The Seeker

IT IS TRENDY for the privileged to say they want to give back. For some, I’ve observed that what they really mean is they want more people to know what a big deal they have been. They want to use the generosity they wear on their sleeve to get to be better known, to talk about themselves.

But for Gay and her husband, giving back has no motive other than what it is, well-spring generosity, sincere love of this place. In that sense, she is what we used to call a citizen. After a successful filmmaker career (Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary, The WIPP Trail, My Body Belongs to Me, and Andrew Weil’s first programs), she co-founded two environmental companies who patented recycled glass to replace many strip-mined materials, chaired the New Mexico Environmental Improvement Board, was Executive Director for the Livingry Foundation and served on numerous boards including Coalition for Quality Children’s Media, Center for Defense Information, New Mexico Association of Grantmakers, and Bioneers.

Our talk was raw, personal. When you watch her chair, say, a Santa Fe Film Commission Meeting, she presents as serious, grounded, and confident. Yet at the end of our interview, she asked me with a touching openness, All the different things I have done? Does it make any sense?

Because, sometimes, our experiences seem unconnected, our world is not a straight line, not a cumulative experience, not progress or not personal development. More like quiet desperation, with sound and fury. Signifying nada.

But in Gay’s case, the answer is Yes, it makes a great deal of sense. — OL

How long have you been in Santa Fe?

Since ‘87. I think that’s 38 years.

Where did you grow up?

In Oklahoma on a ranch, loved the open sky. It was my grandfather’s land, one of the largest contiguous ranches left with native grasses. I was named after him. His name was Tom Gay, and he’s in the Cowboy Hall of Fame.

The relevant thing is it wasn’t just a play ranch. It was a real working ranch. I was out there as a young girl riding horses. The older I get, the more I realize how much it informed who I am. I care about open skies, freedom, support, love. Our family had problems like everybody else, and my parents ended up divorcing. But that freedom and ability to just observe, be with animals and land — it wasn’t something anyone was telling me about how we were treating the earth, but I just felt it from a very young age.

I left high school with my mom when my parents divorced, went to Boulder — also loved Boulder, the mountains. Then I went to Evergreen State College. That’s where they discovered that psilocybin mushrooms grow naturally.

So in the mid-80s, that was my sacrament. Because when I was 17, my brother died in a car accident. It helped me get his death. I designed my own major around environmental science and communications, which is what brought me into film, but I did not go to film school. For my thesis, I put together a project around coal and uranium mining on Indian lands, because it combined an environmental problem with a very socio-political problem: 10,000 Dine Navajo being relocated in the ‘80s. I thought, I can’t believe this is happening in my own country in modern day.

I’d met a pipe carrier who told me about this. A pipe carrier is someone who does sweat lodges and Sundances. I went to where this was happening in Arizona. I ended up living for two years between the Diné Navajo Reservation and the Hopi.

The Sundance is a sacrifice. The dancers don’t drink water or eat for four days. There’s flesh offering — they’re literally taking wooden pegs through the front or back of their bodies and hanging themselves over the tree of life until they break free, or carrying buffalo skulls stuffed with sage until they break their flesh. It’s a very powerful and serious ceremony.

This was when the outer culture was giving us nothing. The mid-80s was cocaine and discos. Watching the strength and sacrifice of the Diné really opened my eyes.

I also did a vision quest, which changed my life. It was August, the South Rim to Horseshoe Mesa. I walked down with a little water but no food. I’d been taught enough about how to build a medicine wheel and ask for protection. Thank God this mesa had a cave because that was how I got out of the sun during the heat of the day.

I was trying to digest so much knowledge and information from books. It was all coming from the outside. In that first vision quest, by just sitting, I realized I already knew inside. There was a relationship between my inner knowing and the outside world. I didn’t have to be so anxious about what I did and read — it was already inside me. I could relax and live life by just meeting it.

Fast forwarding, I felt passionate about helping these Native Americans who were being relocated, and they were at the behest of the media and whatever they said. That’s when I bought my first camera because they needed witnesses.

They said, We need witnessing. So I bought the best broadcast-quality video production package I could afford. It was a big deal — everything I’d saved. I’d film press conferences or traditional ceremonies and then hand them the tape.

I was just so impassioned that I thought, I’m going to do this because I need to.

Everything I’ve done has followed this pattern. My passions and what I care about have always led me. Whether it was Governor Richardson asking me to chair the Environmental Improvement Board, going on unusual international trips, or starting a business — it’s not what I thought I was going to do.

The death of your brother seems to have informed so much of what you have done.

It was 1982. It doesn’t feel that long ago because he truly still lives inside me. He really informed me. I was the youngest, he was second. He was three years older. He was so incredible — such a big, gentle spirit and dyslexic, so he didn’t do well in school, but he was so creative. I remember as a little girl teaching him how to tie his shoes, but he taught me everything else, which is that there is no box to even consider living in.

