Cheryl Jean Miller, Found Harmony With Nature and the Spirit -- Rest in Peace

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Subject:

Cheryl Jean Miller, Found Harmony With Nature and the Spirit

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died December 9 - ovarian cancer

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Date Posted: January 09, 2005 12:58:56 EDT

There was a time a couple of years ago when Cheryl Jean Miller, despite being sick with cancer, toiled to the top of a mountain in western Mexico. She remained there for three days and three nights, alone, without food or water, the days searing hot, the nights cold.

Staring from her mountain perch at the rumpled brown peaks stretching into the distance, gazing at night into a profligate array of stars, she waited. She waited for insight, for some sense of connection to the primordial.

Each day, at dawn and at dusk, she heard a click-click-clicking sound, a sound so faint it could have been the rocks themselves adjusting to the sun's arrival and departure. On the third day, she discovered its origin. It was the click of claws on rock of a huge black cat, a jaguar, that had been watching her the whole time.

"Our eyes met," she told her brother Gary Miller, "and I've never felt so much kinship."

For Cheryl Miller, who died of ovarian cancer Dec. 9, a few weeks before her 50th birthday, the jaguar embodied the beauty and mystery of the life force. She believed that modern man, by shunning visions and the spirit world, had allowed senses once attuned to a deeper awareness to atrophy. She sought to rekindle them.

Living more intimately with the earth taught her not only how to live but also how to die, she believed.

Miller was born in Takoma Park and grew up in Rockville in a house that backed up to Rock Creek Park. She worked with numerous nature groups and in 1997 co-founded Mid-Atlantic Primitive Skills, a group dedicated to reviving such skills as edible plant identification, tracking and shelter construction. She loved teaching children how to interpret the hidden messages in the tracks of a deer or a raccoon.

With new subdivisions, strip shopping centers and warehouses spreading amoeba-like across the semirural Beltsville area where she lived as an adult, she had to make an effort to seek out nature -- in western North Carolina's Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, in a sustainable agriculture community outside Baltimore, in a small vegetable garden across the road from her house.

She was diagnosed with cancer in 1998. When modern medicine in the form of chemotherapy seemed powerless, she turned increasingly to shamanistic insights of the Huichol Indians, who live according to the old ways in Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains. She made two pilgrimages to the tribe's remote mountain villages, in addition to the vision quest where she encountered the jaguar.

She told her brother that her ultimate aim wasn't a cure, necessarily, but knowledge -- knowledge that would come, as the Huichol believe, from the spirit of plants and from Tatewari, Grandfather Fire. As Miller described it in a journal entry, it was knowledge from "the lost world."

Miller was more than the aspiring New Age mystic her nature-seeking would suggest. She had a degree in business from the University of Maryland and worked as a medical laboratory technician at Suburban Hospital and as a sales manager for a drug company. She was working on a degree in land management from the University of Maryland and had a black belt in tang soo do, a Korean martial art.

As her brother recalled, she had to grow up early. When she was 5, her mother died -- also from ovarian cancer -- and her father never remarried. As children, her brothers, Gary and Mark, considered Cheryl their mother. When their father was stricken with cancer, she was his primary caregiver until his death in 1992.

"I didn't feel I was a very good mother, and always knew I had little interest in having my own children," Miller wrote in a letter to a friend. Yet she still yearned for family, Gary said, and when she was 30, she found one. She fell in love with her karate teacher, Marcia Van Horn -- and the karate teacher's assistant, Van Horn's husband, Robert. In 1985, Miller and the Van Horns became "life partners."

However unusual, the relationship thrived. Miller and the Van Horns, along with assorted dogs and cats, lived together for nearly 20 years, until the day she died.

"The relationship that we had was extremely important to all three of us," said Marcia Van Horn, a registered nurse. Although she tends to place her trust in science rather than the spirit world, she respected her partner's quest.

Like the Huichol, Miller believed that life, in some unknowable way, transcends death, and at one point she contemplated hastening death's arrival. An elderly Huichol shaman advised her to choose life.

And she did, Gary Miller recalled. The day before she died, he asked his sister, "Are you scared?"

"No!" she said, laughing. "I'm still hoping for a miracle. Don't write me off yet."

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Replies:

Subject	Author	Date
Re: Cheryl Jean Miller, Found Harmony With Nature and the Spirit	H. SPENSER	September 14, 2006 11:50:25 EDT