Taking the rest of the year off

I have been ordered to take the rest of the year off from work. This is not doctor’s orders. Doctors refused to impose any restrictions on my activities. They have deprived me of the excuse to take it easy for awhile. Nevertheless, my friend and boss has ordered me not to do any work for the rest of the year.

This is not as dramatic as it may seem. Everyone on our little cross-country staff is supposed to take the rest of the year off beginning with Winter Solstice, which is Thursday. Or maybe Wednesday. But Carolyn gave me this order last week after I got home from the hospital and I have been following it, more or less.

This is not because I feel the need to take it easy. I have been going out for regular exercise although going to yoga is a bit like getting back on the horse, considering that I collapsed in Tree Pose less than two weeks ago. I find myself monitoring my breathing. Am I panting too much? Does this mean I am a little short of breath?

Part of me wants to yell, Stop it, don’t be such a wuss! The other part wants to milk it a little. After all, I had a brush with death. Shouldn’t this make me a little more careful, and those around me just a little more attentive?

Well, I got plenty of  attention in church yesterday. People couldn’t believe I was out and around and looking good, that I was really back to normal. But I am, physically.

Emotionally maybe not so much. The wuss part wants some special attention from my husband. Why have we been having so many fights since you came home? he wants to know. I say Because you act as if nothing happened. You act like everything is back to normal, like I didn’t almost die.

This wuss character is what Ekhardt Tolle calls the pain body, the balled-up ego that comes out with a vengeance every now and then when you are tired or going through hard times. It’s the part of you that carries all your personal hurt and pain and a lot more. It is the part of you that is in deep touch with all the pains of the world, with the knowledge and fear of mortality and the dark side of everything. Every now and then it comes out to feed on pity and self-pity and gloom and doom.

Of course, the feeding doesn’t satisfy the pain body; it just makes it grow bigger and heavier and more insatiable. What it really needs is some comfort and reassurance. There, there. This too shall pass. We’re ok.

I know my pain body doesn’t need pity but it does need a kind of limbo. A space between real trauma and real life. It needs the rest of the year off.

So Christmas preparations are minimal and fun this year. Lots of good church, the kind like yesterday’s service, that makes you laugh and cry. Family. More Apples to Apples.

And more blood tests, of course. Every couple of days for a while. (Pity me!) But that is better than every couple of hours. (Poor, poor me! I almost died!)

I had more to write about my ordeal but I want to both hold it for a while and set it aside. I want to allow freedom to move on to other things.

I may write more before the end of the year and I may not. Assume that I won’t. You can always catch up later.

Merry Christmas!

Antiphospholipid syndrome

Perhaps you are wondering, why did this happen to her and could it happen to me?

The medical personnel were certainly asking the first question when I came in last Wednesday because, while thromboses (clots) and emboli (clots that travel) are fairly common among people who are ill, inactive, or suffer from certain disorders, the bodies of healthy, active people like me don’t usually “throw clots.” 

While they were still trying to figure this out, I asked My Son the Doctor how he would go about determining the cause of this episode. He said he would ask all the questions they had been asking and then test for certain genetic-related abnormalities. The next morning the physician treating me told me tests had shown that the antiphospholipid antibody was present in my blood. This antibody can precipitate an autoimmune response, principally abnormal clotting. It may be hereditary. It doesn’t go away. I am stuck with the antiphospholipid syndrome and anticoagulant medication (likely Coumadin) for the rest of my life.

My mother probably had antiphospholipid syndrome. One of my brothers may have it. A niece told me in a response to my Facebook post that she had a deep venous thrombosis several years ago. So I will tell my family to watch out for certain symptoms and get prompt medical attention if they show up.

The antibody is present in perhaps 5% of the population but not everybody who carries the antibody has clotting episodes. Or, as in my case, they may wait to start till later in life. You don’t want to take preventive medication unless you have an actual incident, because the anticoagulants carry the risk of bleeding. In order to balance the risk of bleeding against clotting your dose must be carefully calibrated. That means very frequent blood tests. A big pain.

Also, if you are on anticoagulants you will want to avoid injury as much as possible, especially head injury, and that means no football (not a problem for me) and probably, oh dear, no fast bike next year that could pitch me for a fall while I learn to use clipless pedals.

The other thing you might have to think about is how much spinach or—yikes—kale you are eating in a given week. Not because either is bad for you; it’s just that the vitamin K in leafy greens can counteract the anticoagulant. So the best thing to do is to eat the same amount every week so you don’t have to change your dose.

If you read my blog you might notice that 1) I like kale a lot and 2) I have been eating a lot of it recently because it is still in season. Perhaps all that kale in my system is even requiring extra doses of Coumadin to get me to the right anticoagulant level. This is not impossible, the doc says. Kale is not responsible for my pulmonary emboli, she assures me, but it could be costing me an extra day in the hospital while they elevate my dosage to counteract it. And then, if I don’t keep eating that much kale year round, my dosage will have to be reduced accordingly.

As I think about all this I see how this diagnosis is making subtle attacks on some aspects of my lifestyle that I considered ultra healthful as well as pleasurable.

Biking! I was really getting into that and anticipating getting over my fear of falling. Uh-oh, as my 17-month-old granddaughter would say. I must go back to being afraid of falling.

I must eat my kale and other green leafies in calibrated weekly doses. Can you imagine? So much for the idea that you can never eat too many veggies. This also makes strictly seasonal eating, which I was striving for, quite difficult.

Antiphospholipid syndrome is why I almost died at the Y last week. It won’t happen to you, unless it does. And then, like other curveballs life throws, we deal with it.

The good news is, I go home today!

What happened next

Today I saw just what the doctors meant when they told me that the clots in my lungs had been large, extensive, and serious. I looked at the CT scans that were done when I was admitted and my son, a radiologist-to-be, was here to interpret them for me. It was sobering. 

Peering inside the body with Dr. Myers

Skip the next two paragraphs if you hate medical details or they make you queasy.

