Personal Peace a Prerequisite to Sanity

Pleasantly pulling peace

From classical radio

My antidote to 

Constant Chaos generated

By the POTUS.

He and his vitriol were given an

UNvitation to my day.

Peace Prevailing,

Calm stretches along

Floorboards in my mind

Peace-ing together

Scattered bits of me

Lost since November, 2016

Bitter poison that

Ran deep underground

Now pools in puddles 

on every path

Putrid neon green

Splashes acid on some.

Others bathe in it, delighted- 

The feel of radical

Rashness on their skins

Sensuous and familiar 

Racial slurs their rap

Misogyny their music

I'll stick with classical 

Until the next POTUS rolls around

*.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *

Old Souls

Someone once told me I was an Old Soul. She also told me that just means I’m a very slow learner! Maybe, I just I love life so much that I want to keep coming back. (It works if you work it.) Most days, I love what I get to do in the world and I most certainly love the natural world. It sustains me. From catching a Humming Bird out of the corner of my eye, to seeing a Hawk riding the up-drafts, to the elegant-winged and ugly-headed Turkey Vultures  soaring from valley to hill, my head is up and searching the skies for and delighting in signs of life. Old souls may also be looking down for the life in the grass, the cracks, the hidden bugs under leaf and vine. 

When you've been around for several incarnations, you may get the hang of skills more quickly than your peers this lifetime. How can you tell a slow learner from the rest of the pack? Look for those subtle skills - like spatial visualization and continuity of color and consistency of bread dough and the little things that may otherwise go unnoticed. My Grammy hummed while she did menial tasks, as if nothing - from scrubbing toilets and floors to ironing and cooking supper for her family - could get her down. Look to the one who has had experience with navigating the troubles this lifetime and has come out the other side of trauma without too many scars or nicks or traits that slow her/him down. Look to the Old Souls to guide you through the storms of life.

The Old Soul may be a slow learner, but s/he has a lot of fun with life. It's not as serious as we might be led to believe. There's always room for a guffaw, a chortle, a hissy laugh through the nose or a sudden burst of soda through the nose when something suddenly catches you as FUNNY. Now, THAT strikes me as FUNNY. (I saw Robin Hayes do it with milk in 1956 when Ingrid Gemser made her laugh at lunch under the pergola at Elysian Heights Elementary School near downtown Los Angeles.)

Old Souls laugh a lot. They scratch their heads at the antics of their fellow humans who are too new to the planet to understand the meaning of life is to thrive... to grow and learn and stretch the boundaries of time and space to leap for the MilkyWay and know that what we are seeing is 100,000 years in the past. It takes light THAT long to travel in actual time from the nearest reaches of the Milky Way to our particular mud-ball spinning round one particular star in the galaxy. It's old news, folks. Maybe the Old Souls were around in a previous lifetime to receive the actual stellar waves of what we're only now able to SEE out there in the cosmos. We're tiny; our lives a blip on the cosmic calendar.

I believe that there are tesseracts... tubes through which we can travel at "warp speed" (Scotty) and take short-cuts to where ever we deem it is possible to go! I believe that we'll figure out this space/time/travel continuum thingy in the not too distant future and that we'll enjoy the ride until we decide to do something else.

Old Souls may have many many lifetimes under their belts, but the experience of loving one part of creation deeply, profoundly and unashamedly is probably the deepest and sweetest imprint to cherish. To have loved one human or all of humanity with passion and purpose and sacrifice, or to have loved one idea or set of ideas into being - THIS is the total lesson of all the lives of all the Creatures of all the galaxies in the Universe. Love. It isn’t trite. It’s true.

There has only ever been one song the UNI- verse. We were sung into being by this one song for this, and perhaps, many other lifetimes. I'm grateful for the life I've been given. I'm full of gratitude for the opportunities I've had to learn and to teach my fellow humans that laughter matters. Lightness of heart matters.

The ancient ones in Egypt had a scale - a mythic scale - that was used at the end of life to determine if your particular life was a successful life. Anubis, the Jackal Headed God, would place your heart on one  balancing pan and a feather on the other. If your heart were no heavier than the feather, you passed into eternal life with the lightness of that feather. To be light of heart has terrific value. It's good to remember in what we think of as heavy-hearted times that in the grand scheme, it's not so serious as we may think. Lightening up doesn't mean we stop actively fighting evil, it just means we can have a bit of fun with the work... humming optional.

