Calling Myself Home: Living Simply, Following Your Heart and What Happens When You Jump

By Robin Rainbow Gate

"Calling Myself Home: Living Simply, Following Your Heart, and What Happens When You Jump" by Robin Rainbow Gate is the true story of a woman's complete reinvention of herself, a journey that takes her from suburban Chicago to the Pacific Northwest, India, England, and Appalachia, before she is drawn by visions to move to a rural mountain village in the south central highlands of Mexico. She leaves behind a career, financial security, close friends, her possessions—even her old name—and studies with elder teachers and traditional healers, all in search of a new way of living in harmony with the earth and ultimately herself.
The book explores simple living, personal transformation, and the pertinence of living traditions in today’s world. At heart it's a love letter to the rural community she adopted, and which adopted her. The core message that it's all about relationship—among people, animals, plants, mountains, the elements, the seasons, the cycles of life, and the beings, seen and unseen, that inhabit the world around us—will resonate with many readers. The book awakens the reader to indigenous ways of knowing and living, in service of a model of sustainability the planet desperately needs.
Equal parts travelogue, memoir, and guide to voluntary simplicity, Calling Myself Home will leave readers deeply moved and challenged by Robin's unique journey. Through stories, reflections and inquiry the book inspires and encourages readers to follow their own inner voice. Her story dares the reader to consider whether they're on the right path for themselves, and if not it helps them find the courage to step onto the right one, however frightening the "jump" may be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robin Rainbow Gate
• Release date: Jul 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463381489

Robin Rainbow Gate

Robin Rainbow Gate, born Lisa Sara Kaplan, spent the first 17 years of her life in Chicago. Born into a family of artists, Robin grew up with a studio in her house, and prospered from great cultural exposure and opportunity. For six summers, from age nine, she majored in art (and minored in harp) at National Music Camp, in Michigan, and refers to this time as her early college education.The experience that had the most positive influence on her life (besides giving birth), was her experience in Alternative Education in High School. In the "Community" she learned about learning and thrived on being given responsibility for her own education. It is this experience that led Robin to believe the world is her classroom, and allows her to live by it.After one year at an alternative college in Washington State, where she studied "Science and Humanism" and the history and evolution of modern medicine, Robin lived abroad for five years. In England she received training as a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language, and got married. After two years, she moved to Bangalore, India, where she taught, lived, and gave birth. Three years later, she and her family "landed" in Lexington, Kentucky, where her then husband had a University position.Along the way, Robin has been sole proprietor of "Underart" a small artwear business, cooked professionally (coolest job was as vegetarian middle-eastern and Indian Chef for the Princes of Dubai),and supported herself through various freelance creative projects.In 1993, Robin left the suburbs and married life for a lifestyle more in accordance with her values. She founded the Voluntary Simplicity Support Group in 1995, which met for eight and a half years and still enjoys her simple lifestyle, based on her love for nature and care for Earth.Robin has been practicing plant medicine for years and enjoys harvesting and eating wild plants and making medicine with them. She is currently becoming acquainted with the medicinal plants that grow on the mountains where she lives.Robin put herself through college from 1995-1999 and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in Integrated Strategic Communications, her career goal being Graphic Design. After several years of that work, Robin became Creative Director of the same small publishing company where she'd started, and then General Manager of a regional magazine called Health & Wellness.In 2000, Robin was asked to interview a woman about her experience being a patient. Thus began her second documentary, “Like Rembrandt Draperies: A Portrait of Cathy Tingle”, used accross the nation in medical educational settings. The process of producing this film was a life changing experience which asked Robin to look at her feelings about my death, illness, and dying. That project inspired a business called LifeWorks, where she offered a healing opportunity and/or experience of being honored deeply through the way she listened to and invited their stories, ultimately creating edited tapes (video portraits) given as gifts to their selected loved ones.From February 2006 through April 2007 Robin lived in a village in the South Central Highlands of Mexico where she spent much time learning from elder teachers and traditional healers about the spiritual knowledge and daily practice, as well as traditional healing methods of the ancient Mexicans (The Mexica) still in use today. After her first six months living in Mexico, Robin knew the simple village life was for her. Back in Kentucky, she sold her house, most of her things and within months returned to live amongst those mountains again.Robin's professional services incllude: Teacher of Authentic Indian Cuisine, Food Mentor, Health and Wellness Coach and Facilitator of Intentional Living courses and retreats.As an artist, Robin finds her creativity, sensitivity and knowing delight in expressing themselves through writing, painting, teaching and marketing. Alll her work reflects and passionately honors listening inside and following one's heart and dreams as a way to live and make life choices.

