Beyond Despair: Are There Soul-utions?

During a recent Coffee and Conversation for a gaggle of gals at my Church of Last Resort, one of the mutually agreed upon topics was what to do to care for the earth and stop giving in to the debilitating paralysis of overwhelm and guilt that there's scarcely any one thing a lone person can do to make a difference.

Another group discussed Caregiver Burn Out, and how to take care of ourselves. The other tackled How Not to Despair In Despairing Times (for Liberals).

There were seven in our group. After sharing our sadness, rage, feeling frozen, and impotent to turn the tide of the lemming-like leap humans collectively seem to be making over the nearest cliff, we came up with some Soul-utions. 

In NO particular order, these suggestions were offered.

~Form a support group to help each other do things that stop adding to the problems of pollution, plastic inundation, over-consumption, and greed. Support also can help assuage guilt of not being able to do more, so we CAN keep moving forward without slitting our wrists!

~Know (or believe) that what we do at home is FELT throughout California, which MAY lead the nation in how to lower the fever Mother Earth is now experiencing. The analogy was shared about the beating of a butterfly's wings in Outer Mongolia being felt in the winds of the Sahara.

~Create small projects to do with others... like encouraging  coffee shops to stop giving out plastic straws. Encourage folks to bring their own re-usable mug to coffee shops, etc.

~Go into schools to help kids learn to sort trash. Empower them to know their actions make a difference. Give them hope: They're not alone, we're all in this crusade to reclaim our earth together. One of the women in our group teaches at an intermediate school. She says the many waste bin options for sorting lunchroom discards are willfully ignored by students who are so burdened by the weight of impending doom, they feel there's no hope. They are also angry to the point of acting out, or, worse, acting out their anger internally in the form of depression and even suicide! Yikes! These children are our future! Please, let us join with them and offer hope through action! The teacher is going to check with her administrator to see if we might bring a team of helper/sorter/listeners for several days to just be with and hopefully empower and instill hope in the children.

~Take a fact sheet and two or three friends to see the manager of our local grocery store. Hand over a hand-out with phone numbers and ideas for more ecological approaches to packaging instead of one time use plastic. Entreat them to lobby for their customers who want not the plastic. Send the ideas to headquarters. Tell the Corporate Officers we won't be buying their plastic tubs of salad, and sandwiches anymore and why.

~Take our left-over glass bottles and jars to the bulk bins, where available, to bring home our groceries in multi-use containers instead of relying on plastic one-time-use boxes, bags, and bottles. This works for things like shampoos, conditioners, lotions, potions, nuts, flours, seeds, powders, candies, cereals, grains, and dried fruits. We can even take a glass container to the butcher counter and have it filled with our choice from the meat case. Many stores now take a tare weight of our container, we fill it, then they re-weigh it and put a price sticker on it for the cashier to read in barcode form! So cool!

~Eat less animal protein. Eat more plant protein.

~Pick up trash on walks, especially plastics so they don't go into the ocean and kill marine life and birds.

~Look for new ecological MYCELIUM PACKAGING! Coming to a store near you soon! (we hope!) There's a Zero Waste grocery store in North Oakland on Telegraph that is full of ideas about shopping without wasting anything!
https://zerowastecalifornia.org/bulk-grocery-stores/ 

~Know the facts about the three biggest contributors to global warming according to environmental guru Jerry Rifkin: 
     1.  Buildings are the biggest contaminators of the environment: manufacturing of building materials, waste on demolition, etc. 
     2.  Second is meat consumption. 
     3.  Third is transportation. 

~Every drop in the bucket of a pro-earth action goes into the whole to become quarts, gallons, rivers and seas.  We cannot afford to feel helpless and hopeless. Keep on doing whatever we can to make up for being selfish,  unenlightened, ungrateful children of Mother Earth!

~Start small. Let's do what we can where we're planted. 

~Fires... are fearsome. Winds are fierce. Drought dries and shrivels all that once grew green. 