I remember reading The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak wherein Death is the beginning narrator. Death describes the heft and color of each soul it gathers as it swoops over Nazi Germany liberating each from its torment and struggle. Some souls are light of color and of weight. Others are so heavy even indestructible Death has trouble freeing them from the body. Some are the color of night, the color of slime mold, the color of death itself. Still others are rainbow hued and silky of texture. Diaphanous. The gems in Marcus Zusak's tale number at least one per page. I hold onto the image of that release of souls as I watch with certain reverence and also irreverence the ordinary lift-off of souls as they depart. I'm happy to be alive. I'm happy to have had another swirl round the sun and to learn whatever I can this day so as to be available for yet another day and another year and perhaps several more life-times. Am I too attached to life? Perhaps. I don't care for ultimate rest as an enlightened being (evidently, we're all destined to become enlightened - some century) but I do love life and even in its most difficult moments, I cherish the authentic tears and terrors as they wash through me. Laughter is lovely. Laughter tickles. 

Life: It's all lovely and totally without equal in the universe. 

Old Souls never come back as rocks. Rockstars, maybe. But totally animated!

Campity Camp Camp CAMP!

Campity Camp Camp Camp! That's the title of a short story by a happy camper at The Painted Turtle Camp, which exists to service medically challenged children. Her enthusiasm is genuine and undeniable. Kids are kids first, not their diagnosis. Camp boosts them, their volunteer counselors, and paid staff with every session. Buoyancy is in the air when we're at camp.

The rules are based on the STAR model: 
Stay safe, Try new things, Always build up, up up, never down, down, down, and Respect yourself, others, and the environment. How might the world be different if we all followed the STAR model? 

With terrible news from all quadrants of the globe, it's hard to stay up-beat and find the joy that's still here. Superimposed over the stories of tender deeds, dear humans doing good things for other dear humans, and courageous acts of those who must leave their homelands in order to find refuge are stories of the atrocities of humans turning away other humans into deserts, putting them in cages, separating children from the bosom of their families. Yet, the goodness persists, just barely visible under the chaos we're creating. 

One of my teachers, Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute (SETI) says, "We're creating trauma in the world faster than we can heal it." 

While I see evidence for the balance tipping toward total chaos, my rose colored glasses offer the view that we can and must turn things around.

Saturday, I was at a rally to protest our current administration's practice of separating and detaining families at the border, I was outside the Contra Costa County West Detention Center along with thousands of others who came out in support of family reunification. Signs ranged from the familiar "Resist," to "Vigil Aunties Say, 'Not on OUR watch!'" "Somos UNA Familia," (We're All ONE Family), and "How Can You Support Family Values If You Don't Value Families?" 

Pete Seeger sang a song in the 1960s about the Whole World Gonna Be Gettin' Mixed Up.  (It's a good one to listen to on YouTube.) I think this is what the refugees are telling us: Whether our skins are different colors, or our head coverings differ, or our languages, food preferences, beliefs, and cultural sensitivities, we're all one human family - more alike than any of our differences try to bely.  The quicker we wake up to the fact that all humans (and all sentient beings) are kin, the sooner the chaos will abate and the solutions to global warming and sea-levels rising will be found.

What if there were only this one life-boat Earth? What if there were no "God" or "Goddess" to save our sorry souls? What if we truly are our brother's and sister's keepers? What then? How would we behave.

Thomas Robert Malthus led us into a blind alley in his assertion that there is finite resource on the planet and that once it's gone, all is lost. Buckminster Fuller proffered a different idea: repurposing what we have yields more and better products to use on the planet. I even believe that we can turn around the plastic crisis by employing mycelium to "eat" and degrade the chemicals that keep the dang items we make out of it from bio- degrading. Some microorganisms and fungi* seem capable of taking plastics down to their elemental constituents to be repurposed and reimagined into less toxic and more useful substances. Strange appetizers, that plastic, but each to his own taste! (*Thanks to the fun-guy!)

Let's look for the helpers the way Mr. Fred Rogers invited us to do. When there is a crisis, he said, look for the helpers. They're always there.

