Introduction: What It Means To Be A Compassionate Warrior Woman Taking On Capitol Hill

Links to be added

Friday,  Labor Day weekend: The 21st anniversary of the day I lost my eyesight.

Before I realize the significance of today for me, I am awakening trying to explain to myself why I would even think, consider, imagine I would want to put New Horizons and myself in a position to take on the task of taking on Capital Hill!

Whatever could I be thinking?

Trying to put thoughts into words I find myself considering the ONE story I had thought to write earlier in the week that might succinctly account for my making such a bold, brash pledge such as this.

Alongside this contemplation I note that I need to write two more blogs by night’s end of this day: one for the New Horizons Small “Zones of Peace” site and one for this one, in order to wrap up my monthly quota of one post per week for each.

Beginning early tomorrow I take off for the holiday weekend.  So completing my monthly obligation must be now!

What I had wanted to write about was the one, main "back story” of the front story about "What It Means (To Me) To Be A Compassionate Warrior Woman Taking On Capitol Hill," as I thought I knew it.

Then I started scanning a re-run of my past history beginning with that day that changed the course of my life, the day I watched Richard Nixon lie to the Watergate Commission and lots of people seem to believe him though I sure did not!

Upon awakening this morning I initially told myself that the reasoning behind this outrageous Capital Hill plan of mine could be explained by one simple story, maybe two, at the most. An easy accounting of what has brought me to this point. That was before I started reviewing past events more carefully. 

As the veil of sleep fell aside the main “ONE,” I thought, might be about the near-ceaseless debate Marty Groder, my former psychiatrist mentor, and I had had back and forth, like a tennis match volley, throughout the mid-1980s

We were developing our collaboration more and more in those days as I dug deeper and deeper into Marty’s original theories particularly the one about how high leadership individuals and convicts shared the same essential personality structures. This was the one that grabbed me most and probably accounts for much of my devotion to Groder.

How Marty’s theories could explain what had happened in the Watergate scandal, especially the part about Nixon lying and how and why so many seemed to buy his stories was what I needed most to understand. 

Yet understanding my compelling need was way far off in the future and still something I am inclined to ponder on occasion still.

I felt compelled to solve this riddle, heart and soul, like nothing I had ever known before. To solve the mystery, as I viewed it then and be able to someday turn what I believed Groder could teach me back into some kind of gift to Washington would become my driving ambition, next only to my love for my children and my yearning to be the best I could be for them.

It mattered that much!

And, somehow the two ambitions were tied together. But I did not know that until many years later.

The year that stands out most for me in this regard with Marty is 1985. 

President Ronald Reagan is in office and I, a local am having to admit to Marty, an outlier, that times, once again, are turbulent, as they often are in Washington.  

But what does that actually tell us about how Washington society and politics are totally representative of the darkness of humanity that is set in place and irretrievable.
Our debate goes something like this -- 

Marty (“Not always right, but never in doubt”): “Washington is the center of darkness for the entire planet, next only to Moscow!” 

Me, emphatically:  “No, Washington is the center of light, a battleground in the ceaseless war between darkness and light!”

Accustomed as I was to Marty’s Scorpio stinging comments, I cut him a bit of slack in the argument, factoring in that he was a native New Yorker. I could, thus, forgive his one-dimensional view on the subject of the dark side of Washington. 

I, on the other hand, saw Washington with the heart of a Beloved. 

After all, I had come to the nation’s capital just out of college, believing in Kennedy’s Camelot and all I innocently thought it represented.  And though my ideals have many times been disappointed and I had, over the years, physically moved myself further and further away from Washington’s center, I consider myself, to this day, to be a part of it, it a part of me.

For all its faults and no matter who inhabits the White House or Congress, the Washington I see is through the eyes of one who is in love with the town, its many personalities, peculiarities and ups and downs, most especially coming out of the political arena that is the very blood of the town.

Is this the story that explains my reaching for the this sky high achievement upon which I am now embarking? 

Sounds like a love story to me! 

Suggesting that “what it means to me to be taking on Capital Hill” is that I still have faith in the ideals that brought me to Washington so many decades ago and that these are worthy of my belief that collectively we American citizens and politicians can do better than we are showing these days. We have it in us. We always have. 

