August 26, 2022

This time I'd like to feature two of Alaska's original pioneers. I was touched by each of their homes, now preserved by the National Park Service.

Fannie Quigley cooked and helped the broken spirits of those who had traveled very far through snow and ice to this beautiful land hoping to find gold. She lived well past the end of the trail and staked her first claim in 1900 during the Klondike Gold Rush. The greater hope of all who came was to find gold in these mountains, and they are loaded with gold. Some prospectors were lucky and struck gold in the hills of Alaska. And as my husband just reminded me, including us. There is Fort Knox where America keeps its gold, however it pales to what’s in the mountains of Alaska.

When Dick Proenneke was 51, the retired marine got in a bush plane and had himself dropped off in the wilderness where he homesteaded and lived off the land. He fished, in the Twin Lakes, sometimes frozen, next to his small log cabin. He built his log cabin from the pine trees that grew up on the small square of land that became his world. He kept copious notes on weather, the rare visitors, wildlife and the changing seasons. The national park service maintains this now refurbished former home of Dick Proenneke. When i was there I felt he was there to, welcoming curious visitors.

Born and raised on a Nebraska homestead near Wahoo, Nebraska, Frances "Fannie" Sedlacek was used to a hardscrabble life. Her parents Vencil and Josephine Sedlacek were immigrants from Bohemia. They had arrived in America in 1866 and settled in Nebraska to file a homestead claim shortly before Fannie's birth in 1870.

The 1870s and 1880s were difficult years in Nebraska. The Panic of 1873 led to a four-year economic depression and falling farm prices. This was worsened with droughts, plagues of locusts, blizzards. These and other hardships from her childhood would help prepare her for life in the Alaskan frontier.

Staking a claim in August 1900 on a stampede to Clear Creek, she met and soon married Angus McKenzie. In January 1903, Fannie left Angus and set off on an 800 mile hike down the Yukon River ending up in Fairbanks. She made her way to the remote Kantishna Hills near Mount McKinley (now Denali) among the hundreds of hopeful prospectors in 1905.

This week from Dr. Hayward M. Fox, our amazing deep dive guru, and the Institute of Personal and Transpersonal Knowledge, I'd like to include an excerpt from words I've heard over the last few years. These two paragraphs never cease to help me with frustrating moments. 

We are told from birth that we are separate—separate from other beings and things and separate from the Whole. Our innate intelligence has been conditioned in this way of knowing and this way of being. We live the life of this separation story with its need to protect and perpetuate our separate self. We experience thoughts and feelings that we call our own and therefore defend these knowings as we would defend ourselves.

Feeling so separate we develop personality styles, ways of thinking and feeling, and ways relating that are all designed to protect the vulnerability of our separateness. These strategies have both served and limited our way of being in the world. What we hold as identity either fetters or liberates. We can examine patterns that structure knowing and thereby outgrow personal identity.

Sometimes yesterday’s protection becomes today’s prison.

School is back and so is recess. When I went to school, I loved recess, what did we do? We jump roped to music and rhymes. For those who have children, here are some books on Jump roping, a fun activity and excellent exercise for children of all ages. The picture above is of my new set that I got this weekend.

Let's give it up for Giselle Aubrey, one of University of Arizona’s student scholars, class of 2026. I've been watching Giselle grow up for at least twelve years, she's been a gifted musical mariachi, I think, almost since she was born. She's now 18 and already an accomplished violinist and vocalist. Well you can see for yourself in the video attached where she honors Linda Ronstadt’s living legacy. I’ve had Giselle play a few times, she and a small group of Tucson's youngest and greatest mariachi musicians. She sang at a special event for my husband Michael one year here at our house. Her brother Ethan is also a very talented young musician. We may see him featured at a future date.

This is just in from Linda Collazo, our favorite rising Opera star from Brooklyn, New York. Here she is performing at Tapestry of Tributes held at the Wheeler Opera House, part of the Aspen Music Festival. She wanted to share this with all of us and I'm proud to put it in.

Next week we're hoping to have Sandy Washburn back for an update and a trip down to Mt. Cook, New Zealand where I tragically lost a friend to the mountain.