Julie in the forest

Complacency is countered by integrity, which is an unswerving love of the truth and a willingness to live it.
—Jack Kornfield.


Julie grew up in the deep south of the USA, troubled by the injustice of racism and determined to do something about it. She spent many years leading programs for teens and now leads a non-profit that provides care-givers to people with disabilities. She is the single mother of three children and three dogs, and she had her DNA done in hopes of locating her birth mother, so far with no luck. Instead she found her father’s family and me, another “illegitimate” offspring of that same man, now deceased, a man neither of us ever met. She's 24 years younger than I; my first-born son is three years older than Julie. We don’t look much alike, and we were brought up very differently, in families that had different values and economic situations and probably would not have spoken to each other, had they met at all. 

She was adopted by a devoutly Christian family that has never left the deep south. They lavished love on her and are still a bulwark and a solid source of support and stability for her and her children. Despite the differences in our nurturance and upbringing, we have both devoted our lives to working for social justice and are both hyper-responsible and independent to a fault. We are also alike in physical ways: we’re both tall, we both have a deviated septum, migraines, and sinus problems. We have our differences of course: Julie was never “into books” and is an outdoorsy person who fully inhabits her body and loves to work out.  She marveled at the tall trees and lush greenery of the northwest, and much as I love the rain forest, I live much more in my head and heart than in my body. Julie avoids politics, and her work in the world is guided by Christian ethics—ethics that in many ways are very like mine, though mine come from a different source. We talked and talked and talked.