Amazing and Strangely Beautiful: A Train Moving Through A Crowded, Urban, Vegetable Market.

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with ,

This week has been crazy what with dueling colonoscopies for the hubster and I (including those ever-fun and entertaining cleansing preps beforehand), a mysteriously injured leg for Dane the Mangy Rescue Mutt, and visits to a dear, dear friend who has just entered hospice and is–bravely, calmly, and gracefully–readying himself for final departure.

It’s been a lot.

So this week I thought I’d just post a fascinating, 44 second, Youtube video of a train passing through a densely crowded, urban, vegetable market.  This thing just blows my mind.  See what it does to yours.

Living in the western U.S. as we do here, wide open space is a given.  The expectation of being able to see long distances, lots of sky, and relatively few people is actually structured into our physical, brain circuitry and the hubster and I have frequently noticed how, after a while, we start to feel constricted when traveling in areas that are heavily forested or otherwise “closed in”.  I imagine it involves some form of imprinting.

Anyway, this video beautifully illustrates how these people (possibly in Thailand?  I haven’t been able to discover for certain…) have imprinted on a heavily populated, urban environment.  Adapted.  In some strange way they’ve elevated these difficult living conditions into something fascinating and dynamic, disturbing and deeply moving.  The precision and coordination between so many diverse, moving parts looks like choreography, doesn’t it?  Or possibly an undersea scene.  The awnings coming back down after the train passes looks like the way sea anemones eventually, gracefully, unfurl again, after being disturbed.

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

The Jewish Do Not Leave Their Dead Bodies Alone

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying, Uncategorized and tagged with , ,

(children intuitively understand)

One of the great sorrows when my mother died was leaving her body alone in the hospice facility after she died.  Indeed, for my sister it went beyond sorrow into trauma.  The problem was that her death was unexpected and she hadn’t done any advanced planning for the disposition of her remains.  All any of us really knew was that she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes scattered in a bay that she loved.

None of us (ten kids frantically assembling from all over the world) had a clue what to do.  We didn’t know the laws governing human remains and it was a shock to find out 1) how much paperwork is involved and 2) how much time it takes to complete it.  To our dismay we discovered that due to the lack of advance planning it would take a full week before she could be legally cremated.  None of us was in a position to wait that long…it had been hard enough just to get there in time…but more importantly, even if we could have stayed, there wasn’t really any way to stay with her body.  Cremation facilities don’t provide waiting rooms next to their refrigerators.

Turns out our culture isn’t very family-friendly where its bodies are concerned.

So instead my sister and I closed the door, gathered warm water and cloths, and bathed her body ourselves there in the room where she died, loving, tender, and stricken as we said our final goodbyes.  Then we reluctantly walked out of the bedroom and facility, climbed into a car, and drove away.

It was awful.  Leaving her all alone like that, vulnerable and helpless with no one to protect her.  It felt like we’d abandoned her to strangers and I’ll always have deep regrets about it.  But lacking any kind of long history and established customs for that kind of thing we just weren’t prepared to do it any differently.

Which is why I was fascinated to run across a beautiful, poignant article in the New York Times titled Keeping Them Company At The End.  It’s written by Joy Levitt, a rabbi with congregations in New Jersey and New York, and in it she tells the story of sitting with a woman and the body of her dead husband until the doctor could get to the house and pronounce.

It caught my attention for a couple of reasons.  One, she refers to a kind of awareness that I often hear described by people working with hospice; the recognition of “what an unusual and extraordinary privilege it was to be in that bedroom.” And she also does a wonderful job of capturing the illuminated quality of love which so often permeates the room around the time of dying.  But what started me reminiscing about my mother’s death in particular was her description of the Jewish tradition of guarding the bodies of their dead.

“Jews do not leave dead bodies alone. Communities appoint people called “shomrim” — protectors — to watch over the deceased from the time of death until the funeral. It is considered a “mitzvah” — a commanded act — and a holy thing to do, but its origins probably date to a time when there weren’t adequate ways to protect bodies from rodents (or perhaps evil spirits) during the night.”

What a great tradition.  It made me wish I was Jewish for a minute.   Not surprisingly, the white-Protestant-repressed-denial-of-death background I come from doesn’t have much to offer in this area.

I was just looking around online and found some of the following resources for anyone interested in a non-traditional approach to care of the body and funerals.

Home Funerals (lots of great links in this one)

A Family Undertaking (trailer for a really, really beautiful and inspiring documentary.  I watched this a while back and just loved it.)

Final Passages website

And to find out information on the actual laws governing disposition of human remains in my state, I did a search for Idaho laws governing disposition of human remains and found the existing legislation.  I imagine some variation of that would work for most states.

And by the way, if any of you have a minute, I’d love to hear about experiences you’ve had or resources you’ve found, too.  Thanks!

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Autism, Vaccines, and My Beef With (Some) Scientists

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with , ,

I love science so I subscribe to Scientific American.  It’s a fascinating, thought-provoking, extraordinary read which usually fills me with a lot of hope for the future.  So I look forward to it every month.

