El Jardin Founders
I grew up with scientific and technical interests next to Stanford University in Los Altos, California, while it was becoming known as "Silicon Valley". Following my sister Sharon’s lead, I lived at the Esalen Institute, in Big Sur,
Richard Wheeler
Norie Huddle
I'm the second of five children and grew up in the middle of about 1500 acres of beautiful woods and fields in northern Virginia—which I watched being destroyed by suburban sprawl. This generated an early and very deep concern for
the future of the natural environment. At 17, I went to Italy for a year as an exchange student (AFS), which opened my eyes to a whole new world and way of thinking. After graduating from Brown University (Russian language major), I went into the Peace Corps (Colombia, South America) for two years, where I learned a great deal about problems in a developing country and where I was also trained in an excellent systems-thinking methodology—training that I've used ever since in my work.
After returning to the USA, I spent a couple of years doing office work, realized I was getting addicted to the steady pay check, and "retired" at age 25 to do only what made absolute sense to me for the rest of my life.
Who Are We?
California, where we met Dr. Ida Rolf and became Structural Integration and Movement Education (“Rolfing®”) practitioners. Later Sharon and I participated in the founding of the Rolf Institute. I now have 37 years experience in private practice and giving public presentations, professional seminars, lectures, and workshops.
My structural work with clients led me to study anatomy, paleontology and functional morphology for 20 years at Los Angeles’ Page Museum (aka the “La Brea Tar Pits”) where I studied lots of bones, published original research on saber-toothed cat skulls and was Senior Staff Excavator. I also had the honor of being the first person invited by the Page Museum to exhibit art photography from inside the tar pits.
I’m a visually-oriented artist, trained in calligraphy and scientific illustration. In addition, I use acrylics, airbrush, photography and computer to create images, paintings and drawings, many of which are on my website. I play a variety of musical instruments, have recorded one CD of original music for baroque arch-lutes & harmonica. I also play guitar, djembe (African drum) and the shakuhachi (traditional Japanese flute). I’ve traveled to 18 countries, lived in France for 6 months and was fortunate to be able to circumnavigate the globe as a student with the University of the Seven Seas. I attended Reed College (Portland, Oregon) and studied modern dance at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, California.
As a result of my "early retirement plan", I learned to live well on very little money and have been blessed to lead a widely varied life with a strong sense of purpose. This included living in Japan (1971-75), bicycling across the USA with a group of Americans and Japanese (1976), doing anti-nuclear and alternative energy organizing, participating in citizen diplomacy projects in the former USSR (during the decade of the 1980s) and writing six books (about the environment and about transforming human civilization).
I've done a wide range of consulting and video and audio productions for an equally wide range of clients. Over the years, I've read avidly and have conducted interviews with thousands of people, in an ongoing effort to understand as much as I can about our global realities, as well as how to create something new and wonderful within the (collapsing) old civilization. The basic story of this transformation is told in my book, Butterfly.
I do public speaking and seminars, do coaching in which I use the Voice Dialogue Process and several other psycho-spiritual processes I’m trained in. I also love inventing processes and doing creative problem solving. I enjoy art, music, gardening, cooking, carpentry, good conversation and interviewing, concept development & video production. I love helping to create and nurture effective teams to carry out worthwhile projects that can make a difference in society and in people’s lives.
Beginning in the early 1990s, I built my own house (with the help of neighbors and friends) on 12 acres of land in a beautiful part of West Virginia near Harpers Ferry, about an hour and a half west of Washington, D.C.