Crises of faith, politics, war, and the environmental nightmares we've created, the horrors we're perpetrating on whole swathes and castes of people - all have helpers to support us moving toward more humanitarian ways of dealing with the crises. Some of the helpers are now dead, including Mr. Rogers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahattmah Gandhi, and Buckminster Fuller, but their words and spirits point the way toward a brighter future, if we'll only follow their lead. 

New helpers arise. Paul Stamets, mycologist believes in bioremediation and knows so much about the usefulness of mycelium to get us out of the plastic mess. Jon Kabbat Zin, Jack Kornfield and other meditation teachers (Jesus, Mohammed, gurus, and Gautama Buddha) know how to teach us to be calm in the face of adversity. Children all over the world know how to celebrate the joy of nature. Just watch them as they see for the first time the rain, the sun, trees, flowers, grass, other humans, and critters! The magic of the natural world keeps us adoring Mother Earth. Those who aim to destroy her for their own personal gain need her softening influence the most.

I propose that we take all leaders who do not have their people's best interests in their hearts go to camp. Campty Camp Camp CAMP! where they can be introduced to the STAR Model and once again sign up for membership in the human family.

Lyrics to "All Mixed Up":

All Mixed Up You know this language that we speak,  Is part German, Latin and part Greek  Celtic and Arabic all in a heap,  Well amended by the people in the street  Choctaw gave us the word "okay";  "Vamose" is a word from Mexico way.  And all of this is a hint I suspect of what comes next. [Chorus:] I think that this whole world  Soon mama my whole wide world  Soon mama my whole world  Soon gonna be gettin' mixed up.. I like Polish sausage, I like Spanish rice,  And pizza pie is also nice  Corn and beans from the Indians here Washed down by German beer  Marco Polo traveled by camel and pony,  He brought to Italy, the first macaroni  And you and I as well as we're able,  We put it all on the table [Chorus] There were no red-headed Irishmen  Before the Vikings landed in Ireland  How many Romans had dark curly hair  Before they brought slaves from Africa?  No race of man is completely pure,  Nor is anyone's mind, that's for sure  The winds mix the dust of every land,  And so will woman and man. [Chorus] This doesn't mean we will all be the same,  We'll have different faces and different names  Long live many different kinds of races  It's difference of opinion that makes horse races  Just remember the rule about rules, brother  What could be right for one could be wrong for the other And take a tip from La Belle France: "Viva la difference!"

Place Holder

Summers are busy.

I love that I get to spend time with my nine-year-old granddaughter - even if it's mostly as her chauffeur. We sing. We talk. We eat snacks together as we zip along Berkeley and Oakland freeways between day camp and home or sit stuck on the road in terrifICK traffICK. Her company makes everything sweeter.

Writing that I promised myself to do still simmers on a back-burner of my brain while I write place-holder pieces to keep my foot in the door.

Away all weekend at a family wedding in Truckee, California, I did place-holder yoga and place-holder meditation. Even an abbreviated practice in a tiny cozy rental house with two young cousins and their mama gives me some comfort and greater ease in the world. So, though it's not the complete, thorough practice I usually  create every day, it supports continuing the habit of doing the routine once in 24 hours so I don't lose my place or lose my Self in the over-busy-ness of life.

Place-holder writing is this blog... a commitment to show up once a week for myself as a person writing. Sometimes, I write what I want to be working on. Sometimes, the subject has no particular thrust or intent. It's just writing to keep the chops polished. I don't expect anyone who stumbles upon my ramblings to get anything from it. Perhaps like watching warm-ups for any physical art form; the stuff of barre work for ballerinas or spring practice for baseball teams, this is just to keep limber enough for the work ahead.

Today is one of those times.

Writing parts of this book, Emergence, puts me in a quandary. It feels like trying to catch moonbeam motes and nail them to prose on the page. Elusive, inconclusive and requiring me to be reclusive, these images of work I've done in the shamanic realm with clients has got me stymied.

