I Hate Cancer

I hate cancer, but I love the families we work with at camp whose lives are impacted by it. Instead of building a wall to impress the world with his genius, couldn't our president and his congress put money toward finding better treatments for brain tumors in our most vulnerable children?

Mule, one of our long time camp counselors at Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times, recently posted this on his face book page: 



We need to do better than this. 

Currently, our methods for dealing with tumors are slash, burn and poison. The discombobulation in the wake of these treatments is devastating. Members of our camp population suffer from loss of sight, balance, sensation, mobility, speech, immune function, and ability to socialize, among other losses, due to side effects. 

The losses endured by siblings also take an emotional toll. Parents do the very best they can. Medicine is doing the best it can, but we're creating more cancer in children than ever before.

Cancer is an equal opportunity destroyer. It cuts across all ethnic, racial, religious, age and gender lines. There are more cases in areas where pesticides are concentrated, and in areas where water and air quality are poor. So, there is an economic component that is skewed. 

In 1984 Juana Gutierrez started organizing Mothers of East Los Angeles to fight against the smoke stacks being built in their neighborhoods for the purpose of burning toxic waste. The good that these women have done and are doing for their families is astonishing and a simple example of how impactful we can be when we stand together against the idiocy of pretending that this planet is not our only life boat in the inhospitable ocean of outer space.  For more about their struggle and triumph click this Living On Earth transcript.

http://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=93-P13-00015&segmentID=5

I propose we confer with our inner space (hearts and minds) to see what we might do in our own households and neighborhoods to clean up the toxins. 

Could we pre-cycle to diminish the size of our individual carbon footprints? That means purchasing items packaged in less plastic or buying items in bulk, and instead of carrying them home in plastic bags, re-purposing our glass jars from spaghetti sauce and canned fruit, or mayonnaise to store grains, pasta, dried fruits, cereals and the like. Getting the plastic out of the waste stream will support cleaner air and water. Many stores are coming on board to support us bringing our own containers to fill with the groceries we purchase from bulk bins. Every scrap of plastic we don't buy is one less scrap in the land-fill... which drains to the water table.

If Harvey and Irma teach us anything about how everything ends up in the water, we should heed the teaching and cut down on the chemical load we're dumping into our own nest.

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It was a brilliant weekend at Jack's Camp in Livermore, California. We Can has merged with Pediatric Brain Tumor Network. Camp is the same, the name has changed. Cool weather and blue skies prevailed. Stage Night, which we call We Can Do ANYthing, showed off the many and varied talents of our campers age 2 to 22. Dancing, singing, lip-syncing, magic tricks, and jokes delighted us all. One sixteen year old showed off walking across the stage without his crutches. After Stage Night came the dance party. Wow! This was the most cohesive celebration I've ever witnessed at camp. EVERYone was dancing! The music was at a doable volume; the kids, their adults, and all twenty-five volunteer counselors danced and danced. We decorated wheel chairs and ourselves with glow-sticks and light-up rings and enjoyed "YMCA" and "Electric Slide" on wheels and on foot. 

Good-byes Sunday afternoon were tearful. No one wants to leave the haven of safety we've created together - where the break-out groups help  patients, siblings and parents bond with their peers.

There's no place on earth like camp. It's not the place, it's the people.

Love people. Hate cancer.

Privilege

How are we privileged? Let me count the ways…

White

Male

Youthful

Physically Able

Protestant

Heterosexual

Monied

Living in a non-war-torn, non-violent, geographically stable area

That leaves an elite few on the planet… The First Worlders who may never have suffered the challenges of sexism, racism, classism, age-discrimination, persecution, poverty, war and natural disasters. If you haven’t experienced these challenges, does it mean you cannot have compassion?

Is empathy what we’re really talking about here? The ability to put ourselves in another’s shoes - to feel as if a challenge were happening to us - and act to help our fellow humans.

Am I privileged if I can't put myself in the shoes - soaked shoes - of those struggling to find ground in the wake of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma’s thievery?

What was solid has become wet, muddied and drowned ground. Folks have had torn away from them the basics: Shelter, food, clean water, and clothing. Can I identify with that? My child self can, yes.

I have experienced being white since I was born, but not being a male. I was raised in an 

a-religious, middle-income, broken and dysfunctional home. Just like most folks, I had some challenges.

Do we really have to have been at the effect of the exact same adversities to have empathy for those who suffer? I don’t think so. We are hard wired to feel with our tribe... to have compassion. There is even hard wired into us the reflex of yaaking when we see someone else throw up. If Glorg and I have been feasting on the same mastodon that’s gone bad, chances are I should purge if I see him do it. It’s pro-survival. (I’m not sure about why yawning is so contagious! Maybe carbon monoxide build-up from our cave fires caused us to yawn for more oxygen? Something to explore another time!)

