Harvesting Life:

When I heard about a Ph.D. program that was not taylored  according to some conventional Western (male-dominated) canon, I pricked up my ears. A program that gives you credits, units, a degree… for reflecting on your life-long learning? A BA, MA or Ph.D. that rewards your conscious awareness of your own path, your personal life choices? A program that wants you to write about your own interests and passions?

In Europe, where I am from, nobody had ever heard of such a thing.

I  have always been a diary writer, in love with self-reflection. But even in my wildest dreams I would not have imagined earning a Ph.D. by writing about my own life experience. Clearly, UIL, a “University without walls,” must have been created with someone like me in mind.

I investigated this place of free, progressive  thought and spiritual service and enlisted for a 4-semester Ph.D. program that could be accomplished in one and a half years. I threw myself into the course work – writing essays. I had written many essays before, as a student, as a journalist, as a feminist commentator, but this was intrinsically different. I was looking back at my life in a way I had never looked before. The perspective opening up for me  now was like a harvest – I was invited to walk through the garden of my life,  to stop at particular trees I had planted, walk down this path (or impasse), gather fruits of insight and bring them home.

In writing the thesis I made use of my learning to open a path into new terrain: I wrote about my work with lesbian couples, about my own 20-year-relationship, and forged a theory (based on experience) about the compatibility of intimacy and sex. My Ph.D. thesis was published as True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships (North Atlantic Books), and I can’t deny that I felt proud to see the letters behind my author’s name. The best part, however, is the lasting inspiration I feel from being a student at UIL, talking to my Provost, and deciding to become a Provost myself in order to help others find UIL and grasp this beautiful idea.

I now work with several MA/Ph.D. students and relish the colorful  interconnections between my work as a counselor and writing coach and the tasks of “provosting.” Usually, counseling is not connected to writing; usually writing and editing are not so intensely connected to personal reflections on learning. UIL is  the perfect connector, the  hub of a wheel that ties together different disciplines in a oneness of purpose – integrating what we know from living our life.

As I am guiding students through the steps of their harvest I am surprised and touched by how different their approaches and movements are. While each of them is finding a unique way of thinking and writing about their lives, there is one thing they  share: they still find it hard to believe that they will be officially rewarded with a degree for something that is so natural, so personal, and yields such profound personal satisfaction.

After some twenty years of practice, I am still deeply moved by the continuous mutual learning and growth to be found in the process of listening, questioning, and honest searching. When I look back at my own experience in therapy, I am convinced that the way we relate to our counselor is an interesting reflection of how we relate in general. I am reminded of the moment in the movie Kissing Jessica Stein when Helen wants to know if her new lover Jessica has come out to her therapist.

Helen: What does your therapist think?

Jessica: Oh, I didn’t tell my therapist.

Helen: Why not?

Jessica: It’s personal.

What I like about being a counselor and coach is precisely this potential for a safe, caring, personal connection. I cherish dream work and the subtle ways we translate feelings into words, find and refine our personal goals and truths.
I see myself as a guide, a “way companion,” and mentor, especially for women. I know from my own experience that in the presence of an attuned listener a great deal becomes possible: healing, growth, the unfolding of wings.

Professional Background: M.A. in Clinical Psychology from New College, CA. Completed  MFCC training,  3-year internship at Child Development Center (Children’s Hopsital, Oakland). Private studies with Dr. Otto Will and Dr. Beulah Parker. Ph.D. in spiritual psychology. CTI (Coaches Training Institute) training.  Ordained as minister at AIWP (Association for the Integration of the Whole Person)

Spiritual (pastoral or ministerial) Counseling is a listening art based on empathy, interpersonal collaboration and spiritual recognition. It is non-diagnostic. It does not offer treatment for an illness or pathology, either mental or physical. It seeks for and encourages a relationship to the higher or creative Self, which many people regard as the divine. It remains curious in the face of the unknown. It understands troubles and difficulties as the portal for spiritual growth. It believes that a spiritual perspective may include all aspects of life: family history, trauma, use of substances as escape, self-defeating patterns, thoughts and behaviors, as well as the inevitable losses, separations, and absences that occasion grief and mourning. It recognizes that spiritual authority resides in the client, not in the counselor. It listens for the other’s unique spirituality. It is interested in what the client considers the meaning of life; where this is not known, the counselor helps to seek this meaning.

In Spiritual Counseling the goal is to mutually create an environment within which the unspoken self can emerge.

