Tag Archives: Life

The Garden That Got Me To Settle Down

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

Gardens are not static environments.  You can’t just plant a flower bed and a tree and then expect them to stay put like, say, an arrangement of furniture.

No.

Those lovely flowers will instead grow (hooray!), bloom (yowza!), get spindly (huh?), wilt (wait a second…), and die (ugh) before scattering their seeds to areas of your property you wouldn’t have thought possible (WTF?!!).  At the same time that tree you planted will also grow (and grow and grow) until it eventually shades out the flowers below and the seed scattering which seemed like such a problem in earlier years will no longer be the issue.  It’s now the bare dirt where nothing survives.

Even though I fell in love with growing green things in adolescence when my first, obliging houseplant survived, I didn’t discover this longer-term, dynamic garden relationship until my forties.  This is because, for the first 37 years of my life, I didn’t live in the same house for longer than three and a half years.  For the first seventeen, I was a Marine brat and that’s how often my father was transferred.  The next six years of migration were the result of my on again/off again college attendance.  And the last fourteen involved first one husband who bought and fixed up properties (our homes) for resale, and then a second husband who was adventurous and highly mobile.

Due to this nomadic lifestyle, I’d never had a long-term, committed relationship with a garden before.  Oh, sure, I’d dated quite a few, but always with the understanding that it wouldn’t last.  I was basically in it for the botanical sex; sticking my seeds of choice into the fresh, fertile soil and then devouring the resulting, delicious fruits of the tryst before cinching up my roots and moving on to the next plot.

I was a confirmed bachelorette of the garden world…and perfectly happy with the life.  So when the hubster (adventurous husband #2) and I made our fifth jump in five years and landed in Boise, I had no reason to think this garden would be any different.

I went ahead and sunk my heart and soul into tearing out all the old landscaping (i.e. roses and grass) and replacing it with something more eclectic, but mentally, I always kept myself ready for the next move.  For the first five years, I told myself I could still dig everything up and take it with me when we moved again.  Then, once it became clear that this plan was delusional, I resigned myself to taking a smaller collection of favorite things; a few large rocks, all the container plants, and the old bathtub I’d rigged up as a fountain.  (Basically anything that weighed more than a quarter ton.  The hubster usually fell silent during this part of the conversation.)

This lie survived for eight more years before transitioning into the final period of denial where the hubster and I no longer talked about moving at all, but didn’t realize we were no longer talking about moving.

And then, in 2008, I suddenly realized I was trapped.  I’d held still for too long.  My roots…which had been kept oh-so-carefully tucked up in the belt for decades…had slipped loose while I wasn’t paying attention, snaked their way down into the soil, and transformed this house and garden from temporary way station into permanent home. We’d accidentally and unintentionally created something I could no longer afford to lose.

I had no idea until that moment just how badly I’d needed a home that I wouldn’t have to leave behind.

So.  That’s the story of how, over the last sixteen years, the garden and I (I call her Redbud) have become intimately acquainted.  She’s the lady who landed me, the one who finally got me to settle down.

But, as with any good relationship, I’m always discovering something new, too.  Redbud’s microclimates are constantly shifting with the changes in tree cover and watering experiments.  (I do so love to tinker.)

One of our recent successes involves a narrow strip of side yard on the north side of the house which leads from the front yard to the back.  It’s barely eight feet wide and, for the first nine years we lived here, I mistakenly assumed that nothing would grow there but shade plants.

Upon closer study I realized about half this strip actually receives direct sunlight from May through early July, enough time for any seedlings planted to get a good head start.  So I began to think vertically.  I suspected that if I built a trellis tall enough, any vines started in May would be able to to chase the southward shifting sunlight high enough to escape the return of shade in mid-summer.

And lo and behold, I was right.

You can see how the lower squash leaves die off from lack of light (on the right) while the vines on top flourish. This year has been good for butternut squash.  I have six vines and will probably get fifteen or sixteen squashes.  I try and alternate years between winter squash and pole beans.

To utilize growing space, I planted four shade-loving Schisandra vines on the shadier (left) side of the trellis.  (They require both a male and female for cross pollination so the more vines one plants, the better the odds of getting one of each.)  Schisandra berries are supposed to be a powerful herbal remedy but I wouldn’t know anything about that.  After four years I’ll finally harvest a single cluster of berries this fall, which is not enough to have an herbal effect on anything.

