We’re all on a personal Journey. Just remembering that makes us appreciate the importance of pursuing our own path. My Journey began in a quiet, polite little town in Canada just outside Toronto. At least it seemed polite when I was young but, of course, nothing stays the same. I could look down my street, a street shrouded by giant 200-year-old maple trees and see Lake Ontario. But something was missing. In fact, as I grew older, it seemed like everything that was important in my life was missing. I was always in search of my inner horizon and my best friend and I knew I was never going to find that in my old neighborhood. I had to leave.

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I met my husband Kerry in London, England between years in university and it stuck! Eventually, we eloped. In my experience, no one elopes if they’re having a good time. We ended up on the Greek island of Sifnos. There were only 5 foreigners living on the island at the time. We rented a shepherd’s cottage overlooking the tiny harbor for $7 a month. No power. No water. Just a room with a rope bed, the stunning view of the Aegean and all those sheep. I started to recover from a family with a history of violence and parents who never wanted their children to succeed and I found myself increasingly connecting to a hidden inner spirit that had always been there. I began to paint. A beginning. I truly believe that we draw the influences we need to us or perhaps they’re drawn to us. I’d never had formal training but I found a Chinese Master in the stillness around me and he taught me how to use my brush.

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I’ve always found that exploring life outside my comfort zone gives me oxygen and that enlarges my world view and the depth of my creative expression. After almost a year, Kerry and I returned to Canada and we found a cabin in the forest in British Columbia. Again, no power. The running water was the stream behind the cabin. Turned out it had been the guards’ cookhouse for Tashme, a ‘relocation camp’ for Japanese Canadians during the Second War. That summer former ‘residents’ visited with their families to show their children where they had spent the war. And we’d known nothing about this. The women were happy to show me what plants in the forest we could eat.

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Ultimately, we returned to Britain via the Spanish Island of Ibiza. That was long before it became party central. There was no one there but the locals. And, of course, Morocco. We were both breathing in their cultures and the stories that moved them. In London, we bought an aging Austin van for £35 ($90 Canadian), a mattress and a one burner kerosene stove, and randomly visited dozens of villages in southern Britain. We rented a tiny room in London’s World’s End on a cul-de-sac populated by East Enders dispossessed by massive building projects. The owner of the house was in prison but his mate, a confessed jewel thief, very considerately rented out rooms to supplement his own income. He had a scrap book of all his arrests. The stories! Every Saturday night the Metropolitan Police (AKA Scotland Yard) would block off the street, kick in doors, drag our poor neighbors into the road and put the boots to them. The English Bobby? More stories.

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So we drove overland from London to India via Afghanistan. It was my idea and it seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. One Saturday morning over our first cup of tea, I announced that we should leave for India. When? First thing Monday morning! Kerry was shocked and he worried about our safety driving an ancient van without so much as a spare tire through hostile territory. I was undaunted. “After all,” I said, “What could possibly happen?” It took 2 weeks to get our vaccinations and an oil change, a challenge in London in those days. Visas were going to take months so we just decided to arrive at a border and figure it out when we got there. It was a Monday morning and the entire street turned out to say goodbye. Word had spread in the traveling community and there were 11 people with their packs stuffed into that tiny vehicle. 5 made it as far as Athens. We briefly returned to Sifnos and I continued to paint.

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We survived the dreaded Turkish border where young travelers were definitely not welcome but we were attacked 3 times in Eastern Turkey. Iran was a relief. The Iranians were welcoming and the Shah had kindly imprisoned 100K of his political enemies so no one was speaking out of turn. In Afghanistan, we foolishly continued to camp out in the open desert. One morning we were wakened by a camel bell. A black 2 humped Bactrian camel was grazing just feet away, the open desert behind was dotted with lumps of milk chocolate mountains disappearing into the horizon. Magical! The bazaar in Kandahar was terrifying. The locals were heavily armed and they made it clear we were not welcome. Kabul was a collecting place for our generation feasting on hashish at $2 kg. Sadly, for a lot of them it was the end of the trail. Camping at the foot of the Khyber Pass a farmer informed us that 2 weeks before bandits had stopped a German tour bus and murdered all 35 passengers not 50’ from where we’d been sleeping. Time to leave Afghanistan! At that point, we were having to push the van to a start. And all the way across, we continued to shop in village markets and I made dinner every night on our little stove. Fortunately, we arrived in India more or less unscathed with lots of stories.

