From Tuscany to Big Sur: Marlene Sunyata Adair

On some rolling hills a ways north from Partington Ridge lives an elfin lady who communes with Nature and paints on prayer flags.

Her spiritual name, Sunyata, means silence in Sanskrit. Not the blank, sterile silence we find in empty rooms in office buildings, but the full, potent silence of nature, which carries quiet birdsong, wind and rustling leaves. Sunyata is the “empty full,” or, as the Sufi poet Rumi alludes to in his poetry, the space between voice and presence, where information flows. Her oil paintings, like her wisdom, flow out of her in streams of joy and light.

As Big Sur is a Mecca for seekers, many of our artists bring deep spiritual and psychological awareness to their creative process. A former Montessori teacher, Sunyata (OK, we call her by her given name, Marlene, or Marly for short) graduated from the University of Santa Clara in Psychology, with a PhD from Stanford and additional studies at Johns Hopkins. She has taught infants’ and young children's social development, and currently trains family doctors in human development, counseling, and, as she puts it, the “'inside job’ of mindful professional practice.”

Her first trip to Big Sur was to Esalen Institute in 1988 with colleague Helen Palmer, to assist in a workshop on Palmer’s pioneering work on the Enneagram.

“My experience of Big Sur on that first visit was feeling that I could die here, and it was not a morbid thought, it was a glorious feeling,” she says. “I had a sense of laying back on one of these ridges and melting back into the Earth. Becoming the oat grass. It was a wonderful sensation.”

At Esalen she befriended a great local lady, Kay Andres, who became one of her spiritual teachers. “Kay was relentless in her search for her own self-awareness and understanding. “ Marlene says. “Name it and It is yours; that was her motto. She was (sadly she passed away in 2005) what the Buddhists call a ‘noble friend’ the one who drives you crazy yet gives you untold gifts.” It was Kay who suggested that she study with local plein air painting teacher Ronna Rio.

Although Marlene painted in Florence, Italy, during her college years, she took what she calls a "35 year moment of distraction" from her passion. Her father told her that if she wanted to be painter, she had better mean “a house painter.” But an essence of the richness of Tuscany, Italy, the land which produced both Marlene’s parents, would eventually come forth in her own lush work.

Her maternal grandfather came to California from the island of Elba, Italy, as a sailor in the Italian Navy, navigating around Cape Horn and up to San Francisco in 1906. He grew tomatoes, onions and grapes in the San Joaquin Valley, and made wine during Prohibition. Her father, also a farmer, from Lucca, had an artistic sensibility as well. Marlene recalls him picking up a cantaloupe and telling her passionately, “Isn’t this beautiful, Marly?”

Her artistic goals range from the simple: “What makes me happy is to paint pieces that a 1st grade teacher can share with her students, to brighten the classroom," to the profound: "I want to weave the traditions of east and west into my work, and to announce the sacredness of daily life." One feels this in her still life paintings that incorporate weather worn prayer flags.

The daily life Marlene experiences in Big Sur is a prayer: taking deep breaths, being present, and watching what comes up in her work. Her waking visions are surreal—a luminescent egg at her throat, fiery Chinese symbols, radiant persimmons. She paints every day, and her most recent inspiration is a late work by Matisse, "Two Masks (The Tomato)."

Marlene tells me about Eckhart Tolle, (author of The Power of Now) who wrote that when we are overtaken by beauty, the mind stops. That’s what we really love about beauty, that we stop. “The human lifetime is not only a blessing,” she says, but “there is not a moment to waste.”

Big Sur light is blue, Marlene says, and the view from her home illustrates this perfectly. It recalls a dreamscape from a fairy-tale: rolling green hills to the west, north and south, with a backdrop of the enormous, sparkling sea, stretching to infinity.

“Pay attention to your distortions,” Marlene says, “because, like finding your voice, your distortion is your style.” Now that’s a concept I can really believe in!

The Artist at work

You can find Sunyata's paintings only at the Del Campo Gallery in Big Sur!

A Walk in the Woods

A bright Saturday afternoon, a dear friend and her son. A walk in the woods to the Source: the Partington watershed springs. "Who needs a sculpture garden?" Margaret remarks as we come around the path and find this tree, its skeleton delicately suspended in the air.

My former Maid-of-Honor Margaret now lives in the big city, but relishes her trips to Big Sur. While living here she met her husband, (yes, I take responsibility for being the matchmaker) tended her garden on a neighboring ridge for a decade, and birthed her baby boy Nigel.