Since the fence that continues along the northern border of the backyard has the best southern exposure on the property, I’ve lined it with espaliered fruit trees.  There are two pears and two apples, which all failed to produce this year because the f—g squirrels bit off almost all the fruit buds in late April.  Here are the espaliered pears:

The two muslin bags in the lower right corner are protecting this years crop–two pears–from further depredation.  It’s working so far.

I’ve had better luck with the peaches; so much so in fact that, despite early fruit thinning, three branches have broken so far under the weight.

The squirrels are chewing off upwards of ten or fifteen fruits a day now, so I’ll probably revert to last year’s strategy and strip the tree early, allowing the green fruit to then ripen in a protected area.  While the taste is inferior that way, at least I win. Gardening, like any good, long-term, committed relationship, is full of compromises.

Redbud’s grape predators are threefold; squirrels, robins, and Dane the mangy rescue mutt. Muslin bags have been an effective deterrent for all three.

Occasionally, a frustrated squirrel will chew through the stem causing a grape cluster, bag intact, to fall to the ground.  Dane has discovered that if he picks these up and delicately mouths them, he gets a delicious shot of grape juice.  He therefore leaves the squirrels unmolested when they’re working around the vines.

Dane is the sole predator of garden tomatoes.  He stripped the bushes once this year.

We were forced to cut down a couple of beloved but badly misplaced trees this year.  We decided to create pedestals out of them.  The driftwood are pieces we’ve collected from various spots along the Pacific Northwest coastline.

 

 

Clearly, there is no tree stump involved in the last photo but I like the driftwood and figured I’d toss it in anyway.

And now, I apologize for the abrupt ending but Redbud calls and I must away.  Happy gardening to you all!

copyright 2011 Dia Osborn

 

 

 

For Constance And The Other Pets We’ve All Lost

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

I learned that a big, flatulent, snore-prone, asthmatic bulldog died suddenly of a heart attack over in Wales a few days ago.  Her name was Constance and her bereft humans are John and Chris.  The news made me sad.  They’d only had her for about ten months…she was a kinda, sorta rescue dog…but in that short time they fell for her pretty hard. 

(Which was something of a puzzle to me, as it often is to non-bulldog people.  Bulldogs are not the most attractive of animals and she could be quite a bitch besides.  But I think that’s part of the reason WHY John and Chris loved her so much, because she was always so fearlessly and unapologetically herself, warts and all, and really, when I think about it, I kind of love that, too.  You go, girl.)

Today’s post was going to be about the dying music that’s come down to us through time, the valuable information embedded in that music regarding how to die, and how in the hell we’re supposed to extract said information all these years later, across changing attitudes, languages, and cultures.

But it doesn’t seem right.  Not today.  Instead, I’d rather play one of the songs I had in mind and dedicate it to Constance and the other beloved, joy-bringing, innocent, vulnerable, and deeply missed pets we’ve all lost over the years.  They’ve mostly died quiet and unnoticed by the wider world.  For some strange reason, we’re not usually given much room to grieve our animals when they die, in spite of the fact that their loss can be as painful and devastating as that of any other family member.  So today, I thought I’d make a little more room.

Goodbye Constance, and all you other beauties who graced our lives for a little while.  We love you.  We miss you.  We thank you.

Lyrics:

Oh all the money that e’er I spent
I spent it in good company
And all the harm that e’er I’ve done
Alas, it was to none but me
And all I’ve done for want of wit
To memory now I can’t recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all

Oh all the comrades that e’er I’ve had
Are sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e’er I’ve had
Would wish me one more day to stay
But since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I’ll gently rise and I’ll softly call
Good night and joy be with you all

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

When NOT To Tell Someone They’re Dying

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

People who work in end-of-life care feel pretty strongly about telling people the truth.  If someone is dying and they want to know, then they damn well deserve to be told.

Why? Because wrapping up a life requires time to tie up the practical details, deliver final messages, bid farewells, and savor all the myriad “last times:”

Last birthday or bike ride, vacation or dance.

Last scent of fresh rain.

