Hello Emilie,

Where to start…I read the entire book over the weekend, or should I say, the book read me. 

There’s so much that’s impressive about Life On Land—first of which is the sincerity with which you explain what it is like to be you, and how you came to be that way.  I would think that most people who get to know you and your work experience you as the creative genius, iconic and highly actualized person that you are and may not realize that it wasn’t always that way. 

I appreciate that you selected key moments from your life to explore, rather than take the straight shot, linear, A-Z tour through the details of your autobiography.  As a result, the moments you chose to write about became like torches throwing light backwards and forwards, and by the end of the book, illuminated great swathes of your interior life. 

Life on Land is a beautiful, remarkable book, and one of the best and most scrupulous I can remember reading about the process of creativity.  One doesn’t have to be “into” Continuum, or healing, or dance, or somatics to get a lot out of it; one just has to love people who create beautifully. 

I recently read Bob Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles.  Dylan surprised me how well he could tell the story of his life after singing about it for so many years.  I was particularly impressed by how vivid his recollection of details, decades old, was.  I was similarly impressed by how vividly you were able to capture so many specifics about your own life, even when those details occurred in the midst of deep personal pain and trauma.  Like Dylan, you demonstrate a passion for not settling for the life you were born into, but invented life anew, so that it fit the large, shifting shape of your soul. 

As a poet and a life-long lover of music, I loved the quality of your language.  It’s hard enough to write good poetry, but to write prose that dances with music and pulses with poetry, is much more difficult.  It is because of your unique way with words that the book itself feels embodied.  Page after page, the words landed in my body and mind, and found a home. 

I’ve read one, possibly two, books that offer the rarest of literary gifts—the author’s own transmission.  You’ve probably had the experience of traveling far to meet a teacher, to find that, in the best of circumstances, what couldn’t be taught was caught.  It’s a rare gift.  Once in a very blue moon it happens through a book.  Walt Whitman did it for me in Leaves of Grass when I was a teenager.  Reading Life on Land I found myself continually wanting to dive into writing of my own (poetry), to dance, to listen to silence, and to get on the floor and do Continuum.  From the very first chapter the words became other-than-words, more like probing and prodding fingers, healing hands, sound and breath, making new life for my cells, my bones, and muscles possible.   

Midway through the first half of the book I was distinctly reminded of reading Allen Ginsberg’s Howl;  there it was, the similar New York battlefield, similar cultural insanities imposed upon and wrestled with.  Ginsberg’s Howl is three parts intelligent agony, one part Holy! blessing (if you haven’t read it recently, you may enjoy doing so).  Life on Land, while not retreating in the least from the battered-heart-landscape, offers blessing and blessings throughout.  I thank you for not only being able to so vividly name the many ways that our tribes, our society, our leaders, and even our own DNA programs us for suffering and the passing on of more suffering, but the radiant way you name how (and show how) we can take God/Life as lover and beloved.  Life on Land makes possible the redemption that Ginsberg’s epic and best poem could not. 

I realize how difficult it is explain Continuum, but in the last part of Life on Land, you completely pulled it off.  Again, I had to get on the floor, Saturday night, two A.M. to experience in my body what you were describing in words.  The words “epic” and “masterpiece” will be used to describe this book in the future.  For me, your book is part of a trilogy of awakening that began several years ago with Deena Metzger’s Entering the Ghost River.  Ironically, when I came back to Continuum in April 2003 and took yours and Robert’s Neural Plasticity class I had plans to visit Deena and her husband in Topanga Canyon the following weekend.  It didn’t happen, as I spent the next two weeks studying more Continuum, first with Susan in Santa Barbara and then yourself back at the Studio.  Maybe I’ll meet her someday.  Her book is amazing and roars with the same fire as Life on Land. 

The second book of this “trilogy” is Alice Walker’s We Are The One’s We Have Been Waiting For.  I believe strongly in all of her books; just yesterday I was telling a friend what a national treasure Alice Walker is, how lucky we are to have her alive and writing in these difficult times. 

And now comes Life on Land which points, potently, through words and beyond words, to the Mystery and Sensual Divinity that we are.  It puts us back into the driver’s seat, namely our bodies. 

So how to sum this up?  Life on Land is the story of a maverick genius who reinvented herself at least as well as the great shape shifter himself, Bob Dylan.  The story of a cultural muckraker and status quo slayer, reminiscent of Robert Anton Wilson and Zorba the Greek.  But in this case, grounded in the Three Anatomies, the author not only demonstrates profound change within her own life, but give us the means to follow on her path, and make that path our own. Part cultural storyteller, part spiritual midwife, part romantic poet and poetic romantic, but most of all one hundred percent Emilie Conrad.

I see why these words took so long to find their way onto the printed page:  they had to be lived, tested, made love to, one passionate day at a time.  What we have here is golden.  Your inner Teachers must be celebrating.

  With gratitude,

  Jeff Rockwell

  (Your faithful serpent)