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 As a child, I drew cats sporting flower upholstery instead of stripes or spots. A potholder loom, sewing machine, and etch-a-sketch joined crayolas (favorite color maize) and paints in my early technology toolbox.
My parents allowed me to make a garden in the only sunny spot in our backyard, and baby carrots sprang forth and fulfilled their own agenda in spite of my pulling them up periodically for examination.
As I grew older, I made clothing, photographs, letters to Congress, war protest, clay pots. When the first portable video cameras (remember porta-packs?) emerged, I learned to use them, and to "crash edit" my final work. I hosted one of the first alternative media programs on local cable television.
On and off for two years, I lived with a Lakota medicine man and his family, contributing my media skills to document native lifeways for his traditional school. Co-op life was a broad experiment in Madison, Wisconsin,
where I moved to live in a 40-member housing cooperative (with balconies on four levels
overlooking placid Lake Mendota) and also to become part of cooperative groups such as People's Video, Crazy Horse Radio, and the Good News Bakery. I planned and executed community outreach programs, including Native American Week, which brought hundreds of university and K-12 students together with Native peoples playing traditional music, singing and dancing, creating art and craft, and telling some of the old stories.
I moved to the country, learned plant identification, and collected medicinal herbs. I scoured second-hand stores and made quilts from neat old fabrics. I learned to spin yarn and used plant materials for dye (lots of olive brown which gets tiresome but to its credit doesn't show dirt). I raised sheep (favorite ewe
Saffron; ram needed repeated application of 2 by 4 for distraction--I'm a pacifist but they don't call them rams for nothing) and learned to shear them. Then I hired a professional to do my shearing--he made it look like peeling a banana instead of my inter-species wrestling match. Media production continued to attract, and I began typesetting for a regional magazine (Ocooch Mountain News) and then advanced to layout, photography, and darkroom work.
After the water pipes froze three times, I moved to the desert. I went back to school and studied art, landscape architecture, and television production. In between classes, I learned to manage honeybees as a research aide for the USDA. I was selected to direct a live public affairs program broadcast on the local PBS station (nothing like having to direct, *live,* to make one hyper-alert); after we proved ourselves for one season, they let us record it on tape and I continued to direct for the second season. I balanced the jobs (I also taught television production, produced instructional videos, and worked in a darkroom, sometimes all at once) and the cerebral studies with pre-dawn hikes in the Santa Ritas. Being curious about how people learn and how best to use my skills to help them, I studied educational psychology and then educational technology. I started creating interactive instruction and videodisc-based materials. I got the chance to teach computer programming (and wished I'd paid better attention when I took the course myself), but I managed to stay at least several days ahead of the students (I really learned programming this time).
Now in Virginia. Which has arranged to hold June through August in a rain forest. Where if we're lucky we revel in the moisture which bathes our skin, coating us even in the deep woods. Where nearly every summer day is a "two-turtle" day. But lest this grow too monotonous, we have dry clear cool fall sunshine that can fill you with melancholy while sparking the trees which follow the folded hills. There are always three or four good snows in the winter and a couple days when I have to crawl on hands and knees down the hill to my car (but the ground never freezes solidly so I can still garden if I've a mind to). Spring is a three month extravaganza of bloom from early bulbs, to redbud, dogwood, azalea and rhododendron, through intoxicating scents of honeysuckle and beastly wild rose.
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o, I'm a design geek. Who is happiest when part of the day
is spent running in the woods.
