Take Care of Your Neck

Two days ago I learned that I had a herniated disc between C5 and C6. That explains a lot. It's not that it was a big surprise since I've had neck pain on and off for several years. Chiropractic and Massage got me through until two years ago when a couple skiing cartwheels hurt my shoulder and neck  and took the agony to a new level.

When I sat down and did an injury inventory, I was appalled how one little woman could amass such an embarrassing list–6 concussions,4 whiplashes, innumerable falls involving torn ligaments and cartilage. Then my brother told me a story of his friend who was a rodeo rider and frequent car crasher. That gave me some perspective on wear and tear. What I have is fairly normal. So next step is research and talk to a neurosurgeon. Yikes!

It All Started With a Journal

Journaling! Why do I do it after all these years?
Habit? Obsession? Therapy? Memory aid, for sure!

But now the big question is why did I save them? Because now they make a stack as tall as I am. They incriminate on so many levels, though most of the folks I railed at for years are now dead. I did make a deal with my best friend years ago. When I kicked the bucket, she promised she would rush to my house before I cooled and whisk them away off the closet shelf.

Why have I saved 40 years of mostly rant, blather, occasional inarticulate rapture, bafflement and self-pity? Burning would be too good. However, since they contain the history and archives of a certain persona that lives in my body, I'm afraid to toss out the baby with the bathwater. For my next novel, I will need 16 years of them.

The solution for me is obvious. Dragon Dictate, the speech recognition software for Mac will allow me to conceal the five square feet of evidence on my hard drive in password protected documents. It will, however, mean reading every word. Yikes!

Sometimes sifting back through old journals is like I imagine an archeological dig if the archeologist had been present thousands of years before. I not only discover my history from the pottery shards but maybe discover that I planted a clue or two for the future me.

Could my younger self have sensed the mess I was becoming and intuited that I would need a map back to the critical junctures, those crazed interludes, dashed dreams, and dramatic leaps? I like thinking so. It gives my life a sense of order it has rarely had in the living.

My journals, when I'm brave enough to read a few years back, are always a huge surprise. The stories are a riot, because I fell backwards into my life day by day. Not a bad way to go, it turns out, though exhausting. I find poetry I didn't remember writing, escapades better left to the past, and characters who impacted me profoundly, briefly, then moved on. Despair always drove up on hope and relief. Even if the urge to write was often ignited by pain, I often wrote myself into contentment. Still do!

All those pages full of me gave me a voice to hear. Now writing is the only thing I can't not do. Now a train load of stories is backed up on a siding inside my head waiting to get out. So I better get going.

Here's to pottery shards!

Elders

Another elder has passed from our midst and he will be sorely missed. I wanted to take this opportunity to honor a man who has been a role model and hero to me. He would probably be chagrined at such accolades. Oh yeah, he would try to duck out of the room and scoot around the corner. Nevertheless, some of the spiritual giants are just made that way–humble. LeRoy Divine Lake was an acquaintance who I knew first hand by his wonderful, ironic way with words, his mesmerizing bass voice, and his uncanny skill at cribbage.

Secondhand, I knew him as he lived through his deeds quietly reported by others. Like the cars he would keep running for, and rides he would offer to, those in direst need of transportation. The young people he mentored and checked in on who were at risk for unwise choices. Or the meeting he kept alive in the place that most needed it. Or those times when he would just show up at the exact moment someone needed him.

His presence provided an unexpected and understated joy to those who knew him. Like many of us, he probably hadn't always been a source of joy. Yet, in his own time and place, he became that.

I know I speak for many when I say we have been so lucky to have him around all this time. His health problems gave him a severe thrashing, but he kept getting up again and again. Now we get to honor that fun and surprising gift of himself that LeRoy brought with him everywhere he went. If you want to attend the service this weekend, see his obituary in the Daily Interlake.

Stalled Out

I've been here before! Nothing is happening!

It feels maddening to be stalled out like the rusting clunkers I once drove over bad roads, like a sailboard when the wind deserts me, but it's really a gift, a bookmark that a new life awaits. Stalled out is that state of suspension between yearnings, between dreams, between times of forward movement. It feels claustrophobicly eternal and damning, but I discovered that it's not. Here's what happens: I attempt to move forward with a plan in the realm of work, home, relationship, or writing; then realize there is no juice behind it, everything gets in the way.

The first several times I experienced this in my 20's and 30's, I would react with action- have an affair, go on vacation and not come home, change sexual preference, change back, quit the job, start a business, start drinking more or with different people, whatever. Now I clap my hands and say, "Goody," like I did when I was three. I need to fall back into the stillness of it and feel confident that this stillness, or stalled-ness, is specifically for me. It has my name on it.

Today is the day I realized I'm officially stalled. Fall is a natural time for it, since all of nature is taking an in-breath before the big freeze. When I first began to understand that the 'plateau' feeling was actually the ripening of something, I got to anticipate it, and more importantly, enjoy it. But it feels like I have been left by the wayside, that life is currently a dismal might-have-been reflection on a missed connection.