However, in the latest issue of Scientific American, Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, wrote an article entitled Trust Me, I’m a Scientist where, after referencing the current storm raging around vaccines and autism, he ponders why-oh-why “so many people choose not to believe what scientists say.”   He goes on to posit two possible explanations:

1)  The ever-popular (and sadly accurate) speculation about the poor quality of science education in the U.S. which he downplays, and then his own theory;

2)  People are emotionally prone to accept inaccurate beliefs, a position he argues for during the rest of the article.  (He is a psychologist.)

Needless to say the dreaded “I” word eventually surfaced…IRRATIONAL…the one which, however true as a strict definition, scientists also use for character assassination against someone coming from a non-scientific perspective.

And as usual, as soon as I read the word my blood pressure shot up about twenty points and I had to put the magazine down while I struggled to calm the bristling, snapping, fiercely irrational dog in me that scientists keep poking through the fence with these fucking  sticks.  I don’t think they understand how patronizing it feels–or how counterproductive it is–when they airily reduce and dismiss the rich, complex, nourishing, ancient and essential emotional/instinctual lives we all share as irrational.   They might as well just call us naked, dirty, jungle people who eat with their spears.

image from Wikipedia

I mean, really.  It’s so much harder to help people once you’ve antagonized them.

Now just so we’re clear here, I don’t for one second doubt the sincerity of the brilliant, decent, dedicated scientists who are working to find causes and cures for autism.   I, personally, am really grateful they’re trying and I believe them when they say please, please, please people, we’ve looked long and hard, and we really and truly cannot find a link between autism and vaccines.  It sounds to me like they mean it and so I weight that information accordingly.

But on the other hand, not finding a link and proving there is no link are two completely different things.  The first finding leaves wiggle room and your average parent’s instincts are likely to sniff that out and mistrust it.  Instincts don’t like uncertainty.  For them uncertainty is like a patch of tall grass where predators could still be hiding, even though the scientists periodically go in and beat the brush.  It’s nothing personal against scientists, it’s just that…well…it’s tall grass.

So, a possible suggestion for scientists here:  Acknowledge that wiggle room is wiggle room, and try not to patronize a parent who knows it and is already growling and circling their child.  If you do they’re not going to listen to you and it won’t be because you’re a scientist.

And a possible suggestion to parents who are thinking of not vaccinating their children at all:  Please don’t get so focused on this one patch of tall grass that you completely forget about the other tall patches behind you.  A few of those ones definitely harbor predators and you need to have some kind of plan in place for fighting them off, too.  Whooping cough, diptheria, polio, etc. are all still crouching nearby, eying your child and lashing their tails.  And even if their populations are relatively low right now, low is not the same as extinct.  Low means they could still breed their way into a comeback given the chance so, whatever plan of action you eventually settle on, be sure you build some kind of defense strategy that protects your child (and the adult they eventually become) against these other diseases, too.  While they may seem less familiar today than autism, they’re certainly not less dangerous.

I once helped care for a woman who lived for over fifty years with the personal devastation caused by one of the last, major polio outbreaks in this country.  She was quadriplegic and still, over a half-century later, in constant, low grade pain.  The stories she told me of “how it used to be before the vaccine was discovered” made my hair stand on end, and through her eyes I finally got the chance to see what an absolute horror the scourge of polio really, really, was, and what a blessing the polio vaccine has been for all of us born after it’s discovery.   She thanked God everyday for that vaccine, and for the fact that her grandchildren would never have to endure what she did.

Vaccines are not an evil.  To the contrary, they’re a miracle and a gift.  But they’re also not without risks which means, miracle or no, they still need to be utilized carefully and wisely.

So back to Dr. Willingham’s question about why “so many people choose not to believe what scientists say…”  (Man, there are just so many things wrong with that question.  Like…what?  Scientists own the ultimate truth and we’re all somehow obligated to believe everything they tell us?  Or that there’s something wrong (irrational!) with us non-scientists if we question their conclusions?  Boy howdy, that phrasing smacks of an arrogance that’s totally setting my inner dog off again.  Damn.)   Frankly, I think his conclusion that “people are emotionally prone to accept inaccurate beliefs” (another phrase brimming with innuendo) borders on being dismissive and condescending.  

I know this much; people are definitely emotionally prone to mistrust those who disrespect them.  And as long as skeptical parents feel that scientists like Dr. Willingham are talking down to them, I just don’t see them becoming a lot more receptive to the science itself.

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

False Positives Are The Tenth Circle of Hell

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with , , , ,

image from Dante’s Inferno by Giovanni Stradano

Four months of hell are officially over and I guess the news is good:  the hubster does NOT have prostate cancer.  Hooray.  Of course he never had it to begin with.  This whole, horrible journey has just been one big, fat, fake-out from the word go.   He didn’t have prostate cancer when December’s PSA number came back elevated, he didn’t have it through the roller coaster of doctor appointments, advanced testing, and useless treatments to rule-out-other-causes that followed, and he didn’t have it when they did the biopsy last week.