The huge ugly clots were nearly blocking my pulmonary arteries, distending them and extending way into the lungs. Some were even saddling the branch between the arteries—the worst kind, the sort that can kill you instantly. They were straining my heart, and no wonder I was gasping for breath for at least the few minutes until I was put on oxygen. Because of the stress on my otherwise healthy heart the doctors decided to do a somewhat risky procedure the day after I was admitted.

The experts in Interventional Radiology inserted catheters through the femoral veins in my groin up through my heart and pulmonary arteries, where they dripped powerful clot-busting medication directly on the clots, dissolving them within 24 hours. During that time I lay flat on my back in the intensive care unit, soaring on excellent painkillers over the constant ding-ding-ding of calls and monitors and the noisy chatter of staff. The ICU nursing station seems to be a social gathering place.

After spending one (unmedicated) night too many in the ICU, waiting for transfer to intermediate care, I was ushered to a large private room in a new unit. It is a luxury hotel compared to the ICU. Jesse was able to get two consecutive days off from his duties as a first-year resident in a suburban Chicago hospital and came with his wife Linnea to hang out, along with Vic.

I feel 110 percent better but I am confined until I reach a proper level of the blood thinner that I will have to take for the rest of my life. Thus I have been able to enjoy a bit of a forced vacation surrounded by family.

Last night we played our favorite game, Apples to Apples, which involves matching adjectives to people and phenomena and taking turns judging the best matches. It can be arbitrary and crazy. The game works best with at least five players, but we were only four. Emily Dickenson was staring at us from my Kindle screen. I suggested Emily might join us as our fifth player. So she did. I propped Emily between my legs and every fifth round we had to make our choices based on Emily’s sensibilities as a 19^th century reclusive poet. Emily won three rounds, tying with Vic and Jesse. We laughed hard and I didn’t bleed from my nose or any of the many holes that have been poked in my body over the past five days.

So far so good.

Next maybe something about antiphospholipid syndrome, my diagnosis.

 Emily and me

How I almost died in yoga class

It was in the middle of Tree Pose. I had stood on my right leg, left foot planted on my calf, arms raised gracefully overhead. I switched to my left leg. Suddenly I started swaying for real and I was gasping for breath. I descended to my mat as gracefully as I could, hoping no one would notice. After a minute, I hoped someone would notice and Rhonda, the teacher, did.

If you’re going to collapse in yoga class, you’d want it to be in Rhonda’s class. She’s not my favorite yoga teacher at the Y because she’s chatty and her entertaining tales of her junior high art students can disrupt the flow, so to speak. But she’s warm and motherly—my favorite person who teachers yoga. Rhonda was right on it. The paramedics were there within minutes.

As soon as I got some oxygen I began to feel better and I was embarrassed to be causing a scene. I just wanted to go home and rest. But Vic wasn’t with me. He was in Chicago and I couldn’t very well drive myself home. Besides, the folks at the Y insisted I go to the hospital. Standard procedure. They promised to track Vic down and call a local friend, even though I couldn’t remember any phone numbers because who needs to remember phone numbers these days? They’re all programmed in. I didn’t have my cell with me.

I remembered to ask the paramedics to get my purse out of the car. I was glad they didn’t turn the sirens on as they drove. I’m fine, I’m fine, I kept saying.  No, I didn’t have chest pain—well, maybe a little heaviness. I was breathing normally. Maybe I was just dehydrated. I was more worried about getting hold of Vic—to reassure him. I had the paramedic call Joanna—the only phone number I could remember—and get Vic’s cell number but I insisted the paramedic tell her not to worry.

I managed to call Vic from the ER. The Y and Joanna had already reached him. I sent him on a wild goose chase for our friend Sarah’s phone number but Sarah showed up a few minutes later. The Y had reached her, too.

I finally decided to stop trying to manage everything and let other people take care of me.

A nice medical student took my history. I have no health problems, I am on no medications, and this has never happened to me before. Well maybe almost. The Friday before, also at yoga, I found myself breathing harder than I thought I should be but it was a strenuous class. I had exercised moderately since then. No problems.

She thought for a minute and then asked if I had ever had any blood clots. Indeed, two months ago I had an inflamed area on my right leg that my doctor said was a superficial clot that would go away by itself. I told him my mother had had several pulmonary emboli—the clots had traveled from her legs to her lungs. He said not to worry. Those were “deep vein,” not superficial, thromboses.

The student and the ER doc thought my problem probably was not pulmonary embolism—I wasn’t sick or in pain. But they’d do a CT scan just to rule it out.

Minutes after the scan the doc came back and informed me that I had extensive clots in both lungs.

I’ll write more in the next few days. But just so you know, this is me today in my little “office” in my deluxe room in the cardiac care unit at South Bend Memorial, with my IV bag,  computer,  tea,  phone,  Kindle,  eye mask, and ear plugs. Family is here. I have everything I need.

 I’m fine—really. I wasn’t last Wednesday. But I am now.

Kale massage

This is not about some new spa treatment. Rather, it is about me massaging the kale.

(But the spa treatment may have possibilities. Imagine getting a rubdown with handfuls of the stiff curly variety.)

The kale is still growing strong here in southern Michigan and I have access to an unlimited supply. So when directed to bring a salad to a potluck yesterday I immediately thought of kale. But raw kale is too tough for salads. Chew, chew, chew, and then chew some more!

So when my daughter mentioned that a friend had served up a delicious kale salad into which she had massaged the dressing, I was intrigued. Later I woke in the night with a vision of a kale salad massaged with some leftover apricot vinaigrette I had on hand. I would top the salad with oranges and toasted almonds.

The vision was so yummy that it nearly kept me up the rest of the night.

Yesterday I dived right in and massaged that kale into a yummy salad. My technique was messier than it needed to be but the results were terrific. Today I googled “massage kale” and found out how I really should have done it and that, of course, many cooks had already tried this.

First you grab those kale leaves and pull them off the stringiest part of the ribs. (Well, first wash and dry the kale and your hands.) Then you cut the leaves into thin ribbons and put them into a big bowl with whatever dressing you are using. You grab, squeeze, and rub that kale until it turns a rich dark green. It becomes tender! Add whatever other ingredients you desire to the salad.

There are many recipes for massaged kale salad on the internet. Here’s mine.

