2001 Winter

I.

I asked Bill Graham Presents for press tickets to the July 19 Indigo Girls concert at Eugene's Cuthbert Amphitheatre, and was gratified to find two tickets awaiting me at Will Call. The outdoor venue, nestled amongst the fields, woods, and waterways of Alton Baker Park, is probably Eugene's best. I experienced most of the concert from the dance floor, perhaps thirty feet from Amy Ray, Emily Saliers, and their band.

I enjoyed much of the music--some early well-known songs stood out--but the more recent, alienated rock numbers left me unenthused. Most of all, I realized how much I like the music and musicians I do like, and that fame or commercial success are not necessarily directly correlated with talent or freshness of material. Discussing the concert afterwards, a friend and I agreed that two folk musicians who made their names here in Eugene are, in our estimation, more talented than the Indigo Girls, and yet likely will never be as well-known. (Playing alone, together, and with the band Babes With Axes, Laura Kemp--still local--and Katie Henry--who now visits periodically from her new home in Vermont--have been leaving marks on Eugene's musical scene for nearly a decade. They will likely never command a $28 ticket price, but I'd choose their music over the Indigo Girls' any day.)

I used to live in a cult which had very unconventional rituals involving sexual and intimate relationships. Among many strongly held views about the "corrupt" nature of mainstream society, meaning all society outside our particular community, was the belief that it was impossible that a healthy relationship--intimate or even merely sexual--could exist "out there." Since we did believe that sexuality was one of the essential human pleasures of life and that procreation was an important part of creating a new society, a set of rituals had been evolved to facilitate the whole mating process in a saner manner than we thought was commonly practiced in the larger culture.

Honesty, or transparency, was the key element in the social system. Ideally, everybody knew who was attracted to whom. Casually, working together, we would talk about our sexual attractions; and more formally, everybody in the community had mentors with whom we were in almost daily communication about any aspect of our whole lives, including our sexuality. And there were required meetings practically each evening, separated by gender, where we talked a lot about sex and relationships. The women's meeting had an important biological as well as social function, because birth control was performed by visual examination of the woman's cervix with a gynecological speculum by a trained participant, and each woman kept her reproductive cycle charted. This way people could have sex without the corporate interference of latex or drugs.

"I got a four page letter from your father today," my mother's voice said over the phone. I was sitting in a phone booth at Lost Valley Educational Center in Oregon. I had called her on my day off between two personal growth workshops I was helping to put on.

"He said he's divorcing all of us. He gets out of jail in four days and he's going to serve me with divorce papers. He says he loves us but he can't forgive what we've done to him."

I was used to my mother relaying the latest drama of my family to me. The pattern was for me to listen and then relay the story as I heard it to my friends. It was only a year ago that I realized how much energy I had tied up in my parents' "stories." How I used them to label and define who I was in the world: Victim, Savior, etc.... My first reaction to this story was to smile incredulously and sarcastically respond, "Uh-huh."

This issue marks the completion of our third year as publishers of Talking Leaves. Since the beginning of 1998, when Lost Valley Educational Center took over publication from Carolyn Moran and her Deep Ecology Education Project (who'd been at it since 1989), we've put together nine issues. Each one has focused on a theme of perennial interest to us--"Art and Ecology," "Cultivating Community," "A Sense of Place," and the like--and has drawn together diverse viewpoints and experiences from the larger network of people in our "evolving ecological culture." Operating on a shoestring budget, and thanks to reader support and several small grants, we've kept this forum alive and expanded its reach; we now count approximately 700 public and university libraries among our subscribers, in addition to numerous nonprofit educational and activist groups, and the many individuals who also subscribe. We've been printing 5000 copies of each issue, and if you're reading this, you have one of those copies in your hands. Congratulations!

As we approached press time, we learned that the readers of Eugene Weekly (our local alternative newspaper) had voted Talking Leaves as "Best Local 'Zine" in the 2000 "Best of Eugene" poll. We're honored!

People are still deciding whether to approve of passion and marriage between people of the same sex. How will they react when I announce intentions to marry outside my kingdom? I will soon find out for I intend to set up housekeeping with a handsome, magnificent eucalyptus tree that has long been central to my sense of well-being.

Needless to say, he is always there for me. A veritable sage, he is as lush in wisdom as he is in foliage. He is a dominant figure at the center of a small community of trees on an island of green in a human residential neighborhood. This oasis is shared by magnetic, open palms and a towering cluster of trees whose slender trunks come together at the base to form a basket for catching their fragrant fallen blossoms.