Anne Hillman is a woman with a mission.
For 30 years or more, the Portola Valley wife, mother, singer, music teacher, management consultant, mentor, poet and thinker has pondered the big questions of how humanity can survive its growing divisions and conflicts in a crowded, warming world.
Her answers appear in a new book. “Awakening the Energies of Love: Discovering Fire for the Second Time” calls for transformation from our stressed-out, conflicted lives to a new kind of over-arching love that can transcend differences.
“There has to be another way to resolve conflicts that are destroying our world — conflicts between religions, between cultures, between views of appropriate sexuality,” Ms. Hillman says in an interview.
In the summary of the book on annehillman.net, she says, “This love is not a feeling; it is a great power.”
Growth of a book
“Awakening the Energies of Love” grew out of Ms. Hillman’s own life and spiritual journey. Her personal perspective and wide reading make it far more accessible than the tomes of the philosophers she draws on.
“I use personal style to give a thread through it so that people can follow,” she says. “It is an integration of science and religion and psychology and the spiritual.”
Ms. Hillman’s life was shattered 40 years ago when she was a young mother and music teacher married to the head of the music department at Dartmouth College.
It was 1968, and she was at the airport with her children, 3 and 7, to meet her husband returning from a concert tour. The plane crashed. Her husband was killed; he was 34.
“It was shattering,” Ms. Hillman recalls. “I had to learn to live all over again. I didn’t want to sing after he died.”
Ms. Hillman did pull her life together. She received a fellowship for a new program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study that gave opportunities to women to do graduate work part time. She earned a master’s degree from Boston University, and embarked on a career consulting on organizational development.
Ms. Hillman started with the Boston hospital she was born in, and was soon invited to join Kaiser in California. There she also began consulting with electronics organizations in the all-male, high-stress world of Silicon Valley. “Those firms broke me,” she recalls. “So I had a good mid-life crisis.”
One of the firms Ms. Hillman consulted with was Durango Systems, which made an early business computer. She fell in love with her boss, George Comstock — a no-no in that culture.
They married and moved to Ladera, and then to Portola Valley, where Mr. Comstock has served a term on the Town Council, including one year as mayor. Both of her children are now doctors, she says. Between the two of them, Anne and George have seven grandchildren.
During her stressful times some 30 years ago, Ms. Hillman remembers a turning point in a bakery. As she was admiring and sniffing newly baked bread, she realized: “A beautiful loaf of bread doesn’t feed you until it’s broken.”
Love in a book
Love is a difficult subject, so Ms. Hillman’s new book took 30 years to produce — 25 years for the yeast to rise, and five years in the oven to write.
Now it’s available at Kepler’s and on Amazon.
In tackling the power of love, Ms. Hillman divided her book into two parts: what’s known about love; and what’s unknown. “We don’t have words for the unknown,” she says.
When we talk about love, we are thinking about it, putting words to it, viewing opposites, taking sides, Ms. Hillman explains. “That’s the nature of thinking. We need words. We need opposites.”
Ms. Hillman views this new larger concept of love as being necessary to transform the human condition from conflict to harmony. She quotes the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of Love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered Fire.”
We do know some things about this kind of love, Ms. Hillman believes. “Love has to do with letting go of control. And that’s very hard,” she says. It means relinquishing safety, and relinquishing power.
Ms. Hillman believes fervently that these skills can be learned. Her book attempts to teach them. “It’s a skill, and it needs practice,” she insists.
What about physical phenomena such as climate change? Ms. Hillman acknowledges the problem is huge.
“We’ve done all the mastering,” she concludes. “If we don’t learn to harness love, we will destroy life on the planet.”
