The Lofty Chronicles

~ Lauren’s Childhood at Light Morning ~

Part Seven: Gifts and Synchronicities
(continued)

Winter 1992 (continued)

I Told You! (Monday, 25 January 1993) Lauren’s on another reading binge. Our current bedtime story is The Lord of the Rings. Tom’s reading one of  The Narnia Chronicles and an Indian book to her. Ron’s reading her Tom Sawyer. And she’s been reading The Canada Geese Quilt to me, and Little House in the Big Woods and Alice in Wonderland to herself.

This evening she asks to be excused from the supper circle after a hasty meal and immediately curls up in an armchair with Alice in Wonderland.

“I told you this day would come!” she crows, then disappears into her story.

A Shrunken Teenager (Wednesday, 3 February 1993) Last night we celebrated Candlemas. A nice evening, with equal parts of music, candle ceremony, treats, and chatting. One of Lauren’s friends joined us and the two of them went outside with Ron during the candle ceremony/meditation, parading lighted candles through the garden.

This morning, while cleaning up the community shelter, we discover some clothing in the loft. Lauren’s friend had gone there to change into play clothes soon after having arrived last night. Among the tangle of clothes is a small, black, lacy bra.

“Is this your friend’s?” Joyce asks.

“Yeah,” replies Lauren. “She also has this lacy black underwear. And she stuffs socks in her bra to make her breasts look bigger.”

We nod noncommittally.

“She gets all dressed up like that, and puts on all this makeup, and she looks like…” Lauren pauses, searching for the right word. “She looks like a shrunken teenager or something.”

We all laugh, remembering Lauren’s occasional flirtations with make-up, and the awkwardness and experimentation of our own pre-teen years. Now, as parents, we get to re-experience it as our children embark upon their own tumultuous journeys through adolescence. As one of Light Morning’s basic working premises goes, “Anything unresolved from the past is re-created in the present.” I’m sure we’ll have plenty of opportunities for laughter and assimilation in the years ahead.

Hand Springs (Saturday, 6 February 1993) We’re walking down from the community shelter this evening. Moonlight over the garden. Lauren is practicing hand springs. She’s got cartwheels down and has recently been urging Joyce to help her learn to do hand springs. Apparently Joyce’s instructions are working.

“My best one yet!!” Lauren cries out, after utilizing a slight downhill slope to gather enough momentum to flip over and land on her feet.

She’s loving gymnastics, martial arts, and tree climbing these days. Other favorite activities include painting, crocheting, sewing, playing with her dolls, and modeling a whole family of wonderful little creatures out of colored clay.

And, of course, reading.

How Does the World Need Me? (Sunday, 7 February 1993) Last night we sat around the shelter talking with Sarah, Alice’s firstborn, who spent the weekend with us. She needed to be away from home for a while and get some perspective on her life. She’s a junior in high school and is full of questions and emotions and awareness. She stayed at Windwian, our guest cabin, talked with various ones of us, and also spent some time alone.

Anyway, we got talking about how ever since she was a young child, she has been deeply touched by the beauty of the Earth. We reminisced about her first walk out to Yoga Knoll, when she was three or four years old.

“How beautiful it is!” she had said in a hushed tone. “How beautiful it is!” And her eyes had brimmed with tears of wonder at the sweep of the hills across the valley.

Then our conversation turned to the special gifts each of us has, and how deeply the Earth needs these gifts.

Lauren, throughout this talk, was over in a corner reading a book, paying no apparent attention to what we were saying. But we’ve come to know better. Her antenna is always up. It’s almost frightening how totally tuned in she is to the nuances of her environment, and especially to the words and emotions of her parents.

This morning, after I’ve gone up to stoke the fire in the shelter, Lauren is wondering aloud to Joyce.

“How does the world need me?” she muses.

“I think,” she continues, more to herself than to Joyce, “I think the world needs my drawing.”

This apparently satisfies her for the moment and she goes on about her day.

A Humongous Jump (Wednesday, 10 February 1993) Lauren is recounting her morning’s dream to me.

“Some big kids are picking on one of my friends–a girl. Teasing her. So I run at them and jump on one of them and hold on tight. They run, and I keep hanging on to the one I jumped on. Then the one I’m hanging on to makes this humongous jump, about ten or fifteen feet high, and twists around in the air and lands like it’s a karate jump. And I still hang on tight!

Mending a Friendship (Wednesday, 10 February 1993) I’ve been feeling like Sisyphus lately, in relation to Lauren’s friendship with Becky. It’s a friendship that I’ve been trying to nurture for quite a while, frequently inviting Lauren to accompany me when I visit Becky’s parents, and occasionally initiating a visit just for that purpose.

Becky’s a nice kid , she lives next door, and, like the other children in that family, she home schools. Their age difference (Lauren’s going on 9, Becky’s 11 or 12) doesn’t seem to matter much. They enjoy each other’s company.

Last fall, however, their friendship hit a rough spot. Becky mentioned to Lauren that she thought that another girl in the neighborhood was strange in some ways. Lauren inappropriately passed this on to the other girl, with some embellishment, and it ended up getting back to Becky, who, understandably, was hurt and angry.

This was compounded by a misunderstood remark that Lauren made at a party. Then Becky’s mom’s parental protectiveness was triggered, and she got angry, and let Lauren know about it.

All this began to surface just before our trip to California. It wasn’t until we had returned, and the rush of Christmas had passed, that I could turn to it. By then, the trail (of figuring out what had happened), as well as the friendship, had grown quite cold.

My initial reaction is one of frustration and regret. I feel like Joyce feels when one of her important plantings–a shrub or a cluster of flowers in which she’s invested a sizable amount of energy–gets mowed down by the deer. Then I realize that this is also a perfect opportunity to explore the importance of friendship and the process of problem-solving and conflict resolution.

So I invite Lauren to visit Becky’s family with me one evening. She wrestles with her reluctance and, after a considerable struggle, is able to overcome it. Once there, I encourage Becky and Lauren and the other kids to share what had happened, and what their feelings about it are.

Lauren is pretty uncomfortable, parking herself right next to me the whole evening. But overall it goes well. Everyone finally being able to talk things over and sort their feelings out seems to break the ice.

Over the next couple of weeks we visit several more times, each visit being a little easier. Now the two girls are happily playing together again, the wounds have seemingly healed, and with the healing has come a renewed appreciation of how important friends are. Lauren and Becky’s willingness to mend their friendship has paid off numerous times in recent weeks–as they rendezvous at the horse pasture; or go sledding by the back barn; or make plans to practice witchcraft together in one of our unused cabins, once the weather warms up.

Mom (by Lauren)

Profiles (Thursday, 11 February 1993) Lauren’s been drawing profiles lately, eagerly following Joyce’s artistic tips. Here are a couple of her nicest ones.

Sentient Beings? (Wednesday, 17 February 1993) The Radford Army arsenal, thirty-some miles to the west of us, blew up this afternoon. Joyce and I were working upstairs when we heard a rumble like thunder in the blue sky and felt our house tremble. We knew immediately what had happened. There have been similar explosions in the past.

At supper tonight, Ron says, “I heard on the news that the nitro-glycerin that blew up in that room at the arsenal today was all being handled by robots, and that no one was hurt.”

“That’s good,” we reply, recalling that some of the prior explosions had resulted in fatalities.

There’s a moment of silence. Then Lauren says,” Do robots have feelings?”

Dad (by Lauren)

We all smile. I associated to the Star Wars trilogy, one of Lauren’s favorite stories, which she listens to on the tape player and occasionally watches on the VCR. She’s doubtless thinking about the two personable robots in those movies, C3PO and R2-D2. Lauren’s affection for them has probably been translated into a concern for the robots at the arsenal, which has caused her to question our assertion that, “No one was hurt in the explosion.”

We grownups perhaps too easily dismiss such child-like empathy as merely anthropomorphic. Yet Lauren’s question (“Do robots have feelings?”) is an important one. For other, related questions come from the same place. “Do animals raised for food have feelings? Do the live trees we cut for firewood have feelings? Do the fish and birds and seals killed by an oil spill have feelings?” And if these creatures do have feelings, do they also have rights?

Why is it easier for children to ask these questions than it is for adults? Even when grownups do ask such questions, they are generally asked not from the heart but from the head. Maybe children more easily identify with other creatures having feelings and rights because their own feelings and rights often go unacknowledged by the giants with whom they live. Or perhaps children are still open to an innate empathy, a spontaneous compassion, which has not yet been covered over by layer upon layer of responsibilities, guilts, and vested interests.

We have much to learn from such seemingly naive questions. In this so-called civilized world, we grant few if any rights to other-than-human species. And we routinely dehumanize those members of our own species who differ from us in color, status, or belief, the more easy to commit atrocities upon them.

With the planet giving us increasingly painful feedback for these follies, we may need to become again as little children and to ask, from the depths of our hearts, some rather simple, child-like questions.

Sowin’ on the Mountain (Thursday, 18 February 1993) “What does that mean?” Lauren asks.

We’re doing dishes after lunch. I’ve been singing, “Sowin’ on the Mountain,” an old folk song that I grew up listening to as a kid. The chorus goes,

Sowin’ on the mountain, reapin’ in the valley,
Sowin’ on the mountain, reapin’ in the valley,
Sowin’ on the mountain, reapin’ in the valley,
You’re gonna reap just what you sow.

