MORE BIO
Grew up young and loving the outside and water in Southern California, Newport Beach of all places.

Went to college Caltech, full of smart suckers all very competitive and that didn’t seem like real living, so I transferred to Stanford, which was a bit stodgy, even then during the Vietnam, raise hell years.

Leaving college and intent on avoiding the draft (no higher office in sight for me, saying that), and interested in the “real world,” I volunteered for VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, and worked with black people in the rough areas of Brooklyn, New York. This was the wild years, of Black Panthers and Martin Luther King being shot, but people are people, and getting to know a block worth (2000 people) of black and Puerto Rican people was a lot more education in life than four years of college had been.

I met the mother of my children, Peggy Cunningham, in New York City in 1968, when I was a VISTA ( internal Peace Corps) volunteer in Brooklyn and the Bronx. We had two children, Wenonah Elms and Brendan Elms. Soon, there’ll be pictures of them on this blog.

We did some interesting things together, Peggy and I, as I taught school in Gilroy, California for 3 years and learned that real vegetables were the ones you raised organically and they tasted 50 times better. We also got into goats and goat milk and cheese.

We tried the commune thing and we learned a lot and left and came to Berkeley, where Brendan was born (Wenonah was born in San Jose, when we lived south of Gilroy in San Juan Bautista, but had to go to San Jose to find a hospital where the father could attend the birth). Peggy and I split long ago, but both kids went through all their school in the Berkeley system, which, if you are smart or talented, or both, is a fantastic system.

In Berkeley, I made a living as a counselor and a group leader and Fischer-Hoffman Therapist and a design/builder and a landscape designer and learned most of the list in the About Me section. I’ll make the list even fuller here: organic gardening, meditation, Tibetan meditation, Gestalt therapy, the eneagram, the Oscar Ichazo/ Arica stuff, Fischer Hoffman Process (was a teacher in that for awhile), Tai Chi, massage, Erickson Hypnosis, NLP, Raw Foods Health, Body Electronics, Permaculture Design, Feldenkrais. Only Body Talk came along as completely “new” after moving to Sonoma, though I had no idea until I moved that I’d end up a Feldenkrais practitioner, I just knew I was constantly recommending it to people with body “issues.” I also didn’t know it was a learning system until after four years of studying it.

I also did a lot of writing in Berkeley, essays, plays, screenplays.

It was when Brendan got out of high school that I felt free to leave Berkeley and come to the country.

In the prologue you can find how I met Marlie.

The nice part of that story, is that I just said “Yes,” to someone asking me to something I never had any desire to do: come to yoga. And then we ended up in Feldenkrais by saying, “Yes,” to a little postcard that someone passed on to Marlie about a weekend workshop in Feldenkrais hosted by the man who became our trainer, Denis Leri, whose site is

Sonoma is nice, beautiful and all that, and polluted with too much money and too many cars and too many drinkers, be it “responsible” or alcoholic. It’s country and most people don’t realize that, so locked away in their cars and indoors they are. It’s progressive, sort of, except most people believe sickness and health problems spring from some mysterious force, rather than bad eating and living decisions. It’s small town and near a big urban area and over expensive and still wonderful.

And then, as we all learn and keep relearning: it's the inner weather that makes our life. Sonoma can be awful and if I'm wonderful inside it doesn't matter. Sonoma can be wonderful and if I'm worried and out of the present inside, it doesn't matter. Sonoma is just a place, with some good chances to get outdoors. Many, many place offer a good chance to get outdoors.

Are we taking that chance?

Have you taken that chance today?

Life is one moment after another, isn't it? How's this moment for you.


Ciao for
Now,
Chris

707-996-1437.
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