Grandma's Song of Healing

Harry MacCormack met Ida Mock in 1971. Despite a 50-year age difference, they immediately sensed a deep connection that embraced both a knowledge of Native American culture and a turn toward metaphysics. Harry had just written a book about Native American traditions, and Ida had been a long-time spiritual medium. Over a period of 13 years, Ida related her life story to Harry through question-and-answer interviews and astral projection back to the time of her childhood. What results is a fascinating memoir of a remarkable healer and medium born in Idaho in 1892, that also reveals the spiritual unfolding of a 29-year-old man just beginning his life as an organic farmer in western Oregon. Ida’s story not only traces the life of a pioneer woman awakening to her powers as a medium and a healer, but also recounts the steady press of progress upon the western frontier—the expansion of the railroads, the arrival of the automobile, and finally the advent of modern technology. Ida, who had seen it all from a tiny cabin in the upper reaches of the Clearwater River in the 1890s to the first home computer in the 1980s, was the perfect guide for Harry, a new age back-to-the-land farmer whose heart ached for what he saw as the incursion of modern society on the beauty of undisturbed nature.