How about childbirth? If you've never given birth, might you be excused from knowing how intense the experience is? Or can I count on you to be empathetic in an EMERGENCE-y. That’s where the word comes from, you know… a person is being born here, THIS very moment. The event won’t wait! It’s an emergence, SEE?!

How about women’s privilege? We get to experience the joy of childbirth or not, now that there are more choices at preventing pregnancies.

Privilege in this realm of childbirth choices is afforded those who can go outside the mainstream medical field to soften the blows which technological birth keeps jabbing at moms and newborns. Under-served women in communities of poverty are treated rather poorly and the birth stats show it… with poorer outcomes in weight, Apgar scores, and more drugs being used during the birth.

Without empathy, we’re creating trauma quicker than we can heal it. Mother Nature is doing fine all on her own to create traumatic events. Must we assist her with acts of violence, war, intolerance, and hatred?

It is heartening to see how neighbors in Texas are helping one another through the biggest storm crisis to hit that state in nearly a hundred years. Individuals with boats are paddling house to house to check on folks who may be unable to get out. We cannot count on government to become Deus ex machina. Help must come from within our own hearts… the internal prompt to see what we may do to make a difference. I believe the same will hold true in Florida and the whole Eastern Seaboard. The people of Louisiana already showed their mettle during Katrina, when there was virtually no help available from governmental agencies.

Sunday was Pride Day in Oakland. The march was the most colorful I’ve ever been in. Rainbow colors everywhere, and not just in articles of clothing. Skin tones run the gamut from pale to deeply hued. We are a rainbow colored people standing together in solidarity and love. 

Here’s a different take on privilege: It is a privilege to live in a democracy where we each can decide each moment how we will act toward our sisters and brothers. What a privilege to unify to celebrate our diversity!

Protection? Hah!

Is there any true protection from the vicissitudes of life?

Sunscreen and flossing not withstanding, experience says no.

Originally, I wrote for this blog a very dark memory of a time I was left on my own at age five with a dangerous family, which happened to be my family. Both mom and dad were drinking and fighting and older brother left to run away to the peace of Elysian Park, just to get away form the war zone. He was eleven. I begged him to take me with him. He did not. Both of us kids would rather have been anywhere else besides in-home with the Sunday night fights.

But what good does it do to talk about it? What do we do with that kind of experience? Conclude that no one is safe? That we're all gonna die?

Or do we cultivate compassion for those whose behavior is other than what we wish it to be and take action, when possible, to steer them into life-enhancing choices?

My lizard brain's mantra is, We're all gonna die. There's obvious truth in that... eventually, all of us will kick the bucket. We're all hard-wired to survive; to fight for every last breath. It takes some amount of insanity to override the reptilian / survival brain, yet to live in fear of the eventuality of that day makes no sense to me. 

Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump may do the earth a favor, by ridding it of the vermin called humans once and for all with one glorious fierce fireworks of a conflagration. In the meantime, whatever time we have left, we verminous beings may as well perform outrageously gorgeous, courageous, humanitarian acts of loving kindness and beauty as last-ditch efforts to save our sorry asses and savor the flavors of LIFE.

Living at all is a gift. Living in fear is miserable, but it is a conscious choice. Living full-on in this rare and beautiful moment is a different conscious choice.  

How do we tame the reptile to allow for choice beyond fear? How do we go about our daily rounds as if the specter of death were a friend to be welcomed to table in whatever time frame the wraith sees fit?

I don't know.

Experimentation is all I've got.

We just had eight delightful humans stay in our home with us for a couple of days. Three of those beings are aged seven, four, and one year. Our eight year old granddaughter and both our daughters were part of the mix as well. In the wake of the visit, we seniors are wonderfully and happily exhausted, ready for the "napuary" or "dozitorium," but instead, we are moving on to the next tasks at hand without pause.  It looks as if we're going to do what one platitudinous email that keeps cycling around and around advises us to do... slide into home completely used up, with torn knees and scraped elbows... having gone all out, giving it all we've got. How fortunate we are. Many are struggling with recent storms, droughts, floods, famines and fires.

Still, maybe because it's Labor(less) Day, we'll let the laundry and sticky floors sit and take an actual nap!

