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Hello again. More time elapsed than we planned between our last posting and this one. Please stay with us, as we get the rhythm down. The first edition of "Personal Notebook" follows (Nov. 98) for interested first-time visitors. The three connecting Websites that make up our little cyberworld are handled by people in three different states. With some transferring of responsibilities, the Valley of the Sun site becomes the catalog and our personal site (where you are at this moment) will be regularly updated in our Agoura Hills, CA offices. This is a long way of saying it will now be easier to update. I'll start off with some recent shamanic experiences of my own. Nellie, a blue roan Appaloosa horse I owned since I was 12 years old, died in October. She was 29 (very old for a horse) and I had not been able to ride her for several years. But her death was like losing a family member. I had dreams ahead of time, warning me that I'd soon be losing her. As one example, I dreamed Nellie and I were walking down a road and she went one way and I the other. I whistled and called her, but she wouldn't come back to me. In real life, if I whistled, she'd run to me, so I recognized these dreams as "bad." |
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The night she died, I dreamed I was sitting at a picnic table on our deck. A big, powerful dark-colored horse came up behind me and nuzzled my neck. I said, "You're not my horse." But when I looked back, it was Nellie. I realized she didn't know what she looked like. She came to say goodbye, appearing as a combination of her two stablemates; Calypso, Richard's sorrel, and the Bay gelding in the next paddock. Awakening to the point of a twilight state, I focused upon telling her with mental images where to go and what to do if she was scared or lost. Then for the next three days (I was working at the office), a large raven landed on the railing outside our windows. The first day it pecked on the window to get our attention. I went out, laid a scone on the wall, and the bird ate it. The next two days, the raven returned and sat on the railing looking into the office for a long time. On the fourth day, I was at home in Malibu (12 miles away) and a large raven landed on our upstairs deck and looked at me through the deck doors, again for a long time before flying away. Nothing like this ever happened before or since. The number four represents home and family. The raven is the keeper of the soul -- the carrier of the soul into the next world. To me, this was very powerful medicine. |
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Tara and Li'rica -- January 1999
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I searched for weeks for exactly the right name. Avalon was the first name I liked, but Richard thought it sounded too King Arthur for this horse. So the search began until I drove him crazy. The following is from his fax correspondence to Montana friends, Brenda Jones and Bill Ferril: "For the last two weeks, Tara has been going nuts trying to come up with exactly the right name for a new horse she found at a San Diego ranch. She's been reading baby name books, Spanish dictionaries, phone books, and she has shared every single name with me. Day after day, until I finally had to say, 'Tara, I'm really burned out on horse names. I love you, and I want you to name it whatever you want. And I think Avalon is the best horse name anyone ever came up with.'" |
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In the end, I decided on Li'rica -- pronounced Lyric-ah. The Latin meaning is poetry, or lyrics. Everyone in the family, including Richard likes it. At least that what he says . . . Richard's new book has been released and the early responses from friends and fans is very positive. The major reviews won't come in for a month or two, but we're hoping reviewers like it. This one is so different, because it's a traveloguea personal journal of our life on the road. |
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Richard and daughter Jessi at a seminar.
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We were saddened to hear of actress/author Susan Strasberg's death in January in New York. She died of breast cancer. Susan was planning to be back in LA this month to be in Diane Ladd's wedding. In the early 80s, Susan pulled Richard into her friends and party circle. In those days, Richard, Susan and metaphysical author and holistic inventor Pat Flanagan hung out and often appeared on the LA talk-radio shows together, confusing a few metaphysical show hosts with their hyper interaction. And Susan introduced Richard to Jess Stearn, who in turn introduced us. When we were married on Jess' deck in 1984, Diane Ladd decided the environment wasn't festive enough, so she ran to a local Malibu florist and purchased a huge array of flowers. I felt she gave my wedding a touch of magic. |
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Jess spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with us this year. Over the holidays we talked about the psychic reading he did for me a couple years before I met Richard. In the reading he said, "In time, I will introduce you to the most important man in your life. I can see you standing, dressed in white, embracing this man on the patio of my Malibu beach house. You'll marry the man, Tara." Jess' has two new books in release. The first is "Millenium," which examines the Edgar Cayce predictions from a 1998 perspective. The second is "Elvis' Search for God," published by a small southern publisher. If you can't find it, your bookstore can order it for you. |
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The Sutphen Clan, Christmas day 1998: Todd, Jessi, William, Steven, Hunter, Travis, Richard, Cheyenne, Tara, Scott. |
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