In recent interviews about his new book, How to Change Your Mind, covering his various guided psychedelic journeys, Michael Pollan discusses how relating these experiences can sound just plain stupid. Yes. This is what I'm up against as I try to capture the essence of supporting a client during the re-negotiation of a life-changing traumatic event. Those big owies that each of us endures in a lifetime tend to offer us some take-aways; some more useful than others. The earlier in life the challenge descended, the more pervasive its potential negative effect - simply because we don't yet have the hardware to perceive life-threatening events as anything but a commentary on our right to be here on the planet.  I chose to specialize in resolving birth trauma, helping to free up little ones from the residue of Fight, Flight, Freeze in their Nervous Systems, because working with them is particularly rewarding. "...one robin unto its nest again..." I also chose this work because it's what I knew intimately and my career was the byproduct of healing myself - with the support of some pretty fabulous practitioners.

When unresolved, those earliest imprints send out nets that snare us every which way - hobbling us in confounding and pervasive sticky strands. Working in the shamanic realm can help change our mind, and our body, and emotions - allowing our spirit to soar again. I've always considered it a privilege to witness the ordinary miracle of healing. So many of my colleagues and I love our work, but are concluding that in our current world we are creating trauma faster than it can be healed one person at a time.

The purpose of writing this memoir at this time after working in the field for over thirty years is to name the possibilities for resolving birth and early trauma so we can move forward in life as a human family with less entanglement in the load of garbage we all got handed.

While not a short-cut or substitute for traditional therapy, journey work without drugs of any sort, has a place in the pantry of ingredients to simmer a client in alternate realities different from the limiting one that has been dogging her/him since birth. Shifting perspective often gives the "AHA" moment necessary to make permanent, if incremental, changes in how we view ourselves in the portrait of the human family... not as the rug for humanity to rest its feet, but PART of and EQUAL to the whole.

Under the attuned guidance of a bodyworker or practitioner skilled in supporting a hypnogogic state, an adult client may enter the realm of conjoint reality on a different plane, viewing her/his trauma as a drama in need of re-write. From a higher perspective we look at the events and what was happening around our personal experience and gain lasting perspective that it wasn't our fault; that we were not singled out to be punished, but rather were given the ubiquitous and familiar load of poop on our plate to digest and assimilate in a way that yields a particular gift unique to us, which we can then share with our tribe.

In my early life, I faced many challenges. The privileged opportunity I had of turning those particular poisons into nectar is what led me to offer support to babies similarly challenged by early life events. Left untreated,  those early imprints can be overwhelming and persistent in their effect on every aspect of our lives.

At camps for children with medical challenges where I'm one of many volunteers, we see two ways of reacting to the loss of a child. When death takes a child, some walk away and never speak of it again. Others reach back a hand to families on the same path behind them. Seeing the result which the latter approach yielded, strengthened my resolve to work with babies and families traversing the territory I know so well.

Would that there were a short-cut to resolving the world's collective traumas. Perhaps returning to some of our tribal elders's wisdom is not a panacea, but rather a rich opportunity to heal individual hurts in community. What happened in isolation is best healed in community.

Humans can only do so much on our own when we truly need at least two to carry our stretcher. When our injuries are of such magnitude that we cannot get up and go home to lick our wounds in private, but need the support of others in order to regain functionality, then each of us lending a hand is crucial to keeping the tribe functional.

We call it co-mmunity, not co-mutiny for a reason. We cannot thrive if we abandon our principles of securing the best out-come for all. Being adrift in inhospitable space on this life-boat Earth, the human tribe must band together for survival. Each of us has a task.

The thrust of this memoir (working title is Emergence) is to offer an accounting of my self-assigned task to have empathy for those who have been hurt early and often and to offer hope for reclaiming functionality... or at least restoring the FUN to dysFUNctional.

What I recount here are stories of dear humans of differing ages reclaiming their foothold on a path of upward trajectory. These are stories of the ordinary miracle of humans healing with a little help from their community.

While I have endeavored to be painstaking in conveying the truest version of the facts of what happened as I could possibly convey, I have also disguised my clients completely for their privacy. 

May the stories you read here engender hope for humanity reclaiming its own humanity!

Look...

Gravity sucks.

Combined with estrogen loss, sun damage, wiry hairs in odd places, general aging and decrepitude, looks are not much to celebrate compared to the glossy magazine models and celebrities in Hollywood’s shadow. 

Yet, Mother Nature is generous. She gives us crepe-like skin, if not crepe paper streamers with which to decorate our sunset years. I love that She’s generous. But, sunsets don’t need decoration. Why should we? I aspire to be the one whose twinkle precedes her with such a force-field that no one even sees the whiskers, wrinkles, and road-maps on her skin.