Nope.  The news is just great.  And it only cost us a horrible first week of initial shock and icy paralysis, four more months of chronic, low grade anxiety and fear, an early nuclear blast of antibiotics that temporarily wiped out his entire immune system whereupon a subsequent cold turned into a bad chest infection with a resulting week missed from work, a painful biopsy with risk of infection accompanied by yet another nuclear blast of antibiotics, additional missed work time for all the appointments and phone calls, a great big round of terror for his parents, a few thousand dollars from our savings, and a medium-grade case of post traumatic stress disorder for me.

(And now the doctor wants him to go on a prostate drug for the rest of his life and we’re looking at a much higher risk for future false positives.  Oh boy.  Maybe, we’ll get to do this every year.)

Honestly?  I’m not sure what to think about everything we just went through.  I feel battered and numb.  I don’t even feel grateful that the news was good because it was never bad to begin with.  Somehow it feels more like we were duped.

Look, I understand the thinking behind preventive screening and yes, certainly, I agree there’s some profound value hidden somewhere in this monster of a system we’ve created.  But I also know there’s something really, really wrong with what just happened to us.  Really wrong.  I’m not clear yet on what that is exactly, and I’m not sure how the hubster and I should change our approach with prevention going forward to decrease the chance that it will happen again.  But I do know this:

1) the U.S. has the highest rate of medical over-treatment in the world,

2) there’s broad concern about the kind of detrimental side effects from false positives like we just experienced (here’s another example affecting newborns), and

3) the science on the actual effectiveness of various screenings is still evolving which means, to a certain extent, we’re all playing the role of guinea pigs.

My instincts are screaming that the system is laced with way too much fear…far more than the situation warrants…and this fear is interfering with our group common sense.  It’s not that cancer and heart disease aren’t real threats, but this frantic, escalating fight to avoid them is eating up ever-increasing amounts of the perfectly-healthy-and-okay part of our lives.

You know what this whole thing reminds me of?  The ever-fabulous Robert Preston playing a slick, handsome, traveling salesman in  The Music Man.  Harold Hill, the con man, rolls into town one day convincing everyone they have a serious problem and he has the only solution.  He seizes on a common, reasonable parental fear and blows it up into a looming monster threatening to engulf the entire town until, predictably, everyone buys whatever it is he’s selling.

I’m not sure who exactly is playing the role of Music Man in this whole prevention/screening/false positives/over-treatment monster we’ve created, but I sure do feel like the hubster and I bit the hook.

Anyway, on a lighter note here’s a Youtube clip of Bob singing “Ya Got Trouble” in the movie.  (It’s a classic and SO much fun!)  Watch how the townspeople fall for his spiel, hook, line and sinker.  Who can blame them?  Call me a sucker but I’d buy anything from this guy.  My father-in-law (a life-long, very successful salesman for IBM) calls this the best sales training video of all time.   The first nine seconds of the clip are sort of dark but it clears up after that.  Enjoy!        

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Update:  10/10/11  Looks like I’m not the only questioning  what’s going on.  New recommendations are being prepared.  See following article for details.

PSA Exams Should End in Men Without Cancer Symptoms, Panel Says: 

A draft report, released today by the Health and Human Services Department’s Preventive Services Task Force, recommends against so-called PSA tests for men who don’t have symptoms that are “highly suspicious for prostate cancer.”

Thor and Mother’s Day

Posted by Dia in Mother's Day and tagged with ,

I apologize.  I’ve started three, seriously moving, insight-filled, absolutely blow-your-mind-and-suck-your-socks-off different posts this week but because of persistent interruptions (doctor, dentist, lawyer, fire-alarm, a cluster of canine epileptic seizures, and the rain-gutter repairman) I didn’t finish.  Not one.

So.  Instead, I give you a link to probably the funniest movie review I’ve read to date.  I laughed all the way through.  It’s written by Mike Ryan, published in Vanity Fair, and takes a shot at explaining the seriously convoluted plot of the movie Thor being released today. (i.e. Q: What is a Frost Giant?  A: “Frost Giant” seems to be a derogatory term that refers to the citizens of Jotunheim (not in any way pronounced Jot-un-heim), the mortal enemies of Asgard who want to retrieve what was stolen from them: something called the Casket of Ancient Winters.)  

I’ve asked the hubster to take me to see it for Mother’s Day.  And if we discover at the very last minute, just as we’re walking out the door, that my daughter has again planned something else for me, then I’ll invite her to join us and she’ll instantly forget the other thing and leap joyfully into the car, wreathed in smiles.  She’ll do this partly because this day is, primarily, all about me and she understands that.

But even more important, she loves good comic book hero movies as much as I do (like mother/like daughter.) So I ask you:

Q:  What better way is there to celebrate Mother’s Day than with the hubster, at least one of my beautiful children who lives close enough to come, and a Norse god?

A:  None.

   

Building Immunity: Dying isn’t avoidable, but the horror of it is.

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with , ,

So what drove me to work with hospice in the first place?

Dying encompasses a significant chunk of our total life experience yet, because our society has such an ingrained revulsion and fear of it, we tend to quarantine, hide, then ignore the people who are actually doing it.  And because I grew up in our society, I dutifully learned to wrinkle my nose, too, to try and avoid things like illness, decay, ugliness, aging, abuse, and death.  Poop and throw up.  Sadness and sagging.  Helplessness, wrinkling and loss.

