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...

Can you Be Spiritual and a Cell Phone User?

Well, I am a hold out so far. I don't have a cell phone. I may one day, when landlines are obsolete. But why hurry? My objections to cell phones are legion. If you read the warning that comes with it, you realize that the company knows there is a problem.

Common sense tells me that a microwave strong enough to send a signal to a satellite and back to my ear is probably going to do some mischief in my brain, less than one inch away. Hello! Wakey... Wakey.

But a really interesting question is the more subtle ways that it creates interference in our lives.

More and more I believe in the idea promoted by all spiritual traditions that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. When we embrace the present moment, we are able to co-create reality with the Creator. To be present to everything happening right now is the goal of countless spiritual disciplines like yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, Chi Gong,

They had other ideas in the middle ages but current wisdom, informed by quantum physics even questions the existence of time. So, according to Eckhart Tolle, the past is a memory residue. It doesn't exist in any real way. Neuroscience cosigns that idea with the newsflash that how we store memories actually distorts them, so even our impressions of the past are seriously subjective, i.e. not real. The future, it should be obvious doesn't exist at all, yet. Therefore, if I am thinking about the past or future, I am not in reality. So the present it is.

How do cell phones figure in this? Here I am driving over the hill to Ronan. In the present moment, I am noticing the wildflowers, growing grass, clouds along the Missions, oncoming traffic. The cell phone rings and I leave the present moment, because I am talking to someone who isn't there! That is level 1 displacement. I am talking to someone who is not in my present moment with the road curves, soft breeze, and wildflowers. Then, when they start talking about their wildflowers, wind, etc., I have second displacement into another reality that is not my own (right now).

We start talking about another person, a meeting we will be having, a problem to solve and there is the 3rd level displacement to the future and to other people in other places. Then we talk about a 3rd person's reality and what is happening to them. You can see where I am going with this. Depending on the topics and how riveting they are, the cell phone talker has left the present moment by a magnitude of 6-10 in a few short minutes. No wonder the driver who is cell talking doesn't see the pedestrian crossing, the car pull out, or the speed sign.

So you could say, well, any phone call does that. People have been talking on phones for decades. What's the big deal. But cell phones are mobile. When I get a call on my land line, I am not hurtling down the road, rounding corners, pulling up to stop signs.

So I just realized, there are really two dynamics I am looking at. One, is how a cell phone conversation creates a fracture that takes you out of the present by various magnitudes of displacement. Two, is that we are inadvertently training our minds to divorce our senses.

What if I trained my two eyes to look in two different directions at once. Would it be possible that they might get used to that independence and do it without my okay?

What effect over time will these phone calls have on people, with their multi-level migrations from the present moment ? But more importantly, by forcing the mind to focus so far from actively operating senses, what consequences might be in store for cell phone users? Could it eventually cause permanent disabilities such as inability to concentrate, mental confusion, intensification of sensory stimulus to the brain, or possibly psychosis?

Don't shoot the messenger, dude. I just think we need to look at how we are asking our minds and bodies to do things they weren't designed to do. Eventually we might realize that we can't be in 2 (3,4,5,6) places at once unless we are Jesus or Padre Pio, who clearly had the super powers and a super calling. as well as a lifetime of prayer, meditation and service to God which all took place in the sacred present.

Are Doctors Bad for My Health?

My Dad was a surgeon so we grew up with a weird take on modern medicine. On the one hand we were completely indoctrinated into the belief that doctors knew all. On the other hand, our esteemed papa when off the job was a shower singing, beer drinking, risk taking maniac. At rest, he often seemed to be dissociated. He could fart a trumpet riff-several stanzas (in public or private). He once had to haul his fainting daughter out of church and was unconscious of the blue streak he cussed the length of the church aisle.

Besides all that, he was one of the most rascally, hilarious and creative humans I've ever met. Off duty it was almost impossible to think of him as a doctor.

In my early 20's, my gynecologist's misinformation almost killed me, so I had a parting of the ways with allopathic medicine. That and a childhood hospitalization for spinal meningitis, terrorized me into looking for the truth about health for my body. Yes indeed.

My beef with medical science and those who 'practice' it comes down to this. The one-size-fits-all paradigm is clearly hazardous to many. And given the obvious fact that science is always in process, always changing with expanding research, doctors could be more humble about their information. Today's medical doctrine is tomorrow's embarrassment, always. Look at the cholestral fiasco. There are still people not eating eggs under the complete disinformation campaign of a few decades ago.

Near the end of his life, my Dad admitted that there was no way to know if the surgery/ and treatment got rid of the cancer or something else. He once had a patient with a watermelon size tumor who went home and cured herself. When he developed prostate cancer, he went inter-dimensional looking for solutions. We could finally talk about medicine.

I get so pissed off when MDs give a 'diagnosis' of arthritis, for example. In America, there is no cure except eventually replacing joints. In Europe, you go to a spa, alkalize your body with juices, get the lymph moving with massage and sauna, and upgrade the entire system so that organs are working, toxins are expelled, and the pain is eased because the conditions that caused it are removed. That is modern medicine on the continent. Why not here? (Don't get me started!)

If I go to an MD with anything outside the slender realm of that specialty or level of knowledge, I am in danger of misdiagnosis or a diagnosis that puts me in the group of 'unhelpables'. So I am very careful with my choice of professional. Those awesome practitioners whose love of the human body allow them to utilize and transcend the limits of that science are a joy to work with. I hope you have one.

My own family physician admitted (God love her) that there was no evidence that neither mammograms nor self exams did anything to save lives through early detection. I was just concerned about the radiation. So she supported me to decline the procedure.