Practical Mystic’s Massaged Kale Salad with Oranges and Almonds

A big pile of kale, enough that the shredded leaves fill a big mixing bowl.

Dressing: Soak 3-4 dried apricots in hot water to cover. Blend them into a puree, adding water as needed. Add 2 T. vinegar (I used pomegranate flavored wine vinegar) and ¼ c. olive oil, plus up to 1 t. salt to taste and some ground pepper.

Pour about half of this onto the kale and do the massage thing for a minute or two. Taste. Does it need more dressing? Vinegar? Salt? Pepper?

Place in a nice wide salad bowl and top with 1 or 2 oranges chopped small and 1/3 c. toasted sliced almonds.

The bowl was practically licked clean by the end of the church potluck. Tonight I’m going to try a salad of massaged kale with avocado and sunflower seeds.

Crashing

I always get to a crash point after a flurry of activity like hosting Thanksgiving. This doesn’t mean that I don’t like the flurry. It just means that there is a rhythm to my energy level and inclinations. Some people seem like Energizer bunnies but I think most of us have our ups and downs.

I’ve learned to expect the crash. Monday is prime crash time for me but this time it held off until Wednesday, yesterday. It started when I woke at 3:30 am and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I pulled on a robe and warm socks and went downstairs and sat in the dark. I would have made a fire but there was no wood inside and I couldn’t bear the thought of carrying wood in before daylight. I was alone. Vic was already off in the city for his three days of work.

I didn’t feel like turning lights on. I made tea. I can do that in the dark. I opened my computer. I can do that in the dark, too. I looked at a volunteer editing job I had started the evening before. I made a few changes in it. I kept working on the job. I did more and more. Day broke and I still didn’t go out for wood for a fire. I didn’t get dressed. I had no energy for either of those things. I kept editing, went through 6 short pieces by 10 am. I ate toast and cheese. Then I turned to my paid work and it, too, happened to be editing, more or less. I did that for a few hours, finished a report, a proposal, and an e-letter. I warmed up leftovers for lunch.

I never did get dressed or carry in wood. Getting dressed, making a fire, even talking were beyond my capacity. On the one hand I was extremely productive. And yet I felt like I had totally regressed into some kind of stuporous hermit mode.

Editing is something I can always do, no matter how bad I feel. For me, editing is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle or doing a crossword. It is low-grade problem solving.

I exhausted even my capacity for editing and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening reading and watching a movie. I did not go out to yoga. I did not get the mail. I did not pass Go or collect $200.

If Vic had been here I might have cooked a decent meal. Cooking for two, like editing, is something I can do, no matter how bad I feel.

I shed my robe and socks, fell into bed early, and slept 10 hours. This morning I carried in wood, made a fire, and started laundering sheets from the guestrooms before I even made tea. The sheets are drying in the cold sunshine. I have cleaned up the kitchen. I am well into my paid work, doing things that are a tiny bit difficult.

I have identified at least two productive activities, cooking and editing, that I can almost always do even when I am crashing. Fortunately, my life provides plenty of opportunity for both. They don’t really make me feel better, just less bad. I don’t have to look back at a wasted day.

Is resting a waste? I don’t think so, even when it involves sogging out in front of the TV. Crash days make me grateful for the little surge of wellbeing that comes with a more normal day, like today.

How do you crash?

There was thanksgiving

“Why do we have to be so nice to each other?” my brother demands as he comes in the door on Thanksgiving. “Why don’t we pick fights like those families on TV? I’d like to see a real fight, and you know what? It should end up with a food fight!"

He is joking, of course. Or is he? Five minutes later he collars me in the dining room and vents about something that is going on in the living room. He is genuinely angry. Fortunately, the episode is confined to my brother and his wife and me; the living room is just out of earshot.

Ruffled feathers are smoothed by mealtime and we all proceed to be nice to each other through the bounteous meal and desserts. I breathe a sigh of relief, of thanksgiving.

Later I find the butternut squash with brown-butter sage and almonds languishing in the microwave—the only casualty of that confined, pre-dinner conflict. But it’s not the first time I’ve forgotten a dish.

Is family pleasantness a veneer? I choose not to think so. I choose to think of conflict as the exception, not the rule. Rather, I try to make it the exception. I grew up in a family that argued. We loved each other, for sure, but we didn’t say so. Instead, what came out of our mouths was good-natured teasing, liberal criticism, and a lot of argument. Over the years I have discovered, sometimes painfully, that the family culture created a default mode in my own manner that is not very helpful in building good relations, either within the family or outside of it. I’ve tried to become nicer, warmer, not so quick to argue. I don’t believe in covering up genuine differences. But I am trying to be more openly affirming than critical, to cultivate love rather than grow the seeds of conflict that are always there. And it's not just me. My brothers have become sweeter, too.

What I believe is that there is as much truth in love as in conflict and one can choose where to put one’s efforts.

In the days before Thanksgiving, the listserves produced tips on how to talk about conflict-laden topics like global warming around the extended family dinner table. Only one instruction made sense to me—to listen, listen, listen. Nobody is persuaded by fact and argument. Everybody already knows what everybody else thinks and one dinner discussion isn’t going to make a difference. Instead, it’s a time to pull out whatever genuine love and affection may be lurking beneath the surface.

Still, the kerfuffles can come out of left field, as this one did. Everything else I’d been worried about before the feast turned out to be a non-issue. The fleas seem to have disappeared; the babies were well, adorable, and adored; and the forgotten squash went into the freezer. Vic will take it to his men’s group Thanksgiving dinner this week. Saved him some cooking time, anyhow.

Hearing again

Yesterday I got a hearing aid. The other one broke when the audiologist was programming it. I’ll pick it up today or tomorrow.

Even with only one there is a marked difference. I hear the clicking of my typing, the swish of my pants as I pull them up, loud crunching when I eat my toast. My footfalls sound the same because the aids don’t enhance the low sounds, where my hearing is normal. But I hear every squeak of the floor. The turn signals on the car tick loudly. The little song at the end of the wash cycle chirps merrily, quite audible from a floor up.

