Forest Firestone
The Forest Gave Her its Name
Forest’s parents were total hippies - grinding their own grain, raising ducks and goats in their small home in rural Northern California where her parents still live. Growing up they did a lot of camping and backpacking as a family. “We had an orange pop top VW Camper Bus and the hammock that stretched between the front seats was my bed,” she remembers.
As a young person, basketball and soccer were a huge part of her life and her identity. “I can see now that basketball was my first real connection to spirituality. It put me in a place where I felt a relationship to everything above and below - where intuition and connection to yourself, the ball, the hoop, your teammates and the game itself is bound together,” Forest reflects.
Forest’s grandma played basketball and always told her that she played on the first semi-professional women’s team. She would tell all her friends she taught me everything I know. It was amazing, Forest explained, to hear this little old Jewish woman who was her grandma talk about playing basketball when she was a girl.
Basketball, or any other sport, can be a huge part of a person’s life. Forest explained, “I can see the huddle before the game as a kind of women’s’ council that I now take part in.” For Forest, this time of unbridled joy of physical and spiritual connection to life all got intersected with a trauma that had her struggling to stay in her body.
O. Andrew Schreiber
Universal Vibrational Rhythms
Playing in the nearby woods of Ann Arbor Michigan was O’s boyhood introduction to the joys and wonders of being with nature, full of hard woods such as red oak, hickory, birch, and elm. “My parents got into Euell Gibbons’ books,” O said, “and, as a family, we would forage and pick morel, oyster, and other wild mushrooms and cook them up for dinner.”
As a kid, he spent a month every summer at his stepmother’s family home in Newfoundland, in the tiny fishing village of Twillingate with its huge rocky cliffs overlooking the North Atlantic. At nine years old he remembers swimming in the frigid waters with ice bergs floating one mile out. “Nobody stays in the water for long, because if you did, you would die from hypothermia,” O explained. “It was a very berry landscape and we picked black, blue, and goose berries. We ate a lot of cod fish too!”
A memorable family vacation was a visit to his father’s parents who had moved to Sun City, Arizona. They packed up the station wagon and drove West through the National Parks of Bandelier, Canyon de Chilly, Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Black Hills. The road trip from Ann Arbor through the majestic national parks of the western US left a lasting imprint on O.
Along the way, his step mother would read stories of the lands they were visiting while traveling in the car. Experiencing Dee Brown’s
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
, Doug Boyd’s
Rolling Thunder
, Carlos Castaneda’s
The Teachings of Don Juan
and others from his school library, O found some hidden language that he knew he was searching for.
As a senior in high school he met his teacher, an Ojibwa elder named Keewaydinoquay or “Kee” for short. He spent summers with her and became her apprentice.