“That line about sowing on the mountain and reaping in the valley,” she continues. “I don’t understand what that means. And why does the song say we’re going to reap just what we sow?”

“Well,” I reply, unconsciously stalling for time, “maybe it means that everything that we think and feel and say is like seeds. And we’re constantly planting these seeds in our heads and hearts–or, like the song puts it, on the ‘mountain.’ But then our thoughts and feelings keep on growing and growing, just like regular seeds do when you plant them in the garden. And they finally get so big that they turn into all the things that we see and touch and experience in the world around us–in the ‘valley.’”

I watch as she dries some silverware, wondering how I’m sizing my reply. Lauren’s spiritual (for want of a better word) education is like the rest of her education-it’s largely child-led. She listens to what we talk about, watches what we do. And sometimes, generally at the most unexpected moments, she asks a question. Our responses, of course, can’t be thought out beforehand. One just has to wing it.

“So maybe the song is reminding us to pay attention to our thoughts and feelings,” I conclude. “Because whatever’s happening to us down here in the valley has a lot to do with the seeds we’ve been sowing on the mountain. Just like we’ll eat different kinds of food out of our garden this summer, depending on whether we plant carrot and tomato seeds this spring, or briars and jimson weed.”

She turns my words over in her mind while she picks up another wooden bowl from the dish drainer and slowly dries it.

“And it’s not just that we reap what we sow,” she finally says. “We also sow what we reap.”

Now it’s my turn to wash the last of the dishes and think things over.

“Are you talking about saving seeds?” I ask.

“Yeah. We get the seeds we’re going to sow next year from what we harvest this year.”

“Good point,” I say, emptying the dish pans and giving the sink one last swipe with the sponge. “I hadn’t thought about it quite like that before, but you’re right, it does work both ways. Maybe we’ll have to make up another verse for that song.”

Dream Bleed-Through (Friday, 26 February 1993) Lauren’s telling her dream from last night:

“There’s this mouse we’ve caught, and she’s laying on a board or something in the portico. She isn’t running away or anything. She’s perfectly content. Then somebody sees that she’s a little pregnant mousie and says, ‘Oh, great!’ Because we’ll have to keep her for a while because it’s cold weather.”

Later this morning, in waking life, Joyce finds four little dehydrated mice as she’s sorting through her fabric supply. The tiny, mummified remains resulted from our month-long trip to California. Mice got into our cabin while we were away and reproduced rapidly. The mother mouse was probably among those we live-trapped and transported down the road upon our return. Her babies had been too small to survive on their own.

A curious “bleed-through” between Lauren’s dream and the waking world.

The “F” Stamp (Friday, 26 February 1993) Just before the lunchtime grace circle, Lauren had been rummaging through the stamp drawer. She’s been interested in stamps lately, asking us to save any unusual ones on our incoming mail. As we sit down to eat, she holds up one that she’d found in the drawer.

“This U.S. stamp,” she reads, “along with 25 cents of additional U.S. postage… What does that mean? What kind of a stamp is this?”

“It’s called an ‘F’ stamp,” someone says, and starts to explain.

“A what?!!” Lauren asks, with a giggle.

“An ‘F’ stamp.”

“That’s what I thought you said.” Another, louder giggle.

We smile, catching her drift. She immediately associated to slang usage. Kid lingo. The infamous and ultimately titillating “F Word.”

“If you have a 25-cent stamp,” the explainer tries to continue, “you can use it with one of these ‘F’ stamps…”

But that’s all the further he gets.

“I’m not going to be using any ‘F’ stamp,” Lauren interrupts with a laugh, tossing it aside in mock repudiation.

We join in her laughter.

And I find myself appreciating anew having Lauren’s pre-teen (as well as Tom’s seventy-something) perspective in this family. They both provide a marvelous tonic to the sometimes myopic concerns of us forty- and fifty-year-olds.

~ Lauren’s Childhood at Light Morning ~

Part Seven: Gifts and Synchronicities

Lauren's gear

Winter 1992

The Worst Day of My Life (Tuesday, 1 December 1992) We’re in California, helping celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Today, however, is Lauren’s big day. We’re on our way to visit Nat, the boy who took such an interest in her last summer when she and Joyce spent a week at the Augusta Heritage Center in West Virginia, where Joyce had been an assistant calligraphy instructor. Some correspondence between Nat and Lauren followed, and this visit was arranged.

As we approach his neighborhood, Lauren’s eagerness and apprehension increase visibly.

“This is the worst day of my life,” she mutters, as we turn onto the street where Nat lives. Her smile, however, tells a different story.

During the first five minutes of the visit, as we talk with Nat’s parents, Lauren sticks close beside us. Then Nat and his younger brothers draw her into their play. Nat’s mother quietly tells us that he never really got over his infatuation with Lauren after meeting her this summer.

Soon Nat’s brothers start teasing him about Lauren. And when Lauren shyly opens a present from him, and finds a necklace, the teasing becomes merciless.

“Nat L-O-V-E-S’s Lauren. Nat L-O-V-E-S’s Lauren.”

Fortunately (or perhaps by design), when we sit down for lunch there aren’t quite enough places at the table for everyone. So Nat’s mother kindly sets a small table for two, off in a corner of the room, where Lauren and Nat can eat in peace and chat together quietly. After lunch, his father takes Joyce and I and the two kids off for several hours to hike in the nearby hills. We walk and talk and throw a football around and get to know one another.

So the day turns out to be a pleasant one. Not nearly the worst of her life, Lauren readily agrees. In fact, she later gives her aunt and uncle quite a warm account of her visit with Nat.

“He’s not a boyfriend, though,” she carefully points out, perhaps to forestall the type of teasing she saw Nat receive. “He’s a friend who’s a boy.”

Sign Language (Friday, 11 December 1992) We’re visiting my cousin Lisa in Flagstaff, Arizona, on our way back from Hope and Caleb’s 50th wedding anniversary celebration. Early in the visit, Lauren discovers that Lisa is taking a course in American Sign Language. Immediately intrigued, she asks Lisa to teach her the finger-spelling signs for the alphabet. Lisa does so, then lets Lauren use some of her course material.

Ever since, Lauren has been immersed in her books and practice. It isn’t unusual for me to leave a conversation in the living room and head up the stairs, only to find Lauren nestled on a step, half-way up, deep in her studies.

Today Lisa takes us to some Anasazi ruins at Lomaki. Lauren is only barely willing to leave the sign language book in the car when we go to explore the site. After a lovely hike through the enchanting, snow-covered ruins, we return to the car.

“Now I can get back to my conversation,” Lauren exclaims, diving back into her book.

Then she explains that she’s practicing for a sign language conversation that she’ll be having with some deaf people in the Chicago train station on our way home in several days.

[Sure enough, settling in for the lay-over in Chicago several days later, we find ourselves next to someone who "happens" to know sign language. She has a deaf grandchild. And as soon as she leaves for her train, someone else sits down who also knows sign language. So perhaps Lauren, who engaged both women in hand talk, had a prophetic guess; or perhaps her intense interest attracted what she wanted; or maybe Chicago's "Union" Station is a hotbed of synchronicity. Joyce and I still recall with wonder our Thanksgiving communion with the nun from Milwaukee in this very station on our way out west. Yet another so-called chance encounter.]

The ABC’s of Home Schooling (Saturday, 12 December 1992) We’re nearing the end of our visit with Lisa. Lauren calls me over to the mirror, where she’s practicing her finger-spelling.

“Do you want to play learning?” she asks.

“Sure.”

And she proceeds to teach me the alphabet.

While learning my visual ABC’s, I’m struck by the power of what’s happening. The phrase “home schooling” doesn’t feel appropriate. “Home learning” is a bit better. Or “home education,” in the root sense of education meaning to draw forth.

It’s so exquisitely ironic! Here I stand with my daughter, in front of a mirror, learning my ABC’s. I’m not teaching her the ABC’s; she’s teaching me. And she has learned them entirely on her own, either from books or from what she has begged out of Lisa.

Talk about child-led learning! This is a prime example.

From what mysterious depths did her impulse come, to be so powerful and insistent?

And now I recall her peculiar phrasing as she invited me to join her: “Do you want to play learning?”

Learning not as drudgery or rote. Not as something demanded by another. But learning as play, so that, “come learn with me” and “come play with me” become indistinguishable. And then having the gift of sufficient free time to follow her interest wherever it takes her, no matter how fleeting or consuming the impulse may turn out to be.

This is the flavor of true education–a seamless, sparkling garment in which all distinctions between work and play, living and learning, parent and child, teacher and student, are effortlessly dissolved into a contagion of enthusiasm.

Stone Fox (Tuesday, 22 December 1992) On the last leg of our return journey from California, riding the Cardinal from Chicago to Virginia, Lauren befriended a girl about her age. (This, by the way, has been a consistently enriching aspect of our journey–the presence of other children on the train, and Lauren’s easy friend-making ability.) At one point, Lauren’s new companion brought a book back to the seat where they were sitting and started reading it aloud.

