My Journey
Quest for Eternal Sunshine — both the book and the website — has been an unexpected and wonderful undertaking in my life. Until recently, my three-decade long career was focused on organic food and farming, and explaining to as many people as possible why organic is the healthiest choice.
The company my husband Drew and I started on only 2-1/2 acres in 1984, Earthbound Farm, became the largest grower of organic produce in the world by 1998, mostly because we had a new and popular product before anyone else: pre-washed specialty salads packaged for retail sale.
This would never have happened if my parents hadn’t been inspired to buy a little farm in Carmel Valley, California when my dad sold his jewelry business in Brooklyn and retired. My mom grew up on a farm in Hungary, and always wanted to have access to fresh picked produce again. (She also wanted a cow, which we never got, but we did have chickens for the first few years).
Drew and I were originally going to spend one year on the farm, helping my parents make improvements in exchange for rent while I applied to graduate schools for international relations. Instead, we fell in love with living in sync with the rhythms of nature and working outside with our hands, and I just couldn’t imagine sacrificing that to head back to a classroom.
When Drew and I started marketing our idea for ready-to-eat salads in a bag (which we’d initially created for our own convenience because we were too tired after working long days to harvest and wash our beautiful greens for dinner), it was my inventor father, Mendek Rubin, who jumped in to help us. He created our first washing and bagging equipment (mostly with odds and ends he discovered at the local junkyard), and also taught us how to think like professional manufacturers —about efficiency, assembly lines, and scaling up. Creating Quest for Eternal Sunshine has been the second significant collaboration between my dad and me, although this one took place posthumously.
Mendek was passionate about documenting and sharing his healing journey. His unfinished manuscript (originally titled, In Quest of the Eternal Sunshine) needed a lot of work before it could be shared with the world. Although it was filled with a tremendous amount of wisdom and some moving and compelling memoir, it was missing virtually every name and date, and huge chunks of his life were unaccounted for. English was my dad’s fourth language and he’d never received any writing coaching, so in addition to researching and writing the missing parts of his story, I had to do a great amount of reorganizing and editing—a process that ended up taking over four years.
When I first started working on this book, I felt like a devoted daughter making an offering to my father — I wanted to preserve his life story and help him fulfill his deep wish to share his revelations with the world. It turned out that my dad’s success in overcoming his immense traumas to live a deeply peaceful and joyous life has helped inspire my own healing odyssey.
My father wrote, “The most important thing I have ever done is to become an explorer of my mind and heart. I got to know myself as I really am, rather than who I imagined myself to be.”
Everybody’s voyage through life is unique. What we each need in order to heal is often different, and it changes over time. Mendek shared the road map that worked for him, and his insights opened my eyes and helped change my life.
While my dad continues to be one of my greatest teachers and my biggest inspiration, there are other resources and healers I’m discovering along the way that I am excited to share through this website.
The journey continues!
- Myra