So I think it’s worth my best efforts and hardest work to fight for these in true Compassionate Warrior Woman-style, meaning fighting for ideals with all the strength, wisdom and love one can muster.

Yet I think this is not “The Story.” 

But it is a part of my story, a snippet, a chapter on the way to my laying out the whole saga, the saga my life has been for the past forty-five years since Nixon’s lying about Watergate, coupled with the prophecy that came to me along with it, altering the course of my life.

So I guess the bottom line for me today is that there is not just one story, not just one simple way to explain "What It Means To Me To Be A Compassionate Warrior Woman Taking On Capitol Hill."

There are many stories behind the front story. 

For example, there is the one about –

• How Nixon’s lying to the American people about Watergate affected me;
• The prophecy that came to me the day Nixon resigned;
• How it came about that Bill Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky and I went blind;
• Marty and I debating about the dark and light sides of Washington and what that meant to me then and what it means to me today;
• Why I found Obama’s leadership and how people responded to it so disheartening at times, enough for me to create the Possible Human, Possible Society Study;
• And -- OMG! Donald Trump in the White House!

Now, at almost midnight, I am wrapping up what I have to say for August, asserting that I can no longer set my mind to writing the "ONE" story that explains it all.

I have many stories to tell on the subject at hand here. 

I think I’ll tell them, write them and learn from them as I share them. I guess that's what it means to me to be a storyteller.

Maybe then I’ll know more about What It Means(To Me) To Be A Compassionate Warrior Woman Taking On Capitol Hill -- and -- so will you.

Still there always will be more to the telling.

Wishing you all a very pleasant Labor Day holiday!

The Cost Of The Quiet, 2017

My continuing series on the Harvey Weinstein scandal and its fallout.

This morning, as I am coming into the day, I am reflecting on the notion of wholeness and the cost one pays for fragmenting or fracturing oneself from that completeness.

With this, in mind, the words of “Alfie," the song, ring through my mind.

“What’s it all about, Alfie? 

Is it just for the moment we live? 

What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?

Also with this I am remembering how impacted I had been by the suicide of L. Wren Scott. 

For months after I carried the fact of her death and what could be made of it, for those left behind, in a central part of me. 

Looking back my heart and soul must have been fully captured by the situation. 

I wrote blog articles about it and did, at least, three radio shows derived from it.

Searching through archives on my computer, I find that that, while L. Wren Scott died on March 7, 2014, I was still compelled to think intently about her death in July of that year.  

Read my blog article of July 9, 2014, The Cost Of The Quiet, to see what I mean about how bound up in this incident I was.

I find other blog articles on the death of L. Wren Scott, dating as far back to March 24, 2014 and radios shows, beginning on March 29, continuing forward to July 5, 2014.

Question: Why did this particular death by suicide upset me so much?

Answer: Because whatever was happening for me in the center of Washington’s darkness was bad enough for me to contemplate my own death by suicide.

Today I am giving much thought to this, as I continue, #Metoo, to sort out the deluge coming out of Hollywood from the Harvey Weinstein scandal, trying to regain my own sense of wholeness that feels a bit fragmented these days.

Similarly I had been captured, too, by the murder of Chandra Levy, And I wasn’t even getting sexually harassed or abused, or in an affair with a Congressman! 

Here, again, the dominant thought for me, in this situation, was “there by the grace of G-d go I.”

Listen to my stories that directly relate to my Washington fast track life that left me, thinking of suicide and knowing how risky was life in that arena. And, get a hint of my back story throughout the various articles on this site, especially under the label of Hot Pants and Motorcycles.

Interestingly "hints" are all you get when a person is hiding the whole truth; another one of those costs of the quiet. Thus, you will find all kinds of these, related to what I was not saying, scattered throughout this site.

Look to what is coming out, now, from Hollywood, if you have any doubt of that.

Here are three of my stories on my Anastasia The Radio Show –

March 29, 2014 -- There By The Grace of G-d Go I -- A

March 30, 2014 -- There By The Grace of G-d Go I!

July 5, 2014 -- The Cost Of The Quiet

Now think about this, if you will, for the thought for the day, derived from the Harvey Weinstein scandal etc. –

The abuse of power in the hands of the power elite, mostly male, can drive an innocent young woman to her destruction, especially if there is no one with whom she feels safe enough to tell what is happening for her..

