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The Inimitable Being of World-Renowned Pomo Basket Weaver and Medicine Woman of Greg Sarris's Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream   Her entire life people wanted for Mabel McKay, world-renowned Pomo basket-maker, traditional Pomo medicine woman, and the last Dreamer of the Cache Creek Pomo tribe in Northern California to explain the inside so that they could understand the mechanics of a healer and Dreamer who had miraculous things happen around her.  In many instances Mabel would say, "You have to know me."  This sounds like an oversimplification that if one got close to her one could have comprehended the "secrets" of this basket weaver who was known as the best of the Pomo basket weavers, and whose designs with coiled reeds, patterns and feathers...

California Music and Personal Transformation of True Nature From Vulnerability to Artist Leading the Way:  Joni Mitchell In Her Own Words: Conversations with Malka Marom   Originally published 25 October 2014 [Note from On Being (2019): "They were desperate to take down that wall, in so many ways, as the documentary Both Sides Now: Live At The Isle Of Wight Festival 1970 demonstrates. Joni's realness in her Songs in that very moment will send chills through your body. She is the very Moment of change that through this Being even the institutions would be altered. Even in vulnerability, Joni's Being never wavers.It is more formidable than Ben Hur, far more powerful than armies. With an unshakable spirit she sings, 'We've got...

Completing the Story of Richard V. Francaviglia’s Go East, Young Man:  Imagining the American West as the Orient “The lives we live depend upon the stories we tell.”  Lee R. Edwards (paraphrasing Joan Didion) “The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake . . . but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.  It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.”  Joan Didion “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become...

A Consideration of Philip and Alex Fradkin’s The Left Coast:  California on the Edge   Originally published 1 June 2014 “Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.”  Saint Augustine “Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll.  Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.  Man marks the earth with ruin, but his control stops with the shore.”  Lord Byron Philip L. Fradkin’s The Left Coast:  California on the Edge, (2011, University of California Press, 126 pages, index, color photographs, paperback, $36.95) with photography...