I didn’t say “What?” to Vic once in our, as usual, minimal conversation last night. Most remarkably, however, I sat in the sauna last evening at the Y and followed a whole conversation between two girls without looking at them once. It was the usual low, mumbled, fast teenage talk, which I am sure they have adopted unconsciously to keep their elders out of the loop. But I understood nearly everything. It was all I could do to keep myself from interjecting, “But I think you have to go to medical school to become an anesthesiologist.”

My powers of speech comprehension--which is a matter of attention as well as hearing--have been sharpened by the years of hearing loss. In fact, the audiologist told me when she gave me the test that my 80-85% speech comprehension was remarkable, given the degree of my loss. So I have regained the sharp ears (ear, today) that helped make language learning easy for me in the past. No wonder I had trouble understanding African French last week, which used to be easy for me. I’m sure I could pick it up much quicker with the aids.  That is the great gift of good hearing, which I was losing, the ability to understand other people’s languages, whether it is Teenage English or heavily accented French. And with it, the ability to eavesdrop.

I love to eavesdrop. It is part of my nature. I am a born observer, a quiet hider in corners, watching the world pass, trying to understand it. I am an Enneagram 5. I have grown out of that shell, of course, and become an active participant in the world. I can be outgoing for long periods of time. I am happy to be in charge, a better hostess than guest. But I still find comfort and pleasure in being the silent observer. It’s my default mode—either downright solitude or solitude in the midst of society. It’s why, in years of going to the Y, I have never struck up a friendship there. I’d rather indulge my penchant for watching people. And now, listening to them as well.

I broke that pattern of solitude-in-company the other day at the Y. Rather, someone else broke it for me. I was wearing one of my bike trip T-shirts and a lithe, gray-haired woman spoke to me as I was walking down the hall.

“Do you bike?”

We talked for 15 minutes and exchanged email and land addresses. We will bike together next season. Well into the conversation, I noticed that she was wearing hearing aids, the all but invisible kind I was about to get myself. I could see them only because her hair was clipped very short.

I think I’ll let my hair brush the front of my ears just enough to hide the tiny, transparent tubes. Although I am telling anyone who cares to read this blog that I wear hearing aids, I’d rather be stealthy about it in public. I want them to be invisible. I, too, want to make myself invisible from time to time so I can eavesdrop.

The color orange

Last night I dreamed that I had bought myself an orange dress and orange socks. They were as bright as the new Chicago Bears home uniform (which I don’t much like; I miss the midnight blue). 

Nevertheless, it was the only thing I could think of to wear. I was looking for the dress and socks but I couldn’t find them. I was soooo disappointed.

Apparently my soul is yearning for orange. Orange for me represents passion, fire, warmth, out-thereness—even brash exhibitionism. I see I chose a peachy shade of orange for this blog, where I write warmly, I think, and in an out-there way.

But I am not feeling much fire and spirit these days--more matronly and humdrum, more practical than mystic. Hence the dream: I couldn’t find that orange dress and socks.

Recently a friend reported dreaming my daughter, granddaughter, and me standing in a store window, dressed in reds and oranges. Where did that come from? It is true that my daughter loves orange both for herself and Hazel.

Joanna in orange before Hazel had any orange clothes

Hazel in orange, with lemon.

 

But I am not much of an orange person. My friend was dreaming an exhibit of spirit and passion in all of us that I’m not experiencing right now, but it may be potential. How might I get more orange into my life?

I will interrupt this writing to get ready go to church. I was waffling on church this morning. The Chicago church is usually more orange-spirited than the local one but it is many fossil-fuel miles away. I was thinking of staying at home and working on a grant proposal I’m doing for a friend but that does not feel at all orange. So I will go to local church and out to lunch somewhere with Vic and report back.

Later. So we walk into church and of course there is orange everywhere. The altar is draped in orange (tasteful rust, actually) with a cornucopia full of orange gourds and flowers. Shades of orange glow in the magnificent Tree of Life fabric art that permanently graces the apse. My friend Barbara sits in front of me in her brown and orange jacket. The preacher of the day wears an orange-striped tie. (The best I could do from my own wardrobe was an amber necklace.)

And I am moved by the service—the music, the sermon, the prayers, the brief conversations with new friends afterward. I had been set up, of course. I went reluctantly, puzzled, and with low expectations and, wouldn’t you know, Spirit shows up everywhere.

We have lunch in a Chinese restaurant decorated in red-orange, come home, and light an orange fire. Later we'll watch the Bears in their orange uniforms.

Will there be Thanksgiving?

All my Thanksgiving plans are threatening to unravel. Most of my family does not know this yet, but I can already see it happening.

First there are the fleas. Are they gone? I think so but I’m not sure. Lalo-cat has been treated twice. I’ve cleansed, vacuumed, put clothes in the freezer or dryer, sprayed cedar oil, and banned the cat from all upstairs bedrooms. I’ve done as much of that as possible downstairs and draped the living room furniture in sheets, to keep any stray fleas out of the upholstery and reveal telltale creatures.

Every time I think they’re gone I see one, just one, but it sends me on another round of all of the above.

Every time the cat seems flealess I brush him and one or two dead ones fall off. They’re still coming from somewhere. He is banned from the garage when he goes outside, and it’s 30 degrees at night, and still. Every time he goes for a day without scratching and biting I dare to hope—and then, like just now, he sits in front of the woodstove and bites and scratches.

This would not be so touchy if there weren’t babies coming for Thanksgiving. One is a 6-month-old who is learning to crawl. She was here a few weeks ago, the first time I thought I’d eradicated the fleas. We put her on a blanket on the living room floor for 15 minutes and a flea found her pale, warm, fuzzy head. AAARGH. She was here for a few days but got no floor time after that. (And apparently no more fleas, thank God.)

The cat had made himself scarce during her visit. I’m thinking that any fleas would have made the cat first choice if he’d been around, so keeping him penned in the basement is no solution—his treatment makes him a flea-killing machine. But he also apparently sheds some live ones. AAARGH.

But like I say, no visible live fleas for days now. Less scratching. Cold temperatures outside at least. I’m not ready to call off TG because of fleas.