Everything was going along just fine until one day I started to notice that, with aging, more and more of the people and places I loved were passing under the shadow of these things.  This, of course, made avoiding the necessary things more difficult and I started to chafe.  But it wasn’t until it reached the point where avoiding the scary stuff became synonymous with avoiding the people I loved who were experiencing them, that something inside me finally mutinied.

The system clearly wasn’t working the way I’d been told it should.  So, after some thought, I dug my spear out of the closet, painted and crossed myself, then marched off into the heart of darkness to investigate that big, hidden chunk of life for myself.  Go explore it.  Learn my way around.  Find out if it was really as bad as everyone said it was, and discover if I had the stomach for it or not.  I quickly found a hospice where I could volunteer, then approached my first bedside and sat down with a catheter bag knocking against my knee, the fumes of urine wafting steadily up into my nostrils, for the next two hours.

And in direct contradiction to all I’d been led to believe, I survived.

So I continued.  I stepped in and volunteered some more.  Decided to go a little farther and return to school to get certified as a nurse’s assistant.  I gave my first naked, elderly gentleman his bath, wiped fecal matter from the wrinkled genitals of a younger woman whose multiple sclerosis had left her paralyzed, and slipped my arm and strength behind the shoulders of a grandmother who could barely raise her head from the pillow while she heaved up blood into a trashcan.

And, lo and behold, I still survived.

So I relaxed a little and started falling in love with people.  I listened to their stories, sometimes over and over again, and fell deeper into love.  I studied those struggling in the depths of decline and loss; witnessed those who once walked stopped walking, those who once spoke stop speaking, those being left behind look around blindly, their hands reaching out, bewildered and lost, for something they’d never find.

And I started to do more than just survive.  I started to change.

I began to see through the blood and wasting and smells, the crushing overwhelm, occasionally catching glimpses of something shining behind the clammy skin and unfocused eyes.  I occasionally heard something in the way people spoke, something gentle just beneath their words that was so vast it wrenched my heart and stole my breath.  And sometimes—sometimes—I’d feel that thing there in the room, flowing all around us like a current of air or water, an underlying, pulsing love that was so searing and tender it left me sobbing over the steering wheel afterwards, shaken to the core.

Something transforming me, bit by bit by bit.

The concept of immunity fits well with the changes I’ve experienced.  You see, it’s not that the dying process isn’t as hard as I feared.  It most certainly is and, what’s worse, I now have all the details.  No.  I didn’t become magically oblivious to the horrors involved.  What seemed to transform was my ability to witness and contain the dying of others without being devastated by it.  It was a gradual process of course, requiring a gradual exposure, but over time, as I discovered how much stronger people are than I’d previously suspected I felt myself growing freer from my fear for them, and as my fear dissipated it allowed me to see their strength more clearly.  It became a self-perpetuating feedback loop of expanding perception and depth inside me.

This developing immunity involved something inside me growing larger with each passing day.  I’ll say it one more time because I feel it’s so important to understand—it’s not that the suffering I witnessed diminished in any way.  The hardships endured by the people I was serving remained just as real and grueling as ever, and my heart never ceased breaking for them because that’s what a heart is designed to do when confronted with the profound human suffering of others.

But as my immunity to the horror grew, my heart began to break in a different way.  Not in the destructive way that leaves smoking ruins and rubble in its wake, but more like the way an egg cracks open to release a new and different form of life into the world.  That’s what it felt like time and time again; as I watched a frantic daughter stumble into the room at the last minute to collapse by her mother’s bedside, sobbing with relief because she’d reached her just before she died, or a husband, desperately struggling out of a morphine fog for a few moments to take his wife’s hand and tell her how sorry he was for not recognizing her.  That inside, where he still existed, he would always, always love her.  Each time I felt the enormity of their love and loss inside me like a physical blow, felt a sharp pain inside my chest as something smaller and restricted cracked violently open allowing something fragile and dripping, unfolding and new, to spill out and fill me.

It was as though I was dying a little too–each time—and then being reborn again as something clearer, larger, and calmer emerged from the shards.

In a very real sense I felt like I was being vaccinated with the pain and dying of these people, so that my own capacity to bear such things, to understand and contain them, could grow.  I’d always thought of immunity as a physiological response but the capacity seems to exist on the mental, emotional and spiritual levels as well.  It became increasingly clear to me that, while the benign and loving experiences of my life are what nourish and prepare me, it’s the injuries and hardships along the way that force me to harness and deploy that strength.

I’d like to leave you with a quote that best describes this process of immunization for me, as well as its resulting gift of strength.   It’s from Victor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist who survived imprisonment at Auschwitz and afterwards authored the book Man’s Search for Meaning, and he captures the insight far more succinctly:

That which is to give light must endure burning.

image

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Shark Whisperer

Posted by Dia in animals and tagged with , , , , , , , ,

I just stumbled across this three minute, somewhat-unnerving-yet-deeply-moving video of Christina Zenato, a woman diver, interacting with sharks down in the Bahamas.  Frankly, I didn’t believe this kind of gentle relationship was even possible and yet here it is anyway.  Sometimes it feels so good to be wrong.