~Plastics & convenience are seductive. How do we wake up? Stay Woke?

~California MAY lead the country out of the dark ages where we suffer under the Trumpeting Bovine who's deregulating car manufacturers so we can guzzle even MORE gas.

~Global stability is a grass roots endeavor. OUR leaders are modeling and supporting greed. We who can, must take things into our own hands and persevere. Doing so cuts the victim stance in the bud. We are empowered people... or to use Holly Near's words: "We are a peaceful angry people and we are marching, marching for our lives..."

~One of our church members is Irish. She said the violence during the Troubles in Ireland was taken-on at the grass roots level. Those who led the peaceful demonstrations became leaders of the politicians, not the other way round. 

~Vote for environmentally woke candidates who will fight greed and overgrowth.

~Volunteering to register voters in swing states is a possible action for some.

~In The Hundredth Monkey by Ken Keyes,  Vision Books, 1981, the author describes something that happened on an archipelago of islands off the coast of Japan in 1952. Scientists provided Macaca Fuscata Monkeys sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkeys liked the taste but not the gritty sand. An eighteen month old female named Imo discovered the potatoes were easier to eat when she washed them in a nearby stream. She taught this trick to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new way and taught their mothers too. The cultural innovation was gradually picked up by various monkeys before the eyes of the scientists. Between 1952 and 1958, all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable. Only the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes.  At some point there was a critical mass number of monkeys performing this action on the one island.  A curious thing happened! Without being shown how, the potato-washing behavior jumped to the monkeys on all the other islands in the archipelago, instantaneously! When that (imaginary number) hundredth monkey picked up the behavior, the mind field was strong enough to jump to the minds of other monkeys on other islands. When we Californians have a critical mass number of humans performing good things in honor of, and to save Mother Earth, the behavior may jump to other states. The story of the Hundredth Monkey is timely. Let's review how powerful our minds are in terms of influencing other's minds. We can call ourselves Environ-Mentalists! And Eartha Kids!!!

~We cannot control what Earth does. She may blow her stack through volcanoes, tremble under us, send us winds, furious tornados, hurricanes, monsoons, and droughts. We cannot invest in the outcomes of our actions, but only do what seems right and good and hope for the best. 

~Greed and overgrowth are not the way Nature does it. These human traits are not replicated in nature. There are natural boundaries in the natural world. Eventually, balance is restored when things get out of hand. 

~ Read What's the Matter With Kansas? How the Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank.

~Elie Weisel attests: No one cried in Auschwitz. They played music, buried their violins to save the music, found community essential. Meaning was more important than bread. Getting bread for the children gave life meaning.  What gives our lives meaning? What can we do to keep hope alive?

~Grandmothers are motivated to hand down a better planet than it seems we've got left. Greening Grannies and Vigil Aunties, UNITE!!!

~There are good waste management procedures in some places. Do more of that!

~Is the action, product, or support I'm about to do/buy/give good for the children's children's children to the Seventh Generation? If not, to the best of my ability, could I NOT DO THAT? BUY THAT? SUPPORT THAT?

~Drops in the bucket become POURING not just drops. Between Greed and Climate Deniers there's a lack of respect for life. All is connected. Escalating climate change is due to greed.

~Pull on one thread. See where it leads. 

Oh, That Funny Pun One!

Children's Hospital Oakland says...

“If laughter is medicine for the soul, then our resident funny man, PUN, is just what the doctor ordered. PUN has been a magician in our hospital for more than five years, entertaining kids with magic and fun! PUN, a former Hollywood game show producer, began volunteering in children's hospitals in his 30s and soon realized that bringing out the love already in the room was the real magic. "I just do tricks," he says, "but when I get the whole family laughing, that's the #magic for me." 

Pun says...

