I think often of Colly (nee Corolyn) Woods Soleri. She was, when I first met her, barely 40, a young mother of two daughters, then 12 and 4 years old. She had a busy life, to say the least. Not only did she manage the family household and the business affairs of her already-famous husband, she managed to keep in touch with virtually everyone who crossed their threshold. 

She had a wry sense of humor that she was not afraid to turn on herself, which she frequently did. Talented in her own right - she had studied the violin and was, I think, not an indifferent instrumentalist until she simply stopped playing - she was a gifted photographer. She put her simple box camera to use constantly, with remarkable adeptness. (And her triumph over the Gestetner machine on which she managed to reproduce the pages and pages of Paolo writings that she'd carefully hand-typed on her Selectric was nothing short of phenomenal.)
     
Colly's love of music is manifest at Arcosanti. The amphitheater of the Colly Soleri Music Center is an extraordinary performance space: I only wish she had lived to enjoy the sublime music it affords its audiences. 

I saw her last in 1981, when we stopped briefly at Arcosanti and Cosanti on the way to New Mexico where I had left our belongings when I came off my teaching job on the Navajo rez. I remember  all too clearly standing with her in the kitchen of their ranch house on Doubletree Road. I could not help but parse her face, her expression, her stance. What came out of my mouth, like a medically intuitive no-nonsense savant (which I am not) was, "Boss Lady, you have to go see a doctor."
     
I remember how she moved her hand vaguely in the air, waving me, waving my words, off. Oh Clara, she said, and I knew from the way she said it, the way she stood, that she was not going to do what I was asking her to do.

I had no choice but to put the encounter 'on hold,' as it were. We went on to New Mexico, gathered up our things, went back to BC, settled into life on Slocan Lake. Later that year, after younger son Jacob was born, I had a truly awful dream, unforgettable, vividly prescient in quality. It was so unsettling, I phoned Mark Neptune in New Mexico to ask him was all well with our friends Ike and Jean in Tucson since the dream's landscape somehow resembled the Southwest. Mark assured me Ike and Jean were fine. Uneasily, as best I could, I put the ominous dream out of my mind. 

Until Ivan Pintar phoned, told me Colly was gone. Told me she had gone to a doctor, but in August - too late to slow down the painful end. Told me the family had gathered in around her, kept her close until she breathed no more. Told me, too, that she had been buried. On the hill above the river that runs through Arcosanti's garden camp, I learned later, when I returned to Arcosanti to see what I might be able to do to help cauterize that awful, gaping wound.

​Paolo filled big jugs with water which we carried, scarcely speaking, for the rosemary - "for remembrance" - that had been planted where she was buried, planted over her grave. Rosemary. For remembering.
   
There are people who are indelible. Colly, our boss lady, was one whose mark will never vanish, must never be erased. 
   
​Click on the link below for a Youtube of a "Colly Concert" performance by classical pianist Sonya Kumiko Lee at the Colly Soleri Music Center at Arcosanti.      

  The simple explanation of why I went to Canada is that I wanted to see how Cuyler was doing. He'd left Cosanti because he wanted to learn how to build a harpsichord and at that time, the only place in North America to do that was Vancouver, BC. Plus UBC had a great music school...
   The sub-text to that excursion, though, was the relief I felt, crossing over the 49th parallel a few scant months after I, along with umpteen million others, witnessed Ruby plug Oswald with a live bullet at close range in a Dallas police station. 
   Smack dab in front of a live TV camera. 
   Canada didn't look super different from the USA on the outside. English-speaking, city configuration subtly similar to others south of the 49th. But I thought it somehow had a different feel to it, which was very, very significant. Essential, really. 
   Less evidence of violent aggressivity, absence of continuously ongoing war-mongering, no frontier mentality or at least not one overtly palpable. All that was significant. Different.
   But in the summer of '63, there had been a letter that Paolo and we, at Paolo's instigation, had sent to JFK. That was a few years ahead of the mainline antiwar protest, all the brouhaha that eventually ensued; but in our letter, we told the President invading Vietnam was not desired by us. I feel certain sure we apprentices and Silt Pilers, pacifists by inclination rather than religious conviction (although I did know a little bit about Quakers, having had friends in high school who were Friends), had zero interest in empire-building; nor were we the least bit keen on the bloodshedding that inevitably is an attendant requisite of empire-building. 
   I don't recall being particularly analytical about my feelings at the time but in retrospect, I'm sure the letter Paolo instigated was consciousness-raising for me as a signator, prepared the ground for my eventual migration. Ripened me for it. I wasn't draftable due to my genital equipment but I was totally clear I didn't want anyone sent to war - much less die in one - for me.        How could that ever be right? Paolo himself had refused to serve in Mussolini's army: he'd slipped across the border into France from Turin. A man of conscience, that Soleri fellow. 
   Vancouver, I found, was a charmingly quirky city. Fog horns bellowing in the morning. A soft, misty, painterly light that made all the colors of everything natural, poignantly sharp and clear. 'Pubs' with separate entrances for men and women, drinking 'red-eye' - a glass of beer mixed with tomato juice, which its imbibers claimed was terrific. Government-controlled liquor stores, closed on Sundays. Almost everything having to do with commerce closed on Sunday. "Blue laws" - ahhh, so. 
   A Canadian friend told me there was no difference between Canada and the USA but I was sure that couldn't be true. The Maple Leaf is not the Stars and Stripes: how could there be no difference between the two countries? After I scoped out the UBC campus with its fine old library building, its garden-like landscaping, what wasn't to like? 
   Somehow my mind managed to set itself to a place and its people. Near 50 years later, I'm a dual national, grateful to my adopted northern home for letting me land. If you have a place to stand, you can operate a lever and, as Archimedes noted, a lever can be quite useful. Not much arcology-building in Canada, and not a huge number of people in Canada have come to work at Arcosanti. But socially, economically and politically transformative change rarely happens overnight, eh?