Her reading level was a bit beyond Lauren’s. Joyce and I kept casual tabs on the scene, wondering what Lauren’s reaction would be. Would she feel disconcerted by the discrepancy between their reading abilities? Or would she feel challenged in a competitive sort of way? Or would she be indifferent? I doubted it would be the latter reaction, since Lauren was keeping an eagle eye on her friend’s face and book throughout the reading session.

A day or two after returning home, Lauren receives in the mail a book called Sarah Plain and Tall. It’s the latest in a series of Weekly Reader books that have been coming the past year, thanks to a subscription from her grandparents Joe and Sandy. The earlier books had been beyond Lauren’s ability, so we’d placed them on a book shelf to await her ripened interest.

After supper, on the same day this book arrives, we go to Ron and Marlene’s to watch a video. Lauren’s not particularly interested in our fare, so she tromps down to the little TV. in the basement to see what she can find. Much to her amazement (and ours) she tunes in to a movie version of Sarah Plain and Tall!

The next day, be it coincidental or causal, whether related to her friend on the train or to the overlapping of her new book and the made-for-TV movie, Lauren shows a sudden interest in the Weekly Reader books. Going over to the book shelf where they’ve been patiently waiting, she picks one out and asks Joyce to help her read it. It’s called Stone Fox.

So Joyce and Lauren develop a pattern of sitting down in a big chair together each afternoon. Lauren holds the book and reads the words she knows, turning to Joyce for help with the unfamiliar words. All of us are astonished by how much she already knows and how rapidly she picks up the new vocabulary.

Even more important, Lauren is deeply engrossed in the story, commenting on it as she goes along, and crying at the bittersweet ending. There’s no question of whether she’s comprehending what she’s reading. And as soon as she finishes Stone Fox, she chooses another, The Canada Geese Quilt, and asks me to help her with it.

Feels like another of those learning spurts.

Book Reader (by Lauren)

Reading and Drawing (Wednesday, 6 January 1993) Lauren shows me a picture she has just finished. It’s such a lovely blend of two of her strong interests–reading and drawing–that I’m including it here.

Money! (Friday, 8 January 1993) Joyce, Lauren, and I are having a problem-solving session. Lauren’s wanting to make some money. Her parents are looking for more help around the house. The mutually agreeable solution that we arrive at is to set a minimum amount of time per week that Lauren will devote to household chores, and beyond that she can do additional jobs for pay.

She’s excited by this solution and immediately starts pestering us about what needs doing. So we come up with a job list– sweeping, gathering kindling, washing windows, packaging calligraphy–and she gets busy.

This afternoon she looks up from sweeping the floor and glances at the clock.

“I need to work another 17 minutes,” she enthuses, “then I won’t have to work for the next three weeks. Or if I do work, man, I get paid for it. Money! Money! Money!”

Becoming a Goose (Monday, 11 January 1993) Lauren’s telling me one of her dreams from last night.

“I’m running away from these people who are chasing me. Then I just know I should turn around. So I turn around and run straight at them! When I hit them, I fall down. Then I start to feel this THUMP, like the beat of a goose’s wings in my chest or something. Then I see a flock of geese flying over, and I seem to be one of these geese. And that’s the end.”

“When do you become aware that you’re a goose?” I ask.

“It’s like all my life I knew I’d be a goose, but I just didn’t know when. And it was when I hit who was chasing me and fell down that I became one.”

“How did you know to turn around and run toward the people who were chasing you?”

“I just knew somehow that when these two guys with sticks were chasing me, that if I turned around and ran right toward them, right toward the middle of them, that I’d turn into a goose and be able to get away.”

The Charm Bracelet (Monday, 11 January 1993) I don’t quite know how to begin this entry. Bizarre, strange, synchronous–all the words have already been used, attempting to describe similar experiences in the recent past. One incident in particular looms up, casting a brilliant shadow of deja vu across me as I write. It’s a September afternoon. Lauren and I have stopped at Smith’s Store to buy apples. Lauren finds a small scrap of paper on the ground…

No, I remind myself. This is January. I haven’t just returned from Smith’s Store. I’m sitting at my computer, recovering from yet another plunge into the inexplicable universe. The encounter, now just minutes old, replays itself before my closed eyes:

Lauren’s playing quietly downstairs.

“Hey, Dad,” she calls up, “want to see something strange.”

I register some feelings of anxiety, perhaps triggered by a subtle tone in her voice.

“Haven’t we been here before,” I think.

“Sure,” I reply, wondering what it’s going to be this time.

She comes up the stairs.

“Look at this, will you?”

And she hands me a charm bracelet.

Three or four years ago, Ron’s sister Diane had this charm bracelet in her house, along with several other items that she used for entertaining small children. Ron felt that Diane’s stash was a pretty good idea, so he collected some similar trinkets for Lauren and Rosie, who was living here at the time, to play with when they came by to visit.

Shortly thereafter, Diane gave Ron the charm bracelet. Lauren immediately begged it off him, and it’s been kicking around her room ever since.

She places it in my hand.

“Take a look at it,” she says again.

I do so, noticing that six or eight charms hang from the well-made chain. There’s a little bell, a pair of scissors, a barrel and a goblet, all of silver. Looking closer, I see a small disk with a spinner-type arrow on it. In tiny letters, at the top of the disk, it says Lie Detector. Around the circumference are the words, True…False…True…False…

“It’s nice,” I say, wondering what she’s getting at.

“Look at the clasp.”

I run the bracelet through my fingers, the various charms feeling like beads on a rosary, until I reach the clasp. The side facing me is blank; just plain burnished silver. So I turn it over. There, engraved in neat capital letters on the inner, hidden side of the clasp, is a single word: ADAM.

I stare at it for a few moments in total, mute astonishment. Then I’m suddenly back on the porch of Smith’s Store, bending over a tiny scrap of paper that Lauren has just picked up off the ground and is holding up to me on the tip of her finger, a scrap of paper with a single work printed on it-ADAM.

The paper turns into the clasp of a charm bracelet; but the word remains.

“That’s too much,” I finally manage to say.

She nods and smiles.

“When did you first see it?” I ask.

“Just now.”

“You’ve played with this charm bracelet all these years and you only just now noticed that word?”

She nods again.

I shake my head (probably a subliminal shield of denial) and hand the charm bracelet back to her. She returns to her play, taking her charmed life with her, leaving me poised over the keyboard of my computer, staring into inner space, pondering the imponderable.

Part Six: The Turning Tide
(continued)

Lauren Wearing Her Mask Shirt

Autumn 1992

Getting the Hang of It (Friday, 30 October 1992) “I think I’m getting the hang of these comics,” Lauren bubbles, walking by with a comic book version of Star Wars that she’s been reading to herself.

“Glad to hear it.”

Later in the morning, Joyce finds her in the community shelter with a book in her lap. Several more are on the couch beside her.

“I think I’m getting the hang of reading,” she says, apparently enjoying the turn of this particular phrase, and obviously pleased with her progress in exploring the mysteries of literacy.

After lunch, with yet another book in her hand, she asks, “Can I go up on Snowberry’s roof and read?”

I’ve been installing Tom’s solar panels the past few days and Lauren’s been up on the roof giving me a hand. She’s found a small valley where the roof lines of old and new Snowberry meet and had spent some time lying there yesterday, looking up at the sky while I was caulking the panel mount.

“Sure. Just be careful.”

Ron later goes up to Snowberry to get some of Tom’s firewood under cover. He says that Lauren climbed the ladder, book in hand, and spent a long time curled up on the roof, happily reading.

Reading Over Breakfast (Monday, 2 November 1992) “Does anyone want to hear ‘The Ginger Bread Boy’ this morning?” Lauren asks, looking up from her book.

It’s breakfast time, but she can’t be bothered with food. She’s too busy.

Ron, Tom, Joyce, and I smile and nod, and Lauren proceeds to read aloud not only “The Ginger Bread Boy,” but also “Little Red Riding Hood” and another story. She would have kept on going, too, had she not finally lost her audience to their various morning chores.

Finding Her Pleasure (Tuesday, 3 November 1992) Joyce is walking out the driveway this afternoon and comes upon Lauren, perched in the upper branches of a dogwood tree, reading.

“Ahhh,” says Lauren, with a slow sigh of contentment. “I think I’ve found my pleasure.”

“Ahhh,” I repeat, when Joyce shares the encounter with me. “I think we’ve found our pleasure, too.”

For this is just what we’ve been waiting and hoping for–to have Lauren come to the world of books in her own time and in her own way, and so be gently lured into the love of reading.

We read aloud to her often. We try to recognize and respond to her impulses to learn to read, which seem to come in waves. Beyond that, we refrain, as much as possible, from allowing cultural norms and expectations to dictate the how and the when of it.

“Lauren’s not really doing home schooling any more,” Joyce remarks. “At least not in the sense of us trying to teach her all these various subjects. She’s teaching herself. We help out now and then, when she asks for help. Mostly, though, we’re following John Gatto’s suggestion to just get out of the way and let it happen.

“That’s what’s so radical about it. She decides what she’s interested in at any particular moment and how to pursue that interest. These critical decisions aren’t made for her by parents or teachers or other well-meaning adults. It really is a vitally different approach to education. It’s still a little scary. But it sure feels right!”

