My own immediate family lived in a cottage called Moss End. Its previous Scottish owner had been a game-keeper, but I was free to play in the neighboring deep, dark forest. One caveat: I must never touch the toadstools. I did not, but how brilliantly did the ones with red caps and white spots light up the gloom when I poured tea for my thirsty animal friends. An early photo shows me with apple red cheeks, tousled blonde curls, naked—and, no doubt wholly grubby—investigating a hole in the ground.

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Who lived there? A gnome or a hedgehog?

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My family started asking questions as well. How to tame the small creature, who stamped her foot, wailing at requests for compliance to a ‘real’ world?

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Was the child touched by fairies or was she feral?

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Cheltenham Ladies’ College boarding school was their answer. Surely seven years of uniform and convergent thinking would mold me into a civilized ‘old coll girl.’ With my wellspring of imagination forced underground, I vaulted higher in the gymnasium than any girl ever had and wielded a fierce hockey stick on the playing field. When it came time to show I could focus academically, I chose foreign languages. Though I understood Russian, my mother’s tongue in Ukraine, I had rejected it early: xenophobic children had ridiculed my name. I took my ‘A’ levels in French and Spanish.

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Where could I be free after graduation?

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While I’d labored through Don Quixote in Spanish, it was Platero, Juan Ramon Jimenez' merry donkey, who stole my heart. In Spain, I taught English to nine fidgety children of a family who lived in Madrid, but made sure to experience the ardor of flamenco dancers in Seville. The transformation of my dull and dowdy English self became imperative. I needed to project a feminine image that would beguile. It was time to find a prince of my own.

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I thought I had, but was wrong.

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I made my way to New York City’s art world. The galleries which I helped run were full of images. I was more intrigued, however, by my own. I was undergoing another transformation, this one initiated by a new, ceaseless streaming of internal images inaugurated by a golden star shining against a blue background. Subsequent images frequently showed a jug, ever pouring water from on high.

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What was the source of these images? I suspected it was spiritual, but needed to find out.

 

California lured me. Some of my dispossessed Russian family lived there. U. C. Berkeley was starting a new program: students could design their own curriculum. I’d dropped math at fourteen but, motivated, I taught myself algebra in order to pass the SAT. I called my major Symbolic Thinking and Film.

 

How did moving images influence collective mind—our cultural consciousness?

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One day, standing in a commons room where a turned-off TV sat on a table in the center, I experienced a compelling suck as voracious as any black hole: not only was television robbing children of their ability to process images, but children were consuming other people's manufactured imagination. Children’s minds were up for sale.  

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I changed the name of my major to Media and Social Change. Social change happens slowly. But I could nudge it along. I could give children the chance to use their imagination to create and perform in their own TV show. The program could also be combined with other interactive forms of social media.  

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But what about my original reason for going to college? I’d hoped to pinpoint the source of my on-going stream of images. And I had.

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The answer was not an academic one. It was spiritual. I frequently see an inner image of a man and a woman holding out their arms to embrace each other. This is strikingly like what some Eastern religions call ‘all-embracing consciousness.’ I no longer strove to project an image of myself as much as accept the sense that I now existed within the wider realm of all consciousness. The function of the streaming, symbolic imagery, I came to think, is to generate spiritual meaning which is prior to words.

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If anybody had told me, back in the mist of my Scottish childhood, that I would graduate from U.C. Berkeley as member of America's Phi Beta Kappa society and earn an MA from Stanford on a California State Scholarship, I’d have covered my mouth to staunch the giggles.

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Where was America anyway? Let alone a place called California.

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I deployed my MA in Communication to fundraise for Children’s Media Lab, the non-profit I started, at a time when I finally found the prince of my heart. We travel widely, always happy to return to our home in the San Francisco Bay area, as magical for me as was Scotland. I write about far-away lands and those I can only sensually imagine.

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What is real and what is not is something we must all learn as children and be ready to redefine. Hiking in our local regional park, I am always alert to the real possibility that Mountain Lion might leap across our path, as once he did. But I am also grateful for his sensual spirit which has passionately brought Golden Aphrodite to life through me to become a reality. 

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See more about Children’s Media Lab.