In fact -- there is one the most serious costs accompanying the quiet; there is almost no one to tell. So you carry it all by yourself while it eats away at your soul!  

Here is an earlier article from October, 2013, that I wrote on this theme of power-over threats, There By The Grace of G-d Go I, long before L. Wren Scott's suicide.

For us naive women, I think it illustrates how power over abuses by men can almost be experienced as akin to same kind of threat as living under Hitler when you get right down to it; a mortal threat!

So what’s been happening in Hollywood to the young women who have been victimized by the power brokers of that system and the culture created?

What has been their cost of the quiet?

We must look hard at this for these particular, victimized women, especially in this day and age of understanding Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) and the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE).

I grew up in Hollywood from age twelve on. I did not leave it behind until I married at twenty-one. Today I am wondering if knowing Hollywood games, as I watched them growing up, at the side of my father – and seeing the price he paid in that arena, “Big fish in small pond in Ohio, small fish in big pond in Hollywood," aided me in leaving the Washington games to save my soul.

Resilience, we are learning, is what allows an individual to overcome serious survival threats. 

The Hollywood women who survived Harvey Weinstein and others like him are incredibly resilient. 

And, winner survivors, at that, as they have, not only survived assaults on their person hoods and their livelihood. But they have also done remarkably well in coming through these ordeals as true achievers of the highest brand.

What can we learn here, especially as women, about both the "Cost of The Quiet" and the will to survive, under extreme threat and pressure?

Now, it's all about #Metoo!

More later.

Before I Knew……

July 10, 2018: 

Reflections on how my “trying” to manage a power and sex abuse experience in my life (circa 1990) through filing an Ethics Complaint against my former psychiatrist mentor, Martin G. Groder, M.D. is changing certain ways of my being in the world, greatly enhancing my ability to self-define.

Before I knew how to effectively challenge the dark side, I had, at least, learned how to leave it.  Leave the Dark Side in others, that is. But still there was the Dark Side of me that was, paradoxically, the leave-taker. 

People do not, generally, give ample respect to warrior aspects manifest in passive or passive-aggressive ways. However the Dark Side Warrior employed in this manner can be no less lethal than its more aggressive counterpoint while its more Compassionate counterpart is as loving and devoted as is Mama Bear to her cubs.

I wrote the piece below "before I knew" of the situation that led to the filing of my Ethics Complaint. Today, however, I am reviewing this article, adding some updated perspectives, especially on the Cost Of The Quiet, the self-protection mode of leave-taking I had typically used, up until the past decade or so as my main mode of personal defense.

I want to contemplate this aspect -- leave-taking/withdrawal from others rather than giving voice, authentically, to who and what one is, what is experienced and what is felt -- and add to what I have written here. 

This former method of self-protection pales for me, especially these days, as I come up against the obstacles placed in front of me, pursuing my Ethics Complaint with the ITAA, the International Transactional Analysis Association. Throughout this ordeal, almost from the very start, I have constantly encountered what I perceive to be one sabotage of my well-being and justice after another through the various forms of their resistance to handling my grievance.

However, not even once did I consider turning away. Instead I have been a true Compassionate Warrior Woman all the way, my Self my greatest Beloved in this instance.

Yahoo! This situation warrants careful review and consideration, all on the way to me celebrating me!

While I pursue this contemplation of mine, have a happy day. It is beautiful out here, today, on the mountain although a bit humid.)

Original article begins below.

Before I knew how to effectively challenge the dark side, I had, at least, learned how to leave it.  

By that time I could go a good bit farther than my little bike could have taken me. In that I found my saving grace. But leaving, rather than staying to fight, had its costs and its consequences.  Yet, perhaps, asserting my freedom to leave a culture behind, built on the foundations of darkness, is the first lesson I learned from Watergate. 

I am reflecting on that today, as I look out my office window at the chickadees frolicking on my window screen, playing their aerial games on and around the bird feeder, swinging just beyond, sunshine on leaves turning from green to gold in the distance.

Tranquility and peace must also have come, eventually, of my leaving behind a culture that was pulling me into my own Dark Side to cope with it. 

But my introduction to peace and tranquility, as an alternative lifestyle to the darkness my D.C. fast track ways were drawing me into, came a long time later. I, definitely, had to grow into that state through immense discipline and determination. But I had pledged to not sink in, ever again, into my own darkness. Not if I could help it!