Book preview

Part 1Chapter 1 Cut Glass Memories

Iam two years old and have just been scolded for touching a small cut-glass table in the living room.

Some moments freeze like snapshots in the mind. Next to the fancy, pink-upholstered chair no one ever sat in, stood the small decorative side table. It had a narrow oval top with a tarnished brass knob in the middle, rendering the remaining surface area useless. I liked to fondle and try to unscrew the mysterious ball despite the metallic residue and acrid smell it left on my fingertips. I was equally fascinated by the disproportionately thick and sparkling pedestal and smooth top through which I could see the elaborate crystal forms on its underside. When I wasn’t playing with the knob I would lie underneath, reach my arm up and run my fingertips over the sharp little facet mountains. My grandmother was sitting with my mother on the blue couch, its satiny striped bolsters the only other thing I liked in that room. I was happily absorbed in the table’s secrets when my grandmother’s voice shattered my concentration. Don’t do that. I crab-walked to the middle of the room. Sitting on the hard sea of bald light-blue carpet I asked, Why? There was a heavy pause. Because what will people think? This made no sense to me. What did touching a pretty glass table have to do with others? What could they possibly think of me for that?

This was the first of countless similar lessons from my maternal family. Two things happened in that moment. First, I understood then that everything I do is for someone else. What I do or don’t do must please others or avoid their judgment. That I won’t know the rules but will have to guess them right. That life is an impossible game. Second, I made my own rule: I would refuse to acquiesce to the expectations of my family (and implicitly my culture) when they lacked logical explanation. I rejected much for decades.

I remember being four and deciding to explore the experience I’d had with my mother earlier. Everything had seemed fine and then woomf, just like the metal doors sliding shut at the beginning of the old TV show Get Smart, the energy stopped. She ceased answering my questions and being nice. I didn’t know what had happened. Had I done something to cause her abrupt departure? Did she not love me anymore? I asked my mother if I was adopted, having deduced in my little-girl mind that adopted children were loved less. With the primordial desire to feel loved at every moment leading the way, I studied her. Unconsciously believing I had to leave myself and be some idea of perfect in order to be loved, I became superb at mimicking the behavior, words and timing that would elicit an effusive response.

Another time I faced my parents in the hallway, the white baby grand piano behind them, and asked my mother if she was angry with me. No, honey, I’m not mad. I believed she was lying. I was being told, again, that what I clearly perceived was wrong; that I could trust neither her nor myself, creating a double bind that matched my confusion with seeing. I couldn’t use both eyes together to form a single, comprehensible three-dimensional image. Instead, my eyes constantly switched. I’d look with one eye, then the other, trying to make sense of my world. One eye said, me and the other, you. We couldn’t exist. Existing and being in relationship with others felt life-threatening. Knowing my feelings and communicating them registered as impossible. Thankfully, my parents had three offspring, which was lifesaving in later years when we would compare notes and comfort ourselves by agreeing my parent’s behavior was crazy-making.

