The usual Santa Cruz privileged rant goes something like this: Santa Cruz is easy on homeless people and that attracts more to move there, the city coddles them and liberals make a lot of money providing services for them on taxpayer's dime, people choose the homeless lifestyle (I'm not kidding) and don't want to work, are lazy bums using drugs or ( Read more... )

Previously, I described how I left for Iowa as an absolute last resort, my children starving at Leo Carrillo State Park. I settled in to life in Iowa, got my own apartment, and continued to correspond with and talk to Mahasraya on the phone. I had agreed to return if he got us a place to live, and I fervently hoped that he would.In January of 1982 ( Read more... )

In the previous installment of my story about my homeless odyssey, I had just been rescued from the sodden campground where I and my children had run out of food, and was headed to the train station to take an Amtrak train cross country to Iowa, returning to my emotionally abusive family to spare my children from starvation. I had also told the ( Read more... )

To recap: We were living in a camper on the streets of Santa Cruz when Keshava and Mahasraya got the great idea to travel up to Portland to try to find a guy selling land in Oregon for a hundred bucks an acre ( Read more... )

(continued ( Read more... )

The seeds of the Odyssey were planted when my ex-husband Mahasraya and his friend Keshava got this idea to rent a house in Atascadero and use the land around it to have a martial arts camp. I came back from my trip to see my family with my two small children and they had moved in to this house already. It was billed as a fixer upper and a bunch of ( Read more... )