Laura is also a writer, intuitive, and healer. She graduated with a B.A. in Sociology and has her Masters Degree in Clinical Art Therapy. She has also taught art and been an arts advocate for more than 20 years.

Laura spent six years during her twenties living in Sweden where she traveled and studied independently, supporting herself with a variety of different jobs, including doing hospice work, working in a mental hospital, and teaching English to immigrant families from thirteen different countries using art as a common denominator. While in Sweden she also went to art school and worked with Amnesty International. Her years working in cooperation with Amnesty gave her a keen understanding of the suffering and brutality we humans visit upon one another. She worked as a translator (English, Swedish, Persian/Farsi) and helped refugees through the grief process who had been tortured and lost family and friends.

Back home in the states, Laura worked with children and teens for whom art therapy was a wonderful modality for healing abuse and trauma. She also worked with VietNam veterans using art therapy to help recover from post traumatic stress disorder.

At the beginning of the war with Iraq, Laura had a horrifying vision. It was a vision of total nuclear annihilation of everything on our beautiful blue and green planet. She writes, "At first I began having what I now call psychic 'breakthroughs' where I would 'see' images from the battlefield in Iraq. These scenes would flash before my mind while I was awake like images from a movie. I remember seeing the giant sand storms that came in the early days of the American invasion. I saw scenes of soldiers trying to take cover from the blowing sand, trying to breathe, dodging explosions. I read that local people said they had not seen the sun so blotted out like it was from these sand storms for a couple of hundred years or more. A few days later I would see almost the exact scenes on the evening news." These experiences, unspeakable as they were, were only the beginning.

Laura continues....

In the spring of 2003 I had the most horrific vision. I saw from a high aerial perspective nuclear missiles flying and impacting the earth, crisscrossing between continents. I was too far up to even see what countries were being hit. I could only see the giant mushroom clouds rising above the earth. I stayed with this vision of utter destruction until I had seen 13 missiles and could stand no more. For months I was too stunned to speak of this—it was so unthinkable.

What could I DO??

At the time, all I could do was go into my young daughter's room where she lay sleeping, fall onto my knees, and put my hand over her heart and promise to do whatever I could to stop this horrific vision from coming true. I had always cared about leading a nonviolent life, but that night I made a commitment to become a scholar of peace and a peace builder. It was not enough to read about what wise people had said; my question was, "What are people doing right now in the world to bring Peace to our understanding?"

Since the time of that first apocalyptic vision, I have prayed and meditated in the early hours. My mantra became, "Use my life!" and all other work, dreams, and goals were shucked away.

In the spring of 2005 I had a new vision. Once again, I was high in the air. I "flew" over Bagdad and across Iraq and could see the bombs hitting and the smoke spiraling upward. I then moved around the world until I came to our beautiful Pacific Northwest. I was suddenly looking down at the back and beautifully outstretched wings of a Great Gray Owl. I could see the wind ruffling its feathers as it flew through a clear blue sky—over deep green forests and a sparkling river. How majestic this great owl was!

Suddenly, a huge cloud of unearthly bluish vapor was rolling toward the Great Gray Owl and I. The owl tipped its wings and looked back into my eyes. I turned to look over my left shoulder and when I looked back, the owl tucked its wings and just fell from the sky. As I watched its limp body falling down, I saw a ghost owl fly on before me. Horrified, I cried out, "Oh, my God! What can I do??" Then, the idea of a wave of peace came to me. I said, "Show me what it looks like!"

At once I was carried out into the atmosphere and I saw the whole earth at night. A beautiful white dove flew before me, beckoning with its outstretched wings. It was following the curve of the earth and in its wake, millions of tiny candlelights lit up in its path all over the surface of the earth!

Not long after, I was shaken awake in the middle of the night with the direction, "PAINT!" I did so in a very accelerated way in the near darkness—a painting that I now call "Wave of Peace." A small representation of this painting is near the top of the home page of this site. It is the image of the vision I had and the first inkling of what will become the Glastonbury Global Peace Gathering on August 8, 2008.

After more than four years of in-depth study and meditation, praying, and practicing peace, The Peace Planet Proclamation came to me in the middle of one night. My intention is for it to serve to unite, motivate, and strengthen the many visionary efforts taking place all over the world today.

