Margaret Murray is a writer and teacher. She was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and attended Carnegie-Mellon University and Hunter College. She has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for the last 35 years and is the mother of three children. She attended the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and was the recipient of an American Federation of the Arts Scholarship and a National Endowment grant.

Sundagger.net was begun in 1999 after I visited the Four Corners area in the Southwest and Chaco Canyon. Amazed and inspired by the mysterious ruins, I began to research Pre-Puebloan culture. I found myself reaching across the barriers of time, space, and national origin, intersecting and contrasting the disparate cultures of the indigenous Anasazi and our frenetic contemporary techno lifestyle. But how to bridge the gap between the two worlds? I had been attending Native American sweat lodge ceremonies and realized that I could use the sweat lodge as the portal between the worlds.

In Native American history, I saw loss everywhere. Loss of land, culture, identity, power, and pride. It was irremediable, with no happy endings. To this tragedy, I added my own sense of loss regarding my ruined marriage. What could be possible under these despairing conditions? But then I thought of the idea that maybe you get more than one chance–though not in this lifetime. I imagined a story where a man, a family, lose everything in one lifetime only to have the chance to regain it in another.

Sometimes it takes more than one lifetime.