Last kiss of a beloved.

Last pang.

Last breath.

These moments are essential.  Validating.  Sacred.  They’re like rare, sparkling jewels scattered through a gathering dusk, and their aching sweetness is life multiplying itself a thousandfold as it picks up speed.

Yes, definitely–receiving the news that we’re going to die is a blow like no other, and trust me, delivering the message sucks, too.  But the alternative…to strip a person of their opportunity to gaze around in final wonder, to direct them instead to keep their head down and keep running, running, running on some exhausting, futile wheel of cure-seeking or worse, allowing them to die bewildered, panicked, or lost…is to strip them of life’s final and greatest miracle.

It’s selfish.

Now.  Having said all that, there’s one situation where it’s advisable not to inform someone they’re dying, even if they say they want to know.  It’s when they’re suffering from short term memory loss.  Whether the damage sources from dementia, brain injury, alcoholism, or pharmaceutical side-effect doesn’t really matter.  The effect is still the same.  Each time they hear it, it’s like hearing it for the first time all over again.

Personally, I think people in this situation should still be told initially, even though they’ll probably forget.  But telling them repeatedly would be kind of cruel.

Nobody needs that.

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

(The graphic above is by scottchan and, like many of the photos I use here, I found it on the terrific open source website: FreeDigitalPhotos.net.)

Learning How Not To Be Violent

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

With the vandalism and violence of so many (primarily) young men in London, I’ve naturally been thinking about our youth in general; how we’re supposed to teach them to behave in a civilized way, and what it looks like when we fail.

It made me think of a small incident I overheard last week.  There are three small children who live next door and, since they’re home-schooled, I often hear them playing in their backyard during “recess” while I’m working in the garden.  The youngest is three years old (with the shriek of a banshee) and, listening to an exchange she had with an older sister, it forcibly struck me,

1) just how not-civilized we are to start with, and

2) how grueling it is to train us to try and cooperate and respect the rules instead.

Only not in the way you’d first expect.

Third Child has reached the stage where she understands the basic rules of cooperation: Thou shalt not hit or call names or take anything by force, Thou shalt talk instead of scream, and Thou shalt use your words to try and work it out with your sisters before tattle-taling to mommy.  So when her older sister tried to pull a fast one and tell her that, no, no, no, you pick up the dog poop, Third Child understood that she had to raise her verbal fists and talk about it before resorting to other options.

Noooooo!!  We have to take turns!  We’re supposed to take turns!

I know…and it’s your turn.  (With age comes cunning.)

No it’s not!  It’s your turn! (Youth was not gullible.)  We have to take turns!  You have to take turns!!

Okay.  I’ll do it later.  (Age doubled back to try and throw her off the scent.)

No!  Nooooo!!  It’s your turn!!  You have to do it now!!  We have to take turns!!  We have to take TURNS!!!

By this time, Third Child had reached the limits of a three-year old’s self-control and her volume was climbing accordingly.  Older sister, realizing that mommy was likely to hear, finally capitulated and went off grumbling to pick up the poop while Third Child breathed raggedly for a minute or so, trying to de-escalate her emotions.

By this time I’d stopped what I was doing on the other side of the fence and was just standing there, fascinated and floored.  Third Child’s performance was absolutely amazing to me.  The discipline and effort she displayed in her attempt to deal with the problem in a civilized fashion (the above version is actually abbreviated–in reality she must have repeated We have to take turns! twenty or thirty times before she finally started to lose it) was really, truly impressive.

And, not to take away from Third Child’s achievement in any way, but I also instantly recognized the amount of mind-numbing, soul-sucking time, patience, and repetition required on her parents’ part, to get her to the point where she finally internalized the rule she kept repeating. Children don’t learn something as complex as what it means to be civilized from just telling them to do it once.  Either do adolescents or adults for that matter.  It’s the kind of thing we all need to hear over and over again, to observe by example in the behavior of others around us over and over again, to practice for ourselves–making lots of initial mistakes while being patiently corrected–over and over again, before it can finally be internalized as a first response.

And even after all that, it still needs to be continually reinforced or we’ll eventually slide back into the powerful impulses of our more primitive selves.