The Election (Thursday, 5 November 1992) The election is finally over. Ron voted for Perot. I believe it’s the first time he’s ever voted. A surprisingly large number of our friends and neighbors did likewise. Interesting phenomenon. I find Perot to be a refreshing candidate, but his analysis and remedies don’t strike me as being very radical. He’s looking deeper than the other two, perhaps, but he still doesn’t come close to addressing the roots of our problems and opportunities.

Joyce chose Clinton. Lauren accompanied Ron and Joyce to the polling station, where she was allowed to go into the booth and help Joyce cast her ballot. That way Lauren got to make sure she didn’t switch to Perot at the last minute.

Lauren’s been a staunch Clinton supporter. Even cuts his picture out of the paper now and then. I don’t know where she got her preference. Maybe from her friends next door, who have Clinton-Gore posters around their house. Or maybe she arrived at it independently. I asked her about it, but she wasn’t able to articulate her reasons for wanting Clinton to be president.

Only One Night (Sunday, 8 November 1992) Lauren has been trying out her wings lately. Until very recently she’s been sleeping in a small bed next to ours. She has a bed in her own small bedroom, but uses it mostly as a play area. Occasionally, when Claire or Myra spend the night, Lauren will sleep there with them. But she’s never, until now, been ready to sleep there on her own, let alone spend a night at a friend’s house.

A week or two ago, however, at her own initiative, she started wanting to sleep on the living room floor in her sleeping bag. Then she said she wanted to sleep in her own room. Joyce wisely replaced the foam-pad bed with an extra mattress from one of the guest cabins. She also bought a set of dark pink sheets.

Lauren was thrilled with the new set-up and promptly started to spend the nights there. I knew she had really made the transition when she came down with a fever last week and, despite feeling rather sluggish, still chose to sleep in her own room, rather than next to her parents.

Then yesterday I took her to Joan’s for her riding lesson. It was too cold, though. So we went to Claire’s instead. I told Lauren that Joyce or I would pick her up after supper. To my surprise, she said that maybe she’d like to spend the night there.

“Just in case,” she said, “could you or Mom bring my sleeping bag, my two pillows, my teeth equipment and a nightgown?”

I nodded and gave her a hug. When Joyce brought her stuff over in the evening, Lauren decided that she did indeed want to spend the night. Joyce told her we’d stop by for her the next day.

This afternoon we pick her up on our way to town to have supper with friends. As the three of us drive down the driveway, Lauren says, “I made an achievement.”

“You sure did.”

“Know what made me do it?”

“What?”

“I figured it was only one night.”

I’m reminded of the A.A. approach of living life one day at a time. Or learning to like an unfamiliar food by trying a little bite of it. Her strategy and willingness feel strong and healthy.

Joyce and I have also “made an achievement.” We have chosen to trust a gut feeling that, by keeping Lauren physically close to us during her early years (through the use of a Snugli baby carrier and a family bed), we would provide her with a fundamental emotional grounding and sense of security.

There have been times, over the past year or two, when we’ve wondered whether it wasn’t time to nudge her into her own room. And of course there’s been the inevitable cultural questioning and pressure from the “outside.”

But we’ve basically been able to keep in touch with the rightness of our approach. And now, as with reading, Lauren has signaled her own readiness and willingness. Once again, it comes down to trust–trusting ourselves, trusting Lauren. Not an easy or a blind trust. But oh so essential.

What I Didn’t Learn in School (Monday, 9 November 1992) It is sobering to see how little my formal education (my years in high school and college) have prepared me for the lifestyle and values that I have chosen. None of my current core values were emphasized during those sixteen years of schooling. Most of them weren’t even addressed.

And this isn’t because the schools I attended were poor or disreputable. They were both excellent institutions and did a credible job of inculcating within their students the basic orientation and beliefs of the prevailing culture. Only in retrospect do I see how dangerously narrow that orientation was.

More specifically, here is some of what I didn’t learn in school:

I didn’t learn how critically important good health is. Beyond one rather pathetic attempt in junior high school, there were no classes on how the human body transforms sunlight, water, air, and earth into personal energy, and the specific ways in which this daily, alchemical transformation can be optimized.

Nothing on the inter-relationship between energy level, mood, and perception. Or between exercise, stress, and wellness. Or between the health of the body and the health of the Earth. No instructions on how to decipher and creatively respond to the manifestations of dis-ease. And no awareness of, let alone motivation toward, the higher octaves of health.

Nor did I learn much about work. I learned how to work with my head, but not (with the exception of one junior high shop course) how to work with my hands. Nothing at all about building a house, planting a garden, adopting a more appropriate diet, heating with wood, or using alternative energy. I wasn’t taught how to maintain and repair an automobile, how to manage personal finances, or how to make wise investment decisions.

Even more significant, there were no courses in the recognition and transmutation of our rather toxic cultural attitudes toward labor, so that good, hard, manual labor can be experienced as something intrinsically pleasurable, rather than onerous; voluntary, rather than compulsive; playful, rather than serious.

Equally amazing, as I review my high school and college years, there was virtually no guidance offered in how to build friendships and nurture a family. None of the ingredients that go into a sustainable relationship–discovering and sharing gifts and goals; sensual and emotional openness; effective communication skills; solving problems and resolving conflicts–none of these were presented even as electives, let alone as a vital component of a core curriculum.

Preparation and training for parenthood was likewise ignored. Apparently this most difficult of arts was, like marriage and friendship, something that students were expected to pick up from their birth families or from the culture at large by osmosis.

Finally, my college had a chapel, and it offered courses in philosophy and religion. Yet none of the professors, at least to my knowledge, had much more than an academic expertise in these fields. The search for the soul, the urgent need for meaning in one’s personal and communal life, the perilous exploration of what Jung refers to as the collective unconscious, and the practical use of such inner disciplines as dream work, meditation, and prayer as means of undertaking such a journey–all of this was entirely absent from the catalogues and course descriptions where I went to school.

This is not to say that there weren’t many admirable and enriching aspects of my high school and college education. There were. Nor do I mean to suggest that our schools should be solely responsible for providing motivation and instruction in the above-mentioned areas. Other cultural institutions, such as the family and the church, obviously share this responsibility.

Yet if the mission of our schools is to help students prepare as fully as possible for life after school, and if such preparation does not include learning how to achieve and maintain optimal health, how to find deep pleasure in one’s work (be it mental or physical), how to establish strong and loving friendships and marriages, and how to discover meaning, purpose, and wholeness, or holy-ness, in one’s daily life, then our educational system runs the very real risk of becoming irrelevant to many of the young people who are coming of age in these perilously opportune times.

Puff and Stays-Around (Tuesday, 10 November 1992) Joyce and Lauren have been feeding soft pears, the ones that haven’t stayed firm during storage, to a couple of new friends. Puff, short for Pufferbelly, is a small raccoon who’s lame in one of his front paws. Stays-Around is a young deer, perhaps the fawn who was born in our yard, the one that Joyce and I and the mother deer chased an eager dog away from this past spring.

For both animals, their love of pears has overcome their innate caution. They come to within five or six feet of the feeder. Lauren likes to spike a pear on the end of a ski pole and have Puff eat it off the pole. The other day both the deer and the raccoon arrived simultaneously and ate together. They were a bit wary of one another, Puff at one point growling at the much larger Stays-Around and warning him off. There were plenty of soft pears to go around, however.

Soon we’ll be off to California. When we return, the pears will all be gone, and our wild friends will have to fend for themselves. It’s been nice having them around, though.

The Train Trip Across the Ocean (Saturday, 14 November 1992) Lauren awakens with a strong dream this morning. At my request, she tapes it. Then I transcribe it:

We’re going to this train station. It’s on a little island made of sand. I don’t know how we got there. When we get to the station, on the metal of the train is carved “6:00 TRAIN.” And when we get on the train, it suddenly starts to go on the water. We keep going and going. See, it’s on a low steel bridge, and it seems like the train is running on water. It passes over a tiny island–I don’t know, maybe three feet or something.

It keeps going, and then starts to hit the ground. It tumbles over in front of a bigger island. Then me and a few other kids are tumbling in the waves and we see something. It’s whitish-gray. And when we see it clear, it’s a unicorn.

The unicorn is a big, stallion unicorn. It looks really strong, like the metal of the bridge. It’s like all the metal of the bridge has turned into that big stallion!

Then it turns into a human. A man. And then back into a stallion. It’s like all the metal and iron and steel in the bridge just turned into that unicorn. I don’t know whether the unicorn could have turned into the bridge, too. I have no idea. The end.

When she relates the dream over breakfast this morning, someone asks if it was only kids that were in the water.

“Yes. Maybe only kids could have seen the unicorn.”

Dear Adam (Tuesday, 17 November 1992) Alice comes by this morning as we’re getting ready to leave for California. She mentions that Adam is going home for Thanksgiving. He hasn’t yet told his parents about why he moved to D.C. Understandable reluctance, but full disclosure seems needed.

Lauren apparently thinks so, too. She writes Adam a note and leaves it in the community shelter for him. He’ll be visiting Light Morning this week-end.

“Dear Adam,” the note reads. “Tell your Mom and Dad what you did! They’ll still love you. Love, Lauren.”

