This is Whidbey interview by Kate Poss
Raised by musical parents who belonged to the Communist Party, and considering herself a “godless one,” Sally Ashford—also known as Pushkara—lost her singing and speaking voice in 1979 at the age of 39. Devastated at the loss of what she believed was her gift and identity, Pushkara would soon experience a spiritual awakening and opening of her heart that unveiled the path her life would take from then on.
AI defines the name Pushkara in this way: “In Sanskrit, Pushkara (पुष्कर) has multiple meanings, primarily referring to the blue lotus flower (Neel Kamal), symbolizing purity and beauty, but also meaning ‘one who nourishes’ (from push for nourishment and kara for doer), a sacred lake, a swan, or even the sky, often connected with nourishment, spiritual cleansing.”
Sally received this name when she joined a devotional community.
Sitting in Pushkara’s cozy aerie office/sanctuary at the top of her bluff top home with views of the sparkling Salish Sea, I admired her grace, her lit-from-within blue eyes, and the way her expressions honestly reflected her emotions as she shared a peek into her life. I typed while I looked directly at her, listening to her whispery voice, a result of spasmodic dysphonia that hijacked the ability for her to speak and sing without her voice breaking. I came away from our two-plus hours together with a sense of calm and appreciation of her history.
Publishing her first book, Breathing Life into Death…Poems, Songs & Visions, Pushkara tells her story in poems, some of which were written into song and performed by friends on South Whidbey.
When asked about her first published book, she laughed. “I’ve written many stories,” she explained. “To put a book together is another matter. The preface, afterward and bio tells more about me, because the poems do not necessarily tell you about the journey.”
The journey began in Los Angeles where she was born in 1940, and raised by parents who had joined the Communist Party. Her father worked in construction and the family moved from Los Angeles to Idaho to Oregon and to the Seattle area, depending on where her dad found work. The family settled into Seattle by 1945.
“A lot of working class and union members were persuaded by the Communist ideology prior to the second world war,” said Pushkara. “America and Russia were allies, and until McCarthy came into prominence, to be a communist was not unusual. By the time I was 10, however, the Communist Party was fragmented, going underground. The Rosenbergs had been executed. Our family was cut off and isolated from this tight-knit community. For two years, I could not see nor talk to my best friend.”
By the time she was a teen, Sally led a double life. She had friends in high school, she sang in choirs. But she was also being groomed to become a communist activist, a part of her that had to be kept secret from even her best friends.
She laughs, recalling the past, and saying: “True confession: at 16 I led a double life. I was active in school life, I sang in the choir and was president of the girls’ athletic club. At the time, I was studying Marxist dialectical materialism. That’s also when I felt I had to decide, ‘Okay, I don’t believe in God.’
“In the 50’s the FBI was at our door. The McCarthy investigation committee came to Seattle. My mother was ‘named.’ Her (my mother’s) affiliation was entered in my school records, which didn’t make me popular with my teachers. I didn’t figure that out until a few years later, by the way.”
So, like in a scene from a Cold War movie, the teen then known as Sally was selected to travel under an alias to New York.,
“Myself and a young man, from another Communist Party family flew under an alias for a young communist convention. Subterfuge. All the secrets I held. I know secrets have a lot to do with…” and she points to her throat. “To whom do you tell the truth when you fear your parents could be arrested? We were terrified. Members of the Communist Party were being put to death.”
Pushkara sang from a young age with her sister Marj. When they were teens, Marj, a best friend Kae and her sister joined a leftist folk chorus, The Wayfarers. “Which was still quite apart and kept secret from my high school friends,” recalled Pushkara. By the time she was 18, Pushkara sang and led songs in a trio called The Cascades with her husband, John Ashford. The couple performed together for 25 years at numerous venues, at festivals, in coffeehouses, and concerts. She also sang in operas and performed in musicals.
Three children arrived: David, Frank and Wendy. With her “activist gene” Pushkara became a change agent. She cofounded the Seattle Folklore Society. She helped launch Seattle’s first K-8 public alternative school, which later was funded by Seattle Public schools. Her sons, then 10 and 7, were enrolled. After earning a Masters Degree in Social Work in 1978, Pushkara’s professional life expanded exponentially.
She worked as a Home and Family Life instructor for cooperative preschools, taught music for preschool teachers to incorporate in their classrooms. She created a program addressing family violence, working with an array of professionals from law enforcement to addiction counselors to help women in abusive relationships. While leading a stress reduction workshop she created called “A Repertoire for Self-Care,” which involved music, she began experiencing the first signs of spasmodic dysphonia.