One day I climbed onto the kitchen counter to reach for a glass on a high shelf. I grabbed the shelf edge to pull myself up, and the shelf tipped and down poured glasses and cups, crashing to the floor. Suddenly my mother was in the kitchen. She asked me what happened and I replied honestly yet strategically, hoping I wasn’t in trouble. Watching her response like a movie, I saw she wasn’t mad, she was just glad I wasn’t hurt. I stood there in a private moment of victory, saying to myself, I’ve done it. I have figured out my mother perfectly. I know exactly how to act with her so she is always nice to me. The price for developing this total focus on her and, later, everyone else, was that I buried my own self so deeply I no longer knew or expressed myself, except for feelings of happiness and occasionally sadness, which were the only acceptable emotions in my family.

I am seven years old, sitting in the car with my mother.

We’d just pulled up into the carport and she had asked me an intimate question about how I had experienced something, what it was I really felt. I wavered. Is it safe to tell her? In the past she had taken what I had shared and used it to hurt me. My love for her was as innocent as a puppy’s and I naturally wanted to please her. I told her. She held my fingertip and the flat surface of my fingernail between her index finger and thumb, as she often did, pressing deeply. It bordered on pain and reminded me of the rough pink washcloth with which she scrubbed my genitals in the bathtub when I was a tiny girl.

At least it was touch.

Her reply to my honest answer was immediate, judgmental and cruel.

She had fooled me for the last time. As she squeezed each of my fingernails in turn, I made a decision: I would never tell her anything real about me again. And until the final chapter of her life when death was looming, I didn’t.

Later, I applied my childhood experience of my mother to my concept of God: external, mysterious, and needing to be pleased in order to approve of me—a set of goals impossible to achieve. The things I had to accomplish or be in order to be good enough to the Universe were once again unknown and unknowable, so I made them up, but the possibilities were so vast and varied that I could never really win. Not a fun game my mind had created. Convoluted and thorough in its design, it was as impossible to win as it was, seemingly, to extricate myself from.

The questions of how to live and love not only terrified me, they struck me as confusing propositions that I wouldn’t say no to, yet were never worth the cost. The perceived demand that I must devote myself to figuring out how to please people and the Universe drained all my energy. It was stressful, fear-based and thankless.

My father was more available to me. As a child, my favorite game was Flying Angel. He’d take off his loafers and lie on the den floor with his knees bent. I’d stand at his feet till he lifted them off the shag carpet, his thin black-socked feet on my tummy. Then he’d hold my hands while I leaned forward as he raised his straightened legs toward the ceiling and hoisted me into the air. There I’d be, looking down at him, giggling, and when I had my balance, we’d let go hands and I’d become Flying Angel. When I was older, we both loved jazz and would pantomime a five-piece band, moving smoothly from trombone to alto sax, snare, piano and stand-up bass, while WBEZ provided the tune.

I liked my dad until I was 15. When I was a junior in high school, I had an awakening to spirituality and to my own ideas. I was critical of things I observed, from indirect communication between my parents to the way our society operated. In my family such observations were unwelcome. I became the rebellious outcast, angering my non-spiritual parents when I insisted on going outside to pray at sunset. Can’t you just set the table? quipped my mother.

When I began to form my own ideas about life, I looked to my father for approval. Instead, by his belligerent reactions I judged he saw me as a threat. Though at my core a deeply spiritual and sensitive person, through my father, a doctor, I had absorbed the patriarchal mentality fundamental to science and technology. When I began to question that structure and receive harsh treatment in response, I felt as though I was re-experiencing a life as a witch: condemned and punished for my beliefs. My arguments with my father were an external manifestation of my inner battlefield. I fought myself, hating my analytic, critical mind while having such a strong intellect. How could I love and accept myself as spiritual and therefore good when my bad and wrong intellectual part was an undeniably central part of my make-up?

I couldn’t stand up to my father. I tried, but I argued from a place of sadness, disappointment and rage that he was abandoning me, because he didn’t understand, agree with, or at least respect my point of view. It was a moment to grieve, grow up and separate. I didn’t achieve it.

A few years earlier, on a visit to my maternal grandparents in Miami Beach, I opened a drawer full of pill containers. I counted to 70. Having listened to their medical complaints for years, I understood by then that one medication would create symptoms requiring another medication, which would create more side effects, necessitating a new medication, and so on.