This is the first time we've been in this canyon since the Basin Complex Fire this summer. Mostly we notice the quiet, that and the brand-spanking new PVC pipe that goes from the springs to the manifold, the beginnings of a system that serves all the families on the ridge. Instead of an overgrown, leave-the -breadcrumbs-behind-you-as-you-go hike, we can see our way clearly through the devastated but greening landscape.

We play make-believe science fiction inspired games with Nigel, 6 (almost 7!) shown here with a specimen for the lab back at the mother ship. Crumpling Bay leaves and holding them up to our noses, taking in that powerful tangy scent, makes our hike even more invigorating.


What trip to the woods would be complete without a sighting of mysterious fungi? After consulting David Arora's fabulous guide, All That the Rain Promises and More... These look just like the photo of the Death Cap (Amanita phalloides) Darn, I guess we won't be eating these.


Near the Source...at the bottom of the watershed we find the springs, with redwoods climbing all the way to the heavens. Even, or maybe especially, burned to a pitch-black, they are beautiful. We half-expect to see colorfully dressed hobbits emerge from the roomy "cat's eyes" (the burnt clean bases of the redwood trees) to offer us cups of spiced tea and biscuits.

Time marches on, as the stream feeding the Source flows quietly into the sun. The land has given us our Epiphany again: our "sudden, intuitive perception of the essential meaning of a simple experience."
But what's this? Emerging from the forest we find we've entered another continent...When I first saw these charismatic creatures I thought I'd slipped into a portal that had delivered me to the far reaches of the Andes. Next stop, Machu Picchu? (Hint: don't miss clicking on this link!)


Back on the road towards home, we promise each other we'll be eating delicious home-made (by Margaret!) chocolate brownies and enjoying French champagne bubbles (for our Twelfth Night celebration) very soon.

What Nature Would Build

Master architect, Mickey Muennig came to Big Sur in 1971 because he was curious about a workshop in gestalt awareness offered by the Esalen Institute. After completing his architectural studies with the noted architect Bruce Goff at the University of Oklahoma in 1959, he’d been working in his home town of Joplin, Missouri (where he built the landmark Foulke House and also designed a mineral museum) and in Denver, Colorado.

He arrived late to the class at Esalen, and was instructed to “meet people by touching them,” so he found himself silently groping about in the dark, encountering his fellow students. You might say that he has been feeling his way more deeply, into his art and life, ever since.

During his stay at Esalen, he was invited to build a home for a local. Thus began the next four decades of building in Big Sur. Soon after, he discovered Partington Ridge, driving a friend to her teepee on the mountaintop. Determined to buy land here, he eventually purchased 29.5 acres halfway up the ridge.

Here he built his own teepee of glass and steel, which he lived in for 18 years, followed by the creation of his own simple home built into the hillside, which has an indoor garden, gentle archways and tons of natural light.

As with many Big Sur folks, his commitment to living here is so profound that it has sustained him through difficult times. When the landslide of 1983 turned Partington Ridge into an island for a year, the National Guard helicoptered in food and supplies. With a sparkle in his eye, Mickey recalls sharing champagne with the pilot on Sundays.

Mickey is a practitioner of “organic architecture” promoted by the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright, so his work, visible throughout Big Sur, integrates the natural world with his structures. His architectural creations amplify nature, and given the backdrop of Big Sur, this is saying a lot.

Wright, who would stride regally into the lecture hall at Oklahoma University wearing a cape and a pork-pie hat, once remarked that “it was better to be a little bit right than a lot wrong” in response to Bruce Goff’s question about why Wright's students’ work imitated his own. Goff taught by incorporating the rhythms of music (Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was a popular inspiration in his classes) and demanded that his students come up with new ideas.

As a young man, Mickey studied aeronautics, and his vision of Big Sur architecture is influenced by his fascination with flight: “I wanted to build the wildest homes possible here,” he says, “I’d like to tell Frank Lloyd Wright and BG (Bruce Goff) that they’d be proud of me.”

In Mickey Muennig, Big Sur is blessed with an artist who creates substantial, large scale works that are both innovative and inspired by the dramatic landscape. Since he has basically created an indigenous style of architecture here, Pilgrims regularly come to his office door to learn more about his life and work. The Post Ranch Inn, the Hawthorne Gallery, and the Esalen Baths are examples of his work that are open for the public to enjoy.

If, as writer Henry Miller said, “Big Sur is the face of the Earth as the Creator intended it to look,” then Mickey’s structures are what Nature would build, allowing mortals to live, work and play in spaces that honor her majesty.

Teepee photo by Jack Ellwanger, Pelican Network
Mickey and Mickey's home photo by Toby Rowland-Jones

Spiral of Light

Imagine a rainy December night in Big Sur, guests driving down muddy roads through forest and cattle paddocks to enter a large, cathedral-like structure in a spacious meadow.