“Then the music stopped,” recalled Pushkara. “Not all at once. I tried to find out what was going on. At first, it was a very slight interruption in the sound. My story is that I was a singer who lost her voice. Simultaneously with that, I cried out for help. I had no religious inclination.”
She describes meditating with a friend—who now lives on Whidbey and owns a glass studio— and having a spiritual awakening in her poem “Coming of the Light:” “C-R-A-C-K—a breaking sound in my chest. Light blazes from the chasm of the heart. Perfect peace replaces the desperate chaos—the stormy seas of life, forever abated in this dawn’s pure light.”
From that moment on, Pushkara’s life took on a new dimension. Her marriage to John did not last and he left when the boys had moved on to their own lives, and Wendy was 15. John remarried, and Pushkara was at his bedside the night he died about 8 years ago.
As a single mom with a newfound spiritual power source, Pushkara was lit from within.
“It was so PROFOUND,” Pushkara recalled of the time. “When I received my awakening and started meditating, I was invited to prisons to teach meditation. I worked both ends with those who were abused and those who were incarcerated for abusing. I learned judgement had no place in the world with this awareness of spirit.”
Just when she said these words, a chickadee landed on a branch outside the window in her aerie, as if to affirm Pushkara’s words.
Along with her spiritual awakening came dreams which inspired ballads. She dreamed of a prisoner being freed, not from prison, but from his own inner prison. In her dream, the Lord placed a golden token in the hand of the prisoner, which brought him freedom in spirit.
She would write a ballad some 20 years later, which was performed in 2005 by friends on South Whidbey at her 65th birthday. Visit Pushkara’s blog post to learn about The Golden Token, and learn of her experience teaching its concept at a maximum security prison. She told the story of her dream to inmates.
“In the dream, one man was saying, ‘I like the part about the prisoner being freed.’ When I shared it with the inmates, the walls and bars between us fell away,” added Pushkara.
Prior to her spiritual practice, visiting convicted felons was beyond Pushkara’s comfort zone.
“Before the time of my spiritual awakening, I would never have imagined doing such a thing,” Pushkara writes on the Golden Token blog post. “Chanting Sanskrit mantras and willingly going into a male prison facility were foreign to anything that I had ever done. Some unnamed terror came over me on arriving there to give my first talk. As we were leaving, I told my companions, ‘Somebody had better take my hand, my eyes have gone out the back of my head.’ I felt very spaced out and in no way grounded in everyday reality. Even so, I continued to show up each week to make the journey to the prison.”
Meanwhile, Pushkara traveled to India and beyond on her spiritual pilgrimage. Along the way she met Margaret Bendet, who was part of the same spiritual group. Margaret taught memoir on Whidbey, and recently moved to Oakland CA. In her book, Pushkara thanks Margaret for her “acute attention and kindness in reading, reviewing and editing the book’s text.”
I reached out to Margaret—who I know from our previous work at Sno-Isle Libraries and our mutual love of journalism. She texted: “I’ve known Pushkara for decades. I met her in India in an ashram, where we were both studying, and I knew her in an ashram in upstate New York as well. When I was thinking about moving to Whidbey Island some 18 years ago, she had me over for lunch in her gorgeous house overlooking the water. I thought, ‘This is heaven!’”
Pushkara moved to Whidbey Island in 2002. By 2008, her “activism gene” sparked to life once again, and she built a gypsy wagon. It was inspired by a dream she had.
“I had a dream that the work I will do is going to be known long after.” She pointed to the “Peace Pilgrimage” poem in her book, which describes her dream: “You will live in other people’s houses, and the work you do will be known long after your name is forgotten.”
“When I woke I had an image, of a gypsy wagon with a troupe of singers, dancers, storytellers. This was a form of activism we can understand. It doesn’t have to be a struggle. It can be fun. It can be playful and bring us together. The same day I woke up from this dream I went online and saw in Port Townsend a course on how to build a gypsy wagon. That course was in 2009. In the mean time I put feelers out. Friends said we’ll help you build. We had an inaugural event where we invited the Port Townsend woodworking school… it gave our community a taste of what this could be.”
Now with her three children, son Frank’s wife and teen sons all living with Pushkara, the home is full. Dog Raksha adds to the mix.
For Pushkara, now in her 80s, she said she’s finally come home to her heart.
To learn more about the book and her life, visit her webpage, https://singpeacepilgrimage.ning.com/
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