The movie, Book Club celebrates friendship among three friends of a certain age who have one another’s backs. While predictable, I did laugh out loud several times in the old Elmwood Theater in Berkeley, filled with folks (mostly women) of a certain age. 

It’s the certainty OF age that’s the given, not what will happen when we are truly old. Maybe the greeting card is right: We should slide into home with our hair messy, our muscles sore, and a twinkle in our eye. Chin whiskers be damned. I’m going outside in the light to Play!

A sudden chill blowing in off California’s coast caused my So Cal volunteer counselor hubby to say that last week, when it was so warm, he was afraid of getting a mosquito bite and, when the temperature dropped so unseasonably, he was afraid of getting frost bite!

Unbearable news cycle… children being ripped from the bosom of their family.  We’re creating trauma with a capital T faster than ever we can heal it. Between War and Epidemics, why must we insert Shredding Families? Romans 13:1? Really, Mr. Sessions?

Some friends and I are thinking about going to Southern California where there is one such facility that houses these youngsters who have been wrenched from their country, their mothers and fathers, even their siblings. No one is allowed to touch or comfort them. Really, Mr. Sessions? We’re wanting just to be witnesses: Vigil Aunties, (and Uncles) sitting vigil, bearing witness to this atrocity that is inhumane and evil.  How can those who carry out “orders” sleep at night? How can these people live with themselves. How is this policy different from the tactics of any fascist regime? 

Put a frog in cold water and turn up the heat, it will acclimate until it’s too late, be cooked, and die. Pop it into already boiling water and it will jump right out. The fire has been warming us since November of 2016. If your country is not safe and you seek asylum in one that you think is safe(r), how is justice served when everyone turns a cold shoulder and worst of all wrenches your child(ren) from your protective arms?

Aunties with white hair, delicate or bulging varicosities tracing roadmaps of Cleveland on their legs, and lots of life experience have had enough. We’ve earned our stripes and will not sit by and watch the heat being turned up slowly. We shall intercept, interrupt, and disrupt the status quo that allows border agents to rip nursing babies out of their mother’s arms. We will resist. We will turn this around.

What's already occurred is sinful, if you want to put a religious spin on it, Mr. Sessions. Simply SINFUL. Your actions will come back to haunt you. May you have terribly disrupted sleep. You deserve it.

The Old Guard

Burton Ritchie Payne died June 9, 2018. At nearly ninety-eight years of age, Ritchie had a good long run. 

He was my mother's paramour during her sunset years, 1994 until her death in 2012.  They met at an Elder Hostel educational program on campus at University of Southern California.  The subject of the three day class was  Films of Steven Spielberg.  Neither Ritchie nor Mama Barbara had lost touch with how to raid another's nor lose their own hearts to create a romantic arc.  After three lunches together, she moved into his Glendale home in short order.  They enjoyed travel, Scrabble, studying esoteric topics, and the PBS News Hour.  I teased her about being born and living in Cincinnati and for her autumn years, just living in sin.  I chalked it up to my not having raised her right.

Ritchie had outlived his two previous wives, each of whom bore him children.  Kim and Michael were his first kids; Michael was born of Ritchie's second wife.  When my husband, daughters, and I were introduced to the three, they independently and collectively warned us that their dad would talk our ears off.  In Ritchie's own words, he was "paid to be an asshole" - as contract negotiator for Warner Brother's Studios.  After we got to know him, we imagined that representatives of the other side must have run off the WB Burbank Lot - screaming and pulling their hair - yielding to the studio's demands just to be done negotiating with Ritchie.  We nicknamed him Motor Mouth.  

His kindness to my mother cannot be denied. In 2003, Barbara had a catastrophic stroke which paralyzed her right side and made Swiss cheese of her left brain.  Her words fell into those holes. Complete aphasia for a poet and woman of words was cruel punishment.  During her two month convalescent hospital stay, in a lucid moment, she made the decision to return to Ritchie's home.  I shall never know whether that decision was born of great love for him or, because she did not want to be a burden to her own three children.  My brothers and I went along with her spoken desire

Ritchie's gracious invitation to Barbara to continue living with him, necessarily included her hospital bed, and full-time care-giver. For seven and a half years, she ate, slept and was bathed in that hospital bed in his living room. There, all of us family members could gather comfortably to surround her with love and music.  I'd crawl right into bed with her placing her old guitar against her bony knee to play the old folk and freedom songs of the 'sixties.  Her brother Larry came once a month to play his trombone or guitar for her as well.  She knew all the melodies, harmonies, and lyrics in various languages and she sang right along with us, only near the end of her life did she sing out "doodly-doo" in perfect rhythm when the words failed to pop to mind.  The brain is an amazingly plastic organ.  She was able to learn some new songs we'd learned at camps where we were volunteering for summer camp, and winter, spring and fall family weekends.  