His death helped me wake up earlier in my life than I would have. I also realized how culturally upside down we are around death. Life is precious, and you can’t count on the people you love always being there. By not holding death close to us, we actually aren’t doing a good job of living as a culture. I was in a spiritual death that I had to wake up from after his death. The natural world and medicines helped bring me back to life.

There was a part of Matt that I think his soul knew he was going, because he lived very thinly tethered to the earth. He informed my risk-taking too. We’d do things like jump off the roof of the house onto the trampoline to catch the trapeze bar. We just had an incredible time. We got hurt a lot but survived — in the end, he didn’t.

I don’t think he was trying to die. He was getting a little sloppy with his life because it was a tough time in our family, and he was trying to find his way. I think that was his unconscious rite of passage. He was driving a sports car too fast on a mountain road outside Gunnison, Colorado, where he was going to school. He got off on a soft shoulder and died instantly. He had pet birds, and we were sure he had the bird with him because we couldn’t find it when we went to his apartment.

You found yourself looking at the way we were being careless about the life of the Earth. Were they connected?

Yes, I was reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead and then The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary. It was all connected.

I made a connection between The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is your own personal way of going through the Bardos as you die, and I thought, We need a Planetary Book of the Dead, because we’re in stages of killing off our environment. The consciousness of it was just starting to evolve then.

That’s when we actually could have affected outcomes, but Reagan had just taken the solar panels off of the White House. If you were into environmental stuff, you were considered flaky or girly, not serious.

You had experiences with psilocybin and with death in a very personal way. You recognized that our world — the world that Leary and Ram Dass were critiquing — had a problem with the reality of death. Did that frame your interest in making the Dying to Know film?

Yes. After working on the reservation and filming, I needed to make a living. I did all kinds of interesting things because now I had a camera. I joined some other independent media people who were great mentors, like Godfrey Reggio. In college, I saw Koyaanisqatsi and wanted to make that kind of film. I did one of my theses on Reggio’s film. I started getting independent film work here.

But I had other interests, too. When I was studying environmental science, I carried my Mason jar around so I wouldn’t waste styrofoam whenever I got a drink. One day, I gave them my mason jar at a fast food place, they filled it up, and then the guy took a styrofoam cup off the top and threw it away. I asked why, and he said, That’s how we count.

I was horrified and realized I needed to go further upstream of the problem. That’s why when Bill Richardson asked me to do regulatory work for New Mexico as Chair of the Environmental Improvement Board, I said yes — even though I had no idea what the EIB was.

I spent time contemplating why we have all the information about climate change and nuclear weapons but don’t do anything about these existential problems. The answer I kept coming back to is that we’re not in the natural cycle of life and death. As a culture, we don’t live in that cycle.

So I thought, in my own sneaky intervention, I could try to naturalize this process. That’s when I went back to 1995, when I’d originally filmed a conversation between Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who became Ram Dass.

Those two helped personify and bring together so many of my values—between psilocybin as a medicine and tool, but also death as a doorway and tool. I thought, What would make a difference in having this conversation around death to naturalize it for our culture? It kept haunting me. So I returned to Ram Dass and thought, I’m going to finish this because now I have time.

There’s a thread in your work around the power of dreams.

From the time I was very young, my mother saw I was having big dreams, and she got me into Jungian dream work. We did that together until she died.

I don’t think I’ve ever made any big decision in my life without a dream informing it. It allows me to use my subconscious, the bigger part of my psyche, to engage and know what to do. I’ve learned to trust it.

Death, drugs — which I’d say are medicine — and dreams are the three things that keep me grounded. They’re my North Stars. Even though I don’t need to do psychedelics anymore, they certainly helped guide me early on.

You did this film about Ram Dass, a big influence on culture with his Be Here Now message. But his focus changed when he had a debilititating stroke — he then spoke about illness, death in a whole other way.

When Timothy Leary was dying, you though something would happenif you brought these two friends to together.

They were voices for what was happening inside of me. They served something I really needed to say. I realized that I did not make the film that a baby boomer would have made — I was born in ‘65, and they’d already done their Harvard experiments with the graduate students.

I came into it with this lens of death and psychedelics. What really attracted me — and why I kept using the yin-yang symbol in the film — is that they had such different points of view. I didn’t want to tell anybody what to believe, because I was dying to know myself. But I appreciated that they loved each other so much despite their different views.

For the first time, I got to see Timothy Leary through Ram Dass’s eyes, which was the lens of love instead of judgment. Leary was either glorified or demonized, and I don’t believe in that. He was kind of scapegoated, and sure, he was somewhat his own worst enemy, but I loved the way they were together and the voice they created to examine these things.

