URANIUM WARRIOR
Uranium Warrior is one woman’s heroine’s journey. You’ll travel into the heart and head of Robin Davis as she has to find her inner activist in order to face down an International Corporation who felt entitled to take what they said is ‘rightfully theirs’ no matter the risk to those living within the proposed mining zone.
This book will draw you in with two voices, the voice of the activist in the real time of the events and the current voice of the woman who had to grow exponentially during and following these events.
This book is a must read for everyone who has ever faced both inner and outer demons. Robin’s personal success and CARD’s community success offers both inspiration as well as nuts and bolts for your own hero’s journey.
Chapter 1 – Horses
“Robin! Robin! Where are you?”
Oh my God, Oh my God… Mom noticed the unlocked front screen door and peered out, her hand gripping the doorknob to steady herself. She felt nauseous, her heart pounding in her chest. Her ears filled with an internal thump, thump.
WHERE IS ROBIN! her mind screamed.
The distraught mother looked down the road, straining to hear police sirens. She hoped her panicked call had spurred them into coming fast. She needed help! She swallowed hard, bile burning her throat as she forced it back down by sheer willpower. Where could she be? My young mother had been busy with the laundry, her mind filled with the multitude of mundane things she had to get done that day, when she noticed I was gone.
The air pressure of the farm trucks driving by at high speed buffeted my two-year-old body. I closed my eyes and let the pulse of the pressure push me back onto my bare heels. I smiled, enjoying the warm moving air as it effortlessly shifted my torso forward and back.
The trucks whizzed by as I opened my eyes and immediately noticed the horses standing in the field across the street. Oh yea… that’s where I had been headed. My toddler brain had been distracted by the pleasurable buffeting of air pressure from passing cars and trucks. The sensation helped me forget that my goal was elsewhere.
It was the horses that drew me. They had from my first experience as a baby, feeling the warm blow on my skin as my mom introduced her new infant to the muzzle of a friendly and curious gelding. While I have no conscious memory of this, my mom would say I had been touched by a horse before I could walk. Something about those big, lovely beasts made my heart fly open with joy like nothing else I’d experienced in my short life. I had bubbled over with excitement when I leaned on the front screen door and it swung wide open. Unafraid, I immediately tottered out the door and climbed on hands and knees up the five garden-level steps. My eyes focused on the big bay mare who was quietly grazing on the far side of a rusty barbed wire fence, well beyond the busy country road.
My mom dropped to her knees next to the bed and peered underneath. A drop of nervous sweat dripped down her nose and onto the floor. She wiped her face with the back of her trembling hand. She was running out of places to look. Did someone take her? Had she been kidnapped? Tears threatened. She was pulling herself up by the bedpost when she heard the short chirp of the siren. A police car had pulled in and parked under the tree. She flew to the door to let the man in, relieved that help had arrived.
I pulled as hard as I could at my dress. The spike in the barbed wire held tight to the hem, effectively holding me captive. The harder I fought the more entangled I became. My tiny hands fumbled ineffectively, creating a frustration that was new in my minimal life experience. I whimpered, teeth gritted, falling into the grass onto my back as I struggled with the sharp wire. Soon, a soft blow of air invited my attention. I turned my head to face a brown nostril that smelled like grass. Forgetting my predicament for a moment, I cooed into the mare’s nose, reaching out to touch the silky muzzle with both hands. I squeezed the giant nose, a grin stretching across my little face. The gentle mare blew again, curious about the struggling creature who was trying to invade her pasture. Giggling replaced tears, the trapped dress forgotten in a moment of deep equine bliss.
Another quick search of the house revealed nothing. While child abductions were rare, they were not unheard of in the town of Arvada, just west of Denver, Colorado. The officer wasn’t ready to accept that horrifying conclusion given all the places a toddler could hide, but concern was certainly growing. On a whim, he opened his trunk and pulled out a pair of binoculars. Scouring the area through the glass in a slow turn of his torso, he spotted an unusual flash of color in the field across the street.
“Mama, the fence got me,” I muttered, my tear stained face pleading for rescue. My mom hugged me tight, tears streaming with relief as she forcefully tore the dress from the barbed fence.
