I have been thinking about Francis Grow quite a bit lately. Most people who knew her considered her either a mystic or insane. After all what woman in her right mind would ride a bicycle from Boston to Tucson in the 50s? Well Francis did, so most people dismissed her as insane.
She was born in 1900 and she attended
Eastman School of Music, around 1920, when my mother was born. My mother also attended
Eastman School of Music, so when they met around 1960, and my mother felt the need of having some female adult company, she chose to rent my bedroom to Francis.
Francis lived with us for about a year. My mother's mother had died a few years earlier, so I am sure my mother felt Francis was a surrogate for her. Like my mother's mother, Francis was very religious and very proper; whereas my mother thought of herself as a modern city girl, who did her best to avoid letting people know that she had been born and raised on a Michigan dairy farm. Francis and my mother had a falling out over my mother's loose modern morals, verses Francis' life-long virginity.
Before the great falling out, my mother used to take us kids to visit Francis on holidays, like Christmas, and Thanksgiving, after Francis moved out. I recall that she lived along the Rillito River, where cotton woods and tamarisks kept the air cool during our hot summers. She had well over 20 cats, and she was handy, and made her living doing repairs, so she had built her cats an apartment complex, next to her cottage, all of which nestled under the dense shade of tamarisk trees.
I am not sure why, but when I started having the material world and the immaterial worlds colliding in my waking state, which is what Michael is going through right now, was when I looked up Francis. It was about 1974, and Francis lived in a small bungalow house in a nice quiet neighborhood south of Broadway and east of Country Club roads in Tucson, AZ.
Her cottage was full of boxes of her stuff. We met in the summer room, which is a Tucson architectural feature from the 19th and early 20th centuries where a room was built on the north side of a dwelling where it was shaded and cool. It had no windows, or walls, but was typically all screened in to keep the bugs out. This is how people kept cool in Tucson before air-conditioning.
At that time, I described to her what was happening in my dreams, which was me leaving my body, but I had no cultural context for such an event.
She said, "Oh dear, you are just having out-of-body-experiences." She then got up and rummaged through her boxes until she found a group of lessons that she had received from the Coptic Fellowship on out-of-body travel. They were small booklet individually bound with a staple, and tied together. I seem to recall there were about 50-or 60 lessons. She had tied them together with old twine, and sent me home with them.
I read all of them, and found them only slightly useful. They were a series of creative visualizations to project back to the great pyramids and explore them while out-of-body. For me the out-of-body-experience is totally no-cognitive. It just happens on its own, and I do not make anything happen. It all just happens on its own, and is more interesting than anything I could have invented, or read in a book.
I saw Francis a few times after that. She was very interested in us building a retreat center together for healing. The
A.R.E clinic was in Casa Grande at that time, and they were interested in
Edgar Cayce's healing work. But, Edgar Cayce seemed seriously out of date to me, even though I was serious studying and practicing natural healing at the time. Nonetheless, I thought her idea held merit, but neither of us had funding, and living in Casa Grande in the summer seemed like insanity to me.
At the time my father owned 30 acres of land along the San Pedro River, just north of Benson. So, I approached him with the idea of Francis and I developing a healing retreat center there. He was not interested in letting us have access to his land. Which sat for decades unused and eventually become nothing more than an eroded moonscape.
At the end of it all with Francis I felt she was more crazy than enlightened, so I kept my distance. Now, I realize that she was most probably more enlightened than crazy, and if I had aligned with her, then I would have helped her and myself far more.
About 5 or 10 years later she sold her house, which her family had bought her, and she bought a used RV and set out to spend her last days camping in the National Forest. Around about 1983 she had some health, mechanical and financial problems that she could not take care of, so she ended up being a ward of the state.
I regret now not helping her more. But, I see now that most people who are aware of my life most probably think I am more crazy than enlightened. I think most humans are completely insane and deluded. Oh, well. That is the way of the mystic.