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India captured us. It was overwhelming and so unexpected. We had to leave our van at the border due to Indian insurance requirements and gave it to a friend who drove it back where it died on the docks at Calais. We spent almost a year and a half in India living in small villages, sleeping wherever we could, eating what the villagers ate. Not surprisingly, we got sick and we got very thin! Goa was still in its hippy infancy and strangely out of place with its neighbors. We were the non-drug users on call for bad trip rescues. The Catholic Priest down the beach with his naked female companions was the money changer. But the Indian tapestry was so dense that every day seemed to blend in with the next.

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We found an ashram buried deep in south Andhra Pradesh. The 20 Westerners gathered there were an unusual collection of independent travelers each with a different background and faith, each following their own path. There we were, a runaway Royal, a grizzly ex-US Marine, a needy Evangelical biographer, a 'Digger’ from San Francisco. British. American. Australian. German. And 2 Canadians. The Swami’s only rule was that we be respectful of others and their traditions so it was far from the highly structured environment of a traditional ashram. That made it all possible and the stories were astounding. The Swami was a wise man. He knew that simply being in that environment would profoundly change us. So he forced us with minimum input to become our own teachers. The dreadful conditions, the food, the water, the endless heat and the dust were the drivers of our own expectations. We were sleeping on our straw mats on the open ground literally in the middle of nowhere with just a rough path over the scorched hills connecting us to the world outside. If we stayed, we had to embrace change. Meditation was an individual choice but predictably stressful under those conditions. We stuck with it. It was entirely life altering. On major festivals, a 100K devotees would show up, throw their bedrolls on the ground, cook for themselves and feed the poor that would collect from neighboring villages. One day the Canadian High Commissioner to India Jim George arrived in the Official Government Car with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s brother Charles and his wife Adrian. As the only Canadians, we were the designated hosts. It all seemed very surreal. In our year and a half in India, we lived on $600 Canadian Dollars and gave half of that away mostly to other kids who needed to get back to Delhi and return home.

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In that time and in 40 countries living at the level of ordinary folks, we gained a rare and indispensable skill. We learned to listen. We were just kids. They had all the stories.

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Back in the West, we had to find our own path in a world facing an electronic revolution with little appetite for change. We soon discovered that if you’re actually listening for those changes, you can always find a creative path forward. We became Issue-Driven management consultants and, not surprisingly, Cultural Analysts on major Constitutional, Environmental, Local, National and Global Issues. We successfully managed the political fortunes of 30 First Nations facing a highly Conservative Federal Government with Canada’s largest Parliamentary majority striking a significant blow for indigenous rights. We raised $100K and hired 23 artists to create major pieces of art for the City of Winnipeg’s Centennial to alter perceptions of the urban landscape. Naissance was a breakthrough event that played out on a national scale and, fortunately, my piece was one of them. We directed the contentious French Language Services issue for the Government of Manitoba; dealt with the senior planners of 20 major regions in North America defending smaller municipalities against larger interests for a Capital Region Plan; created a film financing program with actuaries at insurance giant AON; and designed a 3-week 6 country tour for then Bishop Desmond Tutu raising $10M from David Rockefeller. We’ve met Saints, Prime Ministers, Supreme Court Justices, Peers of the Realm, Film Studio Heads, Billionaires, SAS veterans and CIA operatives and all the folks in between. Again, drawing on the lessons we’d learned, when you listen to people in crisis and follow the story irrespective of the discipline, a path forward is always there.

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Soon after our return, we bought a small farm North West of Winnipeg, Manitoba. It was our retreat from all the noise, a place where we could better understand the multiple-worlds we were living in. We built a small house off the grid with a 1934 CNR caboose for a kitchen and shared it with our 3 dogs and a very wise cat named Munners. As a writer, that farm was invaluable. In so many ways, I found that my stories told themselves. As an artist, I drew on the open universe of my soul now freely accessible to explore my Journey. And here we are.