Another problem is that the other baby who is coming, granddaughter Hazel, is low-grade sick. She’s been coughing for three weeks. She and her parents won’t come if the cough isn’t better, not with the other baby, who is our daughter-in-law’s niece and whose parents are in Bloomington, IN, for a few months, in the house for four days. The whole point of this gathering was to get the Ann Arbor family, the Oak Park couple, and the Bloomington family together for a few days for some good times while everybody is temporarily, more or less in the neighborhood--the Midwest.

Scratch that (indeed!) if Hazel is still sick.

Beyond that, there could be a whole layer of tensions around child-rearing and illness-treating philosophy if everybody does come. Suffice it to say that our son is a radiologist and our daughter is way into alternative everything.

But hey. Whatever happens, there will be enough turkey. I had ordered a fresh, organic, free-range turkey from the Amish CSA. Then yesterday my local farmer friend offered me one of her fresh, organic, free-range turkeys in exchange for helping her write a grant proposal. I couldn’t say no to that. So I’ll have an extra turkey to go into the freezer for the next family gathering.

Or maybe two.

Baby love

I’m missing my granddaughter. I saw her three weeks ago and will see her next week and she sits still enough to Skype with me for a few minutes every few days but still. This baby love is like big romantic love. It sits in the chest, leaving a hole there in the absence of the beloved.

I felt this way about my own kids and still do, to a certain extent. But the love for the adult child has shifted, like married love shifts, to solid, forever affection. The baby is like teenage first love. Every time I think of Hazel Violet, I grin.

I think, for example, of how, when she was learning to walk, she raised both fists to the sky and toddled off in all directions in sheer exuberance.

I think of all the things she could already do to “help” when I last saw her, at 15 months:

Peel garlic

Put her diapers in the trash

Put bottles in the recycle (and take them out again)

Carry sticks to the bonfire and throw them on (closely supervised, repeating “hot-hot”)

Clean up the floor, crumb by crumb

I think of her two dimples and her thick, shiny, dark hair.

I remember her astonishing appetite.

You shouldn’t talk too much about your grandkids, just like you shouldn’t talk too much about your romantic interests. You must know that the impulse to talk about the beloved can exceed the listener’s capacity to smile and nod.

I can only hope that everybody has the chance, sometime in a lifespan, for big love like this. A partner, a baby, a pet, a place.

Someone, or something, you miss dreadfully when you are separated. Someone, or something, you can’t help talking about.

A fossil fuel diet

In the first five days of my no-burp diet I have lost somewhere between 2 and 4 pounds. It’s really hard to tell with these electronic scales that give you one reading after another. But the direction is definitely downward and, for me, swift. I’ve never been able to lose more than about a half pound a week. I don’t expect this rate to continue but, nevertheless, it is remarkable and a bit puzzling.

I am not hungry. I do not permit myself to be hungry. When I am hungry I eat a little and then stop. I stop not by willpower but by paying attention to the feeling in my tummy. Feeling just a little full? Whoa! The next bite threatens heartburn! I am learning to hate feeling too full. I am learning to embrace the feeling of enough for now.

The learning has been swift—almost instantaneous, in fact. As soon as I identified the feeling I hated and the feeling I enjoyed, I made the switch. It’s the perfect example of the Heath brothers’ image of the relationship between the Elephant and the Rider. The Rider is reason and knowledge, how we understand the problem, what we know we should do, how we strategize to address it. The Elephant is emotion—that big beast that does the actual moving toward the goal or away from it. The beast that needs skillful direction by the Rider but can’t simply be told what to do. The beast too big to control only by logic. Somehow my Rider got my Elephant turned and moving in the right direction.

Another way of saying this is the energy has shifted. Perhaps the shift of energy may be responsible for the instantaneous and dramatic weight loss. It may also have to do with not waiting for the daily weigh-in for feedback but following the energy flow hour by hour, even minute by minute. This kind of shift affects your mentality and mentality affects metabolism. Stress, as we know, affects metabolism, often promoting weight gain and sometimes unhealthy weight loss. It does this not only by influencing appetite but also by affecting hormone balance, especially cortisol. I have a feeling science is only beginning to uncover the relationships among what we are thinking, how we are feeling, and how our physiology behaves.

Where else can we make such instantaneous switches? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our society could develop a sudden revulsion for fossil fuel? This is already happening for many of us. We are learning to hate the excess trip, the belches of dirty diesel from the aging truck, the overheated and overchilled apartment buildings, our enslavement to the automobile, and above all the gouged pits and crushed bedrock that result from trying to squeeze out more, more, and still more. We are curbing our individual appetites for fossil fuel. We are embracing the beauty of the bike and the sun and the wind. With a little help from national infrastructure, we could easily go on a no-fossil-fuel diet.

But we do need help on this. There is only so much we as individuals can do. Until our leaders, too, feel the revulsion in their guts, our policies will keep force feeding us what, all too recently, we thought we wanted. It’s time to say, Enough oil! No more gas! I can’t take another bite! (B-u-u-u-r-p).

The no-burp diet

Day one of my no-burp diet. I weigh in at 164.2.

I will violate social norms and write frankly about my weight and the embarrassing topic of burping because, whether you have my problems or not, my struggles might provide insight for some of yours.

As I grow older and gain weight, my digestive system has become more sensitive. I have frequent bouts of gas and heartburn. I’ve advanced from Tums to store-brand Prilosec and still, yesterday afternoon I was emitting loud, braying belches. Fortunately I was alone in the house.

At the same time I was listening to a little lecture about personal change based on the Heath brothers’ latest book, which also prompted yesterday's musing, Switch: How to Change When Change is really Hard. And I was thinking about how I might try once again to shed a few pounds. That summer of biking, for all its rewards, had not shaved off more than five pounds, though it probably replaced some fat with muscle. And the rather lazy month of October had already put four of those back on.

Now here was Chip Heath, suggesting that I find some kind of positive emotion, a reward, to stir up my motivation for change. Well, I knew about all that. The picture on the refrigerator, the camaraderie of the group sessions, the snug pants in the closet, the regular weigh-ins showing the (hopefully) dropping numbers.

