Reflections

About the Book

Life has often been described as a "journey or "path". Robert Frost said that when "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" he chose "the one less traveled by" and that "made all the difference". This book of autobiographical essays views my particular journey from the perspective of one standing on a plateau looking back over the twists and turns of a path which was in may ways a "road less traveled".

The lens with which I view the people and places along that path is necessarily shaped by all my experiences from early childhood. It is also shaped by concepts gleaned from the general semantics teachings of S. I. Hayakawa concerning the uniqueness and validity of each individual's perception of reality. Another important influence is Buddhism, from the Zen concept of the "isness" of things as expounded by Alan Watts in the early fifties to the Tibetan focus on the transitory nature of being and the importance of compassion. If one truly respects the other person's "reality", one cannot judge that other person and must, therefore, feel respect for their point of view and compassion for the struggles they face in this world.

I hope that this book, while not being too didactic, will illustrate my belief that it is possible to see all that occurs in this lifetime as infused with a certain serendipity which can only be viewed with wide-eyed amazement.

About the Author

The author is a native Californian who was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Palo Alto. She attended San Jose State College with majors ranging from costume design to secretarial to elementary education. In 1954 she married California artist Bryan Wilson and moved to a mountaintop above Los Gatos where she wrote poetry and had two children born in 1955 and 1956. A third son was born the following year after a move to Merced. Divorced after five years, she spent two years completing her undergraduate degree in English, then two more years completing a graduate degree in English at U. C. Berkeley.

In the mid sixties she lived on the California coast just south of Carmel with her second husband and became involved in the psychedelic lifestyle of that period. While hosteling around Europe in the summer of '67 she met a young Italian student. He came to California in the summer of 1969 and became her third husband and the father of her fourth child.

She moved to Vancouver in 1975 with her Italian husband, who had been offered a fellowship for his Ph.D. in Classics at the University of British Columbia, and their then five-year-old daughter. He went off to Japan to teach English in 1982 and they were divorced shorty after, but she stayed in Canada working as a remedial writing specialist at several community colleges and, since retirement, becoming an artist working primarily with acrylic on canvas.