My mom spent the next seven years trying to satisfy my need for horse-time. Finding her daughter safely across the busy road that harrowing morning, her dress tangled in the pasture fence’s barbed wire, left her both relieved and concerned. Mom knew from that day forward that she had to keep an eye on her enterprising daughter whenever a horse was near. A new lock on the screen door and a new awareness of the necessity to constantly inspect that deterrent was only a partial fix. My mom was familiar with the addiction of horses, and was fully aware that her daughter was destined for a life with these special four-legged friends. Her goal was not to avoid equines, but to keep her intrepid daughter alive along the journey.
When I was 5, the fellow next door let me drive his ponies. I would come home from school, change my clothes, and head next door to hand feed the little horses the green grass I plucked from next to the fence. I would patiently wait for the owner to come home, see my pleading face at the fence, and hopefully wave me over. The owner enjoyed my company and enthusiasm, and taught me all he could about how to handle the spunky little beasts.
At 8 years old, I spent time at a nearby ranch that was owned by friends of my mother. While Mom was visiting the owner, I would follow one of the ranch hands around, watching and learning. I ate up everything and anything horse. The ranch soon became a favorite place for me to enjoy both riding and caring for equids of all kinds. I often got to ride “Tony the Tiger,” a little gelding who would buck and kick at other horses when they got too close. Instead of feeling fear, the thrill of the powerful gelding’s bucking made me squeal and laugh with delight. What my mother didn’t know was, eventually one of the ranch hands had other, more personal things to share with my young, naïve self. Things that were scary, inappropriate, and deeply traumatic. These covert and uninvited events would create profound emotional scars that I would have to deal with for the rest of my life.
At 10, I got a horse of my own. Our family and another family with kids bought three horses together, including a lovely mare for me. Arabesque was a dark buckskin, grade (unregistered), mare of unknown decent. And while she may not have had fancy papers, this mare was the most wonderful creature on the planet to me. Arabesque was my best friend. I laid on her back for hours, reading books, staring at the sky, or just dozing in the sun. Arabesque happily carried me all over the neighborhood as effectively as a car, instilling an intense appreciation for freedom that few children had the chance to enjoy. We played horseback Frisbee with the neighbor kids, and even raced the school bus down the street as it brought the elementary school children home. I would proudly announce to anyone who would listen that Arabesque had been clocked at a full 30 miles per hour by the bus driver.
Horses are in my blood. Horses feed my soul. Horses became my destiny. But it wasn’t until adulthood that I discovered that a love of horses had put me in a position to be forced to take a stand and to do all I could to change how my community, and perhaps even the whole world, dealt with one of the most powerful and potentially toxic elements on the planet, Uranium.
Overview & Preview
16 Chapters
312 Pages
Introduction
This is my story. A story of personal growth and a story of citizen success for the environment. This story is the story of my wake up call. I had many different internal scripts running and I had to wake up from them all in order to be functional as an activist.
The working title for this book was “What I learned from Nunn: How a Conservative Became an Apprehensive Activist” because of the many lessons I learned through my apprehension to waking up. I did not want to be an activist. I wanted to live my idealistic version of the ‘American Dream.’ One of the internal scripts that I ran was that, as an American, I was entitled to the dream promised to me. I deserved ‘success’ because I was a good girl who worked hard, paid her bills on time, was law abiding and church going.
When Powertech arrived, literally at our back door, I was certain that it would all work out for our highest good. I didn’t want to look at the bigger picture, I just wanted to focus on my dream. After all, I felt that I was entitled because I had prayed about it and it was manifesting, or so I believed. I believed that God would take care of everything and I just had to passively focus on what it was that I wanted. The power of attraction, right?!? As a Christian I knew about the ‘power of attraction’ but it wasn’t something that I was really focused on. My faith taught me that all I had to do was be a good Christian. THIS is how I would manifest my dreams. Through loving and praying and being nice. I believed that I didn’t need to get dirty in a role of activism. This is what I believed. It is also how I remained in victimhood so that I could complain about my lot in life when things did not go my way.