Glowing candlelight and the smell of hot spiced tea beckons us as we remove shoes and coats in the foyer. Amidst the paintings, Native American rugs and sheepskin draped furniture, we chat with our neighbors. Laughter, hugs and ginger snaps fill the half hour or so before we begin an ancient and uplifting Winter Solstice ritual.

Pagan ceremony gave meaning to our ancestors, by connecting them with the seasons of the Earth and of their lives. European winters, with hardships of cold, famine, and darkness, would bring reverent pre-christian folks together for practical reasons: to share food and light, and to warm their hearts and bodies through celebration.

We hold hands in a long line and walk upstairs to the second story. In complete darkness we slowly form an oval shape around the center of the room. Our leader, a lovely sprite of a woman, quietly lights a square votive candle sitting on a redwood round. Then we see the wonder: branches of redwood, bay and cypress, circling out from the candle in the center to our feet. The beginning of our Spiral of Light.

With the one candle lit, our guide returns to the entrance to the green labryinth and begins to sing in the darkness. This is the first of several rounds we will sing together as we walk the spiral this evening, from Latin hymns to bits of American folk ballads. As our song fills the high-ceilinged room, individuals, couples, and parents with their children, receive candles and follow the path to the center of the spiral, lighting their flames from the central one.

Each celebrant then places their small, lit taper, mounted on a round slice of tree, amongst the greenery of the spiral. Everyone's procession to the light is different: young people walk fast, goal-oriented, while older folks stroll more thoughtfully. Some, like myself, prance a bit on the walkway. Some light their candles simultaneously with their spouse or child, others solemnly light their flame separately.

When we've all had a turn, the effect is kind of like an enormous Christmas tree, laid out on the floor, sparkling with each individual's light. Light will return to us on this darkest night of the year. We will move forward into clarity and joy.

Our guide had said the Light Spiral ritual is transformative. I recognized that truth as my throat caught, holding my husband's hand approaching the circle. As I walked out of the spiral through the candle-lit forest on the floor, I felt the release of weight, a momentary spiritual lightness and ease. This feeling was echoed in the smiles on the faces of my neighbors, and the way we gently brushed each other's hands as we returned to our seats.

On Summer Solstice of this year, we dealt with fire in a very different way, slashing down trees and brush to stem its flow over the mountains and to our homes. This Winter Solstice evening of gently lighting candles, of singing as a community, was a way to experience fire differently: As a force of nature honored by our ancestors, and as a symbolic guide for us and for our children.


My favorite song of the evening:

Though my soul may rest in darkness
it will rise in perfect light.
I have loved the stars too fondly
to be be fearful of the night.

Happy Winter Solstice to All!

Holiday Estrogen

For me, the holidays are the time to take to the couch, cuddle up with a soft blanket, plug into the old movie channel and cry. What a year we've had, and how ready I am for it to be over, already. Going back to the 1940's, with its cinematic themes of sacrifice, disassociation, and pluck, is somehow comforting.

In the last month of our beloved nonagenarian neighbor Bob Nash's life he told me he'd heard the song, The Bells of St. Mary's, in his head, all night long one sad evening when he was ill.

Tonight this wonderful time-travel piece played on our satellite. Those rich dulcet tones of Bing Crosby's voice evoke his era (and the season) to perfection. When he and Ingrid Bergman sang the theme song with the sisters, I sobbed and thought of Bob, and his last days on the planet. I miss him. He was my ballast, a part of my heart. I know it was "his time," but so what? It is a loss I honor, every day.

Seeing the dewy skinned and trembly voiced Ingrid in a nun's habit mystified me. Bing, with his Roman collar and boater hat, worked behind the scenes to make the nuns' dreams come true: the local tycoon (Henry Travers, Clarence Odbody to fans of It's a Wonderful Life) donated his building for their school. When the rich man finally gives in, a mongrel terrier he's befriended yelps and yawns in the pew just behind him. (I think the dog inspires his benevolence more than the church and the beautiful nun, but that's just my take on it.)

Yes, just transport me to the mid-1940's, when life was so much clearer. This time of year, the weepy hormone, Estrogen, gives both sexes permission to shed some tears remembering our dreams of holidays past. Call it a massive, culture-wide, anniversary reaction to our dysfunctional world.

So what can we say as we approach the end of this annus horribilis? Well, we learned a lot, our souls pressed to the windshield of the speeding car headed into the bottomless lake. Our hearts grew, as we realized we were surviving, not crumbling. The only way to do this in difficult times is to expand, not contract. And that means pushing our hearts to the breaking point, filling them like grand balloons, almost to bursting, but not quite.