May all who are suffering, and those whose homes are underwater in whatever way they may be - financially or literally - find a way to higher ground, ease and comfort among fellow humans who offer compassion. I'm bowled over by the kindness shown by neighbors to neighbors in times of crisis. Maybe Harvey will turn out to be a great teacher. Every chemical we set loose on the planet has a consequence. Water is a great equalizer. If we put poison into it, all will be poisoned. All species, all classes, all races, all castes, all genders, all religions, all sexual identities. All will be poisoned. One family, one planet. Harvey and Irma seem destined to teach us something. May we be good students.

We ourselves are our only protection from our ignorance, hubris and -isms.

Protection, Part One

When I was five years old, my folks put up a double wide garage door to shade the patio at the back of our house. It attached to the retaining wall that kept Jo Bartz’s hillside front yard from falling into ours when it rained, and was held up in front by two four by fours.

It was coolest at the back of that shady place, right next to the wall, where were two iron-framed canvas-seated butterfly chairs and a small table made it the perfect place to curl up and read. In those hills of Echo Park, there was usually a small breeze and the deep shade became a perfect cozy corner of my life.

Sometime after Dad left, Mom designed and had her father help build an addendum to the garage door shade. With turn buckles and guy wire, they strapped up big flat colorful geometric shapes between the house and garage door. They cast lovely shadows of triangles, squares and circles onto the red cement below. Gramps Stern used old nose-cone material from McDonnell Douglas where he worked until 1964. By then, my step-dad Leo lived with my mom and me, and my little brother Steven had been born.

The new addition to the shade cover worked wonderfully. My grandfather was a natural born engineer who worked in the aircraft industry from 1910 until he retired. He designed the tools to build the tools that built airplanes. Even in the stiffest Santa Ana winds and winter storms, the shade cover held up. Mom painted the cinderblock wall in colors to echo the shapes above. 

Being a fair-skinned freckled red-head, I should have appreciated the shady efforts. But I knew everything there was to know about sun tanning, and spoke hubris fluently. I attended inner-city schools where the majority of my classmates had lovely yellow, brown or black skin. From Junior High right through my senior year in High School, I cheered my freckles on… “get together, get together, give me a tan!” Alas, I was melanin deficient, so all I ever got was lobster red and spotted. While I peeled, it was not very appealing.

One season, when I was cheerleader, I resorted to Coppertone’s Quick Tanning Lotion in order not to stand out as blue-white alongside my melanin abundant friends. QT Lotion smelled of popcorn and left my arms, legs and face looking more like a Fifty/Fifty Bar, than tanned. I was striped orange and white for the big game, yet the show went on. And I smelled like popcorn for several days. 

Wouldn't it have been wonderful if I had someone to protect me from myself and my misguided efforts to be more colorful?

In the Shadows

In the shadow of the eclipse, August 21, 2017, what dark things may slip out?

What heinous crimes may be committed by those who hurt and want to share the pain?

As the dark side of our moon shows itself to the sun, and slips between it and our mud ball spinning, momentarily bringing night at mid-morning, will ghosts and ghouls be lifted from the primordial ooze to wreak havoc on humanity? 

Oh, no, wait... that's already happened. We're on our own, folks. Shadowy figures are at the helm way before the eclipse, steering us into dark murky waters with treacherous shoals. 

We've got a lot at stake in our country. A second (un)civil war is brewing beneath the surface where reason has been eclipsed by unreasoned dogma done up in huge brush strokes across mammoth swathes of the United (becoming Untied) States.

A friend says she'll grant all the white supremacists one state: Texas. They can have Texas, she says. They'll be happy. Segregation may work for 'em. I don't think I'll miss them.

May you relish the thought, if not the actuality, of a total eclipse of the sun... just so you can say, "I saw it!" And may you enjoy the experience and make your own story about it and all it represents, or could represent if you were inclined to give meaning to the event.

As for me, I'll be under cloud cover and have to rely on the vicarious thrill of a live youtube or news station coverage on my phone. Clearly, the shadowy aspects have captured my imagination.

Let's reconvene and swap stories.

Open Heart Purgery

  ·.¸¸..><((((º>.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸><((((º>`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸><((((º>`·.¸¸.·   *

I hold open my heart to the possibility that my Father’s testimony to us was born of love and his keen sense of drama. He had a preference and flare for creating fanciful truths, rather than sticking within bounds of what most people consider “actual reality.”

Were we descended from James Clerk Maxwell, originator of electro-magnetic theorems? That’s what he told us. Was Grammy Florence Whitehead Maxwell truly a full-blood member of the Cherokee Nation? Did she and her brother, my Great Uncle Ed, really survive removal from their land, a brutal orphanage experience, and mission schools? Or were these dreams of my father born of wishes for a more flamboyant ancestral stock?

