I go where I'm pulled from inside. I'm pulled to anarchy, earth smelling, jungle, woods, ocean, people who yell and cry, invite you in, scold, hug, grin and share. Pulled from inside this mixed-up working/uppermiddleclass, English/American/whoknowswhat, country/uprooted, uptight/flagrant, antiauthoritarian/frightened/defiant, angrygrievingpassivepushy, gardening/ walking/hitchhiking/liveoutside crazywoman. That's part of how I've come here. I'm sure of it. I haven't tried very much to shut anything or anyone out. I've wanted to encompass everything. That's part of trying to fit in, strangely enough. Try to fit in to enough hugely different ways of being and you get stretched. Around the middle of my life, I got to thinking trying to fit in was a terrible thing to do, that it made me sell out who I am too much, but now I'm not so sure. Maybe it has drawbacks, but being immovable has bigger ones, I think. Hopefully, there's a middle ground.

I wrote about love in my B.A. honors thesis in philosophy. I've lived love, and it hurts. I helped open the first contraceptive clinic in Cork city. Then my baby died, and I fled north to Donegal and the Reichian community with Jenny James, who now writes her fierce love from Colombia. Do you know about Reich? Unlike Freud, he celebrates passion, the goodness of human beings, getting down under social conditioning to the true social cooperative human being. He celebrates the real goodness and generosity of children. He refuses Freud's assumptions that we must suppress and sublimate ourselves to be civilized. Rot, he says! And he died in a U.S. jail in 1952 because he trusted the U.S. justice system to be fair. The F.D.A. burned his books. Read him. He may have been crazy, as they say, when he died, but I don't think so. He had built a rain maker and was bringing rain to the desert. He was curing cancer with orgone energy and emotional release therapy. So many therapies have descended from him without a word of thanks, ashamed to be associated. I owe Jenny and all the folks who keep that community going the hugest debt. I think they saved my life and help bring me here where I celebrate love and seek to break out of cerebral standardization while arguing within it.

From:
Too Many Deaths: Decolonizing Western Academic Research on Indigenous Cultures
By Gabrielle Welford
A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Division of the University of Hawaii in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, May 2003
© 2003 Gabrielle Welford (welford@hawaii.edu)