I had made a start and if it was tempting me, I needed to, at least, reach out for the many safeguards against further falls I had created  to protect me, to help me turn back from my shadow self.

This, of course, is the “power with” path I had not known, at all, in an earlier time. The way one must go when the personal “power to” and the “power within” cease to be enough. This way, of course, is a life-long practice; the staying out of one’s own personal darkness; the dark side is always there, in the not far off distance, beckonging for your return.

The battle, however, is well worth the effort, if you know what I mean!

(My recognition of the power it takes to hold off the darkness and the enormity of the just rewards, I believe, is much of what I heard in the story I introduced in my article “On The Magic of Storytelling." I will look forward to sharing more of the story I heard that day in what, I believe, will be New Horizons first submission to our StoryCorps/Official New Horizons Small "Zones Of Peace" Storytelling Collection.

Wherever the "power of the one,” or the collective can win against the Dark Side, there is cause to celebrate!)

Yesterday, as I struggled to find my way out of the personal dark spaces the Harvey Weinstein scandal has uprooted in me, I was fighting, once again, to find my way through to the Light. Definitely the path ahead was for the better though I don’t always feel better yet. As many others do, also, I hope for a new world order, at least in my own backyard for starters. But I don’t know it yet, so there is still fear and doubt.

You see, although, I am now far away from the drama of the Hollywood's present expedition to find the slimmest glimmer of Light in all that darkness, #Metoo is very much present in my daily life. For darkness drains Light and the battle to regain the latter, the Light, is hard won. 

Personally, what is now happening in Hollywood that is spreading, thanks to the beautiful Goddess presence of many women throughout our country, has pushed me to write long overdue letters to my children regarding the sexual abuse I experienced within our family and the family secrets, collusions and conspiracies that had, to date, kept me silent. 

Struggling, as I was yesterday, to find the Light, while still feeling despair over what has occurred over many years, I found these words of Native American wisdom by Jamie Sams in her book that I have long cherished , The Sacred Path --

"The shadow side of self, which inhibits growth, is constantly forced to die. These deaths occur on a daily basis, whether they be our fears, our doubts..., our self importance. ….Every death of a part of the shadow announces the birth of a new...gift… Each victory over a part of self that does not Walk in Beauty is a rebirth in itself."

There is so much I know now about the Dark Side of society and politics. I had only opened my new eyes that day in the recovery room when my prophecy helped me begin, for the first time, taking what would become, over the years, a studied look at it, guided by something and from someplace on high I had never known before that changed the course of my life forever after.

So now I know a few choice things I am here to share: 1. I know how and why presidents (other politicians, Hollywood producers, doctors, lawyers, rabbis, husbands, fathers etc. etc.) can lie and manipulate – and – many people not only believe them, but enable them; 2. I know how to get out of this blindness trap for myself; 3. I know how to guide other people to surmount that trap too; and 4. I know how to keep myself distant from the darkness.

But I still don’t quite yet know how to always come out of the darkness of others unscathed, as people who wish to do harm usually mean to do it!

One thing gives me hope, however. The same as it is now doing for countless other women. 

I know, now, that I am not completely alone, bearing the many burdens power and sexual abuse and the collusions, conspiracies and the enabling of these that are imposed on women. 

Perhaps there may even be new ways in the future to not only fight these off, but more and more people, including men, to take care to believe women and protect our rights!

For this, I join in with many with prayers, hoping, that perhaps there will be, sometime, in the not too distant future, a safer, more loving, caring culture within which to live and raise our children, especially our girls.

#Metoo

Discovering What Really Matters

The story of “Mommy, I hate your eye patch!” (Part 1)

Words of a seven year old; my seven year old, named Elisa Joy.

I can still hear them ring out as loud and clear in my mind as if they had just been spoken yesterday.

“Mommy, I hate your eye patch!”

Anastasia
(formerly Marcia E. Rosen)
Circa, 1970

These were the words that changed my life; the words of my seven year old daughter speaking in the code of childhood. One had to be able to de-code child-ese to be able to understand them.

They told me she felt abandoned and betrayed by the disproportionate time I spent away from her, handling my cornea transplants (by this time to I was going on #4 in close to as many years),  my workaholism driven career  – and  -- then the hours given over to socializing.

