My mother died in 1983. It was sudden and yet expected as she had a blood transfusion 15 years earlier tainted with Hepatitis C. It lurked silently in her body for all those years, and then reared its head, and in a few months, she was gone. 

Art makes a bridge, from the inner world of soulful truth to the outer world of social engagement and cultural expectations. Poetry was a portal to the otherwise inaccessible, inexpressible reality of my inner life. Through that portal, I entered into spiritual life. Poetry and prayer became synonymous.

Driving from our home in Santa Cruz, CA southward on Highway 101, Mark and I are on our way to celebrate his Mom 80th Birthday. She has lived as a widow for over 20 years. Traveling alongside the Pacific Ocean we round the curve just north of Santa Barbara when the song, “The Streets of Laredo” comes on the radio.

The fluid body practices of Continuum and Yoga has given me a pulse read on the culture-at-large and the challenges that lay ahead with a degree of clarity that would have otherwise been impossible.

On a warm Friday evening, in the fall of 1978, a little performing group I was working with in Menlo Park, California, Dymaxion Moving Company, headed by Chloe Scott, took a fieldtrip to a workshop led by “a woman who moves like water.”

When I was first introduced to the work of Continuum and Emilie Conrad in 1978, I had already been initiated into an ancient Vaishnav yoga tradition by a guru who had been practicing vows of celibacy and silence for over 30 years. 

Continuum is a radical practice. Not just because it began during a radical time of human history—the 1960’s—but because, from its conception, it was an invitation to live outside cultural norms on every level.