Category Archives: family

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Wall

This is for photrablogger’s Mundane Monday #94.

And bravo for this blog: https://safarfiertze.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/all-that-we-share/

and the Danes: https://youtu.be/jD8tjhVO1TcΒ  .

My paternal grandfather arrived as an immigrant from England. My father’s mother’s father was an immigrant from Scotland. My maternal uncle traces our family back to the Mayflower: immigrants.

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March for people

My daughter and I marched yesterday.

She decided to come home from college for the weekend, planning to leave Saturday night. I decided not to go to the Seattle Womxn’s march, but do the Port Townsend one and asked her to join me.

We went out to breakfast and then to our small downtown. I no longer have television and look at news sites daily though a bit erratically, so neither of us had a pink hat. I wore my Mad As Hell Doctors t-shirt, my lab coat from working at the National Institutes of Health with the National Cancer Institute Patch, my Rotary name badge and pins gathered from going across the country trying to get medicare for all, single payer health care, from 2009 until now.

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Four bus loads went from our county to the Seattle march. We heard that the Bainbridge ferry was FULL. That is, they couldn’t not take any more walk on people. Another thirty people or more flew to the Washington DC march. And in Port Townsend, my guess is that we still had 200-300 people, women, men and children, people in wheelchairs, babies, gay, lesbian, straight, bi, trans, that marched from a small park downtown to the Haller Fountain. Galetea, naked statue at the fountain, sported a pussy hat.

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Our local organizer spoke and our House Representative, Derek Kilmer.

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Older women spoke about demonstrating over and over in their lives. A friend of mine called me up to help her sing Holly Near’s Singing for Our Lives, making up new verses on the fly. They invited people to speak.

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I spoke: “I am one of your local doctors. I want to be able to treat anyone who comes to my clinic. We are one nation: health care for all. No discrimination: medicare for all.”

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Home then, and tired. My daughter has decided she wants to learn guitar, to play while people sing. I taught her basic chords and basic strumming. We sang Jamaica Farewell. She picks it up immediately, after all of those years of viola. And she will take one of my father’s guitars back to college.

And this is amazing: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/21/world/womens-march-pictures.html?smid=fb-share

Blessings all around.

Physicians for a National Health Care Program: http://www.pnhp.org/

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/successful/

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Under the surface

For the Daily Prompt: mope.

Mope. We think we should not mope. Go down, be down, downer, don’t go there… but sometimes we have to let ourselves feel, and feel deeply, even if it’s not the popular feelings.

I was grumpy four days ago driving with my daughter for a skiing vacation. She gently told me not to grump at her. By the next morning it was clear why I was grumpy: an awful cold had come to visit and I was not going to ski. And I probably got it from her, but maybe not, and it doesn’t matter. I moped a little, but was mostly proud that I rested for two days and did not try to push through it, power through it, feel the burn…. I’ve done that too many times and then gotten really sick. I rested for two days and slept for twelve hours daily and moped a little. And yesterday I did ski for part of a day. Then we drove home, my daughter driving most of it, and I hurt all over by the time we got home….

If every feeling is a gift, a visitor, sent from the Beloved, as Rumi writes… welcome them all. This body is a guesthouse, says Rumi. Welcome moping and treat it gently and with kindness and understanding, as we all long to be treated….

The Guesthouse.

 

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The dead are with me

I am at the lake. There are younger people with me. We go to the graveyard. The earth is soft and loose. There are no markers or stones. We do not need them.

“I can feel the people in the earth.” says one of the younger people.

“Me too!” says another.

“Of course.” I say. I name the people under the earth and introduce them. The young people are amazed. I am surprised that they have never felt the dead. I think the cities and concrete and phones and television and computers: all of these must block the signals. But we never allowed electricity here. The phones don’t work. Candles, aladdin lamps, propane stoves and heat with wood in old cabins. Thin shacks where we hear the wind and water, and tents, lying in the embrace of the earth.

We leave but when we come back, the young start to reach down into the soft earth, arms length. “Did they die young?” one asks. “We want to know more.”

“You must be patient.” I say. “Don’t push the dead.”

Later I return a third time to sit quietly alone with the dead. Dark falls, moonless, overcast, no stars. I stand to return to the cabins and my flashlight dies. I know the paths well, but not the path to the graveyard. I tie up my long skirt and kneel. I feel the ground gently. Yes, I can feel the path. I start to crawl slowly, stopping to feel the packed worn earth. I think of wolves and cougars but none have been here for years. It is not cold enough for exposure. It is just dark and slow. The dead are with me and approve.

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Morning

This is for the Daily Prompt: discover.

I see people out with ear buds in place, walking or running. I also see people outside face down towards their phones.

I am sending people outdoors from my clinic, without ear buds, with cell phone off or silenced.

We need the sensory input from forests, from the outdoors, from fields, from beaches. We need the unpredictable and to USE all our senses. Smell, sound, proprioception… Proprioception is your feet telling you whether you are on a flat surface or little stones or a dirt path or that there is a rock there. My daughter and I walked on the beach last night, without a flashlight. I stumbled more than her. We discussed night vision and clearly hers is better than mine. We could see the light of Seattle reflecting from the clouds and onto the water of the Salish Sea. Mostly clouds, a few stars, no streetlights. We could see the windows of houses along the beach. The tide was out and the waves were very quiet, and we walked into a flock of sandpipers who called.

When my son was 18 months old, we took him to family land in Ontario, Canada, with old cabins on a lake. The paths are dirt. I ran those paths in the dark as a child for years, and every year the rocks and sticks were different. My son was used to floors and sidewalks and a grassy yard. For the first few days he stumbled on the paths, which are not even. By the time we left, he was running the paths with ease.

We need that sensory input and proprioception and to use all of our senses. When we get new complex sensory input, chronic pain sensors are turned down, as the brain is engaged to evaluate new information. We need outdoors, we need sensory input, we need uneven paths and beaches and rocks, we need to practice balance or else we lose the skills….

Turn off your phone. Take off your headphones. I exchange calls with birds often. I hear eagles and can imitate their call. I am good enough that sometimes the eagles that I cannot even see when I call, will drop down from the sky to see where the sound came from….Am I some sort of weird eagle insulting them?

Happy solstice and joy to you and yours.