To this day, no other words have ever quite made their way through t0 my heart so pointedly.

I hope the women most sold on Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” book and all Ms. Sandberg promotes with her agendas have someone around like my little Elisa Joy. To remind them of what really matters. And, I hope these women are listening to those little ones and not allowing the surface things in life matter more than the substance.

With things I find in the media and see all around me, I often wonder.

I did listen – with my heart.

But it took a good bit of time before my head had done the interpreting and my behavior had caught up sufficiently. Leaning in (my version, not the Sandberg version) was not something I knew how to do. 

I would continue my survivor/addict style for at least another fifteen years, compartmentalizing the Visible me, grossly separated from my Invisible Self, the rich inner me. With no bridge to connect the two and to allow a crossing of the gap between, a gap that was flooded, I would later discover, by a river of unshed tears. 

Little Elisa Joy would pay the price as a victim of the mother’s heart she could not seem to reach. It was there alright but she could not touch or feel it. In the meantime, in the deepest throes of my solitude, I ached to give her that which I had no knowing of how to do.

In spite of my limitations as  a mother, over the years I became a Master at human relations; my proficiency earning me the acclaim, as a psychotherapist and community development guide, that “If she (meaning me) can’t cure ‘em, nobody can.

 Little Elisa Joy, now a grown woman, has never forgiven me.

Certainly a glass ceiling does exist in the business and academic worlds and beyond.  I have just been lucky perhaps. I have never personally encountered this. So  I may be  a bit out of touch with the anguish.  However, I too have had my trials by fire making my way in the world, intent as I have been on claiming the whole of my birthright; my inalienable right to be me at my best, accepted and respected for it – and justly compensated.

But the obstacles I have encountered have been, overall, of my own making, I believe. I certainly do see innumerable ways I could have handled things differently and better.

Nonetheless, on the day my daughter spoke those unforgettable words, I had hardly begun the path of my life’s journey that would plunge me, repeatedly, into the heat of transformation – and – which would lift me out of it, again and again, to breathe the rarified, sweet air of purification.

I did not understand the distinctions, yet, between the Dark and the Light. I did not yet understand the inordinate price each of us would pay for that survivor/addict personality I had developed in my own growing up. Nor, did I, yet, realize that those pained words of my child, Elisa Joy, would eventually transform my life, if not hers.

I write this now from a place of emotional overload. I have, long ago, left fueling my life on adrenalin excesses, addicted to excitement and its many ways of playing in one’s life. My writing is of my inner world with its connection to the energies I call the Divine Source and, this week, the demands of the external world claimed me.

All week long I have been wanting to bring my devoted readers another posting, even if a brief one.  However, this Saturday’s forthcoming CoffeeHouse Conversation On Race Relations has driven the vehicle that is my body, mind and spirit.  The Force within me that powers the beautiful, yet far from perfect life I now live, has been taken with the sweet promise of contributing to the world around me in a meaningful and impactful way.

Thus I find myself after my eight year sabbatical for blindness and recovery (1998 – 2006) drawn into that world where glass ceilings seem to limit, reminding myself of Helen Keller’s words –

“One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.”

Recognizing what really matters most is not always easy. 

At Ben Bradlee’s Funeral

My dream time had me at Ben Bradlee’s funeral this morning. With numerous others I was helping to set up for the reception that would follow the memorial service.

How odd, caterers and waiters would have been tending to this task. But somehow in my dream it looked more like a Shabbat service with an Oneg Shabbat at our local synagogue. (Oneg Shabbat is the gathering after Jewish Sabbath services, often with food and socializing.)

Most interestingly was that there was a table for beverages, alcoholic and otherwise, at which I was placing a Jewish brand of whisky with English lettering of a Jewish man’s name. Even more intriguing is that the name had the initials of my father!

No Hebrew writing, as I recall, but then there might have been in smaller letters that I just didn’t happen to notice. Nonetheless it was a distinctly Jewish brand. And that fact alone held importance for me.

The feeling accompanying the dream was one of warmth, richness, community conviviality.  Absent qualities at gatherings I attended in Washington with much too much on the superficial power game playing level.