     Some 25 years after my first encounter with Paolo's sand-cast architectural models, sand-cast buildings and sand-cast bells, I was introduced to sandplay therapy. I began examining Arcosanti  from an organizational, educational administration perspective for my first grad degree, analyzing sandplay therapy from a Social Work perspective for my second,  It's of natural interest to me, the connection between sand casting and sandplay; therefore no surprise I've been contemplating them while wondering about the links between them. 
     Assembling a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the completed picture should look like is a challenge, but what I've come to is this: Beyond the commonality of sand (and water), what sandplay and sand-casting also have in common is that they are also both primary forms of "serious" play. Three-dimensional. Sculptural (qua architectural). Graphic. Kinaesthetic. Dramatic. 
     Seeing that parallel leads me to consider comparing them as manifest forms on an "expressive arts" continuum. Although I daresay Paolo never considered the possibility that what he was doing was or might be taken for a type of therapy, I suspect that might have been an error of omission. Because if I utilize a Behavioral Health perspective to examine the experiences of the thousands of people who've participated in the 'urban laboratory' experience, all those folk who've contributed their 'sweat equity' to the experiment Paolo initially set out to conduct, it seems to me we should not discount the extent to which Arcosanti - even if has been and primarily still is a "company town," has been/can be construed as a therapeutic environment. Maybe not intentionally, but nonetheless...
     I have yet to canvass all those thousands who've helped build Arcosanti (although I'd love to be able to do that) but what I've observed over the years is that people often come to Arcosanti with a pressing problem in tow. They're in transition, seeking a solution to an issue as personal as it is/may be political and/or professional. They're seeking solace or refuge, in a way. They need to sustain themselves as seekers, they seek to maintain themselves as doers. They hope to feel useful, they want their talents to be needed  - and wanted. 
     Why not? Why would an educational experiment not be responsive to such people, to such problems? Moreover: To what end, of what use is such an altruistic physical plant if it sets aside responsibility, even quasi-responsibility, for the emotional, psychological and/or the intellectually material as well as the physical nourishment of its proper constituents? 
     Those constituents, its people, its builders, are its "tribe," as Jeff Stein, Cosanti Board of Trustees President, suggested. And Arcosanti has withstood - endured, even, for decades - their criical debate pitting "construction site" against "community."      No final agreement could be reached as to what the place was since the argument was fairly specious. When has a construction site built itself? A construction site *is* - it simply exists. It takes a community of some kind to gather together the energy and resources needed to construct something - even something simple, never mind an entire laboratory that's meant to house a few thousand urbanists. 
     The debate continued, sometimes quietly, sometimes fiercely. Consensus was - still seems to be - elusive. Me, I'd like to take this puzzle to my colleagues when the International Society for Sandplay Therapy. ISST, of which I am an associate, meets. Which it does, every second year at a different location. This year's meeting will take place in Venice, in - yikes! - a few weeks. Unfortunately, it's a long paddle or row - or a very long swim - across an ocean.. It's looking unlikely, right now, such a voyage. So I'll muddle the puzzle along with me for a while longer, see where it leads...