A ‘Chance’ Encounter (Thursday, 19 November 1992) Every now and then the universe startles us awake, as though we inadvertently come in contact with a live wire or a hidden nerve. The sudden shock jolts us out of our familiarity and into the moment. In this spacious, magical moment, needs are sometimes met even before they’re recognized, and the wildly improbable becomes commonplace.

We arrive in the Chicago train station this afternoon with a several hour layover before the California Zephyr departs for San Francisco to take us to my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. We’ve been mildly apprehensive about the trip, not knowing what kind of feedback we’ll get about the events of this past summer. A few of the people back home, both neighbors and “professionals,” have been critical of our attempts to offer support to Adam throughout this ordeal.

Their reaction is completely understandable. Sexually abusing children is a disturbingly deviant behavior, striking us in some of our most vulnerable places–the primordial protectiveness we feel for our kids; our own culturally charged and murky sexuality; and the profoundly ambivalent feelings we have about empowerment and victimization.

So our concern about possible further repercussions during the upcoming family reunion is like a low-grade, almost subliminal anxiety as we wend our way through the crowded Union Station, looking for a place to sit. We finally see three empty seats and settle in for the long wait.

Lauren is immediately corralled by a pair of twin girls, age 11. Soon the three of them have a board game spread out on the floor of the station. Joyce and I gradually fall into a conversation with the woman who is sitting next to us. She’s a nun, probably in her early 60’s, and is dressed in her full habit, which is unusual these days. She tells us that she’s on her way to visit her brother’s family for the Thanksgiving holiday.

We learn that she lives in Milwaukee and works as a chaplain or counselor or comforter in a local prison. She describes the hostile reaction she often gets when people learn about her work.

“Why do you spend your time with the prisoners,” they ask accusingly, “instead of with the victims? They’re the ones that need your kindness and support; not the criminals.”

We nod our understanding of her dilemma.

She goes on to say that this hostility escalated dramatically when she began to spend some of her visiting time with one particular man who is in prison for multiple homicides.

“No wonder she got people upset!” I think, for the man’s crimes are among the most lurid in recent memory. He was convicted not only of the serial murder of numerous young men, but also of cannibalism and of having had sex with the corpses of some of his victims.

“I’m the only person he trusts,” she says softly, almost to herself. “Because I can see the goodness in him, behind all the horrible things he did. Other people can’t see that goodness. All they can see is what he did. But what he did doesn’t make the goodness not be there. And if he can find forgiveness in his heart for what he did, that goodness will grow stronger.”

She falls silent, as though resting in the tension, the irony, the mystery.

In response to her openness, we tell her the story of this past summer, of how hard it’s been for many people to see Adam as something other than a menacing phantom.

She looks at us searchingly for a moment, then lowers her eyes.

“Do you know,” she says slowly, “that of all the people in the Milwaukee jail, the only ones I can’t visit are the ones who are there for sexually abusing children. All the others I can visit. But not them. I just can’t bring myself to do it.”

Joyce and I look at her wonderingly, and then at one another. Here is someone who has befriended and can see the goodness in a notorious killer. Yet she is unable to be in the presence of a child molester. How very strange, we think, that Fate, or whatever one wishes to call it, has seated us next to a woman who so paradoxically embodies both the compassion we have been striving for this past summer, as well as the cultural abhorrence we have faced and felt.

Later, when I go to confirm our departure time, the nun confides further in Joyce, and the paradox at least partially resolves. Trusting the intimacy of the moment, she says that as a young girl she had been sexually molested by an uncle and that she had never really gotten over it.

“I’ve never been able to tell that to anyone before,” she murmurs.

The two women look at each other, a sudden rush of empathy flowing between them.

Soon the boarding call comes for the California Zephyr. We gather our baggage and say our good-byes to our new friend, each of us feeling that we have celebrated Thanksgiving early this year, in a crowded Chicago train station.

Part Six: The Turning Tide

Lauren with cousin Pepper

Autumn 1992

The Turning Tide (Tuesday, 1 September 1992) The tide of this crisis seems to be turning. Several days ago, Lofty and Rose spent most of a day dressing up in fancy dresses. Lofty borrowed one of Rose’s hair bands and later got some for herself. She’s also taken to painting her finger nails again. And yesterday she took along a backpack full of dresses when she went to play with Claire.

Tonight, as we’re finishing up the book about Abbie Burgess, we come to the chapter in which Abbie is courted by and falls in love with Isaac. This elicits some girlish giggles from Lofty. Joyce and I glance at each other, amused and rather surprised by her reaction.

Later she says to Joyce, “Do you know what I’ve been thinking about?”

“What’s that?”

“I’m considering becoming a girl again.”

Three Balancing Acts (Tuesday, 1 September 1992) I’m engaged in three critical balancing acts when it comes to Adam. The first is between issue and dynamic. We are obviously caught up in the issue of his abusive behavior and the ensuing crisis. Yet we can’t allow our preoccupation with the issue to obscure the underlying dynamic of his chronic stress and alienation, which has been active for quite a while, well before it gave birth to the behavior. Issue and dynamic are intimately related, like twig and root.

The second delicate balance is between the literal and the non-literal Adam. I can’t afford to simply focus on one or the other–either the person standing before me, or that aspect of myself which he mirrors back to me. I must pay attention to both.

The third balancing act concerns my beliefs about change. While believing in the potential for radical personal transformation, a belief right at the core of Light Morning’s reason for being, I must also acknowledge the heavy, sluggish power of inertia. Can Adam actually transmute the deep twists that led to his damnable involvement the girls? Or is this like hoping for a leopard to change its spots?

Important questions, for both of us.

A Missed Visit (Tuesday, 1 September 1992) Lauren recently had a dream in which Adam came by and we all sat around talking together. She felt good about the dream and has been looking forward to seeing Adam on his next visit from his therapy program in Washington, D.C. When he actually comes to visit, however, and sits around talking, we’re in Roanoke and miss seeing him. Lauren is very disappointed.

Dream Song (Thursday, 3 September 1992) We’re talking over breakfast about how our life’s circumstances are like a powerful dream.

“If only we can stay awake to it,” I say. “It’s so seductively easy to get sucked into the vortex of the literal drama and fall asleep to its deeper significance.”

Then someone mentions the biblical reference about Christ being “the first fruits of them that slept.”

During this brief conversation, Lauren’s off in a corner of the community shelter, busily involved in a project and not paying the slightest attention to our metaphysical speculations. Or so it seemed.

Later in the morning, Lauren and I are down at the house. I’m ensconced in one of the big chairs in the living room, proofing the outgoing edition of The Lofty Chronicles. Lauren’s at the treadle sewing machine, in a bright mood.

“Zippety doo-dah, zippety-ay,” she’s singing. “My oh my, what a wonderful day. Plenty of sunshine heading my way…”

I smile and go on with my work. She continues singing and sewing, oblivious of my presence. Then I notice that the tune of her song has veered off. The lyrics have changed, too. Soon she’s half chanting, half singing, allowing the words to come through spontaneously, as she occasionally did as a young child.

I listen more closely. She’s chanting out her questions about dreams and dreaming. Since I already have paper and pencil in hand, and can do so surreptitiously, without breaking her spell, I begin to transcribe her impromptu words.

Don’t you call it a dream.
Why don’t you call it a dream?
Does anybody know what a dream is?
Can anybody tell me what a dream is?

The slow, rhythmical cadence of the treadle sewing machine is like a shaman’s drone note, calling forth and supporting the song.

If anybody knew what a dream is…
If anybody knows what a dreamer is…
So why don’t you know
What a dream, dream, dreamer is?

Then singing and sewing are suddenly interrupted by the sound of war whoops coming down the path. Moments later several kids burst into the portico, eager to play. Both song and spell evaporate into excited kid-talk and happy laughter.

Visiting Nat (Wednesday, 9 September 1992) Anticipating our trip out west in November, Joyce was recently wondering aloud to Lauren where in California Nat lives. Nat is the ten-year-old boy Lauren met at Augusta; the one who was rather taken with her. Lauren expressed interest, so Joyce checked the zip code directory and an atlas, discovering that Nat lives quite near Point Reyes, where we’ll soon be visiting my parents. She told Lauren this and asked if she’d like to visit him while we’re in California.

Lauren said yes. So Joyce got a letter off to Nat and his father.

Tonight someone brings in the mail, including a letter from Nat, and a note from his father, saying they’d love to see us when we’re in the area.

“Oh creeps!” Lauren says, obviously embarrassed that her impulse has borne fruit.

“I mean,” she adds, correcting herself, “that will be fun.”

My Name’s Lauren (Tuesday, 22 September 1992) This morning I’m reading a long letter from my father. Lofty, passing by, peers over my shoulder.

“What’s that name ‘Lofty’ doing there?” she asks, seeing a reference to The Lofty Chronicles. “My name’s Lauren.”

“Well,” I reply, “folks are only just now getting used to calling you Lofty, so it may take a bit of adjustment to get back to Lauren again.”

“Mom,” she says, turning to Joyce, “please notify people that I’m Lauren, and I’m a girl, and I’d like girl things for Christmas.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Joyce says with a grin.

Later, over supper, several of us are hoping out loud that Lofty won’t just go away, never to return, and that there will still be a little room left in Lauren for Lofty.