I used to wonder, during the many years I spent in Paris, why I could not sit at my desk and gather my thoughts. There was nothing wrong with my desk. My window looked out on the Parisian sky, grey slate roofs and terra cotta chimney pots. A desk with a view. But whenever I started writing, a restlessness forced me down into the streets. My café was across from the Luxembourg Gardens, its big windows an arm´s length away from the huge old sycamores and chestnut trees of the garden. Le tout Paris – everybody, would come strolling through the cast-iron gates cross the street and settle in the café – mothers and kids, tourists, groups of well made-up old ladies, students from the nearby Sorbonne, publishers from their headquarters at St. Germain.

I would choose a table right behind the windows that were open on hot days and feel at the crossroads between nature and culture. France has always prided itself for being the “country of the center,” where the extremes of life are balanced by style, elegance, and raffiné food. Where men have permission to be feminine, and women to be masculine. Where a woman of a certain age is forever attractive to anyone younger than herself. “Paris France,” as Gertrude Stein wrote, “is peaceful and exciting.”

Whenever I return to Paris I am still drawn to this café with the lazy greenery outside and the high-strung pace inside. Waiters in black tailor-made vests and long white aprons flit about like swallows. They serve coffee in white porcelain pitchers, a small one for the espresso, a bigger one for the steamed milk, so that everyone can find the perfect balance of tastes in their cup. I watch the curls of cigarette smoke rise from every table. My thoughts begin to stretch.

I sense the connection to the expatriate writers, artists and thinkers before me, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes or Meret Oppenheim, who had their Pernod and their best ideas in a Paris café. I can´t be lonely here, the way I am at my desk. I can banter with the waiter or begin a dialogue of glances with some woman I am curious about. It´s in this very café that I met my life companion, years ago, because this American in Paris had also picked Le Rostand as her writing café whenever she passed through Paris.

I feel the centuries of French café culture – a tradition, an atmosphere, a way of life that has been honed and refined to take care of me – body and mind. In my Paris café I have entered a cultural space. I am in the middle of a thought or just drifting. A noise, a word, a sudden movement enters my mind and subtly shakes it. As in a kaleidoscope another picture appears. An idea. I start writing.

I would never have imagined the way I came to write my first novel. Many years ago, I used to hear a silly little ditty in my head, the kind that Germans call an “ear worm.” My ditty went, “Grasshopper, grasshopper, take me to Italy!” I was fond of it without any reason, perhaps because in eternally gray Paris, everyone always longs to go south. When I moved to Berkeley, the ditty moved right along with me. I remember driving over the San Francisco Bay Bridge one day and singing it out loud to my companion Kim. It suddenly struck us that the “ear worm” had to have a meaning if it was still playing in my head after all that time. What if I truly listened to it? Would it reveal its secret?

Apparently I had hit upon the magical formula: the very moment I took the words to heart and asked them to speak to me, a story came. Over the course of the next year, my novel The Grasshopper’s Secret took shape. The grasshopper playing in my ear had literally taken me on a ride.

Ditties, words, sentences knock around in your head and roll over your tongue all day long. You can become a keen listener and word catcher. Jot them down, follow the lead of your intuition, your Muse, and before you know it you’ve got a page, a chapter, a whole story, a book…

As a young aspiring writer, the advice I got from most teachers and writing manuals was to create a disciplined writing practice. The notion of discipline held an aura of serious professionalism that put my un-orderly writing moods to shame. I tried hard to be disciplined . . . only to procrastinate more as if in tacit rebellion against myself. I tried all the tricks, from automatic writing to “morning pages,” from loads of coffee and cigarettes to sitting- and walking-meditations. Fleeing the lonely demands of my desk for the warm hubbub of a café, I sometimes got going  — and then couldn’t stop. A day-and-night obsession would sweep everything else in my life into oblivion until sheer exhaustion and anxiety about the neglected rest of my life dropped me back to square one. Was I a fool to think I could be a writer when I had such difficulty writing?

I have come to believe that for some writers discipline is a panacea, and that other writers have to enter a state of playfulness to succeed. Often what it takes to get writing to happen is to distract the inner judge–to trick her and sneak around her unnoticed. Playfulness is a good way to accomplish this, unless we confound play with random playing around, lacking purpose.
After 20 years of practice I have a bagful of tricks to share with you that can outwit the perfectionist critic who keeps looking over your shoulder with scowls or smirks when you long to write. My assistance aims at bringing you to a place in your writing where discipline AND playfulness are tools in your toolbox and where anything is possible because you are not afraid to make a fool of yourself.