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The Journey of Mary Ann Singleton
I left Oberlin High School to spend my senior year with grandparents and graduated from Idaho Falls High School, a dynamic and happy year. I majored in English at Oberlin College, and my love of travel led me to a colorful junior year in Scotland at the University of St. Andrews, with the wild North Sea, kilted laddies, and coal fires, followed by 3 months thumbing it across Europe, my friend and I being rare American women there in 1955. My photos show blue sky over Montmartre and five cars in Piccadilly Circus.
Following college came marriage (and yes, opposites attract) to a young man from New Mexico. Then came the birth of my daughter, Karina. Those years showed me a pristine Santa Fe and Taos, where we lived for nine months at the newly formed Taos Ski Area. In summer I cooked for the small crew of ski slope clearers and took glorious mountain walks with Karina hugged to my waist.
My archaeology-major husband led us to a small Indian site in rural, pre-sit-in North Carolina, an eye-opener, and where my son Helmuth was born. Next came my husband's first museum job in Charlotte, where I had another Awakening--nutritional. That was the year of Adelle Davis, hello to whole-wheat-everything and goodbye to all-day-long coffee. Next came a larger museum in Fort Worth, where I heard Kennedy's plane take off for Dallas and where Karina brought home her crayoned American flag with the words, "The President was in our city."
In Fort Worth were two key events. First was my Political Awakening when I fought, unsuccessfully, the plan to fluoridate city water. I was astounded that my group could not get a hearing for our strong opposing facts and my husband's job was threatened, "if your wife doesn't get out of the fluoridation battle."
The second event was the collapse of my marriage (kids 4 and 7) and my fearful recognition that I had to support us with a B.A. in English lit. Ha. Grace brought me a graduate teaching assistantship at Texas Christian University and then a three-year fellowship at the University of Oregon.
Eugene, Oregon in the 60's! --paradise to my mountain-and-ocean-starved being. While Viet Nam and the counter culture raged, in peaceful Eugene I burrowed in the stacks, sweated over term papers, exulted in Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, and camped a lot with my kids.
With all but my dissertation, in 1970 Grace brought me to Santa Cruz, on the central California coast, and Cabrillo Community College. Among my first students were young men writing their conscientious-objector requests and strung-out vets who needed to tell their stories. And I witnessed the end of the San Francisco and Berkeley 60's scene. For 24 years it was my delight to midwife life stories from Cabrillo's varied students and show, in lit classes, how full meaning comes from compiling ALL points of view.
This was still a time when divorce was shameful and single women were scarcely recognized as human beings. An advice book I wrote for newly-divorced women, based on my own hard-fought battle, earned sufficient money for the down-payment on a house.
Those years saw my Third Awakening--women's rights. I taught the first women's studies class at Cabrillo and the first class in literature by women. And joyfully taught many women's re-entry composition classes.
I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation in 1973, a study of the English novelist Doris Lessing, who began as an idealistic Communist and has become a Sufi mystic and visionary. I had my infant Spiritual Awakening as I studied Carl Jung and Sufism to better understand Lessing. From them I learned that every spiritual tradition has within it the same truth, that the inner Self IS the Divine and that we are meant to fully realize it.
Later, I also realized that the two major modes I explored in Lessing's writing--realism and charged symbolism--were the same as left- and right-brain consciousness, the groundbreaking idea revealed by Ornstein's The Psychology of Consciousness, published at about the same time as my book on Lessing.
And what better place than Santa Cruz to nurture these major themes of my life--holistic health, the role of the Feminine, progressive politics, and the spiritual path?
I retired at 60, have traveled, studied story telling in England, camped all over in my Toyota pick-up with the bed in back, spent long periods at my clan's Montana cabin.
Our generation began life with the horrifying images of World War II. Now we have the Twin Towers and all that has ensued. And genetic engineering. And, amazingly, fluoridation is still very much with us. Most of my life I have demonized the perpetrators of the many horrors that descend on us. Only recently am I beginning to grasp a little of Ghandi's truth, that the enemies are all inside and the only true battleground is the human heart. With Grace I'll live long enough to fully realize this truth and the Source of his vision.
Left to right: Martha Lawall Warnock, Mary Ann Singleton, Bob Warnock--11/02, Soquel, CA