Posted on my Face Book Page with gratitude to UCSF Benioff Oakland for allowing me to witness the resourcefulness and caring of theTeachers, Child Life Specialists, Therapists, and Medical Staff and - most important - the CHILDREN AND THEIR FAMILIES. The pictures remind us that the children can still be children; still laugh and feel loved, even when experiencing challenges to their health and well-being. Whatever difference it might make, there would be no PUN if not for the inherently powerful children and the dedicated professionals who support them during their individual journeys.

Moose says...

So proud of this man who has honed his skills of using JUST the right amount of silly to help kids and their families cope with challenges posed by hospital stays away from home, away from familiar routines. Pun lights up faces, melts hearts, and offers one of the best medicines known to humans...

Laughter.

Thank you, Pun for your humanity and forty-eight years of laughter and tears together, plus all the stuff in between. 

I Love You!

Wendy Bird Has Flown

Harry and Annette Tarsky introduced me to Wendy when she came West for her Junior Year of High School at Belmont, downtown Los Angeles. She'd been to New York for her final year of elementary school years before coming to Los Angeles. Judy's mother, Katie Cool, called Wendy "a Worldly Girl."

When school started that hot September I had a REAL FRIEND on top of the dead-end hill where I grew up in Echo Park. We would slip in and out her bedroom window at the end of a winding path between our two houses so as not to rouse Lord Jim, the huge German Shepard who ruled the roost at the Tarsky's house. AND we carpooled together! Wendy turned sixteen in September, and I in October, 1964. We went to the DMV together and, mercifully, we both passed our written and driver's road tests on the first go. Celebration!

Harry graciously allowed Wendy to drive his huge Ford Econoline Van two days a week and my mom let me have her little yellow Volkswagen the other three days of the week. It was the time of dress codes requiring young women wear skirts or dresses and panty hose. Every Tuesday and Thursday, when Wendy got behind the wheel of that Econoline van, she’d snag the right knee area of her nylons on the damned metal spring that kept Harry’s leatherette and glassine window car registration holder snug to the upright steering column. "Damn!" She’d say. She didn't seem to care about the look so much as to enjoy the feeling of the snag causing the ladder to run all the way down her nylon to her ankle. And she was upset that she didn't remember that it would happen. Everytime. We laughed a lot in our carpool for two. 

Probably we had a few classes together, my memory is not so keen about much in High School, but one class I do remember is Chemistry with W. T. Smith, III. He had an infectious gap tooth smile that made his admonitions against blowing up the chem lab by pouring one beaker full of chemicals too quickly into another beaker full of chemicals seem friendly and not too, well, admonishing. On more than one occasion, the guys in our lab class deliberately tried to "blow things up." Wendy and I got through Chemistry, if not with great interest in the subject, then with delight in W. T. Smith, III and the entertainment of the other budding scientists in our group and the botched experiments we tried.

Coming out of class one day, I was distraught. I'd seen my father at Veteran's Hospital the day before. Dad had cancer of the everything. The doctors thought he'd live about six months before the cancer ate him completely. He lasted only two months. He was getting close to death when school was nearly ending in June, 1965. Wendy and I were walking down the hall. I was crying while telling her about the horrors of the VA patients and my dad being in coma. Someone coming the other way down the hallway waved and shouted "Hi, Mendy & Wendy." I smiled and waved back. Wendy pulled back her arm and slugged me HARD in the stomach. Oooof! "What the hell was that for?" I asked her. Angrily, she said, "Here you are crying about your dad when someone smiles at you and you flash this big phony smile back. That's not real. That's disgusting." I was embarrassed - as much to be seen crying as I was that she was right. I will ALWAYS remember that day and Wendy's earnest teaching, though it didn't stop me right away from being an appeaser and avoiding conflict. 

The day Wendy boarded the train at Union Station Downtown Los Angeles, to head back to Dayton and eventually her home town of Yellow Springs, Ohio, Judy and I accompanied her there, in my mother's yellow VW. We sat with her in that grand old Art Deco station signing one another's yearbooks. We cried and laughed, laughed and cried and melodramatically waved big fluttering white handkerchiefs at her when she boarded and her train started down the tracks. One of us had brought the hankies especially for the occasion. We waved until her hanging-out-the-window form was out of sight. There were real tears. Such was Wendy's impact on us during that formative year of eleventh grade.

