When I was five, and the Second World War was finally over, we stopped moving around to settle upon a small farm we called The Ranch, a few miles from the Sonoma coastline in rural Northern California, at the very end of the then-known world. Our rambling, half-built, half-wrecked house stood more than a half mile from the neighbors on the paved county road, so remote that electricity had never been brought in. Dinners were prepared on an antique wood cookstove, and eaten by lamplight. It was perhaps because our life was so primitive that I eventually became ill with tuberculosis, and was not expected to live very long.
I didn’t have the standard education then, in the textbooks approved by the State Department of Education, but bedbound and isolated from the other children of the countryside I learned instead to read from the books on my parents’ shelves. There were the classics: Shakespeare, Tennyson, Sir Walter Scott; and there were the more contemporary writers: James Thurber, Dorothy Parker and John Steinbeck. And there were as well the folk tales, the legends, and the myths; and while my body atrophied, my mind drifted into other realms that seemed to me more vibrant.
After two years I began slowly to recover and, feeling my body’s return, returned my attention once more to the world outside my window. I ventured out into and rambled the fields and woods near my home in greater and greater circles, reacquainting myself with the natural world in which the mystical elements of life could still be recognized. To repair my damaged lungs I was provided a recorder, with a few lessons from a kindly if eccentric neighbor; I took the small wooden flute out on my wanderings and played, making the music the way that I fit into the world that I explored. I sometimes brought my books and my paints with me as well, and sometimes wrote what I believed were poems, which I would hide in the trunks of trees and under rocks as gifts given and received anonymously.
In those days, in that part of Sonoma County, the wildlife was teeming; and in addition to the routine deer and redtail hawk, who were not frightened of me but came and went as they chose, I saw bear, fox and condor, and snakes of great size slowly unraveling across my path. I napped and dreamed in the flattened grasses of the meadow where deer had curled themselves to sleep, lay in the bottom of my boat out on Orr’s pond to watch the hawks lazily circle the swaying eucalyptus trees, and crouched by the stream where raccoons washed their food. I pressed my young body to ease its treacherous yearnings, now mysterious in its own stirrings, against the smooth red limbs of manzanita and madrone for the delicious surrendering, and then would sleep myself in the warm and eternal Summer sun.
I brought the cows in from the fields to the barn mornings and evenings for their milking, and still can hear the first few squirts of milk that I pulled in streams from her teats which rang like bells into the bucket that I kept pinned between my heels, seated low on the milkstool with my forehead pressed against the great warm wall of the cow. Until the day I was caught in a swarm, but never afterwards, I daily walked through the thick sweet buzzing atmosphere where the beehives had been set out near the berryfields. When I became older my chores began to include felling trees and bucking them up to be split for firewood.
At night I would scan the skies uneasily for great silvery phantoms that would slip and hide among the towering clouds, faeries and pixies could be heard at times and almost seen out the corner of my eye, and I would walk softly through the dark woods aware of the ghosts that could pursue me across the old footbridge if they knew I were there. I studied the stars for the figures of mythology, and invented my own; and certain moonless nights they would take my breath away when I saw them suddenly become pinholes in the dark skies through which One Great Light beyond would shine down upon me. And I watched the phases of the Moon, and the risings and settings of the planets against the starry skies, and felt my pulse race with the wheeling universe.
When at last I graduated from the little schoolhouse in the village some three miles away, my world then opened to include the high school in town, several miles farther away. There I discovered the public library, and began reading books that had not been on my parents’ shelves. This is where I discovered the more esoteric books, about yoga and meditation, and eventually the I Ching. Because my mother had told me many stories about her childhood in Imperial China, had taught me rudimentary Chinese characters to help me understand language in a non-alphabetic form, I recognized the hexagrams as portals through which the mind could penetrate the appearance of an event to recognize the essence of the event: its meaning.
According to instructions given in a book I carved six flat wooden sticks, each measuring six inches long and a half inch wide, and painted a black spot on one side of each at the center so that, when they were gathered up and thrown down, they would form the six lines of a hexagram. Then I would sit cross-legged and close my eyes and visualize a door with that hexagram on it, and if I waited long enough the door would swing open and I could enter into another realm, where adventures always awaited me, like Alice through her looking-glass...