However, in this scene the theme seemed to be one of interweaving parts of myself into wholeness and well being. Also there was a sense of something having to do with the inheritance of my two children, now grown, Elisa and Eric.

How very interesting it all was and somewhat unusual as I had only met Ben Bradlee one time, along with his wife Sally Quinn.

The occasion had been a rather intimate brunch, as I recall, at the home of my former sister-in-law when she was writing for the Washington Post. The Omelet Man, entertainer and cook extraordinaire combined, had been our chef, if I remember correctly.

Dreams are so revealing, if one can make use of them as messages from the unconscious to guide one’s personal emerging of clarity.

Being so inclined I have been taking time to do just that since.

Strange the fragments of me, yearning for unity, now coming into my conscious mind from this dream time adventure at this still early time of the day. By interpretation I have, thus far, included these clues from my unconscious was signaling --

• My prophecy-predicted return to Washington;
• The anti-Semitism in myself, finally reversed after decades, that was, no doubt, heightened by my fast track years in D.C.;
• Unfinished business with my former sister-in-law;
• Concern for the legacy I will leave my children.

As the day is still early now. What will this dream herald for me as my day goes on?

What guideposts will I recognize as this dream continues to work its way through my psyche, like the gift of wisdom from a place somewhere beyond that dreams always bring, if one allows?

On the level of earthly reality, a man of great stature and contribution to the betterment of our society (and politics, one would hope) has now passed beyond our mundane world. And, I am grateful to have shared a brief moment of time with this man who made a legend of the Washington Post in exposing the Watergate break-in.

This was an enormous gift for me, personally. I will never forget the model he represented for me of someone who relentlessly searched for truth and had no fear of revealing it, as big and bold as anyone could.

For this I am, apparently, so grateful that I even brought myself to attend his funeral in absentia on a day that I, in actuality, was traveling to Johns Hopkins battling, once again, to save my very precarious eyesight.

On that score, my eye infection crisis, “we are heading in the right direction,” my doctor says while I, concurrently, continue to navigate my return to Washington, as my prophecy predicts, at least in my dreams.

So I take from my having attended Ben Bradlee’s funeral that celebration is unfolding, even in times of loss, especially if a Jewish brand of whiskey, honoring my tribal heritage can show up for the event.

The Long Journey Home

More Hot Pants,Motorcycles and K Street tales.

Sometimes I can vividly recall the day I left the Ohio (and the California) of my youth behind for Washington. First as a young bride, then as a single mom I learned to navigate life in and around the nation’s capital.

But trying to make my way into and through the adult world without any presence of mature wisdom to guide and support me, especially on-site, was more than a bit of a challenge. Yet Washington did become the fire pit of my maturing identity.

For thirteen years (1961 – 1974) Washington was not only the power center of the America I knew and loved, it was the center from which I was taking the cues for who I was to become  – or, as it turned out, reacting against what I was discovering there.

I once wrote a poem to my father, trying in that less than articulate ability of mine at the time, to tell him how lost I was feeling. As if a person was to be granted a personal set of values by which to live once you become a twenty-something. But somehow I had missed out on the set I was to have as mine.

I didn’t know how to make myself understood by him. So, of course, my father did not get what I was so feebly attempting to say. I wish I could find that poem now.  I keep looking for it every once in a while. It was so very poignant then. And, it still is now for me.

Around that same time I was trying to obtain permission and passage for my daughter and I to live in Israel on a Kibbutz.  “Making aliyah” the sojourn is called; the obligation of every good Jewish person to return to their homeland of Israel. 

I was making progress on the plan. Then the “Six Day War” broke out and it was no longer a viable option. After that is when I recall my anti-Semitism breaking out.

Upon reflection I see that my inclination to separate from my Jewish culture and heritage had been brewing for a while. The Six Day War may have brought it to a head. I think it was at that point I became consciously ashamed of being Jewish. Perhaps I was already, then, critical of Israel’s enemy offensives. But I believe I had been growing in this direction since high school.

Concurrently I could not identify anywhere else to go that I might call home. From Ohio I had totally cut myself off. Washington, probably, had been an attempt to breakaway without conflict.  And, of course, getting married was such an acceptable way to exit.