I look at the lawless, uncontrolled, destruction and violence of the last few days and can’t help but wonder how this happened?  Clearly, the young men participating aren’t behaving in a civilized way, but why not?  Where did the grueling training required for them to learn how to do so not materialize?  Didn’t they have someone to teach them when they were small?  Or didn’t they have enough role models showing them what it looks like along the way?  Or didn’t they have anyone who cared enough to patiently correct them, over and over again, when they inevitably made mistakes along the way?

In other words, in a civilized society, how in the world did so many of our young citizens reach manhood without learning the fundamental tenets of what it means to be civilized?

I firmly believe that those who have done harm should be held accountable for what they’ve done.  Justice and fairness are essential components of successful cooperation.  But I also think that, as a society, it’s possible we’ve all been negligent, and we should also hold ourselves accountable for that.  It looks like the majority of the damage has been done by disadvantaged young men, with few or no opportunities available to better their condition, and I don’t think it’ll surprise anyone when I mention that the hopelessness and anger of grinding poverty has always had a de-civilizing, de-stabilizing effect.

I also can’t help but notice that, worldwide, it’s been the most vulnerable populations bearing the vastly disproportionate burden of the downturn.  Which begs the question; are the rest of us playing the role of the older sister here?  Are we shirking our duties and trying to make the least powerful among us pick up all the poop?

I don’t know what the answers are to these questions…they’re far too many and too complex for simple explanations.  But I do know this: Each of us can, ourselves, strive to behave in a more civilized manner towards others.  Even if they’re not.  Those of us who did learn the rules of civilized behavior can stand in as the desperately needed role models for others who didn’t, or for those who have just temporarily forgotten and need a reminder.

Third Child actually stood in as a role model for her older sister, with great success.  Maybe we can all try to be more like her in our thoughts, words, and deeds.  We can refrain from hitting, calling names, or using force, we can try talking instead of yelling and, if there’s a problem, we can try to communicate directly instead of just blaming, belittling, or otherwise lashing out.

Violence has a capacity to spread, but then so does respect.  Acting with discipline and emotional restraint in the face of injustice is always hard, but if a three-year old can do it, surely…surely…the rest of us can at least try.

Learning How To Get Along

copyright 2011 Dia Osborn

Planking: The Organization of Random Humor

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

Planking, otherwise known as “The lying down game”, has evidently been around for a while but I just learned about it.  It’s totally absurd (a guaranteed hit with me) and involves lying down on one’s face in random, incongruous, often public places, and then holding a prescribed, rigid position with arms pressed against one’s sides, legs and torso stiff and straight, and fingers and toes pointed.

All very crisp and gymnastic, with just a hint of narcolepsy.

Eventually, players started taking pictures and posting them on Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and blogs, after which the game evolved into an internet fad.  A competitive element crept in…participants attempting to one-up each other with increasingly creative choices in locale, composition, theme, and scale of danger…which inevitably led to a couple of arrests and at least one tragic death.

Overall though, it’s another splendid example of the new, broad-based, spontaneous organizational power of the internet, a phenomenon that fascinates me.  (Think Arab Spring and flash mobs.)  There’s something about the way this group-mind communication spreads that vaguely reminds me of those huge flocks of birds all flying in unison, or the big schools of fish which turn and flash simultaneously.  I wonder if we humans are wired with a latent gene, too, directing us to coordinate and move together across vast numbers, but it wasn’t until the internet came along that this gene could finally “turn on.”

In any case, the comedy in play with this game is a mix of farce, slapstick, and nonsensism.  (Yes, there really is such a thing.  Look it up.)  And me?  I just call it delightful.

Here are a few of my favorite examples set to “One potato, Two potato…”  Enjoy.

One plank:

Two plank:

Three plank:

Four:


Beer plank:

Wedding plank:

Fast food:

More:

Pole plank:

Fridge plank:

Chopper plank:

Nude:

Sand plank:

Water plank:

Air plank:

Food:

Still haven’t had enough?  Well, just a few more then.  (But after this you’ll have to go to bestplanking.com for satisfaction.)