They don’t work for me, not reliably and not for long. I needed something more powerful, personal, and immediate.

As I was listening to this you-already-know-this lecture, I was issuing those awful belches every few minutes. I knew why. It was because for lunch I had eaten two bowls of a delicious lentil soup I’d made for myself instead of one.

I noticed how uncomfortable I was. I started timing the space between burps, thinking how nice it would be in a few minutes or hours to be free of them. And suddenly I knew that I had found the feeling I needed for changing my eating habits.

I knew in my mind and my gut what needed to change. Tiny portions, more frequent meals or snacks, total avoidance of some foods like ice cream, and cutting way back on others like wheat. I wouldn’t even need to think about this diet. I would just need to pay attention to the burps and get myself burp-free.

I could have burp-free contests with myself, burp-free marathons, my own Guinness Record on burp-free days. I could even imagine a burp-free Thanksgiving! Suddenly, the upcoming pumpkin and mince pies were losing their appeal, and I could imagine the tiny scoop of my luscious stuffing on my plate next to a moderate slice of turkey thigh, a mound of green kale, a dollop of bright red orange-cranberry relish, and no potatoes at all. And good heavens, no seconds! I could imagine this without a hint of regret or anticipated suffering. The feeling was there.

I know from past dieting experience that I can learn to enjoy the feeling of less. I can go to bed feeling empty—not stomach-growling hungry but slightly hollowed out—and enjoy that sense, go to sleep on it. But I can lose track of that feeling and go back to overeating in the evening, which is my main downfall: seconds on dinner, snacking afterward. What happens is an emotional change: the joy of emptiness somehow gets replaced by a feeling of never-enoughness. When I lose the joy of emptiness I can’t control my eating. And when I lose the feeling I don’t know how to get it back.

I believe I have stumbled on the trigger, the path back to that feeling of being in tune with my body’s needs. My aging body has given me an instant feedback mechanism, the uncomfortable, embarrassing burp. My body is speaking to me--rather loudly, in fact--and, finally, I am listening.

When information is true but useless

Another part of my job is to collect true but useless information, abbreviated as TBU.

Both the collection of such information and the use of an acronym are characteristics of so-called policy work. Policy work itself is based on the presumption that the development of policy, that is, change at some kind of official level, is based on information. It is based on the assumption that you have to have a lot of information to make it happen, and once you have the information, it will happen.

I have to ask, Is this really true? While the process of collecting and disseminating information leads to the proliferation of acronyms in the world, does it truly lead to change?

If the above paragraphs sound convoluted and cynical, they are. I am feeling convoluted and cynical this morning.

I get the TBU acronym from the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan, who wrote the clever and compelling book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Really Hard. They say simply, no. Information is not why things change. Change is propelled by emotion. This is true, they say, of all kinds of change, from the personal level to the level of society, including “policy.” Therefore you can spend all the time you want collecting TBU and nothing will change. You will understand the problems really, really well but you won’t solve them.

Deep in my heart I know this is right and yet all around me my colleagues continue to collect information and I help them do it. I have created a whole website full of fascinating TBU, and I feed another page of such information on another website. Traffic on these sites is not high but I am often told that I am providing an essential service to the environmental movement by gathering this TBU.

Actually I don’t think true information is totally useless. But it is true that information alone does not create change when change is really hard. Information is essential to clarify the problem. Information tells you what you need to change, and which direction the change needs to take. Information is essential background to change. Information can be shaped to provide the path to change. But it is emotion that pushes you along that path and makes the change stick.

In short, information can provide both the why and the how for change.

The Heath brothers outline a path to change that has worked in many cases. They base their methods on solid sociological and psychological research—that is, on information that provides the how. Much of the information I seem to be collecting, however, provides the why—that is, defining the problem. Many of my colleagues are stuck in the why. Too much why and not enough how makes information TBU.

Meanwhile, the evidence on climate change is piling up. New discoveries are being made about how harmful pollution is to our health. Yet another instance is uncovered of corporate pillaging.

All of this is TBU unless we use it to shape the path to change.

Chaos and creativity

Dr. Andrew Weil says our brains are not made for the 21^st Century. In an essay in  Newsweek, “Don’t let chaos get you down,” he points to the lower rates of depression among the Amish and the Third World and concludes that “there seems to be something about modern life that creates fertile soil for depression.”

Aside from the fact that the Amish may be less likely than us English to admit they are depressed, and depression in poorer countries may likewise be underreported, we all know what he’s talking about.

It’s the knot in my shoulders after a whole day of emails and phone calls trying to coordinate a schedule for a Congolese pastor visiting next week. And trying to post things on the website for work but finding the site unavailable on my usual browser. And after that, vacuuming the rugs and furniture once again because my son-in-law reported fleabites on his ankles after visiting last weekend, though I thought I’d nipped the infestation in the bud (ten loads of laundry, vacuuming everything the week before; I’d missed a flea treatment for the cat). And skyping with my daughter and seeing little Hazel droopy and coughing, poor baby! And am I really going to spend that much on hearing aids? I hear my husband cringe over the phone, though he claims not, and we argue about that, if not the hearing aids. And oh. Have I written in my blog recently? Brother Dale, who skyped me accidently yesterday because he was trying to figure out his computer problems, wants to know.

Watching the woods turn from yellow to skeletal drab on a gray November day, I know better than to feel sorry for myself. The only thing to do is write it down and laugh about it. My life, compared to others’, is pretty tranquil.

But things get lost among the chaos, just like those fleas hiding somewhere and targeting my son-in-law’s ankles. I had a dream that may be relevant.

I was at a conference that included a writing retreat led by my favorite writing teacher. My attention was divided between the conference and the writing. I missed the first writing session and perhaps others. As I dipped in and out I noticed that other people in the writing retreat had beautiful, antique-looking notebooks. Where was mine? At the end of the retreat I discovered that I had one, too. I opened it from the back. There were personalized greetings to me on printed pages. There were writing exercises, including some loose, torn-up paper that seemed to be part of an exercise. The notebook was meant to stimulate creativity but I had missed the instructions on how to use it.