But the real deal about that was that my mother had had a nervous breakdown a while back.  And, along with her other outrageous behaviors, she had purposefully set out to destroy each and every relationship I had or could conceive of having. Intent on controlling any independent move I might make, she had imprisoned me behind invisible bars, by terrifying me with daily threats over my very life. Therefore, California, my beloved and safe harbor with my father, stepmother and brother was, thus, even too risky to consider.  Perhaps she could "get" me there too.

With Israel no longer a viable port of entry and Ohio and California also closed to me, Washington became my “home,” as much as any place could be.

With no discernable values by which to live and no place other than where I was then situated, the D.C. metropolitan area became all I could recognize as “home.” So this is where I stayed, incorporating Washington into the cellular structure of my soul.  Washington can become a rather soulful place, if one allows it,that can grow on you. It certainly had that effect on me.

We had come to Washington, my first husband and I, for JFK’s Camelot. By the time I had truly settled my body, mind and spirit there, the three tragic assassinations of the 60s occurred, JFK’s, Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Bobby Kennedy’s -- very hard that all was to make sense out of for an embryonic adult.

My birthday, coming up Friday, brings me to the one year anniversary of my writing my memoir in progress, Hot Pants, Motorcycles and K Street. Writing it has, as one of its agendas, to help me put that time, the era before Watergate, into some kind of contextual framework for understanding my personal life’s journey.

Additionally, today as I head for my special day of celebrating that “I am” I am, also, getting ready to make a pilgrimage to Ohio after many decades totally away.

So it is not so strange that I am asking myself, today, am I going home?

Or, am I already home out here in the mountains, fifty or so miles outside of Washington where I have now lived for almost one-third of my life?

Or, do I need to return to Southern California to be home?

Or, as turtles do, am I always carrying my home with me so that “home” is only a state of being wherever you are?

Worthy reflections, I think, as a prelude to celebrating “I am.”

Where is the place you call “home” and why is “it” that place for you?

The Cost of the Quiet

A Hot Pants, Motorcycles And K Street excerpt

I got a wonderful early birthday gift last Saturday when co-host, Jack Slattery, of The Possible Society In Motion Radio Show, joined me on my Anastasia The Storyteller Radio Show.

I’d been aiming at the show theme, The Cost Of  The Quiet, for months. But I just could not get it to come together, could not quite find the right tone. So I kept putting it off and putting it off again.

But the theme is so pivotal to my Hot Pants, Motorcycles And K Street story that I could not, indefinitely, keep skirting the edges. So central to what coming to JFK’s Camelot meant for me and what happened thereafter (i.e. my life on the fast track of Washington society and politics). So much of who and what I have become.

Secrets! It all began with secrets, or at least that is what stands out most for me at this telling; family secrets and scandals, child abuse, power and money control games, conspiracies of silence, and collusions.  Secrets I lived with and through, however, that led me to know and understand the dark side of our national politics and society so thoroughly that I became an adept at transforming these to the Light, a gift of the hardships for which I am most grateful.

No wonder Watergate grabbed and held my attention these long, past four decades. So much of what went on in that state of affairs replicated the family system within which I grew up.  Years later, in fact, I came to realize how much Richard Nixon was a stand-in for my mother. Nixon provided me with a projected playing field that I would, for years, use as a template for working out what had been wounded and damaged in me growing up.

Then, too, Watergate added to the losses, by assassination of JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, which also loaded up an entire generation with grief. Those of us who came of age in the ‘60s and 70s would never forget this era.

It is only now, four decades later, that “secrets” I’ve held close for these many years are ready to face the light of a new day.  Actually these are not really hidden parts of me and my history as much as they are mementos of what has been a rather richly rewarding life’s journey with, perhaps, more of the challenges from the Dark Side than I would have liked.

Held so close to me, however, they have taken their toll as unhealed grief is wont to do.

The worst of the trials and tribulations has, truly, been the result of my own, more or less innocent holding back of facts, as I have known them, and feelings.  Thank goodness today is a new day. With the encouragement and support of friends and associates such as Jack, I am on my way out of the closet.  Not a LGTB one, by any means, yet a coming out certain to make a few waves.

Destiny would have it, however, that Anastasia, meaning “She Who Rises Again,” would eventually find her voice. And, like so many others learn to avail themselves of our First Amendment rights.

Ah, the truth will set you free.

Hear The Podcast 

Where I Take My Next Steps To Freedom!