The best part of the December holidays? January and the New Year is right around the corner, beckoning to us like the sweet nymph she is. And this year, on January 20, church bells around the world will ring out a new and beautiful song.

Chasing the Muse

My laptop hard drive died a glorious death last week. I found it, sitting on top of my bed in the afternoon sunlight, making furious popping sounds. Repeated attempts to shut down and restart were met with the dreaded flashing question mark. Worse, the computer's bones then burned up before my eyes like special effects in a movie, lines and lines of code splashing across the screen. As the words Complete System Failure sank into my brain I began to wail.

I have this awful habit of copying documents into different folders v. backing up the hard drive itself. DUH. So, a year's worth of writing, lots of drivel, and some bits I was happy with, GONE. I feel like I've had one of my organs removed, a kidney let's say, and am functioning at half mast. How surprising to learn that my words have become such a big part of my identity. Thankfully, I'd sent out a lot of "test balloons" (drafts of short stories) to friends, and so all was not lost.

Now I am chasing down my Muse, calling to her as she speeds over the hills into the back country of my mind. Wait, wait! I need to experience that grief, just one more time, to get the nuance of that bit of personal history I am trying to craft into Art. Show me your face, again, my Beauty, show me your tortured smile. I know there are jewels in your tears. The tears that heal romantic fools...and bring them back to the land of the living.

Anaïs Nin said, "We write to taste life twice," and there are some things I'd rather not taste again, thank you. But with my laptop I can. Composting life's pain into art is a joy and a practice. We must, as Pema Chödrön says, "Turn arrows into flowers by opening our hearts."

Photos by Toby Rowland-Jones

Painting from the Inside

Painter, scholar and healer, Karuna Licht's life follows these three parallel paths. Her story reflects a special time in the world, and in our community. Big Sur is her muse, and her work is unlike that of any other local artist.

As a young girl Karuna lived next to the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. At 7 years old, she saw a woman working in the pottery studio there, and knew she would be an artist. She began as a potter, and her father encouraged her to paint in watercolor as well. The German Abstract Expressionist Emil Nolde, who created miniature watercolors which he called his Unpainted Pictures during the 1940's, was also an early influence. She looked at his work and knew she could push the boundaries of her medium. Her paintings show a Japanese influence too, in their precision and Zen-like quality.

Karuna was a Fine Arts major at Hunter College, and came to California in 1965. She began working in her own studio in the Carmel Highlands, creating watercolors and abstract pottery. As a potter, Karuna explains, she "learned to meditate—how to be still, centered and focused." "Watercolors," she adds, "are for decisive people. You work fast. And with kids, it was easy to clean up afterwards."

At this time, she discovered Big Sur (like so many of us) via Nepenthe. Also, she read the Henry Miller (who also came from Brooklyn) work Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, and decided to build her life here.

Karuna practiced holotropic breathwork with Stanislav Grof at the Esalen Institute, an experience which led to deeper spiritual explorations. She, along with many of the movers and shakers at Esalen at the time, visited Baghwan Shree Rajneesh at his ranch in Oregon. To Karuna, one of his most appealing ideas was that the world will change only when women are in leadership roles, liberated both sexually and intellectually. (I'd like to think that's now coming true.)

She began doing Simkin Gestalt therapy and led Gestalt groups for women in Monterey County. At this time, she relates, women were just beginning to put into words their own psychology, asking the radical question: what if I put my own identity in the center of my reality and started looking at my life? At UCSC she entered the field of feminist studies. For the past three decades she has worked as a psychotherapist, having earned a Masters degree in the psychology of women, via an extension program of Antioch College.

Karuna's life and art have undergone a massive transformation in the past 5 years. She considered leaving Big Sur, but remembered what Ram Dass said about "only moving the furniture around, yet not changing the core. " Instead, she renewed her studies of painting, with Mendocino Abstract Expressionist painter Judith Hale, who encouraged her to paint in acrylic, which she now does exclusively. Her work can be seen today at the Del Campo Gallery in Big Sur and at the Valley Girls Gallery in Carmel Valley.

"I don't want to be only a landscape painter," Karuna says, "I want to paint what's inside me." Judith Hale suggested she paint with a 4 inch brush, the same instructions she'd received at Hunter College so long ago. "I gave myself 2 years to learn this medium, 3 years to have a show and 5 years to make it! And I did."

"Clarity" in acrylic
"Monet's Garden" in watercolor
An early piece done in a Stanislav Grof workshop
"Big Sur Fire 2008" in acrylic