In our distraction we can miss our own creativity. 

Still, I wouldn’t give up any of it. Except the fleas.

 Hazel Violet discovers the recycle bin.

What I do in my day job

Every time I think about quitting my environmental work, as I was last week and as I wrote then, something comes up that keeps me at it, reminds me why I do it and what gifts I bring to it.

If you are interested, here is a sample of what I do. The assignment: articulate the heretofore nebulous “future generations” aspect of the organization’s work in two pages or less, for prospective funders.

Note. I am really tired of persuasive writing. I always sit down to do something like this and think I can’t do it. Carolyn, my friend and boss, calls me and gives me her brain dump on the topic. I usually make a false start in the writing. And then I start again, maybe the next day, and it just rolls out in an hour or so. It is a very strange and specific talent.

Who will speak for future generations?

The Science and Environmental Health Network seeks [a pile of cash] over the next year to catalyze a movement for the rights of future generations to a healthy planet.

We who are alive today are rightly alarmed about the damage being inflicted on our environment and our own health. But the cumulative effects of activities that are changing the climate, depleting water and other resources, crushing the bedrock under our communities, and much more portend a bleaker habitat for future humans. Our current legal and regulatory regimes largely ignore or work against the interests of future generations, through practices such as discounting and cost-benefit analysis. Our current culture encourages present-day consumption and provides few outlets even to express commitment to future generations.

We cannot afford only to protect our own interests. We must learn how to speak for future generations. We believe the time is right for a movement for the rights of future generations to a healthy planet—on the order of the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. It must be powerful and pervasive enough to shift consciousness both in institutions and in the culture at large. It must be practical enough to result in concrete changes in law and policy.

Nothing about movements is predictable, but SEHN would like to do four things in the coming 12 months with the goal of catalyzing a movement for the rights of future generations. Whatever the outcome, the time is right for these initiatives:

Define and advance needed changes in the law. SEHN has done extensive groundwork in the past five years with Harvard and Vermont law schools on legal initiatives that would embed the rights of future generations in the law. We have issued white papers, written articles, drafted legislation and constitutional amendments, and outlined new institutions such as guardians or ombudsmen for future generations. These ideas are ready to be fleshed out and applied and we are beginning to do this. The Oregon Bar Association has asked SEHN to consult on such a project for the state. Like much of our work on the precautionary principle, the state, tribal, and sometimes local level is fertile territory for such experiments.

Convene conversations with proponents of the rights of nature. There is an extensive, diverse, international legal and advocacy movement for the rights of nature. We believe that a movement for the rights of future (human) generations could have much in common with this movement. At the same time, our legal work on rights of future generations is perhaps more advanced in terms of specific applications. We could learn much from each other and perhaps create synergy in advocacy and legal circles. Nature rights advocates have responded enthusiastically to this idea. We are convening the first such conversation in late 2011 and expect to follow up with others.

Make the public case. This year Executive Director Carolyn Raffensperger was invited to help an indigenous community draw up “principles of perpetual care” for the abandoned Giant gold mine in Northwest Territories, Canada. What she learned in the course of this consultation shocked even the engineers and government officials in charge of “remediating” the site when she pointed it out to them: The arsenic remaining on the site must be contained forever. The poison is permanent—not unlike the numerous sites around the world contaminated with radioactivity. Clearly, neither the public nor governments—let alone corporations—are prepared to deal with such legacies. Are we prepared to stop creating them? The public, at all levels, needs to be reminded of the consequences of our actions. The more visionary case for institutions and actions that protect future generations must also be made. Public speaking, media conversations, and consultations are an important part of this work.

Convene women to launch a movement. To date, women’s voices have been rarely heard on issues like climate change, but many women are passionately committed to the future of humanity. The wisdom and energy of women could galvanize this new movement. Carolyn Raffensperger has been in conversation with a number of prominent, visionary women—artists, writers, and activists--about convening a gathering of women to launch a movement for the rights of future generations. The response has been enthusiastic. An event is being planned in 2012, in a threatened or devastated place, that will involve art, music, story, statements, and direct action. A core organizing group includes several young women from the newly launched Peaceful Uprising group as well as other women’s activist groups. An elder circle will include luminaries such as Joanna Macy and Terry Tempest Williams. Affinity groups are being formed—artists, writers, singers, dreamers, and others.  

There you have it. That’s the kind of thing I do in my day job. I will get to go to that women's gathering. I guess it's really kind of cool.

Leymah Gbowee and the power of ideas

As soon as I heard that Leymah Gbowee’s memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers, was published, I bought it with a single click. A few days later Ms. Gbowee won the Nobel Peace Prize. I hope this means that her memoir sells well. It’s a great story.

You may have seen Leymah in the documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about the Liberian Peace Women who sat in the sun and rain and corridors of power until the warring factions that had savaged their country agreed to stop fighting. She was the group’s spokesperson, the one who threatened to strip naked in order to get somebody to pay attention. They finally did and 11 years of civil war came to an end and the last of a series of brutal leaders fled the country (I believe Charles Taylor is still on trial at the Hague).

After a transition, Liberia elected Africa’s first woman president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf , who shared the Peace Prize with Leymah and a Yemeni peace activist. Although Sirleaf is now facing a runoff in her bid for a second term, her opponent is apparently an honorable man. A real choice between two good candidates is a rarity anywhere, especially in Africa. Although Liberia is still licking its war wounds and only now beginning to pull itself together economically, structurally, and socially, it definitely falls into the “good news” column.

My interest in the memoir was personal. I spent a few weeks in Liberia in 2008 with a peacebuilding organization, helped collect stories from former child soldiers, and found that the country, its struggles, the astounding stories of both war and peace, and the people I met there unlocked something in me that I’m still puzzling over. Simple word for it—love, related in some way to Africa. It is leading me to pursue new friendships and ties through things like the Congo Cloth Connection.

But what struck me in Leymah Gbowee’s memoir was the connection of ideas, how ideas make their way around the world and connect us into some kind of community.  Ideas are personal, not separate from the people who originate and perpetuate them.