“I’m about 99% Lauren and 1% Lofty,” comes the reply.

Then she allows that the split might be more like 85/15.

“Hmm,” I think to myself. “The Lauren Chronicles?”

Bike Gymnastics

A Bizarre Synchronicity (Saturday, 26 September 1992) I have just been nudged by another of those numinous synchronicities which have interwoven themselves into the Adam crisis. Lauren and I stopped by the little country store this afternoon, just as Ray was closing up. The three of us are on the porch–Lauren choosing a few apples to buy, Ray carrying the remaining apples inside, and me wondering whether to bring Ray up to date on Adam.

Ray and Adam have had a fairly close relationship. He knows about Adam’s situation and is both concerned and supportive. Adam, however, has not yet felt ready to talk with him about it, so all of Ray’s information is sketchy and second-hand. And for some illusive reason, I shy away from broaching the subject.

Lauren finishes selecting her apples and goes over to the outside spigot to wash them off. Ray has just about finished removing everything from the porch. I‘m still wrestling with whether or not to bring up Adam.

“Hey, Dad,” Lauren calls. “Look what I just found!”

I walk over and kneel down beside her.

“I was washing my apples and saw this on the ground.”

She holds up a tiny piece of paper, about ½” square, on the tip of her finger. Something is printed on it. Looking more closely, my body hair starts to rise. On the scrap of paper, which has either been cut or very neatly torn from something larger, is a single word in bold type–Adam.

“Strange, isn’t it?” Lauren murmurs.

I nod wordlessly. Nothing else is on the ground; Ray keeps his place well swept. Just Lauren, and her apples, and a single piece of paper with a single word on it.

I get up, feeling rather dense for needing a sign so lacking in subtlety. Going over to Ray, I tell him that Adam has moved to D.C., that he’s in a therapy program there, and that he’s due to appear in court in a few days. He thanks me for telling him, and asks me to convey his support to Adam. I nod and head back to the car. Lauren joins me, her bag of apples in one hand and the small scrap of paper in the other.

I soon have the opportunity to pass Ray’s message on to Adam, and urge him to get in touch with Ray. He later calls and talks with both Ray and his wife, Diane. All three of them feel good about the conversation. So Lauren’s “chance” finding of a bizarre little piece of paper helps to catalyze a needed sharing.

Carrying the Story Into Her Dreams (Monday, 28 September 1992) Lauren has a dream that’s a continuation of our current bedtime story, The Lord of the Rings. She tells me about it this morning. She apparently awoke several times during the night, and each time she went back to sleep the dream picked up where it had left off.

“And the dream was different,” she says, “depending on what side I was sleeping on. When I was sleeping on my right side, the dream was really clear. But when I rolled over and was sleeping on my left side, the dream became foggy, or unclear.”

Convoluted Genealogy (Thursday, 1 October 1992) “Hey, Dad,” Lauren says. I’m working on a project. She’s on the couch, deep in thought.

“What would happen if some guy married an older woman. And that woman had a daughter. And then the guy’s father married the woman’s daughter. What would the relationship be between the guy and his father?”

I look up with a blank expression, wrenching my mental gears out of the project and into her rather convoluted genealogical question.

“Run that by me once more.”

So she repeats her scenario.

“Wouldn’t the boy be his father’s father-in-law?” she asks.

I think it out and nod.

She smiles.

“I thought so. Pretty neat, eh?”

Encouraging Feedback (Saturday, 3 October 1992) Joyce receives a letter today from a friend that she and Lauren know from Augusta, where Joyce teaches calligraphy. The woman was responding to a letter in which Joyce had shared the events of this past summer and had expressed concern about their possible impact on Lauren. The friend’s feedback, based on her relationship with Lauren during their week at Augusta, is encouraging.

“Lauren is still open and loving,” she writes, “and doesn’t flinch at the touch of strangers. I watched her relate verbally and physically to dozens of strange women and men. I’ve worked with abused kids, Joyce. They can’t do what Lofty did at Augusta. They just plain can’t. Period. So I believe you’re right. Bless her, she got off easy. Healing will take time, but you’re on that track already.”

Shaking Hands With Myself (Sunday, 11 October 1992) Lauren has a dream in which she is shaking hands with herself. She says it’s as though she is meeting herself for the first time, or congratulating herself about something well done.

Oh Creeps (Wednesday, 14 October 1992) We’re in the community shelter, standing around the cook stove. Marlene says some friends are going to be visiting this coming weekend.

“And they have two boys,” she continues, looking at Lauren, “who are coming with them.”

“How old are the boys?” someone asks.

“Around ten or eleven.”

“Oh creeps!” Lauren exclaims.

Then, seeing our smiles, she adds, “That means, ‘Oh great!’”

Girls Football (Friday, 16 October 1992) Lauren and I are throwing the football around after lunch. I’m showing her a few standard pass patterns—down and out, the button hook, hook and go. She’s having a good time running the patterns.

Later in the afternoon she comes over to where I’m working and shows me a piece of paper with some drawings on it. She explains that she has diagramed all the pass plays we had been practicing and has added a few more.

The paper has a big “GF” at the top, and other letters at the various positions. She explains that the “GF” stands for Girls Football and that “R” is Robert, “L” is Lauren, “M” is “Myra”, and “B” is Becky. She hopes everyone will get together soon and practice.

He’s Still Tom (Monday, 26 October 1992) Lauren and I go to town to see Tom, who’s recovering from skin cancer surgery. The operation removed and then reconstructed his lower right eyelid. It went well.

The surgeon also cut out two other small spots, one from next to his nose and the other from his back. He’s recuperating for a few days at Wes and Shara’s, so that his surgeon can keep an eye on his recovery without having him incur the expense of an additional hospital stay.

“Tom’s a little nervous about you coming in to see him so soon,” I mention to Lauren.

“Why?”

“Well, his bandages have just been removed and he’s afraid his face might look pretty messy and maybe a bit scary. He’s thinking you may not want to see him quite yet.”

“That’s silly,” she retorts. “He’s still Tom!”

“That’s true,” I agree. “I guess it’s like when Darth Vader is dying, in the last Star Wars movie. He doesn’t want Luke to see what he looks like underneath that big black mask. But Luke doesn’t care about the ugly scars. He just wants to see his father, face to face.”

“That’s right. I just want to see him.”

We have a fine visit. The reconstructive surgery was done skillfully, the healing has been rapid, and Tom and Lauren enjoy seeing each other.

Part Five: Trial By Fire
(continued)

Lauren's artwork: Tarot collage

August 1992 (continued)

Shards (Monday, 17 August 1992) Now that I can catch my breath, I’ll log in a few of Lofty’s notes that have appeared recently. The first two were tacked to the wall of the community shelter the past several days. One of them is on a sheet torn out of a small notebook that Lofty has been carrying around with her. It reads, “One thing at a time. Please!!!!!!”

The other is a drawing of a smiling figure, with the caption, “I Can Have Fun Now!”

Still another page from her notebook has a short sentence on it— “Lofty Brown is the best.”

Then there’s the note she wrote to Myra while we were waiting in the therapist’s office the other day. “Dear Myra,” it reads. “Do you want to come over sometime? We can talk about the big Fuss. Love, Lofty.”

Sure enough, Myra came home with us that afternoon and stayed for supper. But as soon as we parked the car, the two girls headed to an empty cabin and had a long talk, all by themselves.

The Shock Absorber (Monday, 17 August 1992) Looking back over the past couple of weeks at how all of us, and in particular Lofty and Adam, have handled this crisis, I realize that a hidden shock absorber has cushioned much of its traumatic impact. This shock absorber is a core belief that has been evolving within and among us ever since we arrived at Light Morning nearly twenty years ago. It has to do with accepting personal responsibility for the circumstances of our lives.

More specifically, the belief holds that each of us co-creates our personal realities. Such ongoing creativity generally operates below the threshold of our conscious awareness. And it is essentially beneficial. In the same way that our body has an innate urge toward homeostasis and health, and will initiate extraordinary (if not always comfortable) processes to achieve these physiological ends, so does the psyche set up precisely those circumstances and conditions that are necessary to restore psychological balance and to bring about psychological health.

This premise goes completely against the grain of the standard culture’s prevailing orthodoxy. And it has far-reaching implications. For it suggests that our conditioned tendency to see things in terms of black and white, or good and bad, is both short-sighted and illusory, in that it creates and perpetuates a world of victims and villains; of scapegoats and saviors.

What it proposes, instead, is the radical view that we all dwell within a miraculously pliant and cooperative universe, in which each of us is always getting what we need, just when we need it.

This scandalously provocative hypothesis sounds far-fetched and abstract in the telling of it. Yet it soon becomes tangible, and challenging, in the living of it. And during a crisis, it serves as an admirable shock absorber.

Adam, for example, has occasionally been able to get beyond regarding himself as a loathsome victimizer of the two girls, or as the potential victim of a harsh “justice” system, and to find a different way of seeing things. From this new perspective he becomes aware of the hard, cocoon-like shell of denial that he has, for so long, been weaving around his soul. He can feel the healing relief that accompanies the shattering of this shell. And he senses, in some incomprehensible way, that both his actions and their consequences are part of a profound process of self-healing and acceptance.