At college, I spent a semester studying the history and evolution of modern medicine. I came across the term iatrogenesis, which describes the experience I saw my grandparents embedded in. The term was validating to my perceptions and I wondered, Were they victims, or did they consciously choose this type of approach to their health? As part of my research I interviewed several doctors and became clear about the dynamic that was being played out between doctors and their patients.

It became obvious that applying conclusions about physical reality onto the health or lack thereof in the human body made our bodies a matter of fact which would not allow for individuality or spiritual, energetic causes for ill health. It also made medical care a matter for the few experts who had studied hard to gain these facts and apply them to ridding our bodies of symptoms.

I saw with razor sharpness that in our patriarchal culture, the relationship between doctor and patient was one of authority versus powerlessness—that generally patients were neither invited to ask questions nor to doubt or deny treatment suggestions. The unspoken agreement was that the doctor would tell them what to do and they would do it. This was not just the fault of doctors; patients agreed, albeit unconsciously, to this dynamic.

We had been brainwashed to fear and doubt modalities that differed from modern medicine. Even health insurance companies wouldn’t readily support treatments such as acupuncture or naturopathy, let alone Reiki or massage.

I observed my grandparents made not better but worse through medical care. I grew to despise science, its left-brain, linear thinking requiring provable, repeatable proof of truth. I saw science as a means for masculine, patriarchal dominance to deny the spiritual. And I saw it worst of all as the impetus for technology’s goal to control nature. I felt grief and outrage that in the role of being patients, my grandparents and so many of us gave up what I called the Feminine, which represented unprovable knowing and reality. To me, The Truth.

When I shared opinions like this with my father, a general practitioner, he reacted spitefully. He had been my buddy; I counted on him. Now we argued incessantly. I had challenged the ideas he had invested in to become a respected medical professional. Although I vehemently expressed my beliefs, inwardly I was still waiting for his approval of my thoughts, my ideas and burgeoning spirituality. So, I lived for many years with one foot on the brake.

I was in the boxing ring with my dad, in opposite corners, representing two universal forces. This dynamic continued for years and affected the whole family. When we were grown and living in different states, our infrequent family visits would consistently culminate in the dreaded final dinner at a fancy restaurant. Dad would drink and soon spit insults about the wrongheadedness of those who believe in spirituality; he proclaimed it nonexistent. The sole male at the table, he directed his tirade at my sisters and me, but my mother was also a target. She depended on my father for medical advice and a calm response to her many health worries, and he knew it. She was attracted to alternative care, such as acupuncture and meditation, but never explored them; losing the security of her husband’s support would not be worth it. Alcohol would release the hidden rage of this normally mild-mannered man, and while our mother sat silent at these dinners, we three sisters would escape to the ladies’ room to validate one another’s fear and anger. We’d swear and cry and only slowly gather the strength to return to the table for another round. This battle played out over decades, until he softened with age and I tired of the conflict.

Chapter 2 The World is Flat, Isn’t It?

Idon’t see things as other people do. I mean that literally—I was born cross-eyed. The ophthalmologist told my parents that if the condition didn’t correct itself by the time I was 18 months, I should have corrective surgery. I had that surgery. They cut the left inner eye muscle with the idea that it would move out and the other eye would follow. Instead, the eye veered out and upward, resulting in strabismus and dissociated vertical deviation, or DVD. Thus, I didn’t have stereoscopic vision. In grammar school I couldn’t catch a ball. I couldn’t follow it or see it coming so was always one of the last to be picked for teams in gym. In our school, popularity directly correlated with athletic ability, so I was decidedly unpopular.

I went to the eye doctor often as a little girl. One time I was sitting with my mother in the waiting room asking her a lot of questions. Normally, I felt she didn’t really enjoy that, but this time, some of the other adults waiting to see the ophthalmologist raised their heads from reading magazines and smiled, nodding. I noticed this and interpreted that they thought I was interesting. I noticed an immediate change in my mother’s behavior with me. She became chirpy, responding to my chatter as if she found my curiosity entertaining and pleasing. I recognized that this was an act, but I enjoyed the unexpected positive attention. I learned to be interesting more often.