Disclaimer:  Evidently she’s a pro, so I wouldn’t recommend trying this at home. 


What fascinated me most was what happened in my brain while I watched.  I swear I could feel it rewiring.  Some deep and unquestioned prejudice against sharks took a hit here.  Big time.

(Which was strange, because I thought I was already fairly enlightened in my attitude toward sharks.  The hubster feels a deep affinity for them and his love for them has rubbed off on me over time, so it was surprising to discover these deep underlying layers of stereotype still lurking in the shadowy recesses of my mind.)

Initially, I admit I thought this woman was an idiot, especially when she started feeding them by hand.  But by the end I realized she has a much fuller understanding of sharks than I do, based on actual, nourishing, beautiful and real life interactions with them.   Something I totally lack…which is probably why my bias has thrived.

Prejudice is funny that way, isn’t it?  It feeds on unfamiliarity.  It doesn’t tend to fare as well when faced with living, breathing, sentient beings.

(Stray thought: Believing in stereotypes is like eating cheap carbs.  They’re like white bread, candy, and soda pop for the mind, not very healthy but what a rush!   Relationships with living, flesh and blood creatures, on the other hand, are more like whole grains; harder and slower to digest but far more nourishing in the long run.)

Once again I’m reminded that all creatures tend to respond positively to understanding, patience, respect, and intelligent handling.  I don’t know why I keep falling back into the default belief that some creatures (including some humans) are impervious to kindness and love…that monsters are real.  That kind of early conditioning is hard to shake I guess.

The video is only a couple minutes long.  If you get the chance I highly recommend it.  It’s soothing and inspiring.

About the technique she employs at the end of the video:  “Practicing a little known technique of rubbing and manipulating her fingers across the ampullae of Lorenzini, the visible dots [electro-receptive sensory organs] all around a shark’s head and face, she induces a tonic immobility. To the observer, this looks like a shark falling asleep right in her lap.”  

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Let There Be Light! Easter and The 14′ Stihl Telescoping Gas Powered Pole Tree Pruner

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with , , , , ,

stihlusa.com

In honor of Easter I’m following a Let There Be Light! theme in today’s post.

The first miracle?  Sunlight  now penetrates into areas of the property that haven’t seen it in over a decade (some of which probably still shouldn’t…oops) because last Saturday we rented a tree pruner and got totally carried away.  The loss of restraint may have been due to simple gloom-fatigue, but more likely it was because of the totally bitchen miniature chainsaw (seriously!! a tiny chainsaw!!) strapped to the end of a long pole that could reach anywhere.  Anywhere.

It was heady stuff.  Who knew that even itty bitty chainsaws can grant that level of intoxicating power?  The chore quickly turned into a kind of pruning Bacchanal, except no wine or naked women.  I believe we cut something off pretty much anything taller than four feet.  Redbuds, catalpas, blue spruce, photinias, apple and maple and peach, and then there was the mugo pine.  (God?  Please help the mugo pine.  We didn’t mean to hurt it like that and we’re really, really sorry.)  The little Stihl Beast cut through tree trunks like butter, apple wood like soft pine, and soft pine like a it was a down pillow exploding, only with wood chips instead of feathers.

We just couldn’t seem to stop.

(The mugo pine; going from five trunks down to two)

The bad news is we have to wait for the trees to leaf out to learn who survived and who didn’t.  But the good news is twofold: 1) The sun will shine on our happy home once more so I should be able to get a decent crop of vegetables again;

(Sugar peas and arugula seedlings: note the elegantly arranged chicken wire to keep out the hostiles)

…and 2) the drastic pruning created all kinds of carnage for the squirrel interstate highway system around and over the garden so maybe Dane the mangy rescue mutt will finally be able to catch a couple of them in his powerful, crunching jaws.  (As I mentioned before here, I currently feel no charity towards them.  None.  They declared war on me, so I will despise them and wish every conceivable kind of harm on the twitching rodent horrors until our usual winter’s truce returns.)  

In the meantime I have a lot of debris to clean up.  Because of time constraints and back pain we hauled anything that fell over into neighbors’ yards, to the dump.  Then we piled the rest into three (big!) piles: one on the driveway, one under what’s left of the mugo pine in the corner, and one in the middle of the lawn.  Why?  Because in spite of the fact that the hubster leans toward hauling the rest of it to the landfill as well, I’m hell bent and determined to chop it all up and use it for kindling and firewood in the wood stove next winter.

Why am I hell bent?  I don’t know.  I just have to.  It’s one of those things.

So five days later I’m about two thirds of the way through the first pile on the lawn.  The hubster is twitching a little himself as he worries about the grass slowly dying underneath, but still refrains from pressuring me.  (Saint Hubster: patron saint of obsessive compulsives.)

I’m doing it all with hand pruners and loppers, cutting each individual piece to sixteen inches or less.  (Again…I don’t know why.)  I’m piling everything against the back fence where it can dry out in the hot, summer, high desert sun so as to readily ignite come next November.

