Oshee Eagleheart

Dear Ursula,

I’ve been intending to write to you for ages, to thank you for the innumerable ways that your words have inspired, informed, supported, and challenged me over the past thirty-six years. Now that you’re turning eighty, I think it’s a good time to write that letter.

I first met you in 1973, in a room behind a little macrobiotic restaurant, called Peace Food, in West Berlin. I was twenty-one and in training to become a full-time worker for an Eastern spiritual organization. Our trainer would read to us from The Wizard of Earthsea, thinking, I suppose, that it was relevant to us as spiritual workers in training. It reminded me that I’d always known I was a wizard, as a faerie child talking to faeries in the woods of Britain and making sticks into magic wands. Of the many ideas in that book that resonated with my being, what stayed with me was the importance of the healing power of embracing and integrating one’s own shadow--one’s whole self--which became and remains central to my way of understanding myself and the world.

...