Never again need you think that about your own life. There is no real evidence for that, anyway. If you look for the immediate aftermath of the doldrums, either past or current, you will usually find a wild opportunity or a rocket shot toward something you have been yearning toward. This is actually the time (for me, at least) to rest up, read a lot, and be ready for when the chute opens and the bucking and galloping begins.

By the way, if you haven't read Biting Back: A No-Nonsense, {No Garlic} Guide to facing the Personal Vampires in Your Life, you are missing a great read and incredibly helpful, fresh look at how to address problem areas in your life. That is another feature of a 'doldrums' episode, that there might be an obstacle or two preventing you from moving forward. This book helps identify and deal with anything that might be holding you back or zapping your God-given powers. Let's face it, we need all the help we can get most of the time. No one has to do this alone.

Good Health Can Be Elusive

Good Health I had for years without earning it or even treasuring it. Then began my tunnel of woe: 2006-2010, 4 deaths including 2 parents, a younger brother and a mentor. Since then, my health goes up and down like a yo-yo. Nothing serious, just inconvenient and puzzling. A couple years ago, adrenal exhaustion from a stressful job just after Dad died. For several months I could barely haul myself around, was working half time and deliriously tired. Then a two year stint with a non-profit which re-upped the stress level and led to another attempt at taking a year off. This time I did it.

Last week I thought I was having a heart event. Felt dizzy and nauseated, no energy. Huffing like the little engine that could. I went to my reflexologist because my back hurt and she 'reset' my chakras, did some deep digging in my seized up muscles and I walked out of there on a cloud. I felt fabulous and still do. Heart is all better. Go figure. I was about to sign up for several thousand dollars worth of cardiac tests. Why? Because I was afraid. Very afraid.

Reflexology, Chinese herbs, Iridology, Acupuncture are all great places to start looking when it gets scary in there.

I should mention that my other health improvements included ditching sugar and coffee for awhile. That is amazingly therapeutic, since they tag team you, ripping up your energy levels and immune response among other things.

Rafting the Big River

Tomorrow would have been my brother Henry's 55th birthday. He died last November. Even though he lasted years longer than anyone, including him, dreamed he would, it is still a shock to comprehend that he's gone. I held him as a newborn. Mom let me change his diapers (that was before Pampers). I was in the hospital when he was just a new baby, so when I came out, he was there and I thought he was mine. In photos, I was always wrapped around him, keeping him from flying out of the frame. He was a busy guy even then. Above, concocting his specialty, sauteed squid.

No one in my life has ricocheted from angst to joy to horror the way he did. Yet the ballast of his relentlessly resilient and uncanny sense of humor always popped him up out of the morass. No one could tell a story like him. Sometimes the stories he told himself were so negative and accusing, they made him sick. The triple Leo slow-burn was never far from his eyes, except when he was engrossed in helping out, which he did often; or being funny, which he did often. He took a special interest in those who had the deck stacked against them, like the young Hispanic men on his jobsite. He found them tools, spoke their language, gave them tips on keeping the boss man happy. Their mothers and aunties invited him for dinner and thought he was a god. For years when we would see each other, he and I swapped fifty dollar bills, depending on who was flush at the time. It was usually him.

When he was a kid, he was so defiant and self contained that I worried about what he would do; how he would make his living. He would take off hitching to Los Padres forest with his white wolf dog and spend his spare time in the woods. At twelve, he discovered rafting rivers, by fifteen he was working them, and by eighteen, he was running his own trip on the Salmon. Later his small kayaking outfitter business gave people a tour of Kealakekua Bay and the Captain Cook Monument.

Sometimes the people you have known all your life are just too enigmatic to capture in words or photos. Bottom line is that he was sick for decades and didn't know it: heart scarred in his twenties, kidneys cooked by his medication, nerves shot from overzealous administrations of Haldol. A classic bi-polar (he had diagnosed himself when his doctors couldn't), he oscillated between ferocious mania lasting months, to crippling catatonic despair that also lasted for months, to periods of incredible productivity and joy. But he had been climbing a mountain everyday for so long, dodging the manic beast, carpentering under grueling conditions, that he didn't recognize physical illness until it threw him on the ground. Even when it did, he just shook his head and got up for more, like a prize fighter in the ring. He was a survivor in the highest sense of the world.

When Kay Redfield Jamison published An Unquiet Mind, he bought a box of them and handed them out to us. Finally someone had described what it was like to be inside his head. Finally an advocate who was both bi-polar and a physician. And finally we understood the journey he was on and what a powerful courage it took to not give up. He became my hero rather than my messed up little brother. Loving Henry was like loving a porcupine. You did it very, very carefully. I had to learn to shut my mouth. Not be a bossy big sister, which I certainly was. As family, we were a problem to him. We were too much. We had seen and said too much over the years.