Finally, it was my turn to see Dr. Folk. I liked him. He sat me on a high leather-cushioned chair and swung a heavy metal machine in front of my eyes. The room was dark except for a rectangular frame on the wall in front of me. Cold hard equipment pressed against the bridge of my nose, Dr. Folk told me to look through the two small binocular-like lenses and tell him which line the musical note was on. I’d been playing piano since I was five so I knew about notes on the musical staff. I found his question strange, though, because the note wasn’t on any line. It hung in space through the left lens. Through the lens on the right I saw the five familiar horizontal lines. Confused, I looked from one side to the other, trying to figure out if the note had been on a line, which one would it be. Switching quickly from the left to the right image it appeared the note was pretty high up, probably at the height of the second line from the top. I guessed, hoping to please the doctor. This was an important moment in my life. Dr. Folk mistakenly thought the note was on a line but it wasn’t! There were two distinct images, one on each side. He didn’t know the truth. I realized I saw things how they really are. Other people saw things as whole and put together. I saw the basic elements in their raw separate form before the illusion that being put together created. I felt sorry for everyone else who didn’t know this truth. My secret made me different and separate. It also caused frustration.

Back at home in my bedroom I thought about another truth I knew regarding the anger I sometimes observed between people. To me it was obvious but no one else seemed to see it. I thought, Anger is unnecessary. It’s caused by misunderstanding. If people would just take time to explain what they mean to others, there would be understanding and everyone would get along.

In fifth grade I was in the school library talking to the librarian, looking at her, but she turned to see what I was looking at behind her. I knew this was because my eye wasn’t straight. I was mortified. Unable to use both eyes together, I would switch from one to the other, the image in each eye distinct and separate. Seeing was confusing for me, and looking at me was confusing, too. In sixth grade I asked my parents if I could have surgery again. Over Christmas vacation, Wendy, the meanest but most popular girl in the class, came to visit me. I was sure it was so she could report to the rest of the girls. There wasn’t much to tell. Only one eye was bandaged but I couldn’t open the other one either, for the pain. When the eye patch was removed, I saw that the surgery was unsuccessful and my eyes remained out of sync.

In my family, if it wasn’t happy it never happened; my parents never talked about my eyes or the surgeries. They neither acknowledged nor asked me about the emotional pain and shame my eyes caused. I felt completely alone and miserable.

Growing up I often didn’t know what I was seeing. If the visual edge of one object met the contour line of another, I saw it as one thing, regardless of whether one was near and the other far. If I saw what appeared to be a large bird in a cage, I had to figure out from other visual cues whether it was a big bird far away or a small bird close up. I did not perceive depth or the relation between objects in space. I did my best to make sense of what I was seeing and I was often mistaken.

At 17 I searched the Yellow Pages on my own for a visual therapist. I found one and made my way to Dr. Sirota's dank office off of Sheridan Road in Chicago where his secretary smoked at her desk surrounded by brown fake-wood wall panel. The doctor spent hours with me, testing my eyes as I walked back and forth wearing different prism lenses, asking me how I felt with each one. In one experiment I stood at the end of the hall and he faced me from the other end. Then he’d start walking toward me, asking if he seemed small or large. He wanted to know when it seemed that he had arrived in front of me. What I experienced was that he would appear small, still small, and then all of a sudden huge. I felt scared, that I had no safety or protection from such sudden appearances; as if someone could just enter my space and take me over. That was how I felt with people all the time. It was also exactly like gym class, when I would watch the ball come toward me and then it was right in front of me—I had no time and no idea how to connect with it.

