A Dyadic Biography
In many ways, Jacquie and Jim see themselves as having been fairly typical middle-class-white Americans who became young adults in the early 1950s, when the United States was beginning an expanding period of prosperity.
In 1970, when they were both in their later 30s and formed a partnership together in southern California, they became involved in the accelerating and speeded-up culture that was taking place there at the time. Since the concluding pages of Within's Introduction gives a time-line synopsis for their lives together from then to the summer of 2006, it won't be repeated here.
However, for further clarification, one of the differences in their fairly typical middle-class-white American stories came in the summer of 1975 when they decided to turn in another direction. They wanted to make more sense out of what they had been experiencing in the exhilarating environment of the beginnings of deregulation and escalating home values in southern California, and they were feeling a need to be involved with the basics of life. So they cashed out and moved to a foothill community in the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern California. There, they built a modest, mortgage-free home and grew most of the food they ate—becoming as self-sufficient and as removed as possible from money-spending activities.
By primarily stepping back for over a decade, from 1975 through 1988, they were able to search for Understandings and apply them, without needing cultural sanctions, rewards, and salaries based upon agreed-upon ways of thinking and doing. As J & J both saw it—they were taking their Lives into their own hands on a step-at-a-time basis, investing in themselves and each other.
Within the context of their relationship and the River of Love, throughout their years together each of them has been able to increasingly expand their personal individuality, substance, and independence, based upon experientially integrating their Understandings of the interrelatedness, connectedness, and mutual interdependence of all Being. Now—in 2009—they are each emphasizing "New Songs, New Stories" from which more events and experiences will be emerging.
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