Anyone who gave him advice (except Fern Pule on the right, the only one who could line him out) better be ready for the withering look of scorn. Henry could 'wither' with eloquence. He had been irrevocably harmed, by those claiming to help. So if you even looked 'helpful', watch out.

Henry was a privately spiritual person, his practice rooted in the sacredness of the natural world and rituals meaningful to him. He always had an altar. Living in Hawaii so long, he was intimately acquainted with the old gods. When we lived and worked there together and raced to Kona for the weekend, we joked about crossing the line between Pele and Lono's domains. There was literally a place in the road where he felt the shift.
There were large tracts within him that no one ever glimpsed, but something shone out from there. He was the most private person I have ever known. Yet his playfulness wowed me. His creativity was off the charts. The cartoons, legendary. Weird answering machine messages. My favorite was him impersonating the local postmaster explaining a large, smelly crate waiting for me at the loading dock marked Kahlua Pig. Or the time he called me early one early Sunday morning after the most intense Hawaiian lesbian bash imaginable, and impersonated a transsexual who had the hots for me. Jeez, I was mad when I finally figured out who it was.

But don't those 'bigger than life' people leave a colossal hole, a big rip in the fabric. I'm still patching that up and some days I do better with it than others. Henry changed me just by being him. He stirred up our family, roiled the waters, by being so original, so unreachable at times, so determined to not be diluted by everyone's idea of who he should be. And he wasn't, ever. Those he loved deeply, he loved forever and intensely. He, Bill and Dad shared a powerful bond, helping one another over the years. His best friends were friends for life: Jason, Jana, Kathy, Alan, plus river running buddies, and people I never got to meet...the whole raft of us now wishing he was here to ply us with hilariously dark stories or even give us the 'back off' look. Wherever you are, Henry Lee Wenner, a.k.a. Doctor H, Heneli, Hona... I imagine people either running for cover or holding their sides helplessly with tears running down their cheeks.

Can you be healthy without being spiritual?

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how Spirituality and Physical Well Being are connected. It seems intuitively obvious that they are related, but how? Clearly, there are spiritual giants with frail bodies; likewise, the glow of physically radiance in a human body can exist without a whiff of spirituality.

Is there a formula? Those of you who know me, will smile at this; always the quest for the mathematical formula. All questions at this point. All hypotheses with too many variables, too many definitions of both well being and spirituality. So maybe head on is not the way to go here: defining terms, creating a debate. Maybe we need some stories.

I started out writing a health book about eight years ago. I was so gung ho, herding all my ideas into one corral so I could hang onto them:
1. hot little health tips
2. ideas about intention setting
3. the power of one's attitude in creating health
4. alternative therapies from magnets to reflexology
5. the science relating mental activity to immune response
6. the power of water (that was before Dr. Emoto and What the Bleep)

I had this idea that humans had factory settings like appliances and power tools, and if we could dial those back in, we could regain the unimaginable level of vibrant well being for which we were designed.

I found several of the settings, even finished the book proposal, then suddenly stopped writing. Some things happened that were the knock out punch for my book:
1. I was off track. I knew it. No matter how accurate my factory settings were, there was a missing piece to this puzzle.
2. I realized no publisher would touch a health book written by a non-expert. My year of pre-med didn't count to anyone but me!
3. I realized the issue with health was not information but willingness. Almost everyone I knew, including me, knew what to do to be healthy. We just didn't do it!! Why write another book that wouldn't really deliver.
4. Then the knock out punch:
MDs' Oz and Mesmet came out with You: The Owner's Manual; that ghost written, Disneyesque , formulaic, aspirin pushing, career building drivel of a best seller. ( Oh my, she sounds bitter). I now believe Dr Oz and Co. are really helping people get healthy with their TV shows and website, even if the book was lame.

One problem with modern medicine is that the patient's experiential 'ground zero' is often not taken into account. Even Hans Selye knew that recent losses could so skew the patient's immune system that disease was almost inevitable. Grief and loss have to be taken into account. Stress is finally on the board as a contributor to physical health. Some MDs even give a contribution percentage to stress, like 60-90%.

Spiritual Bank Account

But how about the other side of the equation? The ledger has two parts to balance. If stress is the red ink then optimism and hopefulness, empathy and joy, are the black. According to research, these emotions or attitudes actively create a medium for the maintenance of physical/emotional/spiritual well being.

I guess it's impossible to go further without defining spiritual well being. We all know what physical well being looks and feels like, at least for ourselves. For some, it means what it looks like-great skin, 6-pack, perfect figure, super endurance. For me, it is the internal homeostasis created by organs humming away at optimum performance that produces abundant energy, physical comfort, compassion, alertness, great sleep, elastic joints, etc. I feel good. I mean, I feel so good it should be illegal! Yeah, sing it, James.

To Be Continued...