With Lauren, the cushion is neither conceptual nor verbal. Instead, she sees her parents and their friends not treating her as a victim. She sees them actively processing the various flavors and stages of their emotions. And she sees that being angry at Adam and being supportive of him, or condemning what he did while loving who he is, are not necessarily incompatible. In this way she can join us, and in many ways lead us, in choosing to focus on understanding and forgiveness rather than blame and punishment.

Blowing Bubbles (Tuesday, 18 August 1992) The image that comes to mind this morning is a huge, magical soap bubble. On a dusky evening three weeks ago, just after the traumatic revelation first surfaced, a small group of the parents and children directly involved gathered on our back porch. As we quietly talked, it became clear that we were being confronted with a rending choice of how to respond to this situation. And in choosing, it was as though we blew a small, iridescent soap-bubble, which grew to enclose all of us on the porch.

Since that evening, as the story and the crisis inevitably spread to the rest of our Light Morning family, and then down the road and into the neighborhood, the bubble kept growing, too. As it encompassed more and more people, it somehow encouraged each of them, in a subtle but profound way, to make a similar choice, to respond in an equally honest and caring way.

And as the story spread still further, into the offices of lawyers and therapists and commonwealth attorneys, the bubble went with it–tingeing reactions, softening hard edges, coloring judgments.

It’s as though we have fostered the polar opposite of a lynch mob mentality. As painful and challenging as this whole experience continues to be, there have been remarkable compensations. Witnessing the soothing effects of this magical bubble, seeing how truly contagious empathy can be, has certainly been one of them.

Full Speed Ahead (Thursday, 20 August 1992) Ever since Joyce and I read John Gatto’s book, and especially since listening to his tape, our approach to home education has shifted. The Oak Meadow curriculum, which arrived on the same day as the tape, sat around for a couple of weeks. We looked at it, talked about it, slept on it. Then sent it back. The principle of child-led learning, as radical and risky as it seems, feels too deeply right to us. To all three of us.

We have had only occasional misgivings since then. Lofty’s been involved with horses and gymnastics and out-of-school-for-the-summer friends. Nothing properly curricular. And we’ve had our own crises and busyness.

Still, it has continued to feel good.

Then over the past few weeks, Lauren seems to have shifted into over-drive.

She’s constantly asking questions: “I’m writing a letter to someone. How do you spell ‘hold’?”

Or she’ll sit beside me in the evening while I’m reading a book and she’ll work out math problems on a pad of paper. Or she’ll accost Joyce, who’s cooking, and she’ll ask for help with cursive handwriting. Or she’ll prod me into helping her set up a gymnastics balance beam, or using Word Perfect on the computer, or finding some books she can take out of the library.

I know these surges come and go, but her current binge is particularly well-timed. It has strengthened our faith in the rightness of child-led learning. Not that we don’t have as many responsibilities for her “education.” In some ways we have more. But now it feels like we’re all on the same team. And instead of us pushing her, she’s pulling us.

Lauren's Artwork: Sun on Mountains

Sharks (Friday, 21 August 1992) We’ll be going to the North Carolina beach with Joyce’s family again this fall. On the final night of last year’s stay, we went swimming by moonlight. The water was warm; the moon shimmering on the waves; the sea gently rolling. It felt peaceful, womb-like, soothing. Archetypal.

Today, however, Joyce reports a phone conversation that her mother just had with someone at the beach.

“She happened to mention our night-time swim,” Joyce says. “And the person’s response was that swimming at night on that beach isn’t advisable. Seems like the sharks come in to feed during the night. They’re not around during the daytime, but they come in at night. It’s apparently not safe to swim then.”

I have several immediate reactions.

The first is, “Jesus, we might have had a close call last year,” and my mind strays to various shark-attack stories I’ve read over the years.

The second reaction is more skeptical: “I wonder if that person knows what he’s talking about. I’ll have to ask around down there and see what other people say.”

This is followed by disappointment at the possible loss of our night-time swims.

Finally, and hard on the heels of my first reactions, comes a sudden sense of, “How perfect, how appropriate, that (at a dream level) our strong yearning to return to the womb, to float on the moon-softened surface of the ocean, should be counter-balanced by the threat of sharks. There they both are–the dreamy bliss and the hideous nightmare; the unsuspecting swimmer and the approaching shark–each gently cradled in the dark, rolling waters of the great Sea.”

Whatever the literal truth of the rumor turns out to be, it’s a perfect metaphor.

Clipper Ships (Saturday, 22 August 1992) Our current bedtime story is about Abbie Burgess. As a young girl in the mid-1800s, Abbie helped her father tend the lighthouse on Matinicus Rock, off the coast of Maine. Lauren’s aunt Heather found the book in Southwest Harbor this summer and sent it to Lofty. We’ve all been enjoying it.

Tonight, Abbie makes a rare visit to Rockland to visit her friend Prissy. While there, she attends the launching of a new clipper ship. Rockland, by the time of Abbie’s visit in 1855, had become one of the busiest ship-building centers on the Atlantic, and was providing many of the clipper ships for the coastal cities of Boston and Philadelphia.

Here I pause in my reading of the story and remind Lofty that one of her many-great-grandfathers, Thomas Cope, had a big fleet of clipper ships sailing out of Philadelphia in the 1850s.

“Probably,” I say, “some of his ships were built in Rockland, at the very time that Abbie was tending the lights on Matinicus Rock.”

Lofty enjoys the connection.

“What’s more,” I go on, “Thomas Cope made a lot of money from his clipper ships. And when Thomas Cope died, that money passed down through his family to his children, and his grandchildren, and his great-grandchildren–one of whom is your great-grandmother, Eleanor Cope. And when she died, she left some of that same clipper ship money to her children and grandchildren–one of whom is me.

“And Joyce and I took that money, back in the early 70’s, and used it to help pay for an old farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains. So some of those very same ships that Abbie saw being built, when she was just your age, helped us buy the land in Virginia where we’re now sitting, reading the story about Abbie Burgess in Maine.”

Look What I Found (Saturday, 22 August 1992) We’re in town today. A few errands to attend to, but mostly it’s a chance to get away from the crisis and do something fun with Lofty. She has an urge to stop somewhere and shop.

“But I didn’t bring any money with me,” she sighs. “I think I have some, but I don’t know where.”

When we visit the bank, she considers drawing some cash out of her savings account. She’s been slowly building it up for something special, though, and is able to resist the temptation.

“Why don’t I take you to see that movie you’ve been wanting to see,” I suggest. “The one about the three Ninjas.”

This elicits an enthusiastic response. So Joyce drops us off at the theater, I buy tickets, and we go into the lobby. As Lofty stuffs her ticket stub into the pocket of her shorts, a puzzled look comes over her face.

She pulls out a wad of green paper and grins.

“Look what I found! I knew I had some somewhere.”

In her hand are some dollar bills.

I laugh, remembering times in college when I’d come across similar stashes of money in the pockets of old clothes. My room-mates had been amazed and horrified at how indifferent I was toward all things financial. And here’s my daughter, thirty years later, carrying on the same tradition.

As it turns out, Lauren’s money remains unspent. After the movie, we visit Rose and her family. Lofty and Rose spend the rest of the day dressing up in fancy dresses, then changing into bathing suits in order to catch tadpoles, minnows, and crayfish in the Roanoke River. They have a wonderful time, and the thought of going out to buy something never even crosses Lofty’s mind.

Part Five: Trial By Fire

Lauren's artwork: Creature with heart

August 1992

An Intense Paradox (Sunday, 2 August 1992) I find myself lost in wonder at the intense paradox between Adam’s utter stupidity, at a conscious level, for believing that his reprehensible behavior with the girls would remain undetected; and his deep wisdom, at a subconscious level, for creating a situation that holds so much perilous promise for his eventual healing and release. Both qualities, the outer stupidity and the inner wisdom, stand in brilliant relief and dance together flawlessly.

Strong Medicine (Sunday, 2 August 1992) As the events generated by the disclosure of Adam’s molestation unfold, I’m struck by the relevance of the Christian teachings. From the Golden Rule (doing unto others as we would have them do unto us), to the warning about letting those without sin cast the first stone, to Jesus having taken his ministry to the outcasts of society, I’m finding our blood-myth to be strong medicine indeed.

The Summer Olympics (Saturday, 8 August 1992) How appropriate that the summer Olympics are under way. What we’ve been going through recently feels like a qualifying meet for the inner Olympics. It’s as though Light Morning has spent most of the past two decades training for moments just like these.

Fertile Soil (Tuesday, 11 August 1992) Adam stunned us last night, reporting that his lawyer is preparing him for the possibility of a possible 40-year prison term. “Twenty years,” the attorney stated, ” would be considered a victory.”

Pondering this draconian sentence during my morning walk, I inwardly hear the phrase, “welcome to the fertile soil of the mass mind,” and realize just how bankrupt our current culture is. How receptive its rich and loamy earth must be to new seeds.

Striving for Openness (Tuesday, 11 August 1992) Open heart, open mind. This has been my mantra of late. Keeping open the infinite array of probabilities. Releasing pre-conditions and pre-conceptions. Acknowledging the rightness of what is. The ripeness of what wants to be. These metaphysical abstractions have come alive lately, serving as a challenge, a comfort, and a refuge.

