With the posting of last month's issue, I announced that Denise Ruiz, the creator and first editor of Seeker Magazine, had suffered blood clots in her leg and was in the hospital. It has been four weeks since that announcement and, regretfully, Denise is still in hospital and on March 8 underwent nine hours of surgery, in which a triple bypass of vessels in her heart was effected and, most probably, a faulty valve was replaced.
I have been pondering this, while sending her books to read, along with my favorite rock, some native sage, a quartz crystal, and pictures of her "ferritos" which I took last summer. I've talked to her several times on the phone during this travail, sometimes trying to make sense of her drug-slurred thoughts and sometimes enjoying a real conversation.
Being 2000 miles away makes holding hands rather difficult. So I hold thoughts.
Seeker is our mutual child. She birthed it and saw it through the significant period when lack of caring would have killed it. Then she handed it over to me for the next stage. I know that I've told this in early columns of "Skyearth Letters" but we also have another mutual love and that is my son David Langer...Blind Crow. It was David's intense interest in role-playing that led him to Denise's "rooms" on AOL. It was David who mentioned that his mother wrote stuff and who passed along to me that Denise would welcome any submission I might have for Seeker. That was three months before I moved from Vermont (near Rhode Island where she lived) to Colorado. For two years, we talked via email and telephone, and then finally met last summer.
Denise has been surprised and deeply touched by the outpouring of love from folks all over the net. I've forwarded messages from folks who came to Seeker after I became editor, thanking her for beginning the webzine in the first place. Others have spoken of her kindness in responding to their writing.
When people lament that it seems so hard to make a difference in this world, I have only to look to Denise to know that the decision to take one relatively small action can lead to so many others having opportunities to spread their wings, also.
For this, I think I can safely speak for the writers and readers of Seeker and say that we are grateful that she made that choice back in the springtime of 1995. And I think I can also speak for them and say that we offer our love and our thoughts and prayers for her healing.
Think of all the ways that "heart" is used in our language and realize that our hearts hold our very essences.