There in her memoir was a mention of John Howard Yoder’s 1972 book The Politics of Jesus, which I had just reread—a book that was as formational for a young African woman in the middle of a civil war as it was for a little Mennonite girl in a sedate, rural community on the other side of the world.

Later she comes in contact with the leaders of a West African peace group, some of whom I have met, and I recognize the ideas that are stirring her imagination. Many of these folks have gone through Eastern Mennonite University’s peacebuilding and conflict resolution seminars, and they are putting into action the ideas of people like John Paul Lederach and Howard Zehr.

I remember talking with Tornolah Varpilah, one of Leymah’s mentors who is now a deputy minister of health in Liberia. He was enthusiastically describing how he was applying the “early warning” system developed by Lederach to watch for signs of instability in communities. Leymah also mentions this idea. Later, when she gets to EMU herself, she is drawn to Zehr’s victim-offender reconciliation theories, which she realizes is what she had been trying to do in her work with former child soldiers.

Totally aside from the fact that I dated Howie Zehr in high school, all this warms my heart.  I believe in the power of ideas, especially when they are transmitted through real, human ties and put to work in real, human situations, even the very worst ones.

Life is a-maze-ing

I am thinking of stopping my environmental work in a year, when Vic maybe retires once and for all. But what will I do instead? Years ago I thought that after I was done with policy and grant writing I would write for fun and profit and I began doodling around and taking workshops but I have run into plenty of dead ends on that front. (“Oh, you are a writer? What have you written?” Well I have this book that nobody wants and like everybody else I write a blog. . . .)

There have been many other apparent dead ends in my work life and I don’t want to write about all of them. But here is the thing. I keep expecting one thing to lead to another and it seldom does—not in the way I expect and hope, not even when I apply myself and exercise uncharacteristic determination. And this occasionally throws me into a panic, like it did last night as I was thinking that I want to stop what I am doing but I am not ready for outright retirement. I woke up with this dream:

I was a struggling academic. I needed to choose a research project and write a grant proposal to support it. I was weighing several options. I didn’t want to do any of them, nor did I think any of them had a good chance of working out. But the project that presented itself most insistently was to study the giant vortex of garbage growing in the Pacific Ocean.

I recognize the different levels of this dream. Some of it is pretty literal: I write grant proposals, and there is indeed a garbage gyre in the Pacific. And then, metaphorically, environmental work is a study in the endless and, despite our efforts, growing collection of human garbage on Planet Earth. My environmental circles (that image again) are dominated by academic and policy-type thinking, at which I am pretty good but I don’t really feel at home in it. I struggle. I am growing tired of doing any of it. And yet the projects, the needs, keep presenting themselves.

Stepping out of this work would feel like an escape from the swirl but into what? The vast ocean of possibility that is life, with no clear direction.

Perhaps life is more like a maze than a journey. We go in one end, wander around, explore the rich possibilities and intriguing dead ends, and come out the other end, which may be very near where we entered. Do not panic, like the family who recently got lost in a corn maze and had to call 911 although they were only 25 feet from the exit.

Above all, do not be sucked in by the swirl of garbage. Study it, or escape from it for awhile and see where the currents of the Universe bear you.

Community

I believe in community. Mennonites do community pretty well because it’s at the center of our faith. We believe that the church, in all its foibles, is how the Kingdom of God is to be introduced and lived on this earth, and we don’t limit “church” to the worship services that bring the people of God together. That is just the beginning of the bonds that carry through the week and into every aspect of our lives.

So going to a new church, as Vic and I started to do early this year, is a pretty big deal, like being adopted into a whole new family. I have been reminded, during this process, just how important community is. And like most things that are close to my heart, it is also prime territory for frustrations and annoyances.

Most of my frustrations have to do with how busy people are. Through the church we signed on to a CSA, run by an Amish farmer who happens to live 60 miles away from us as well as from the church building, which, in turn, is some 20 miles from us. Produce was to be picked up by someone every Friday at the farm and delivered to the church, where some 20 members would, in turn, pick up their personal shares.

Thinking I would do my part for community—and form ties with others who share our hunger for beautiful, organic food and for justice for small farmers—I volunteered to help with the farm pickups. But Vic and I ended up doing nearly all the pickups until well into the season. And we seldom see our fellow members because they come to the church to get their produce at different times and sometimes they don’t come at all. There have been complaints about the messy boxes left in the church foyer and other matters. There have been lapses in communication. In short, much of the messiness of community and few of the rewards.

This is not usually the case with community stuff, in which the annoyances are more in the nature of a Shakespearean comedy of errors. Here is today’s example.

Carolyn, a wonderful new friend from this church, called last week wondering if Vic could do a favor for one of her friends who incidentally came from the same home territory as both Vic and Carolyn, eastern Pennsylvania. This friend, who now lives in Michiana, has a niece who lives in Evanston, IL, a suburb of Chicago. The niece has a piece of furniture that needs to be delivered to the aunt back here in this general vicinity. Carolyn knew Vic goes to Chicago for work a few days each week. Could he possibly pick up this antique bench on one of his runs to the city?

Although Evanston is more than an hour away from where Vic works, it turned out that he had been thinking about attending a lecture at Northwestern U., where he got his PhD, this very week. Today. Northwestern is in Evanston. And so he agreed to drive the SUV instead of the economy car into the city this week (which meant I had to arrange for someone else to do the CSA pickup), spend an extra day, attend the lecture, and pick up the bench. Carolyn gave him the address and phone number of her friend’s niece in Evanston.

As I write this, Vic has been trying for two days to contact the niece, to no avail. More phone calls to Carolyn (via her husband) put him in touch, this morning, with the aunt, Mary Jane. They had a nice chat, enumerating all their connections. Mary Jane knew Vic’s sister, yada yada. (It’s called the Mennonite Game). Mary Jane will keep trying to contact her niece. The lecture is this afternoon and that is when the handover was supposed to take place.

But if the phone connection doesn’t work, the bench is in the niece’s garage. The door is probably unlocked. Mary Jane says, feel free to carry it off.

Community. If only it didn't involve so much driving and phoning. If only we actually lived in our community!