The Cooperative Universe (Tuesday, 11 August 1992) Another comfort has been the way in which so-called “coincidences” have multiplied over the past few days. I can’t begin to list them all. Even attempting to do so feels like taking a live butterfly and mounting it for display.

They range from Myra’s dad “happening” to be friends with the attorney to whom we had been independently referred, and having her home phone number, which we needed but had been unable to get; to our appointment with this attorney being on the same day and at the same time as Adam’s appointment with his attorney; to the exquisite timing of returning to our parking lot late in the day, just as Adam was pulling in, deeply shaken (having just learned of the potential 20- to 40-year prison term) and in need of support.

The T-shirt that Adam gave Joyce last Christmas reads, “Synchronicity: God’s way of remaining anonymous.” I see it more as God’s way of leaving a calling card. Especially when everything spirals out of hand, these tokens of a cooperative universe remind us of a bigger picture and a wiser design. They put us back in touch with the essence of ourselves–with the gifted Choreographer who shapes all the anxious and confusing moments of our days into grace.

Choosing Who to Feed (Wednesday, 12 August 1992) Joyce is wrestling with how she’s been channeling her energy lately. She has concerns about a potential, although unlikely investigation by Social Services into our lifestyle and a possible judgment about our fitness as parents. She’s also anxious about Adam being shipped down the river by the judicial system.

She’s feeling strong tendencies flowing in both directions–feeding her faith and feeding her fear. I’m reminded of one of the striking passages from the Castaneda teachings:

“It all depends upon what one emphasizes. Either we make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.”

History (Wednesday, 12 August 1992) “I don’t like history,” Lofty announces at lunch today, as we’re finishing up our soup and munching on some chips. The comment catches us by surprise, as Lauren has always shown a strong interest in historical biographies.

“History is stories,” says Joyce. “Like the story we’re reading now about Abbie Burgess, who helped tend the lighthouse on Matinicus Rock on the coast of Maine over a hundred years ago.”

“That’s different,” replies Lofty. “I mean stuff about George Washington and all that.”

“How about George Washington Carver? You liked those stories.”

“That’s different, too.”

A pause.

“Well, anyway,” she concludes with a grin, picking up her bowl, “these chips are about to be history.”

We laugh and let it drop, feeling good that she’s in a mood for jokes.

Later, however, while mulling over her professed dislike of history, it occurs to me that it may be her more recent (and more personal) history that she’s having trouble with. In any case, the laughter is healthy.

Three Wishes (Thursday, 13 August 1992) Joyce and I take Lofty to a therapist today. The visit is mostly precautionary. We feel she’s doing well with all this, but want to check out our impressions with someone who has had training and experience in this field and who comes highly recommended. The visit will also be helpful in the event that Social Services gets involved. The therapist first speaks with us together, then spends quite a while with Lauren. Her conclusion is that Lauren is handling the situation well and that she hasn’t picked up any significant inner disturbances. Basically, she’s very reassuring.

She tells us, for example, that she’d given Lauren a “magic wand” and asked what her three wishes were. Lauren responded to this often revealing diagnostic device by wishing for a horse, a sketch pad, and some drawing pencils.

Lauren later tells us that the therapist had urged her to acknowledge having “mixed feelings” about Adam.

“She wanted me to say that I’m angry at him. But I wouldn’t do it because it’s not true.”

Her stubborn refusal to see Adam as someone other than a friend puzzled the therapist. She thought at first that Lauren was repressing her anger. She later became convinced, however, that Lauren’s feelings were genuine. She told us to keep an eye out for delayed reactions surfacing later, but she didn’t feel this was likely. Nor did she think there was a need for further sessions.

Lauren's Artwork: Plane With Contrails

Crisis Update (Friday, 14 August 1992) Social Services has decided not to get involved in this case, so we’re breathing a bit easier. They’ve turned everything over to the Commonwealth Attorney, who sent a detective out today to interview Lauren. The detective was very sensitive and gentle, so it wasn’t nearly as traumatic as our fears might have anticipated.

I sent a letter to the Commonwealth Attorney (which I’ll include below), informing him that the parents of the two girls do not want to press charges, and explaining that our preference is for Adam to receive immediate and thorough professional treatment rather than punishment.

Our lawyer, meanwhile, has been conveying the same to the Commonwealth Attorney and she tells us that, “He is certainly hearing us.”

The current likeliest scenario is for some lesser charges to be filed, in order to enable the court to have leverage over Adam. They want to be able to mandate and monitor his therapy. Some limited jail time may or may not be involved.

Adam, meanwhile, has left Light Morning. He is taking care of loose ends and has an appointment on Monday with someone in Washington, D.C. who is both a lawyer and a psychologist and who specializes is these kinds of problems. My father learned of him through a friend and fellow law professor and passed his name on to Adam as someone who might be well-qualified to offer the appropriate help.

A Letter to the Commonwealth Attorney (Friday, 14 August 1992) Here is the letter that I wrote to the Commonwealth Attorney who is heading the investigation of Adam’s sexual abuse of the two girls.

Dear ________,

This letter follows up the brief phone conversation we had yesterday, during which you encouraged me to send you any thoughts and feelings that we have concerning the report that was made to Social Services on Monday, and your current investigation.

I’m sure you can understand the depth and complexity of our feelings. Adam was and is a friend–someone we have known, lived with, and worked with for over six years. That is what makes the activities he engaged in with our daughters so incomprehensible and so difficult to come to terms with.

I have no desire to minimize the harmful effects of those activities upon our children’s lives, both now and in the future. As a parent of one of the girls, and having listened to my daughter’s graphic description of what occurred, I have experienced many strong emotions lately–disbelief, shock, anger, betrayal, and grief. I have also been deeply disturbed and bewildered by the power of a compulsion strong enough to lure Adam into doing something so unthinkably insensitive and stupid. A compulsion that over-rode not only his decency, but also his common sense.

At the same time, and here I speak for both sets of parents and for both children, we are not interested in punishment or retribution. What we do want is quite simple–we want our children protected from further harm; and we want Adam to receive the best possible therapeutic treatment and support.

It is far better that he receive the therapy he so obviously needs, and then return to a place where people know both him and his problem, than that he be exposed to a prison system which holds little if any hope for effective treatment, only to be later released from that system into a strange and unsuspecting community, with his problems not only intact but quite likely aggravated.

Putting him “out of circulation” may address our need to protect our children from immediate further harm. But it won’t solve anything. All it will do is push our problem down the road–onto another neighborhood, another set of parents and children, another round of anguish and retribution.

Somewhere this terrible cycle of child abuse, of abused children growing up to abuse other children, has to stop. Somewhere we have to find the wisdom and the compassion to see that the needs of the victim and the needs of the abuser, far from being incompatible, are actually the same.

My daughter needs safety; Adam needs healing. What better way to protect my child, and the children of other parents I don’t even know, than to do everything possible to see that Adam receives immediate and effective professional treatment.

I realize that the statistics indicate that a full recovery from this type of compulsion can by no means be guaranteed. Yet the specifics of this case offer hope. Adam, for example, has been a member of our extended family for over six years. Yet it was not until very recently, under conditions of extreme stress, that his reprehensible behavior occurred.

This behavior, as far as we have been able to determine, was non-coercive. The girls were not threatened, nor were they told to remain silent. And while she now understands that his activities with her were highly inappropriate, Lauren also continues to consider Adam a friend and has been very supportive of him throughout this crisis.

Nor did Adam’s behavior extend beyond his immediate family setting in such a way as to become a threat to other children in the neighborhood. Although he was not involved as a direct caretaker with either girl, Adam’s activities grew out of a long, close contact with them. There has been no indication, in other words, during the six years that he has lived here, that Adam has taken a casual or opportunistic interest in any child outside of his home environment.

Equally significant is that, when confronted with the accusations, Adam did not choose the path of denial. Instead, he acknowledged his guilt, expressed deep shame and remorse, and made profound apologies to both the children and their parents. He then immediately sought professional therapeutic help.

This full disclosure was made at a considerable cost to himself, both personally and legally. To see the abhorrence he felt for himself reflected in the eyes of his neighbors and friends was shattering. Perhaps only someone who has gone through such an experience can appreciate how devastating it can be.

He also understood that complete denial was his best protection in a courtroom. But he realized that this ran counter to the interests of the girls and their families, who could be dragged through a long, costly, and traumatic legal confrontation.

Finally, he somehow knew that overcoming denial was the essential first step along the long road to his own eventual recovery.

In closing, I must again say that none of the above is intended as an excuse for Adam’s behavior, or as a lessening of the pain which he has inflicted upon our families. That pain, in some ways, can never be erased.

Nor do I seek to protect him from the consequences of his actions. To try to do so would be both undesirable and impossible. For how else are we to learn, other than by reaping what we have sown?

What I am trying to do is to overcome my own hurt and anger enough to admit that in both his words and his actions, Adam has demonstrated what I believe to be genuine remorse for his behavior, and a sincere recognition of his need for help. I would hope that this remorse and recognition, along with the strong preference on the part of the two girls and their families that Adam receive treatment rather than punishment, might be taken into your considerations.

Thank you for your understanding and your cooperation during this very difficult time.