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Rainbow Ark and the Ancient Broken Heart by Martin Jones Westlin 
Even for their routineness, Ojai's so-called pink moments certainly never disappoint. At most sunlit dusks, rose and magenta brumes illuminate the outlying Topa Topa mountain range; rays play on a rocky marvel as unique as it is resplendent. Locals have probably come to set their clocks by the phenomenon. Ojai without the pink moment is like Seattle sans the overcast. Heather Foxhall's soft aqua eyes train comfortably onto the spectacle from an outdoor restaurant at the Ojai Valley Inn. Although she admires the moment for its beauty, her affinity rests beyond the splendor above. A similar event has brought her here, in celebration of a global activism—her own included—that lays bare the very best of the human will. Foxhall is the founder and director of the Rainbow Ark Foundation, an Ojai-based non-profit group that seeks "to create a global culture of peace and healing of the earth." Rainbow Ark, which held its first Global Wisdom Council at Santa Barbara County's Zaca Lake in 1998, was also a collaborator in this year's International Trek of the Tall Ships. The group convened aboard the Dutch-registered Europa in Los Angeles on Sept. 9. Figures from myriad walks of life met to discuss global realities and the media's role in generating a climate of world harmony. Participants made commitments to celebrate cultural differences and to create theater, film, television and print journalism as the means to the ideal end. The foundation expects to televise a number of its conferences while in Europe next year. Although such aspirations are certainly consumer-friendly, they're also fairly indistinct within a state of world affairs that threatens to swallow pacifism whole. The blur, however, subsides as Foxhall cites a global bond at once indestructible and intangible. "One of the fundamental teachings of the Rainbow Ark Foundation," she explained, "is something I call sacred ecology, which is the ecology of the human spirit. It's the idea that all life is interconnected. We're not separate from each other. We're not separate from the earth. Part of the problem that we're facing at this time is this fragmentation. We feel split off and disconnected from the earth and from each other. The splits go all the way through all of our social and political institutions to the point where... the federal government really isn't addressing the needs of its people directly. "In truth," she said, "none of those lines really exist, not on a map and not amongst each other and not with our relationship with the earth. In truth, we're all citizens of this planet." The Global Wisdom Council, Foxhall continued, is structured accordingly. Its approximately 50 members—including oceanographer Jean-Michel Cousteau as well as Barbara Marx Hubbard—aspire to an inclusive community, its media projects founded in recognition of humanity's dual nature. "Men are not responsible for the state of the world," Foxhall asserted. "The state of the world has to do with energies that are inside every single one of us and in everything that nature has produced. I do think we are in the last days of a patriarchy—a left-brain, logical way of looking at the world that has disregarded the feminine aspect, which is the creative, intuitive part of our psyche that exists in both men and women. So I think the biggest mistake that any of us can make at this time is to take the pendulum and swing it out into this matriarchal answer. "Healing," she continued, "is not about polarizing in any direction. It's about recognizing that both these energies exist throughout nature. To me, healing is bringing that back into balance." Tonight's pink moment subsides as the New York City native recalls a brush with a comparably painted sky, this one at New Mexico's Navaho Lake district near Santa Fe in 1991. Study in the healing arts and theater work with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams had generated a crossroads in life, one that would presently yield the beginnings of her foundation—and its name. "At sunset," Foxhall said, "the thunderheads had gathered, and it poured for about 40 minutes intensely. As the rain stopped, this enormous rainbow landed in front of a rock where I'd been meditating. It was one of those moments that you have in life," she said. "It was an epiphany, one of great clarity. I was what I call being woven back into this enormous planetary soul that we're all a part of. "Every indigenous culture in the world," Foxhall said, " has this rainbow mythos, this rainbow theme, in the center of it. The rainbow warrior is a spiritual warrior. Throughout history, rainbow warriors came together in council and shared sacred teachings that would commence this enormous healing, making whole, bringing back together all that's been split off, isolated, alienated, divided." One of history's most heinous acts has yielded escalated talk of war; misdistribution of resources skews the natural balance among populations. But an Ojai woman has engineered a remedy in earnest, its voices commanding a world of reparations in the words and deeds that inspire them.  Martin Jones Westlin marty@vcreporter.com The Ventura County Reporter Art & Culture October 17, 2002 |