My six years spent in Sweden made an indelible impression on me. Not only because the entire country of Sweden and her people seemed to be endowed with a greater capacity for compassion in regards to suffering abroad, but also a national conviction and comittment to non-violence beginning at home.

In Sweden, a country of just over 9 million people, there are laws preventing corporal punishment, and even the threat of corporal punishment, of children. The Swedish people have the reputation of being "the conscience of Europe" and the country is now home to many political refugees from war-torn and conflict or famine-ridden areas of the world.

I had many Swedish friends who were gracious and generous, and they shared with me the beauty of the Swedish landscape and values; her bright lush summers that ended too soon and her very cold and seemingly unending, candlelit winters. It was not until I moved to Uppsala, an historic university town, that my true education and adventure began. I landed in a community of friends from all around the world who had left their home countries with great sorrow and reticence, only because to stay there would have meant death.

At one point, while living in student highrise housing, I lived beside and became good friends with people from war-torn Beruit, Iran, Eritrea, El Salvador, Chile, and Argentina. These reluctant immigrants were the best and brightest of their countries—the students, teachers, architects, poets, musicians, artists, the intellectuals without whom their mother countries were much impoverished. Their stories haunt me to this day.

Among my best friends was Maria, a sweet, freckle-faced young woman with smooth black hair and a warm countenence. She had barely escaped to Sweden after being tortured during the brutal Pinochet regime in Chile. Her father, uncle, and several other members of her family were among the desaparecidos—"disappeared people."

I remember Mahmoud, from war-revaged Beruit, who baked us all fresh bread and told us his stories as he ground the chick peas and sesame paste for his special hummus he loved to share.

There was an exuberant Iranian community, the most beautiful, genuinely kind people who befriended me and taught me their language, so full of poetry and soulfulness. I tasted and learned to prepare many exotic dishes and it seemed to me they just couldn't share enough. These dear friends... many of whom had fled the brutality of the Shah's regime, and later those who had escaped the atrocities of an even more oppressive regime under Khomeni.

There was Jaffar who looked to be abut 65 years old, very wise and soft-spoken. I will never forget him asking me, "Laura, how old do you think I am?" I was stunned to hear he was my age, 24 years old. His crime was to have been on the sidewalk, as an anti-Shah rally moved by near the University of Tehran. He was a student and had been on his way to a lecture, and was thrown into prison. When the Shah of Iran was overthrown, the Iranian people filled the streets and they broke down the prison doors and carried out the prisoners from their 4'x7' cells, laying garlands about their necks and holding them up to the sky. After four years of waiting, with no notice to his family nor any trial, Jaffar finally saw the light of day and was restored to his loved ones, though much-changed from his youthful, bright self who once had everything to look forward to.

I remember Nuri, a shy, handsome young man of nineteen who walked out of the Iranian desert for many days to escape the horrors of the war between Iraq and Iran, a war he described as "children fighting and killing children." Recruiting boys from age 10-12 was not uncommon.

There was Mosein, a Kurdish poet and scholar who loved to sing and had the most playful spirit. He left the Iranian Kurdistan after witnessing and enduring unthinkable horrors perpetuated against his people. His own young wife, the beautiful Azzam, with huge brown eyes, fringed with immpossibly long black lashes was tortured to death by the Ayatollah Khomeni's Revolutionary Guards. She was five months pregnant with their first child. I know about Azzam's eyes because I met her younger brother who had been able to escape to Sweden and Mosein said, "Laura, he has Azzam's eyes."

I often think of Fitui, a bright young scholar from war-torn Eritrea where children were recruited for fighting in the war with Ethiopia. He was just a young student and yet he was responsible for taking care of his younger siblings, including a five-year-old little sister and two young brothers. Fitui's parents had not seen their children for four years but at least had the comfort of knowing they were safe in Sweden.

These dear friends and their stories of unimaginable sorrow, sacrifice, and courage have profoundly shaped my life. These are just a few of the many wonderful friends whose songs, stories and poetry still live in me today. It is to them and the thousands of people like them who have suffered the utter insanity of violence that the Peace Planet Project is dedicated.