On the

Anastasia The Storyteller Radio Show

The Cost Of The Quiet

Described as follows.

Anastasia welcomes her Possible Society In Motion co-host, Jack Slattery, to this program. Jack has become adept in teaming with Anastasia in an on-air format. In this episode he draws Anastasia out for the teachable lessons from one of her personal “crash and burn stories.”  The story related is excerpted from Anastasia's new book in progress, Hot Pants, Motorcycles and K Street: In The Era Before Watergate.

Anastasia links this tale of her's to the recent tragic death by suicide of L. Wren Scott, partner to Mick Jagger, for a poignant discussion on how the self-determined pressures of achievement and success in the American culture can, potentially, lead to such outcomes.

The on-air portion of the show continues with a conference call forum discussion. 

More Hot Pants, Motorcycles And K Street stories on the way.

Cutting Off Versus Leaning In: The Legacy of In Between

Yesterday, a familiar-seeming face in a photograph of one of the “special to CNN” contributors drew my attention.  Something about that face startled me. Almost hauntingly, throughout the day, the picture kept coming back to me.

Then it struck me; the face in the photograph was my mother’s, or almost so!

Spurred on by that realization, instantaneously, I returned to CNN and the article. I was, by this time, intent on finding out more about the author. Already I had a strong supposition; she was someone I knew; a family member, in fact.

Confirming my hunch that this woman was, indeed, my first cousin, once removed, granddaughter of my mother’s sister, I wondered, once again, at the magic and mystery of life.  This was, undeniably, a long lost cousin!

Having, within hours, only just finished doing a radio show on my newly presented “Lean In Legacy Template,” now, I was face-t0-face, via the internet, with an heiress to the major source of what had been generations of family cutoffs. Here was a carrier, albeit in innocence, of a legacy of family disconnectedness, continuing to this day.

Seeing this living, breathing symbol of the “Cut-off Legacy” of my own family; my first cousin, once removed, who I had neither seen nor spoken to in more years than I care to remember, uprooted a cache of stored memories and emotions, primarily sorrow at the loss.

On the heels of introducing my well-articulated antithesis to disconnectedness of every variety, here was a living representative of the challenge I had built my life upon to dispel; polarization, be it familial, cultural or political. 

Grounded in denial and lies, conspiratorial alliances had managed, to the best of my knowledge, to produce a family tree, rife with the poison of polarization, mired in the kinds of dysfunction that marks our country today, especially in the political arena and international affairs. A toxin so widespread it left no one unmarked in an extended family of hundreds, bringing about as much as one hundred years of heartache.

In a family abundant in doctors, lawyers, and other high profile careers and plentiful in prominence and money, as well as a scandal or two, a secret war of collusions, distrust and disconnect had managed to proliferate. While, at the same time, family members acted as if nothing at all was amiss; denial was viral in my family.

Wondering, once again, at the illusions we had lived by, upon seeing this familial reminder of that past, brought, now, into the present, my mind turned to contemplation on the facts, as I knew them.

Among them was that this relative of mine, albeit unknowingly, on her part, was from the faction of my family most rooted in the cutting off that had plagued our family. Given to a healthy respect, as I am, for synchronicity, my next thoughts turned to what I might do with this unexpected intrusion into my day of pleasure regarding the introduction, through my radio show, of my “Lean In Legacy Template.”

Now what, I asked myself? Was I being given a message guiding me to my next “b’shrt” moment (b’shrt meaning “destiny” in Yiddish/Hebrew)? Was it b’shrt that I lean in to this cousin of mine as my next step in my quest for family unity?

Considering this possibility, I consulted with trusted friends, tossed my I Ching coins, did a new Tarot card reading and contemplated further.

No, I told myself, my golden moment for leaning in, again, to my family was not quite yet. I belonged, for now, at a maintained distance until a gentle portal, or a rational one, based on a quest for truth, higher consciousness and compassion might open.

In the meantime, at least, I now knew where to find a missing – and – missed family member; a public online profile and a web site.

I might seek these out when it was time.

Meanwhile, I would continue waiting and watching, remaining on the periphery, on the edges.  And, do my best to contribute my own legacy; a lean in legacy, as my prescribed antidote to our family’s discord.

I would know when it was time -- and -- how for me to take the next steps toward my family, again.