(Looks like salad, no?)

But enough of that.  Now, on to the second miracle.  In spite of last weekend’s widespread destruction, we still managed to preserve and protect the perennial gifts of hope, rebirth, and new life (thereby following a loose Easter theme), that Spring has brought back to the garden this year.  Here are a couple things I found blooming around the garden this morning:

(rain drops on bleeding heart)

(miniature iris with a cluster of hens and chicks on the left)

(and some tulips nestled among the up and coming daylilies)

Blessings on all your gardens and families and Happy Easter!

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

When Intelligence Loses Some Of Its Dazzle

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying

The recent spate of tornadoes across the Southeast reminded me of this old Youtube video where a camera mounted on the back of a train engine captured video of a tornado hitting the cars behind it.

It’s a great video, terribly exciting and titillating, until one realizes what exactly is in that tanker plowing into the back of the engine.  From the commentary on the site:

The tornado then moved across the Chicago and Northwestern railroad where it blew 12 railroad freight cars off the track. The train was moving at the time the tornado hit it…so as the main engine stopped…the remaining cars on the track continued along it and slammed into the front part of the train. This caused a few more cars to derail…including one containing hazardous materials that caused the evacuation of the town of Lawrence.

Now, this particular incident by no means equals the destructive force of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami-plus-nuclear disaster of last month (and this month, and probably the next many, many months to come) but it’s still a fascinating example of how some of our less intelligent human choices occasionally magnify the destructive impact of a natural disaster.

I lived in a small town in southeast Iowa for close to twenty years.  The tracks ran right through the center of town and it was known that hazardous materials (including spent nuclear waste for godsakes) were sometimes transported on the trains passing less than thirty feet away from the houses full of sleeping, eating, cooing, gurgling, laughing, fighting, loving, worrying, working, struggling, hoping, dreaming, flesh and blood human beings lining either side.

I’ve never understood the practice.  Frankly, in a nation that worships intelligence the way ours does, it always seemed…well… a trifle slow to me.  However, I’ve no doubt that those who make the decision to do it (over and over again for years and years) and their loved ones live nowhere near any of the tracks involved, and that, while they feel genuinely horrified when these kinds of accidents occur, they simply don’t allow it to get them down for long.  (So at least that’s intelligent and healthy of them, oui?)  

Sometimes I think we could live with a tad less IQ among those who are running the circus, and a bit more in the way of common sense and simple humanity.

copyright Dia Osborn 2011


Accidental photo

Posted by Dia in Photography and tagged with

“Remembering Baby”

Taken in Quinault, Washington in March, 2011.  It’s funny, I didn’t even see the little, turquoise angel in the upper right corner when I was taking the shot.  I discovered it a couple weeks later, after we got home, when I was cropping the original image.  I love it when I capture surprising images like this.  They tell a much fuller story.

copyright 2011 Dia Osborn

Maybe I’m Just Dreaming Here…

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with , , , ,

In ordinary, everyday life, things look ordinary and everyday.  They just do.  Days tend to go the way we expect them to which makes life comfortable, predictable and…let’s face it…easy to take for granted.  Abundance is one of the things that breeds this kind of carelessness.  When it looks like we still have an unlimited supply of tomorrows it can make what we do with today seem unimportant.  Less urgent.

Which isn’t true of course.  Every last thing we ever do from taking a breath, to grumbling about chores, to graduating from college, to losing a job, to giving birth, to getting old, to dying, is an irreplaceable, priceless gift of life on a long chain of irreplaceable, priceless gifts.

But the illusion that any given moment doesn’t matter can be powerful and, when I think about it, perhaps not altogether unnecessary.  After all, it could be hard to get stuff done if we were face down on the floor all the time, incapacitated with the kind of wonder, longing, and gratitude for life that often comes to a person when they learn it’s their time to die.  I mean Big Awe can be fabulous, for sure, but it’s not terribly practical when you’re tackling a to-do list.

And yet, I do so love that feeling of dawning wonder.  Those moments when I look at my life and realize (for a mind-blowing, gut-wrenching moment) just how fragile, miraculous, and brief all this is.  Oh sure.  Those moments tend to wreak havoc with my daily routine because after a glimpse like that I want to slow down and savor everything.  Even things like taking the trash out and wiping under the rim of the toilet bowl take longer because crappy though they are, they’re suddenly glowing, like everything is glowing, and it’s really distracting.

But this spike in inefficiency is worth it to me because, for however long those moments last, I’m not afraid anymore.  Of anything.

Look.  I realize that dying is generally held to be a morbid subject and I know it’s odd for me to want to talk about it as much as I do.  But I can’t shake the hope that if I could just capture a couple of those brief and luminous moments in words, that maybe somehow it might help ease some of the deep, unconscious fear somebody else has, too.  That maybe if some of the general, widespread terror could be alleviated, our lives and relationships with one another might be transformed today, long before we ever have to face dying ourselves and embark on our own journeys.

