From Margie Adam to Margie Adam, PhD…

18th April 2010

Greetings!

This website was originally designed in collaboration with my excellent webmaven, Barbara Brust (www.lucilledesign.com) in 1998. At the time I was deeply engaged with writing and performing music and with community organizing. Looking over the site now, I see the pages document my artistic, political and spiritual evolution quite well.My life has been healed and empowered by a commitment to feminist values, specifically inclusiveness and respect for differences. I do believe that women will save this planet if we do what we can, where we are with what we have.

A few years ago I enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Integrative Learning with the aim of completing an advanced degree in Psychology. My goal at the time was to use the process to begin work on a memoir and explore the possibility of becoming an integrative counselor.

When I started this journey, I had no idea I would arrive at a place where the organic process of this work would lead me away from music toward a new calling. However, having now completed my doctoral program with a dissertation entitled “12-step sponsorship and Psychotherapy: In Search of a Hybrid Modality,” it is clear the next step is to open a practice as an Integrative Counselor in the San Francisco-Bay Area.

If I were to post a flyer, this is what it would read:

 
There you have it. For those reading this page who are afraid to follow a path that you are being called to take, I offer you the following poem. And by the way…Welcome to the second decade of the 21st century. This is OUR time!

As some of you know, I began visiting Scotland in 2003 after seeing a photograph of the Callanish Stones on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. The journey has led me to places in the natural world and in my own interior that have profoundly changed me. Words still seem less effective that images. Here are a few photographs that represent some of my favorite places.

Callanish Stones, on the Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides. The weather on Lewis is mercurial so I often drive from the hotel to the stones in the dark and wait for the dawn in my car. Whatever the elements, they are extremely changeable; high winds, sleet and rain sometimes give way to simple early morning frost like this day.
 

Loch Tulla, near Rannoch Moor. In the middle of the long and narrow loch is an Isle called Matilda. A small grove of trees thrives here though none are indigenous to the area. Some conjecture that the trees were planted by a group of women friends who lived in the area and gathered from time to time on the hillock in the center of the island. A single Rowan Tree grows on the hillside near the Loch on the West Highland Way and was said to have been planted either by locals to ward off faeries or by the faeries themselves because the tree has magical qualities. In Scotland, it is not unusual to have two contradictory explanations for the same natural occurrence.

The Quiraing, part of the Trotternish Ridge, on the Isle of Skye. This unusual landscape has inhabited my imagination from the moment I saw it. I return to this place once or twice a year, hope for good weather and on the occasions when the mist lifts, I hike across the mountainside with more joy than I can say.
 

If you find yourself moved by these landscapes and have an interest in visiting Scotland, check out my Connexions Page for new links related to these locations.

If you’d like to stroll back in time with me – as far back as 1998 when I arrived out here in cyberspace – check out my Personal Message Archives. There are some great photos and slide shows embedded in the messages.
 
 

For more information: Pleiades Records