When I first met Grace Llewellyn, I was her down-the-street neighbor in Eugene, Oregon, and she was banging out her book The Teenage Liberation Handbook on the typewriter her grandmother had given her. It is the book I had always wanted to write myself, and I am glad it got written. I highly recommend this book for all teen homeschoolers and their teenage friends in school. And check out some of Grace Llewellyn’s newer books as well…
Grace hosts a summer camp for homeschool teens in Oregon and Vermont, called the Not Back To School Camp, which allows teens from all around the country to network to form their own opinions and decisions about their own educational choices or the educational choices their parents have made for them.
February, 1986 An overpacked Blue Dodge Omni enters the city limits of Eugene, Oregon as the Chinese New Year arrives. In it drives a hopeful thirty-year-old female, road weary and excited. The phone number of the homeschooling family lay on the seat next to her. She drives down West 11th Avenue and her heart sinks at the sight of a strip mall. “Oh dang it, why can’t these hippies make a real difference?” she asks herself. “I feel like I am still in Cincinnati.”
She dials the number, gets directions to Jay Street. The rain begins again. It is strange to be in rain in January. It is a feeling she will never fully get accustomed to.
She first hears of Saturn Return early on in her sojourn in Oregon. “You quit your job, drove across the country, moved here where you knew nobody and had no job lined up? Ahh, yes, it must be your Saturn Return.” She hears that comment more than once in her first months in Eugene, well-known for its counterculture. She dives head first into it and doesn’t come up for air for six years.
A Saturn Return is approximately every twenty to thirty years in a person’s life, and it is a time of great change. That’s what the granola-eating, Birkenstock-wearing, long-haired Hippie-wannabe’s tell her. It is natural to relocate during Saturn return. She listens to their astrological theories. Strains of “The Age of Aquarius” play in her mind as the explanations grow lengthy. She is a polite listener. But not a believer.
She is a believer in controlling her own destiny. It is time to inject adventure, shake things up, find out who she really is. She did not consult planets nor track their movements as she made the move. She just did it.
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Nov 10 2008