I’m not going to get very intimate in this recounting. I’ve crossed that boundary before and I respect the people with whom I went on this adventure too much to embarrass them. Note my treatment of my “four-dating” where I’ve changed the names of the other couple. Sometimes I’ll use real names, sometimes not.

It’s enough that my prospective business clients will know that this is part of my history. I don’t want to burden others with that, so there won’t be much in the way of full names aside from Stephen Gaskin and Cliff Figallo. No one is forced to be nude here.

if it’s who I think it is…Sydney died of brain cancer in 1985 or 1986 or so in Sonoma County California. Ina May came out here to be with her, stayed in Sonoma with my friend, childbirth educator Catherine Ston.(hi Catherine ,if you are reading this;I know you kept Ina May’s nightgown as a memento of that sacred time for some ten years after.) Ina May wrote about Sydney’s illness and death at age 20 very movingly in her book “Babies, Breastfeeding and Bonding,” which was NOT published by the Farm’s BPC, but by Bergin and Garvey. the breastfeeding book went out of print pretty quickly (I”ve heard rumors that there were potential civil suits about some of the material in it, which is too bad…I liked this book a lot, though it;s a little loose and associative compared with some othe rbreastfeeding guides. it’s got some good tales of Farm ways, such as shared nursing of infants and the couple who snuck into the ladies’ room at the hospital together to get the milk lowing while their baby was in the preemie ward, ,not to be found elsewhere in print

Ina May wrote about Sydney’s death for this book only a few weeks after it happened,with the proviso,”I’m still healing.” there’s a photo in the book of a teen-aged Sydney holding, and maybe non-wet nursing ,her baby brother, Paul I believe. (Stephen and Ina May’s youngest if so; his birth is described in every edition of Spiritual Midwifery.)

anyway…is “Martha” Sydney? did she,or her parents, adopt another name later in life? or am I missing something else?

if anyone really wants a a copy of Ina May’s “Babies, Breastfeeding,and Bonding, ” I recommend a search on abebooks.com or alibris.com – that’s where I get my hard-to-find and out-of-print how-to books.

meanwhile,I must confess my anthropological (and maybe slightly prurient?) fascination with the variety of human social arrangements and how they manifested in a community that was almost equal parts restoring idealized traditional values about relationships and inventing new forms for those values,it makes me eager to learn about how their four-marriage became a six-marriage, and Michael’s role in all this,and when and possibly why he left land came back here to the Coast.

like most of us,and especially like most of us who have made parts of our intimate lives public for the purposes of teaching in some form, Stephen and Ina May move back and forth, like a sarong wrapped loosely around a bather on a windy beach, between revealing and concealing their family intimacies. I hope no one takes offense at my questions and observations. when Stephen used to tour California, in late 70s and early 80s, he sometimes snapped at people asking questions about their marital practices,”that’s just another do-we-all-ball-in-a-heap question. no, we don;t all ball in a heap,let’s move on.” well,sure,bu it some of the things he’d said previously about tantra,and ejaculation,and marriages, of two or more, do sort of beg such questions…

I’m having a great time following the story,anyway…and I’ve probably disclosed and re-clothed quite a bit (of) myself as well as some others.

again,thanks Cliff for putting it out herein the cyber-nudist colony…

down the memory-hole once again, Judith