Conscious Choice: New Editor Confesses Double Life

August 2004 | Editor’s Note

New Editor Confesses Double Life

I have a confession to make: I’ve been living a double life. For the past couple of years I’ve been hiding out in academia, as an adjunct faculty member at Columbia College Chicago. Prior to that I spent my nights hanging out with cops and criminals on some of the city’s meanest streets as the solo metro night reporter at the Chicago Tribune. Days I spent in Evanston, where I eventually graduated from a demanding alternative Chinese medicine/Japanese shiatsu program.

It was a survival move actually: The positive esoteric healing world helped me survive the ugly realities of the dark news nighttime, which in turn kept me from becoming too much of a “Pollyanna” during the day. At night I watched people tear each other apart, during the day I tried to put them back together.

My dual identity existence spilled over to just about every aspect of my life. Weekdays, I was in the corporate mainstream. Weekends and vacations I would head to the North Woods or the Southwest to produce reports for The Circle, a Minneapolis-based Native American monthly, or the Chicago area-based Earth Network, where we garnered a local Emmy nomination for a documentary about multinational corporation attempts to overrun the North Woods with mines.

Actually, I wasn’t exactly hiding my more alternative views at the Tribune, either. I would argue for coverage of things such as the Dalai Lama’s visit, or Indian activist Leonard Peltier’s retrial attempts.

Now don’t get me wrong.

Good journalism is good journalism. The same rules apply regardless if you’re working in the alternative or mainstream press. You use the same tools to shine the same spotlight. The difference is where you choose to aim that spotlight. And I feel very privileged to have worked with and alongside some very talented, devoted, conscientious mainstream journalists in both print and broadcast. Many of these people I’m proud still to call friends and colleagues.

It’s just that in some matters we, well, had different ideas on how to spend our time.

While many of my colleagues were vacationing on Club Med beaches, my idea of a vacation was to go to a sweat lodge in northern Wisconsin, firewalk in Sedona, Ariz., or wander through the dangerous rainforest jungles of Jamaica in search of mythical healing waters.

When I lost several friends to tragedy, I sat with my grief for days, weeks and months in a Zen meditation temple.

Back in the 1980s I went on three-day fast, thirst and prayer vigil in Northern California, before I had heard the term “vision quest.” While others were reading Scott Turow’s latest court/mystery yarn, my idea of a good book was Max Freedom Long’s The Secret Science Behind Miracles. (If you’re into metaphysical reads, check out this guy).

A couple of decades ago my family and friends used to make fun of my hard-to-find organic health food shopping habits and I suffered being called the “bunny lover” when I was in the features side of the newsroom and pushed through a cover story on animal testing in the cosmetics industries.

Today it’s not uncommon for the average consumer to refuse to buy shampoo unless it carries the no animal testing “bunny label.” Health foods have become so mainstream there are health food chains such as Whole Foods, native culture books are bestsellers and Eco-tourism is a huge big business.

All of this has led to one of the best compliments I’ve even been paid by a former colleague, who said something on the order of: “I used to think you were nuts with some of your ideas, but now I realize that you were right. It’s just that you’re a little bit ahead of the rest of us.”

That’s why it’s so exciting to become the new editor of Conscious Choice, a publication dedicated to people who are “a little bit ahead” in areas such as social responsibility, spirituality, organics, personal growth, the environment and alternative medicine.

It feels as if I’m finally home.

Around two years ago this magazine, which was founded in 1988, was purchased by Dragonfly Media, a group headed by President and CEO Ron Williams, as the first of what has now grown to five journals devoted to these values. The other four magazines are on the West Coast. Incidentally, you fellow native Chicagoans will be happy to know that in one recent editors’ phone conference I set the record straight on the misconception that Chicago and the Midwest are full of backwards-thinking, stick-in-the mud Midwesterners.

“Look,” I said, “On the coasts it’s trendy to be progressive. But if you’re a progressive in the Midwest, you’re a true progressive.”

And we have fostered plenty of people who “think a little bit ahead.” Heck, we have a whole history of them: social reformer Jane Addams, attorney Clarence Darrow, community organizer Saul Alinsky and author Studs Terkel. It was us, Illinois, who in 1992 sent to the U.S. Senate its first female African-American, Carol Moseley Braun. If our current Democratic senatorial candidate, Barack Obama, is elected, he could be the only African-American in the next U.S. Senate. One of our current U.S. Senators, Democrat Dick Durbin, was one of only a few senators who voted against the war in Iraq. Incidentally, another “no” vote was cast by fellow Midwesterner, Sen. Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat.

Then, there’s our not-so-famous locals who circulate in our alternative circles, accomplishing big things in small ways. We all know who they are.

But here’s something you might not know. There are lots of others like me: people who are living “double lives,” people who work in the conservative world to survive the day-to-day, but “think a little bit ahead of the rest” and ache to honor those parts of their hearts.

My mission is to clear a workspace for all these true visionaries, whatever their exterior trappings: the journalists, writers, poets, artists, photographers, healers, and thinkers. This is a call to all the compassionate spirits who desire to participate in the creation of a culture that uplifts us all. You know who you are.

Some of you are native Chicagoans, and some of you have migrated from other parts of the country. Some of you may be quite successful in the mainstream. But every once in a while you get that nagging itch to do something that feeds the heart and soul. When it does, my door is open to you. It says: “Welcome Home.”

— Marla Donato

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