For what would be her last year, we moved her and her beloved care-giver Ellen into our home so as not to wear out the welcome at Ritchie's.  During that year, he did not come to visit his "dear Barbara" even once.   I wondered if he relished the break from the constant bustle of invalid care in his living room.  As it turned out, dear Ellen cared for Ritchie in his familiar home after Barbara died.  Then, her son Ryan took over Ritchie's care - right through last Saturday night when Ritchie slipped his mortal coil. 

I wonder if he and Barbara will meet up again.  I wonder how his children will adjust to the "new normal" without Lord Loquacious as paterfamilias.  I wonder what the next step will be for dear Ryan who will need to find work elsewhere.  

If there be a Heaven, I hope Mom is there. If there be sneakers there, I hope she puts them on to sneak up and surprise Ritchie with a restored voice.   May they enjoy gorgeous sunsets as viewed during their sunset years together.

The Grandie Got 2 B 9!

I know it's supposed to happen. It's just so much faster than I could've predicted. 

Plans to move north at some point began to percolate on the back burners of our minds the moment we met our granddaughter - on the day of her birth in San Francisco in 2009. 

It took her mama, our daughter, some time to be ready for us to move, so it was just over three and a half years ago that we transplanted ourselves. Our rootlets are deepening in the fertile soil by the beautiful Bay. Instead of arriving the day before her celebration, tired from the drive from Los Angeles, we're now already here and know where to go to get balloons, ice-cream, and last minute party items very close to home.

Generally, the celebrations of her birth have been fairly low-key. This ninth birthday / slumber party / pool party also was low-key. Home made pizza, (her dad), home made cake, (her mom) and clean-up and set-up done by all of us, including her dad's new wife. 

This time, our younger daughter "Auntie Sid" decided to forego the pool & slumber party portions of the weekend and just come up for the Sunday afternoon and evening family gathering at our (relatively) new (for us) home. It makes a lot of sense. If you're not a nine-year-old and in the pool, you're going to be ignored, for the most part, by the Birthday Girl.

We're so glad of our daughter's commitment to drive the four hours from San Luis Obispo to be a presence in her young niece's life, AND so we can all be together. There's so much joy in simply hanging out together.

Here's what I loved hearing at the dinner table Sunday after the topic of conversation turned to therapy: 

D: (the granddaughter): What's therapy? Why would someone want to go to a therapist?

AS: (Auntie Sid): A therapist is someone who can help us be with big feelings. You know the Leggo Movie where Sparkle Pony is always so nice but keeps stuffing all her feelings down deep until she just explodes?

D: Oh, yah... and the screen is just full of her exploded sparkly pieces - like confetti!

AS: That's right! A therapist can help us get some of those feelings out before they get so big that they hurt us or others and so they don't make us go crazy... or explode. 

D: Oh.

What's lovely to me about this conversation - apart from the content - is that at nine, the Grandie is at that lovely stage of life called latency during which she is mastering many skills - from bike and horseback riding to Pogo-Stick jumping to making friendship bracelets to cursive to dipping her toe into the adult conversation - just as much as she wants to. 

When the leftover chocolate cake, frosting and berries were finished, and the tissue paper recycled, D retired to the den to comb the mane and tail of one of her new birthday gifts from her parents - an eighteen-inch-tall black and white horse she'd named Eve. D thought Eve looked and felt much better without her saddle on. Too restrictive, she announced.

The long and busy weekend showed in her eyes and posture. She'd melted into the sofa. Farewell hugs and high-fives were shared and D and her mama were off to prepare for Monday back at school for the last week of the semester. 

She and I will have a good long summer to practice the above skills and perhaps learn new ones... before the hormones hit for the next stage of life.  For that stage, saddles and seat belts may be required.