I felt that we were in touch with God and following His Will because we were good Catholics who attended church every week and prayed for guidance most days. I was active within the Church by volunteering as a Eucharistic minister, lector and wedding coordinator. Before quitting in order to follow my dream of being a horse trainer and riding instructor, I had worked at Saint Joseph Catholic Church in the business office.
I would describe myself as a Conservative Christian Republican. It was important to me to have those titles, just as it was also important to me to have the title of 4-H Leader and Natural Horsemanship Trainer. I didn’t really realize it at the time but I needed something upon which I could hang my hat to prove that I was worthy.
I was always called emotional, but I used emotions more as a tool, as a way to get what I wanted. Not consciously, mind you, but certainly in the way I did things. I was often angry without really understanding what I was truly angry about. I’d project my anger onto Jay, my husband, or onto the political climate or society as a whole. It was easier than going within and learning about myself. I had some baggage that needed cleaning up but I couldn’t clean it up without really looking at it first.
The lessons from the uranium mine battle were ones that forced my hand and forced me into really looking at what was driving me. I was ‘content’ living the lie that I was happy because I was married to a great guy and that my ‘American dream’ was coming true. I was content in not really learning about the intelligence in emotion but rather using that emotion in a dysfunctional way in order to defend the lie that I was telling myself. It was much easier to project that emotion onto others in judgment and manipulation than to look at real truth.
I was good at making my own anger wrong. I wasn’t yet at a place in my life where I could look at anger and ask the questions: What boundary has been violated? How can that boundary be restored? These are difficult questions for many of us and likely why anger as an emotion has become so demonized. It’s tough to ask the tough questions. Making friends with anger in a healthy way is not something in which our society finds value. So I would take that internal anger, look for a place upon which to focus it and make the ‘other’ wrong for whatever thing I perceived as not being ‘correct.’
The Truth is that when I turned within I’d find that I was truly broken and hurting inside. I’d find self-loathing. I’d find the source of pain and heartache.
I was seeking ways to truly get in touch with myself. I was attracting those things that would do that for me. Attracting those things that would make me see truth rather than being a person of the lie. The law of attraction is real and we can make ourselves buy into what is manifesting as the perfect life by ignoring what is happening outside of our own little bubble until our unconsciousness manifests something that requires us to go beyond the lie.
Living a lie does not mean that you will attract a uranium mine, or something outside of yourself, but it might mean you manifest acute or chronic physical or mental illness (dis-ease). It’s all energy and the lessons will come as is best for your own personal growth. I am childless because I have dealt with endometriosis. I now know that I was at war with my uterus because I did not trust being female. This dis-ease was manifested by me to cover the lie that I was living. The body does not lie and will respond to the constant stress of living a lie.
The story of our quest to save the water from Uranium mining is also the story of what began my own looking into my story. Attracting a huge drama into my world, shattering my dreams of focusing on horses and youth and a nature retreat for both, I was put in a position to be a water warrior. Water, the element that represents emotion and the fluidity of life. Water which is LIFE!
I was thrust into a position where I really had to protect LIFE. Without water there is no life. I was thrust into a position of TRULY honoring all LIFE, including my own. When I speak of LIFE vs. life, I am referring to all of Creation and the Spark that makes it and connects it. I am referring to Love and how it is alive. I am referring to Divinity. LIFE is what we are a part of as well as what we live.
For this journey, I had to be willing to look within and love myself enough to step into an uncomfortable position in which I could have never imagined myself. I had to let go of titles and idealism and dreams and look hard and long into the face of reality AND I had to take action to address this reality. This is the real story. The story of personal growth and the action it took to begin that growth.
As you begin reading you will see places where I speak from a voice of a type of narration with the new found wisdom that I have as I write this. It feels important to add these reflections throughout as part of what I learned. The journey of fighting the uranium miners was a deep learning experience on many levels and I hope that this book can begin to help the reader drop into that depth. I recognize that the story is almost two stories in one, but they are truly inseparable. Without the challenges put in front of me as we had our hands forced into stepping into this role of activism, I may have not taken the deeper journey of learning about myself.
I hope you enjoy the read and find it helpful for you on your own personal journey through life as you navigate your own waters.
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