The doctor told me that a person with normal eyes would be able to follow him all the way from where he started until he was right in front of me, with the change in his size remaining gradual. He prescribed new lenses and I was amazed at the quiet in my mind they gave me. He taught me that three-dimensional vision is used all the time, that it lets us know how high the curb is and how much to step down. He told me that I had to think, to estimate what came so naturally for others. The mental effort it required was exhausting.

Through Dr. Sirota I realized that I saw life like a movie screen: flat. His other experiments demonstrated to me that I saw a small piece of the whole picture at a time, that I scanned and panned and pieced together information in order to have an idea of what was in front of me.

One day the doctor said something strange: that I wasn’t as deep as I thought I was. I was puzzled, then taken aback, but then understood why he said this: I thought my intricate thinking was leading me to depths of ideas, but he was saying it had to do with my having to work hard to figure out things that others saw and understood naturally ¹.

My eyes became a painful metaphor for my life. I didn’t understand my relationship with others, or with objects. I wondered, Where am I, where do I end? Where are you, where do you end? What is my relationship with other people, or with simply existing in space? I didn’t know how to navigate through it. I felt alone and afraid of others. Did I not learn how to be in relationship with the world because of a lack of nurturing and bonding as a baby? Or was it because of my eyes not working together, not forming and giving my brain a depth perception? Did one cause the other? Either way, both traumas provided me with powerful motivation.

I often thought, What would it be like to use both eyes together? What would it mean? Sometimes when I was in a conversation with someone, I felt my left eye drift out. While my right eye was fixed on them, giving the impression that I was engaged, my left eye looked at a tree, noticed a person going by. While I didn’t do it on purpose, it may have had unconscious benefits. I didn’t know how to protect myself in the realm of existence. If I had felt safe to exist, I would have met life with presence and self-responsibility. As it was, non-committal to the physical realm gave me a way out. It was the only way I knew to survive.

But what if I were able to look at that person with both eyes at once? I’d be seeing them, they’d be seeing me, and I’d be seeing them seeing me. I’d look at them with all of me, connecting my deep hallway to theirs, really being there. I would be centered, feeling my inherent safety and substance from the inside. It would mean I exist. As a being. An energetic being with heart and feelings, wisdom, presence. I would not be isolated and therefore safe. I would be in the realm of Spirit. That is, me as Spirit. This was my deepest longing and greatest fear; not existing kept me helpless, a victim. Existing carried responsibility, but also joy and passion and vulnerability, the full spectrum of life. This possibility was what I had lived for and why 30 years later I still did eye exercises. As Marianne Williamson put it:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. ²

Perhaps because of my eyes and my unique way of viewing the world I have learned that at every level, it’s all about relationship. From micro to macro, it’s all the same—fractals of the holographic completeness; so it doesn’t matter where I start. I can pick up any thread and learn about myself through my eyes, as a daughter or a mother. I can look at how I treat my body or how I pick a flower. Is it with brusqueness or tenderness? It’s all the same and it’s All True. And truly, all roads lead home.

1 Read more about Dr. Sirota at:

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-06-13/features/0606130228_1_optometry-eye-new-glasses

2 Our Deepest Fear from A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles by Marianne Williamson (HarperOne Reissue ed. 1996)

Chapter 3 Four Weddings and a Spin of the Globe

Imet my husband when I was a senior in the alternative education program in my high school. He was nine years older than me, brown-skinned, and unlike our family, he was not Jewish. My parents—liberal, non-religious, with 12 years' age difference between them—couldn’t accept him.

In my alternative high school, we were given responsibility for deciding what we wanted to learn and how we were going to learn it. From independent studies to internships and group classes, we were taught to use the resources of the community to find facilitators (not teachers) to help us achieve our goals. A group of us were interested in astronomy, so someone called Northwestern University to see whether anyone there would be open to facilitating our class. An astrophysicist who had just arrived from Princeton as a post-doctoral graduate said yes. He was a charismatic and gifted teacher who, through analogies and illustrations, made sure every student understood the cosmological concepts he presented.

Inspired by conversations with my long-haired, white-clad Jewish friend Jon, I was studying