988. (They had always referred to their anniversary date is “the Mar-teenth of Nine-ch.”) Judy and I decided to hold a celebration in Tucson, because Emma Lou’s beloved sister Ruth and one of Ruth’s daughters lived there, plus the March weather would be much warmer and drier. We secretly invited the couple that introduced John and Emma Lou many years before, “Mike” and Wayne Veatch, as well as Al and Sharon Lowry. We all booked rooms in the same motel, so there were two surprise reunions in the parking lot! Judy and I wrote one of our doggerel “pomes” for the occasion, which we read aloud in the restaurant to the apparent amusement of other diners there. I believe we could not have given our folks a better gift than this–there were tears of joy and laughter in generous supply.
Townhouse in Petaluma
(Both) For over a year, we searched for a house to buy– at first in Fairfax and San Geronimo Valley west of Fairfax, and then in Sonoma County to the north, when it became evident that Marin County housing prices were out of our reach. Eventually we found a modest, affordable townhouse on the eastern edge of Petaluma. and moved there in June, 1988. This worked well for Cass, who was thoroughly done with dorm life; Petaluma was close enough to Sonoma State that he could commute there easily while living in our extra bedroom. Of course we were happy to have his company and enjoyed our new role as parents/companions of an adult son. That fall and the following spring semester, he shared the room with his long-time friend Jeff Martz, who took an exchange year at Sonoma State through his college in Utah.
The townhouse was attached on either side to other units, with firewalls between, which provided good sound proofing as well–and a garage adjoining its neighbor on one side. The kitchen, living/dining room, one bedroom and bath were downstairs; upstairs were a loft room overlooking the living room (it served as our joint office/study), our bedroom, master bath, walk-in storage closet, and access to the second-story deck. Both the living room and bedroom downstairs opened onto a small patio, with planting beds along the wood fencing. We found it quite comfortable, even though it was a bit snug when four of us were living there together.
(Jim) Having access to the community tennis courts and practicing fairly often with one friend or another was a special treat for me. The most memorable and entertaining time I had on those courts was one afternoon playing a game Jeff Martz had improvised. Besides Jeff, Cass and me, a fourth player had joined us–a supervising counselor at Camp Winnarainbow (where Cass and Jeff had been employed as counselors). The game required a member of one of the teams-of-two to serve while simultaneously bellowing out a spontaneously-chosen word. The player on the opposing team who returned the serve had to bellow out whatever word occurred to him while swatting the ball back–and so it went, back-and-forth. We quickly discovered that the more absurd the word a given player shouted on his shot, the more likely the opposing team was to crack up–and therefore to mess up the return shot.
(Both) On another memorable occasion, we were playing Balderdash with Cassidy, Jeff, and Greg. In this game, one player reads an obscure word from a card drawn at random from the deck. Everyone else writes a made-up definition for the word on a slip of paper, while the lead player writes the correct definition. After shuffling all the slips, the lead player then reads all the definitions, which can be quite absurd, and the other players try to guess which one is the right one. On this occasion, Jim tried to read Cassidy’s very funny definition without laughing. But in trying to suppress his laughter, he ended up reading it in a squeaky voice while all the rest of us collapsed in laughter, both at his attempt not to laugh and at the definition itself. Molly laughed so hard she fell off her chair while Cassidy ran outside, attempting to regain his composure away from the scene, and lay on the ground making such strange whooping noises that Molly wondered if the neighbors would hear and call the cops. It took all of us several minutes to bring the hysteria under control and we didn’t dare resume the game after that. All of us remember that scene vividly.
Molly rarely played tennis, but took delight in improving her swimming strength and skills in the complex’s swimming pool. We both enjoyed the community-sized hot tub, and occasionally made use of the modest common-house for parties and larger family gatherings. Another virtue we discovered in the grassy common-area was a level space large enough for us to practice tai chi–augmenting our classes at the Petaluma YMCA. Besides being spacious enough to accommodate our practice, the common area had enough trees around it to screen us from the view of passers-by so we were not distracted by our self-consciousness. Recreationally, our townhouse in Petaluma turned out to be a very satisfying place to live as we entered midlife.
That satisfaction was vastly augmented by the quality of time spent with Cass almost continuously, and with Greg less frequently but very enjoyably when he found the time to visit us during his five-year tenure at UC Santa Cruz.
PostScript:
The photo below should have been included in an earlier chapter. It was taken sometime around 1983 at a old-timey photo place in Durango, Colorado, and features many beloved family members plus Greg’s then girlfriend Lana. Enjoy!
NOTE TO OUR READERS:
We have reached the end of previously composed chapters, so future chapters may be slower in coming, because we need to write them first! This process of life review is proving to be very fulfilling and we hope it is interesting and enjoyable for all of you.
We also want to acknowledge the dangerous times we are living in today, with militarized violent fascism arising around the world. We see this happening in the USA as Trump sends National Guard and Marines into Los Angeles to detain and deport immigrants, and to violently repress anyone protesting that. We see it happening in Gaza and the West Bank, as Isreali forces bomb, shoot, and starve Palestinians, and may drag the USA into a war with Iran. Such tragic madness!! We recall a similar time in the 1960’s when both the civil rights movement and protests against the horrific Vietnam War met with violent repression, including National Guard troops shooting thirteen students, killing four, at Kent State University, Ohio in 1970.
May we as a species reawaken to our radical interdependence with one another and with all planetary life, and find our way through this madness to peace, love, and cooperation once again.
I so enjoy reading about your lives and I am inspired by your integrity and joie de vivre! I feel like I get to know you better and I love that. I hope all is well with you. FYI, I am thriving here in southern Oregon. xoxo
Have enjoyed the trips into the past.........some of mine coincide with yours.....but impressed with the details remembered.......I know I don't recall much of those years myself.....and am glad you have kept track of what went on...........