Of course this is probably just a pipe dream.  Most likely, everything is perfect just the way it is and I should just be quiet and garden instead.  Dying is probably a reality too big to cope with in everyday life, too vast and searing to look at until we’re right on the brink of falling in.  Maybe we’re supposed to just forget, fall asleep and live in the dream of small, safe things until the yawning maw opens wide to swallow us at the end.

But then again…maybe not.  What if there’s no law ordaining that we have to wait until we’re actually dying to glimpse the strange, revealing light it offers?  What if the rules are more flexible than that?  What if it’s perfectly okay, even good, to look around us sometimes with transformed eyes while we’re still healthy, happy and whole, so we can see once again, however briefly, just how huge, beautiful, terrifying, priceless, miraculous and brief this life really is?

What if, however impractical or inefficient they might be, moments of heartbreaking wonder were actually good for us?

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

When extraordinary forces act upon mere humans beings (even if we don’t want them to.)

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with , , , ,


NASA photo: Solar particles interacting with Earth’s magnetosphere.

Nine times out of ten when a person found out that I worked with hospice they’d stare at me wide-eyed and say I could never do that. But I was never fooled by this.  Of course they could.  Anybody can.  Bathing, dressing, and toileting are not rocket science.  They don’t require rare tools or four hands.

I always knew what people really meant was I never WANT to do that…a sentiment which, while perfectly normal and near-universally shared, is irrelevant.

Life is full of things we don’t want to do but at some point wind up doing anyway.  And sometimes, much to our surprise, when the time comes we wind up doing them gladly.  It’s important to remember that, no matter how skillfully we hide, sooner or later we’re probably going to be dragged back out of our hole and plumped down beside the death bed of someone we love anyway.  And once we’re there, yes, of course we’ll be as rumpled, wild-haired, and sleep-deprived as everyone else who ever sat by a death bed before us.

But here’s the thing.  With as hard and devastating as it’s likely to be, we’ll also probably experience that same unexpected, fierce moment when we completely forget about how we never wanted to be there, because all we now feel is a throbbing, shattering gratitude that we are. That we get to hang on for dear life to their hand one last time and whisper how deeply, how much, we will always, always love them.

Y’know, there’s nothing wrong with the profound and irreparable wounding that comes to us through our great love for one another.  Far from it.  This wounding is essential and deeply human.  We’re supposed to be dragged under and scarred sometimes.  It’s a big part of what helps save us from the aching emptiness of a shallow life.  I’m not trying to mislead anyone here—all beauty aside, dying and its accompanying losses tend to be brutal for everyone involved.

But I’m telling you, somehow every single person I worked with went right ahead and navigated the journey anyway…and I can’t begin to tell you how much that one, simple fact floored me.  At first I couldn’t quite believe it.  Then later, as I watched each one of those ordinary, average, regular, everyday people negotiate an event with a destructive power equal to any earthquake or solar flare, I experienced a growing sense of both wonder and indignation.

Wonder at how infinitely much stronger we are than I’d previously understood.  And indignation that somehow, somewhere along the line, I’d been lead to believe we weren’t.

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Death With Dignity? (…and they all burst out laughing.)

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with , ,

Not to crack any eggs here but somebody needs to say it:  dying is not, and never will be, a dignified process.  I have the deepest respect for all those good people who are espousing our “right” to die with dignity but, really, they’re tilting at windmills.

The physical act of dying is so like childbirth.  Both can be described in a lot of ways; primal, humbling, graphic, awe-filled, raw, ridiculous, deeply human, and often very, very embarrassing.  But not dignified.  Definitely not dignified.  However, this is not to say that the people who are dying can’t be dignified, because they can.  Without question.  Even in the midst of such an undignified process.  But frankly, the only people I ever saw die with dignity were the ones who were already living with it beforehand.

This is where I think the Death With Dignity movement errs.  With all the good will in the world, dignity is simply not something we get to grant one another.  No matter how good the medicine is, or the standard of care, or the advance directive, or the insurance, or the canopy of whatever legislation we drape over it all, true dignity is only generated from within.  It has to be built by each person, brick by brick, over time, from the inside out, using tools like courage, strength, respect, humility, truth, and grace under fire.  Not an easy task by any standard.

But on the flip side of this effort, once its firmly in place, once a person has anchored into a deep sense of their own dignity as a human being, it’s not something that can be easily dismantled either.  Especially not by things as shallow as whether or not a person can drive or feed or wipe themselves, or smile with both sides of their mouth, or even remember their own name.  I’ve seen people curled up and muscle locked from multiple sclerosis who were still happy, people suffocating from pulmonary edema who were still grateful to be alive, and people with advanced dementia who were still tender and loving to everyone around them.  I’ve also seen those who eventually decided to stop fighting their disease and surrender, not because they no longer wanted to live but because the battle to do so was threatening to consume and destroy the loved ones they were leaving behind.  Our ability to control our environment, our medical care, our bodies, or even our brains is not what ultimately defines us, and it seems like the biggest difference between a person who is living (and dying) with genuine dignity and everyone else is that they’ve figured that out.

I say this with the deepest conviction:

The most dignified people I helped care for weren’t the ones with the best medical care, or the clearest minds, or those who displayed the most control over how they were going to die.  But they were staggeringly wealthy in terms of love and endurance, generosity and strength.  They were the people who accepted their final vulnerability with a grace that humbled those of us who stood there and witnessed it.