Judy and I took the Greyhound bus all the way to Dayton later that summer of 1965. News of the Watts riots followed us across country in the headlines at every bus stop along Route 66. My dad was dead. I felt relief, grief, and anticipatory glee that we were on a road trip to see our dear Friendy Wendy. She picked us up in her blue VW bug and drove us immediately to Glen Helen to see the red rocks and iron-rich yellow water that gave her town, Yellow Springs, its name. For the very first time, I saw fireflies! Wendy opened the sun roof and let Judy and me take turns standing up to catch the soft moist breeze as she whooshed us through this iconically verdant glen. I think I caught a few fireflies in my teeth, as well. I can still imagine I feel that magical moist wind on my face, blowing my hair behind me. 

One night, during our two week stay, the three of us went to the only movie house in town. "Psycho" was playing. It had just been released. In this college town, everyone knew what was going on and when. Wendy took us to the donut house a few doors down from the theater. Fresh baking donuts on a warm summer night smelled gorgeous. We approached the counter to place our order. It was just past midnight. The guy behind the counter pulled a huge butcher knife up from behind the counter with a look on his face very much like Anthony Perkins. EVERYONE in the shop screamed. Judy, Wendy and I screamed the loudest. An indelible memory.

Years later, Wendy went to live in San Francisco. Judy had five-year-old Corbin, I had two-year-old Mosa, and Annet had four-year-old Devon and two-year-old Luke. We were three tired and very grubby moms from L.A. camping out in Big Basin Redwood State Park. The kids invented Chocolate Make-Up and covered themselves completely with the fine rich brown silt mixed with water. As dusk colored the kids golden brown and the redwoods blazed greenish gold in the sunset, up the road came the most welcomed sight we could imagine: Wendy Rae Dallas with a car full of treasure. Dark fell quickly, but we could see by candle light the unimaginable feast she brought to share with us... a whole fresh salmon purchased that very day at Fisherman's Wharf, two bottles of Pouillyfuissés wine, fresh corn-on-the-cob, sourdough bread, real china plates, and real crystal wine goblets. After putting the kids to bed, we came out to find the fish, which she'd wrapped in foil to bake over the fire with lemon and onion, perfectly done, ditto the corn and bread. Each of us tired mamas got down and kissed Wendy's feet. Then we feasted and toasted and laughed and played Scrabble. THAT was the way to camp! I don't recall if Wendy stayed the night. I do remember her on another camp-out climbing up into the pine trees and me following her up. We set up a competition to see who could go higher. Wendy always won. We got up to the tippy tippy top of these graceful old trees in Idylwild. That July and we sang at the top of our lungs, "Oh, Holy night, the stars are brightly shining…."  It had been our ritual over the years whenever we met that Wendy and I would sing and harmonize on that song... falling on our knees and generally acting out the lyrics in silly pantomime to keep from crying a the sheer beauty of our harmonies together. 

When Anne and Wendy met and fell in love and began life together, it was a joyful time for me and Wendy's Angelino friends from Echo Park and Belmont High. She always fit-in, though I don't think she felt that way. Who did in High School?  Her authenticity, humor and ability to create mirth wherever she went, and her vision to see the human inside all of us children of all ages shall linger longer in my memory than will the harder times she faced at the end. 

Thank you, Anne, for being the love of her life and encouraging Wendy Bird to soar.

With so much Love and gratitude for you on the planet. You broadcast love from every pore of your being, Anne!

~ Melinda

January 2020

Crispy Critters Help Us See

Crispy critters in Australia

Billion dead or hurt

Big numbers I cannot fathom

Scorched land cannot feed those left

Still alive but scarred and scared.

Humanity steps forward

But Naught can be done

Without acknowledging

We made this mess

Can we un-make it?

