There are a lot of twists and turns in life. Sometimes it is hard to pin point them. Most often we don't know them while they are happening. This book and where it lead us turned out to be one of them.
I was involved a bit in the political scene in Puerto Rico. We lived in a lovely little casita in the suburb of San Juan, called Rio Piedras. The University was very near our house. I took Spanish lessons there for a bit, but couldn't help getting pulled into the politics. Riots were happening at the U. with increasing frequency. Riots for independence from USA. There it is again: the Vietnam War. Puerto Rico is a colony of the USA. Puerto Ricans had (have) to pay taxes and were being drafted to the killing fields of Vietnam in terribly upsetting numbers. They had to go to Vietnam. They had no vote, as if that would have changed much at the time. They were royally pissed off.
We would go over to see what was happening when we would hear helicopters and gun shots. I would sometimes send dispatches to Liberation News Service, the news source for many of the underground newspapers in the States. Many classes were cancelled because of the politics. (Same thing had been happening at home.) It was a hard year in the US for any person of conscience. The Democratic Convention in Chicago, the murder of Dr. King, the murder of Bobby Kennedy, the murder of thousands of American kids and millions of Vietnamese people. It was bad.
We worked. We partied. We ate lovely food. We visited the frozen food section of the supermarket on our way home from work many days to cool off for a few minutes. Neither work nor home had air. We had lots of guests. Patrick wrote to the woman who had given Bobbin the book, Jennifer Greene.
She wrote that she was going to study Anthroposophy (the work of Rudolf Steiner) the following year in a Masters program at Adelphi University on Long Island. Patrick became more and more interested. Many early hippies had become political activists. Many political activists were stating to turn to spiritual disciplines. I was not so interested, but I was, kind of. What I remember is that Patrick was galvanized by this book. He had to know more. He ate it up. He spent real time with it. My wobbly memory of my own reaction was that I thought it was cool, but that Bobbin and Patrick were much more scientific than I was.
I don't mean to say that I was not interested in spiritual stuff. I was a very good Catholic until I wasn't. At boarding school I was required to go to church every Sunday. We went to every denomination in Boston in the course of 3 years. Bobbin and I had loved studying World Religions in college, reading every original story we could; The Ramayana, the Bhagavad Gita, St Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Merton, Plato..that kind of stuff.
I had never read much of the Theosophists and none of Anthroposophy. Patrick decided he want to join Jennifer Greene and study with John Gardner the following year. It seemed like it could possibly be interesting.
As we wrapped up the school year in Puerto Rico, after losing P. overboard on a wild sail to Vieques with our psychiatrist friend, we made tickets to go to Long Island for an interview with John Gardner on our way to Europe to hike in the Alps for the summer. We needed to do something really healthy, feel bright crisp air, shake off the rum and the laziness which had become our habit in PR. It was a plan. We bought our tiny yellow tent, put everything we owned out on the curb for people to find and take home, and flew to New York for a twenty-four hour stay with John and Carol Gardner whom we had never met.
I was pretty certain that I could find courses I wanted to take n or around New York. I had no idea that I was about to meet the most important man in my life and I had no idea that we would start out like fire and water.
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