Subtly hidden from viewers is the fact that Sheela was sociopath who was given a great deal of power and wielded it, with her outrageous speeches and her very public wheedling and buffoonery. Instead of being presented as a two-dimensional villainous character, she comes off as an unworldly ingénue who was deeply in love with and inspired by a charismatic leader everything she did, she did to protect him. She tells stories of murder plots and mass poisonings from within the sanctuary of her love for Rajneesh. Sheela, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s personal secretary and the public face of our organization, is interviewed from the nursing home that she runs in Switzerland. One thing I can thank the Ways’s documentary for is that it supports everything I recall experiencing as a child, lending credibility to the stories I remember and tell. I maintained a seed of doubt about the incident even when I wrote about it in the essay and for my memoir. I didn’t tell anyone about for a long time afterwards, because as I grew up, the memory of it was so shocking, I couldn’t believe it ever actually happened. I never told anyone about it while we were still at the Ranch, because I assumed that doing so would make it come true. issued a thinly veiled threat against my father’s life to me so that I would behave. And they interviewed local ranchers, the people that wanted to rid the world of us, using the term “Better Dead Than Red,” repurposing an old anti-communist slogan to apply to us, the red-clad intruders.įull disclosure: I have feelings about Shanti B., which are explained in “My End of the World at Rajneeshpuram,” an essay I wrote for The Rumpus last year. They interviewed Niren, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and Sheela’s attorney. The directors interviewed the former leaders of the commune, Sheela and Shanti B., members of the upper echelons, a group of women we referred to as Moms. What separates Wild Wild Country from being a mere splicing together of media footage are the interviews. An immersion in a lifestyle outside our experience or a revelation of material presented in a new and exciting way. This created a depth of understanding rarely found in true storytelling.Ī good documentary is captivating entertainment. Not content to reveal history to his students as a recitation of facts and figures, he brought his students back in time to bring it alive. “Learning about people and places is boring, unless you can live the history, really feel it.” He used to take his students to the cemetery and research the people buried there so that they could feel what it was like to live in the times they were studying. With his eyes alight, he told me many times that history must come alive. My father was a history professor before giving it all up to go live on the Rajneesh commune. The directors, Maclain and Chapman Way, got their hands on hundreds of hours of news footage, pieced it together with interviews, and set it to dramatic mood music. Rajneeshpuram was the commune I lived in during my childhood and early teenage years. Wild Wild Country very flatly tells the outlandish tale of a guru and his followers and their takeover of a tiny town in rural central Oregon in the 1980s. But I don’t believe that there are only two sides to this or most stories. I suppose if balanced means two sides represent a story, then it is balanced. In another couple of months, I am going to start a sabbatical blog that will tell stories of our travels and will serve as a journal of my marathon training.“Balanced,” is the word I keep hearing in reference to the new Netflix documentary series, Wild Wild Country, about the improbable rise and fall of the Rajneesh cult in Oregon. I've run a half before and that was a big milestone, but a marathon? I am terrified that I'm not going to make it and at the same time aware that I am so stubborn that I'll kill myself trying. On the other hand, I am so aware of how far I have to go. On one hand, I am so glad that I was able to do those two with no pain. I just started back in the last couple of days (great timing, the weather has been atrocious) and so far, I feel pretty good. Not too bad, nothing to worry about, but I did have to take some time off of running.
I am also running the San Francisco Marathon on July 31.īack in October, I injured my knee. While we do this, I am going to be working on a photo project about people's hands, the Eucharist and how we respond tot he call to "be the hands of Christ" in the world. The family and I will be traveling around, visiting people we love. I have been given the generous gift of a three-month sabbatical this summer, May-July.
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