We're frogs in cool water

Industry's turned up the heat

So slowly we’ve not yet jumped

All are being cooked alive 

Too late to jump?

Too late to turn down the temp?

We've known.  Exxon has known 

Suppressed facts. Greedy bastards.

Dupont’s duplicitous

Monsanto’s maniacal

Alcoa ain't altruistic

Shell sells us shit

We drown in it.

Horse blinders in place, we pace

Woe to us, trailing carbon 

With each misstep,

Poisoning ourselves because it’s convenient,

Addictive, this "better living through chemistry."

Let carbon that is in the ground stay there.

Cartoon Pogo said in 1955:

Wanna stay alive? 

"We have met the enemy

The Enemy is US."

Songwriter Joe Henry says Harry Belafonte

Thinks hip-hop is folk music.

Some hip-hop has been co-opted 

Works against its listeners.

Discounting, demeaning women 

Out of anger or angst is to

Demean and discount

The Mother of us all: Mama Earth.

Across the board,

Across all waters, we're angry, hurt, and desperate.

When will we ever learn...

Another folk song...

When will we e-e-e-ver learn?

Krispy Koalas offer us another

View of consequences present,

Consequences to come 

Lest we not jump out of hot water we're in

And race like hell to turn down the heat

Question EVERYthing used, bought, supported.

Question from the perspective of this: 

Is what I'm about to 

Do, Buy, or Use good for the children's 

Children's children's children

To the SEVENTH GENERATION??

If not, I vow not to buy, use, support.

To the best  of my ability.

Untangling the threads of industry,

Chemistry and consequences 

Takes time, takes patience, takes persistence

Not to do that dooms us all

Koalas and Kangas hold for us, perhaps, 

The most iconic rank of cuteness

Will images of them burnt to a crisp melt our hearts and 

Steel our resolve to question Captains of Industry for TRUTH?

If not, what will??

Maybe each of us has a personal tipping point.

What's mine?

Age seven I saw critter bones in oil ooze in Los Angeles

La Brea Tar Pits.

I questioned

At 27, when about to birth my first child

Into a polluted, at war world

I questioned

At 45, I was healing personal affronts 

From my father's unconscious acts of rage

I questioned the raging idiocy of greed

At 63, embarking on hands-on grand parenting,

I questioned more deeply,

Knit Pussy Hats in protest of industry and oligarchs 

Taking over our government, 

Dismantling EPA (Hah! What a joke!)

It has been cross pollinating 

WITH captains of industry since inception.

Revolving door was built between EPA and Monsanto!

Money talks!

They scratch each other's backs as they spin around and

Around and around ~ pulling wool, not pussy hats over our eyes

The friction of it all boosts 

World wide temperatures by 

Geometric proportions

We're cooked. Skewered. Fried

And as vulnerable to burning extinction 

As our dearest, most fragile brethren -

Koalas, kangas, insects we'll never know.

Koalas sleep eighteen hours a day.

We cannot afford to do that.

Guardians/stewards must be vigilant.

Can we grow up and SEE in 2020

Our responsibility? Please?!

2020 Vision

My wish for you and all your dear ones: 

Gracious time to be together with those you love, good friends, appropriate challenges, a place where others may shine their love on  you and appreciate your brilliance, and a place where you can shine a light for others, delight in the natural world, good health, time for deep relaxation, cultural and intellectual stimulation, and success in all your endeavors.

I wish for all humans that 2020 bring us CLEAR VISION 

so we may SEE that 

we are ALL ONE FAMILY, 

navigating a somewhat hostile space 

in ONE lifeboat called EARTH, 

and all we have for setting our course safely are oars and rudder fashioned 

of our civility, compassion, 

and respect for one another and 

for all life, creatures, stones, soil, and waters 

on the planet.

May 2020 be kind to you.

Thank you for checking in with 

My Monday Muse from time to time. 

I write for myself, but I'm happy to share.