Harriett Fels - Gilles - Sharon (Amari) in their California home circa 1996
SEE HARRIETT AT 16 YEARS OLD BELOW…
My friend Harriett passed away few weeks ago. I am still in a state of shock. Harriett was the one who was supposed to live longer than any of us. She believed it and we all believed it. But Life decided otherwise and now she’s gone.
I have written the following text to be read at her Memorial tonight in California (If you knew Harriet please leave a comment below):
I met Harriett in the early 80s. We were both doing EST Seminars and I quickly noticed this beautiful and vivacious young woman who kept asking questions about the essence of Life and the nature of Truth. She would challenge the leaders and would want to go deeper into any topics whether it was Love, Freedom, Intention, Relationships, everything… She was a Seeker, always looking for the most profound answers.
Then I learned she was living and eating the Macrobiotic Way – just like I did at that time. So when Algae came into my life in 1988 I naturally presented this opportunity to Harriet. It seemed like a perfect match for her. She flatly said she would never ever be interested in anything like this and refused to hear about blue-green algae. I did not give up that easily. I had seen in Seminars how Harriet was never stuck in her perspective and was always willing to modify her conclusions when presented with new information. Although she almost never talked about it she was a member of MENSA – the high IQ Society. But I knew it. So when I invited Daryl Kollman to give a talk for the North American MENSA convention in Montreal I asked Harriet to interview him for her newspaper. She agreed and came out of the meeting with 2 bottles of algae and a distributor agreement form in her hands.
Few years later as a massively successful Cell Tech Leader with a network of more than 35,000 members she wrote the following in a letter: “vibrating the message – you’re great, of course you can do it, you ARE doing it – literally allowed me to become the dynamic, confident, miraculous, stupendous, ecstatic Cell Tech distributor that I am today (and modest!)”.
We all know Harriet loved Nature. Not just as a concept, she also loved Being in Nature. The first time I came for a visit to her California home she treated Guylaine and I to a long walk along the Yuba river with wonderful scents of wild laurel I believe. This is something else we shared – our love for Mother Earth. When she lived in Quebec in the year 2000 she would come to my home every Monday and we would climb up the mountain where I live. We would taste the wild ginger and horseradish and other plants. We would also track the dear or the fox just for the pleasure of discovering their way of life. One rainy Monday we saw fresh tracks of a lynx, something very rare in my location. We followed the tracks with great excitement and we completely got lost. We had been gone for the whole day and the light was going down fast. It was late fall and the night would be chilly. To come back home rapidly we had to come down the hill on the cliff side and it was both steep and muddy. At one point we had to just slide on our back in the mud straight down for about 20 feet without knowing where we would be landing. It was scary and of course Harriett used this event metaphorically to “let go and trust the Universe”. We eventually made it to the path behind my house. We were sitting on a wet rock – exhausted, tired, dirty. Harriet had mud on her hair and on the right side of her face. I felt very guilty and was about to apologize for a poorly prepared trip when she looked at me with her glorious smile and said “Wow! That was great! Let’s do it again next week”. That spectacular smile in the middle of her lovely muddy face is how I will remember Harriet for the rest of my life.
I love you Harriett
Gilles Arbour
May 17th 2009
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Our friend John David Mann also wrote a text for Harriett’s Memorial:
Dear Harriett,
I’ve known you for well more than 20 years, nearly half my life. In that time you’ve always been one of the most serious, earnest people I know. Yet you continually catch me by surprise when, in the very midst of an intensely focused conversation—and this happens every time we talk—you will suddenly burst out with a smile that lights up the room, like the sun breaking through a scrim of clouds.
Just thinking about it now makes me smile—in earnest.
When I think of you, two words come to mind. The first is champion.
As long as we’ve known each other, you’ve always been a champion of causes large and small, global and personal. Of people and places, of plants and elements, principles and possibilities. There’s something inexpressibly gentle about the way you love the earth and the underdog—and something the opposite of gentle about your fierceness in defending that love. If St. Francis and Joan of Arc got mixed up in some sort of time-space barrel, the person who emerged might have turned out to be very much like you.
Not to say that you’re a saint; just a very real, very human champion.
The second word is passion. Passion for justice, for nature, for integrity, for fairness. Passion for seeing the world around you as it is and throwing yourself headlong into the uncompromising pursuit of how it ought to be.
I haven’t seen you in nearly a decade. The last time we talked you were earnestly detailing the dastardly machinations behind the silent proliferation of airborn chemtrails. And then someone said something—and you broke out with one of those smiles, the ones that linger one for months and years.
I’m not sure exactly where you are right now, but I know you’re there, because I can feel the sun warmth from here.
John David Mann
May 13th 2009
Harriett Fels at 16 (from her cousin Brian) Lightly retouched by Photoshop expert Art Robbins
Update September 13th 2009 – see a Tribute to Harriett presented at the Simplexity August Celebration (the first 2 minutes of the video is about her) http://www.simplexityhealth.com/shplayer169.jsp?flv=/ac09/15_Harriett_Linda_Memorial_30%20fps.flv
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