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Dear People, This month, once again, our annual intensive in the Work That Reconnects took place at Land of Medicine Buddha . That Tibetan retreat center among California's coastal redwoods is both unassuming and magical: simple quarters, clean as a pin, and huge intricately-painted prayer wheels, long wooden porches and gilded Buddhas smiling into the oak trees. It held forty of us in its serene and generous arms as we looked at ourselves and our world, and what this planet-time is asking of us.
Fran Macy loved these intensives and this was the first without him. My family wondered how I would fare without him at my side. But he was not absent--I felt him in the forms and structures we'd created together, and in the parts of the land he loved, not to mention a special place by the creek he claimed on his last Medicine Walk. It was sort of like encountering him. "Oh there you are, hello again."
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for the Indigenous Environmental Network, when he spoke at Bioneers in 2006. His words and pictures so riveted my attention that when an invitation came the next year to a conference on Ecology and the Helping Professions at the University of Calgary, I accepted with the idea of going on from there to see for myself what he had described. My plans for Alberta in May 2009 soon included talks and workshops in Edmonton and Banff, and the company of my Canadian-born friend Jennifer Berezan to enrich the events with her fabulous singing. Jennifer and I used our honoraria for the Edmonton event to fly, with my assistant Anne, North to the Tar Sands.