You had experience with death that most young people don’t have — then imagined and produced this movie about these two cultural icons, their friendship and the death of one of them.

Timothy was a philosophical materialist — You’re dead when you’re dead — while Ram Dass was all about what happens after you die, the spirit and soul going on. I found that fascinating — those two points of view. The truth is, I go back and forth myself.

Which one do you come out on? Do you think your brother has life continuing?

Good question. I’m dying to know all these things myself. My intuition and dream life have given me a knowingness that what goes on is love. That’s why you want to practice love in your life, because fear and hate are where we get trapped.

My sense tells me that’s what continues. When I speak of Matt, he’s certainly living inside me. I think he is in the spirit of nature. He’s not he anymore — it’s a different form that we don’t have language for.

That’s why I wanted to do this film about these two men.

People came to see the film because of Ram Dass or because of Timothy Leary. Some called it The Timothy Leary film, and some called it The Ram Dass film. But they would meet inside the theater during post-screening conversations. It was beautiful, multi-generational, with kids talking to parents.

Americans have had a great belief in their own exceptionism — allowing many to live as if they are not going to die

Capitalism wouldn’t work as well if we accepted death. There’d be less to buy.

One thing I think of is Lily Tomlin when she said, I’m sitting at a phone booth at the corner of Walk and Don’t Walk.

I sit between hope and hopelessness. I really go back and forth. So how do I keep faith? I genuinely love people. I want to facilitate them being their best selves, and all of us creating and telling better stories. I got so tired of all the dystopian, horrible things in our media. I want to give people better stories and more hope — not blindly, but real, compelling, good, true stories.

Do you want to tell stories yourself? Do more film?

That’s a good question. I got sidetracked politically again because I’ve been chairing the Santa Fe Film and Digital Media Commission for several years now. We’ve got a great group of people working together to create a better, more inclusive ecosystem for film and media in Santa Fe.

I care about putting that landscape in place. Am I spending too much time on that and my other volunteer positions? I’m trying my best to get back to my own work. I’m involved with a few really good projects where I’m not the main person, but they’re stories I care about.

For instance, there’s Blankton — a bunch of local artists where I participated as an executive producer. Then there’s a series called Santa Fe that follows some interesting women based on a book, Ladies of the Canyons. It takes place in the early 1900s. It’s cross-cultural, fascinating, wildly adventurous, and sexy. Santa Fe is different because many of these women came out here, taking off the Victorian shackles of their time to be freer. They were the ones who interacted more with the local indigenous people. I think the DNA of Santa Fe is different because many women came out here, not just men conquering the West. That story hasn’t really been told yet.

I’m also working on a very multi-layered, Christopher Nolan-esque dreamscape around the unintended consequences of nuclear energy and climate. And another interesting biopic about Leonard Pickard I’m doing with Jonathan Ollinger and Maya. I was one of the first people they called when he was released from prison. He’s unique, and most people would cover his story through headlines and sensationalism. But I love their perspective and want to go deeper into who he is and why he did what he did.

These are all great projects, but I need to keep carving out more time for my own creative work. I’m doing things that scare me, like taking singing lessons and doing a spirit-in-art class-painting. That’s super inspirational.

You really do have this joy, this energy.

I get energy from people. There’s always goodness there. Ram Dass helped me with this perspective. Whoever the president was, he’d put them on his altar, because you need to incorporate everybody and everything. You have to learn to love everybody because it’s really about what you have inside.

I’ll tell you a little story. I had a stepmother who was very difficult. I was very close to my father, but I had a hard time with my stepmother because she was insecure about having people around that my father really loved.

When he died, she sued us because we followed exactly what he’d written down. She wouldn’t even give us some of his ashes unless we paid her more money. Unfortunately, she didn’t get love as a child — she got money instead.

My father was in the process of divorcing her when he died. He was also selling his company, so he was at the finish line of being able to get the divorce, have the money to do it, and then he died of a heart attack. It was terrible.

After he died, we were in this lawsuit, I was super angry at her. I was in my early 30s, and I would meditate and pray, trying to find peace. This is why I named my dog Grace — I think a lot about what grace is.

One night, I had this dream where I was physically inside her heart. It was so cold and lonely and fearful — oh my God, I can still feel it. I woke up and thought, Oh my God. It was the first time I actually had compassion for her. Before that, it was more intellectual, trying to make myself change. In the dream, I really felt what it was to be her.

So I let go of all my anger. I realized that anger is more destructive to the person having it than to anyone else. Not that you shouldn’t honor anger and follow it as navigation — I still do get angry — but it was transformative.

You’re hopeful.

Helpful, and hopeful. I’m lucky. I’m just so fortunate.