Roberta Llewellyn

Lost Angels Coming Home Roberta Llewellyn

Sometimes mystical, sometimes gut-wrenching, as if a mélange of cinéma vérité had been superimposed on a background of gritty photorealism when she looked back on those scenes.

This story is about Sarah living in Northern California over many decades. She reveals through the angels who watched over her and through the mirroring of movies she watched as a child in St. Helena seeing her life as a montage of miscellaneous film loops. This was especially true when growing up in Oakland during the black and white fifties into the Wizard of Oz technicolor sixties.

Sarah tells her life story and that of her family and the people who come across her path through an honest and caring heart. She finds beauty and meaning arising from dissonant life experiences in the natural world of Northern California and in the deep recesses of her imagination. It seems she lived many lifetimes in one, but Sarah always knew her core self, her main rhythm and where to come back home. She sees herself as a casual mystic, an imperfect, sensual seeker of God. During the present decade, Sarah reluctantly returns to the Lost Coast where her son, Noah, and his partner, Heidi, are grieving over the loss of their young daughter who died unexpectedly. Sarah meets Michael there by chance and while uncovering who they may be for one another they become unwittingly over shadowed by Shasta. A Native American man who insists that the land where Michael has built his home and where he grows his cash crop, must be returned to his ancestors. A conflict of wishes, culture, and humanity makes this story resonant with depth, and through the interweaving of the past with the present.

Roberta was living in Oakland when she married young and had four children by the time she was twenty-four. She enjoyed, in her earlier life, making theater productions with elementary and middle school aged children. Especially at Canyon Elementary School in Canyon, Whitethorn Elementary School in Whitethorn and Quaker First Day School in Berkeley, California. Some of the plays the children performed were inspired from Pomo and Maidu Indian myths. Pacifica KPFA Radio Journalist Vic Bedoian, and Roberta produced a series of Pomo Indian Oral Histories which were made into a series of radio programs titled: "These Things That Cannot Be Replaced." She published a portion of an interview aired with Kashaya Pomo Shaman Bernice Torres in "News From Native California" by Heyday Press publisher, Malcolm Margolin. Bernice was the daughter of historically well-known, Kashaya Pomo Shaman Essie Parrish. Essie was a Prophet and a Dreamer. The aired recording of Bernice includes her singing a spontaneous song for healing the nation as learned from her mother, as well as how she was identified as "one of them," as a child.