A simple check of Wikipedia shows that James Clerk Maxwell and his wife Katherine Mary Dewar Maxwell had no children. The lineage stops there… unless there were wild seeds sown. My father may have known something about such matters in his own life, but I doubt he had clairvoyance about J.C. Maxwell’s carnal history. 

I share my father’s enthusiasm for fantastical flights of fancy. I just don't claim them as real. In profiles of J.C. Maxwell and my father, I see the same high forehead and Roman nose. While experimenting with light, heat, electro-magnetism, and the physical world might he also have experimented with his own physicality? Likely not, but it is a convenient explanation of my own quest to understand how things work in the world and my fascination with all science. Could the genes have come through some imprint running down the branches of our family tree?

Perhaps ancestors.com or twenty-three and me could tell. Someday… 

Open-Hearted Plagiarism

We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. (Truisms R Us.)

I attended a “Death Cafe” coffee and conversation with friends recently and we each told the other five women at our tables about one death related experience we’d had or heard about that impacted us.  The last woman of six at our table to tell her tale mentioned a book called “Parting Gifts.” It’s a children’s book about the gifts that our dying loved ones give us during or after their leave-taking. I remember shaking my head quickly - like a double take - when I heard that. Years ago, I wrote a piece called Parting Gifts about some of the many things I learned from people and critters I loved who died. 

Spontaneous combustion, I call it, when two or more have the same idea in relatively similar time frames but disparate locations. No looking on our neighbor’s test papers involved. 

In his book, How to Fly a Horse,Kevin Ashton tells stories of inventors and scientists whose work built on specific work of folks before them. Not one of us pulls a unique idea out of the ethers that isn't linked to other ideas.

I have a heart full of gratitude for so many humans whose thoughts and inquiries have influenced my thinking process and prompted generation of my own ideas.

In this time of a Bully in the Pulpit, heading our country, troubled souls are emulating the bully's hit-and-run tactics. Emboldened by the Alt Right at the helm, they think they can act with impunity. 

I'm betting we common citizens will start to show our better nature coming forward from a long lineage of folk doing the right thing. Even his own party is complaining about the Trumpeter's lack of firm boundary against racial hate crimes.

Standing up and being counted makes sense. 

May peace prevail. May cool-headedness prevail. May de-escalation reign. May we cultivate compassion, a plan, and fierce watchfulness.

* Fishies whole-heartedly copied from Lori G. from an email with same. Sweet, huh?

Stealthy Healthy Chess Berries and Leftovers

Blackberries require concentration.

Sharp! 

Barbs grab and stab. Go in easy, come out hard. They don't like to let go.

Clothing snags. Skin bleeds

You've got to think several moves ahead. Winds shift, blowing a vine to imbed one fine needle in the hem of your shirt. Or, your attention wanders and you forget to think three dimensionally about how you're going to bring your curled fingers, that are now holding a fat sweet berry, out from the small space you successfully navigated into the bramble when it was a long, slim-as-a-banana, empty hand. And, when those stickers prick your flesh, you might react and drop the sweetest gem you just selected into the sprawling underbrush of thorns. Rats! Another one for a passing bird, mouse, or resident skunk.

Mindful. Slow. Peripheral and focused vision - each a requisite. Oh, and close-fitting clothes and sturdy non-slip shoes, on account of the hill. Cover your toes.

Early in the season, when some berries are deep purple to black and oh so ripe, others red, hard, and sour, and still others sweet little white blossoms, bees are a factor as well. There are plenty of plant parts to share. I love the bees, and they seem to know it. We don't bother each other, but if you're not used to it, and a bee lands on you, you might react in your distraction and move suddenly, colliding with a waiting prickly stem. Cunning. Hungry. These blackberry bushes plan to devour you. Gleaming swords sharpen themselves in the sunlight, like a willful opponent with a cartoon star shining brazenly on one too white tooth.

You've got to watch every move. Yours, and your opponent's.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Queen of Katwe, last year's docudrama about ten-year-old Phiona Mutesi's stunning rise from an illiterate girl from Katwe, a slum in Kampala, Uganda, to international chess master, lays out her innate ability to think eight moves ahead. I loved watching this feel-good movie, and I'll betcha she also would be really stealthy at picking blackberries.

Both sports, if we can call them that, require the ability to think in three-dimensional space. I wish I had taken up chess. I know the basics, but marvel at those who can hold the whole board, the other player's style, and the move of the moment in her mind.

But at the end of the game, there's only the satisfaction of having won. At the end of picking berries, you've got a bowl or more full of deliciousness... true, too soon they're gone, but what a way to go! No left-overs.

Pass the bandaids, please.