And they were also, interestingly enough, rare.  Says something about us, no?

While I’m a passionate advocate for universal access to good medical and home care for the dying, it’s not because I think it’ll grant them some measure of dignity they don’t already have.  It’s because in doing our best to protect and care for the vulnerable among us, and by stepping up and helping to shoulder their last burden in all the ways that we can and should, it gives the rest of us a chance to work on deepening our own innate human dignity..

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Refugee Spiders Helping To Protect Pakistanis From Malaria

Posted by Dia in animals and tagged with , , , ,

Here’s an odd and wonderful story.

Wired UK posted an article today about one of the stranger consequences of the major flooding that took place in Pakistan in 2010.  Evidently, there are submerged areas of the country where the threatened spider population took to the trees and spun draping canopies of webbing which completely cover them.  If you love great photography go take a look at the eerie, beautiful pictures included with the article.

But the most amazing part of the story is the report from Britain’s Department for International Development who is currently working there in Pakistan.  They say there are far fewer malaria carrying mosquitoes in the vicinity of these trees, in spite of the standing, stagnant water surrounding them.

The concentrated spider populations are helping to control the burgeoning mosquito population.  How’s that for a lovely side effect?  This strange partnership between trees and spiders is creating living, arboreal shields against disease for the people living nearby.

I love this; how tragedy can transform a creature we usually regard as a danger and/or a household pest into a profound gift of protection.   I’ll remember this the next time I pick up a shoe to crush one, and instead catch it in a jar and place it carefully outside…in honor of its little, eight-footed Pakistani brethren who are (however unintentionally) protecting my own devastated and suffering brethren across the world.

One small way of gratefully participating in the web of life.  (No pun intended.)

Photo UK Department for International Development

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Squirrels and Spring: The War Begins Anew

Posted by Dia in animals, Living and Dying and tagged with , , ,

The Enemy

The little shits.  I just discovered they’ve gone and bitten most of the flower buds off the espaliered apple and pear trees I planted three years ago.  This…the fourth year…would have been my first to actually get some fruit off these trees, but now?  There will be nothing.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.

No flowers, no fruit.  I’m beaten before the season even started.

Squirrels.  I hate them again.  I spit to the side after saying their name.  I bite my nails at them, chop my elbow and flick my fingers in the air.    I suddenly remember everything they did to the garden last year (every year!) and abhor them with the same passionate loathing I feel in the beginning of each new spring.  My animosity towards them resurrects like some dark and toxic perennial plant, the longer days and increasing warmth calling it forth from its long, winter dormancy.  I recently received a wondrous book for my birthday, The Synonym Finder by J.I. Rodale, and I turn now to look up hatred because this terrible lust for vengeance I feel requires long and sharpened words on which to impale the little, rodent horrors.

Malevolent, bitter, venomous, antipathy. They are abominations. An execration upon the land. And I hold them, my enemies, in eternal aversion and disaffection.

Take that.

It’s so strange, how this resumption of hostilities takes me by surprise every year.  I’m not sure how it happens but, every winter, I seem to mysteriously forget the previous year’s vandalism and begin to think they’re cute again.  Probably because they are, with their flicking tails and miniature hands and adorable, pointed little faces.  During the season of Long Cold I somehow forget how they laid waste to my peach harvest and bit the heads off every last sunflower and ate my bean sprouts just as they were emerging above ground.  The fact that they gnawed vast patches of bark off our trees and dug up the potted plants and chewed big holes in the tool shed eaves slips my mind and instead, I enjoy watching them hop around the porch, nosing among the fallen bird seed and coming up to peek at me through the sliding glass door.

In winter they’re like a meditation, these tiny gifts of life itself.  A reverie.  A delight.  A lovely, hope-filled reprieve from an otherwise bleak and dreary  garden hibernation.  And then?  Spring comes…poof!…and their true nature reveals itself as they start mindlessly destroying things like the furry, four-footed Jekyll and Hydes they are.  Warm and fuzzy one second, then fanged and slavering the next.

So the battle resumes.  Time to go load up on packages of carpet tack strips to tie along the branches of the peach tree and run some electric wire along anything espaliered.  I need to make more muslin bags to cover the grape clusters as the gray monsters chewed holes through a majority of them last year, but I think I still have enough chicken wire to protect the veggie beds until the seedlings reach a stage where they’re no longer so enticing.

And last but not least, as the most important weapon in my arsenal, I have the squirrel-catapult-is-awful-yet-we-can’t-look-away video.  (Click top video if you, too, need release.) And just so you know, this time of year I make no apology (none!) for laughing oh-so-hysterically when I watch this.  Firstly because, as I mentioned in last year’s squirrel rant, I once saw one fall fifty feet out of a tree in our backyard, stand up, brush its pants off, and light a cigarette.  You can’t injure these things.  C’est impossible. But second and more important, even the squirrels are glad I have an alternate outlet for the violent emotions I feel towards them right now.

copyright 2011 Dia Osborn