Here’s the “For godsakes let’s keep a sense of humor men…” plank:

A couple of dead-pan bactrian comedians getting in on the game:

My arch enemy (oh if only…):

And an imaginative, not to mention bath-averse, dog:

Last but not least, here’s something from the country that came up with the fabulous name, Planking. It’s a newscast from Australia with a report on the phenomenon.  Those Aussies…I tell ya.  I really, really love their sense of humor.

(Planking has a Facebook page and a Wikipedia site.  People post their planking photos just about anywhere on the web and then various websites compile “best of’s”.  These particular photos came from Geekosystem’s The 65 Best Planking Pictures From Around the World.) 

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Accidental Photo II

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

Something happened yesterday around sunset that I hadn’t seen before.  For about one minute:thirty-five, the last rays of the sun peeked out from under tumultuous, massed storm clouds and found a sliver of pathway between the branches of three big trees, around the patio roof, and through a major tangle of wisteria to actually make it in our kitchen window.  The light was golden, dramatic, and lit up two vases sitting in the window like luminaries.  And…in a complete fluke…I had my camera to hand.  I took a dozen shots or so and this was at the peak of the light:

Hardly prize winning but it caught the effect so I was happy.  It also, funnily enough, turned out be another accidental photo.  I was only aiming for the vases but wound up capturing an entire series of worlds that I hadn’t seen when I first snapped the shot.  I mean, look at them all.  There’s…

1) the outside, distant garden,

2) the illuminated, inner world of the vases,

3) the invisible realm of glass separating the two (you can only see it by the ghostly reflections it casts),

4) the world of shadows at the bottom right, where the silhouette person lives, and then

5) the dark abyss just under the shelf.

There are more than five of course, (like the neighbor’s world through those darkened windows in the upper, right hand corner) but you get the gist. Without the camera I only perceived a single world with the vases as its dominant focal point.  All the other unique, fascinating worlds present were reduced to background noise, like visual mall music.  It took the camera to give me the time and mental shift necessary to see the rest.

I realize our brains are designed to take the overwhelming barrage of sensory detail that batters us at every moment, and filter it down to just one or two things that we can actually focus on.  And this ability is a good thing.  I understand that.  Without it we’d all have Asperger’s.

But it also means that this seemingly solid, worthy, dependable world we put so much stock in is actually made up of layers upon layers of different realities, entire alternate worlds in fact, most of which we completely miss, all the time.  Our perception of everything around us isn’t even real.

Or no…it’s real enough taken by itself I guess, but it’s only a teeny tiny sliver of what’s really real.

It’s like what the poor sun had to do to itself to make it all the way inside our kitchen window: Reduce an entire star’s massive energy field–immense enough to warm and light an entire solar system–into a low spectrum sunbeam, roughly 2 foot by 3 foot, that only lasted for a minute and a half. Talk about partial.

Having said all that though, still.  The illuminated vases were very…very…cool, and I guess that’s enough.  Sometimes, the slivers alone will knock your socks off.

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

A Huge Life In A Tiny Box

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

(Sorry for the blur but this is the only picture anyone thought to take.)

A couple weekends ago we drove down to the little town in Nevada from whence my people come and buried a small box in the cemetery there.  It contained a variety of things; a seashell, photos, an old, scribbled note in a silver-plated box with blue velvet lining, a thank you card, a George Washington $1 coin from the U.S. mint presidential series, a Chinese coin, pictures of two Hindu saints, downy feathers, a secret bundle, and a handful of ashes from my mother who died over two years ago.

Some of these things belonged to her and others were things we thought she should have.  The seashell and feathers–because she adored the ocean and migrating birds.  The Hindu saints–because they guided her in life, so how much more important that they be there with her afterward?  The secret bundle–from a secret person for secret reasons known only to them.  And the ashes because they were a last, little part of her that we could come and visit whenever we felt the need.

The old note, I found a couple months after she died.  It was a short list of prayers folded up inside the silver box and stashed with her jewelry, dating from about a year before she died.  The prayers were written in this order:

1)  For an improvement in her health (which clearly didn’t work out so well).

2)  For ten million dollars invested in a trust yielding 8% a year (also a no-go). 

3)  For greater clarity (yes!…she was having amazing breakthroughs and insights during her last months).  And,

4)  A last, loving wish for enlightenment and peace for the whole world. This was the one that made me cry.  It was so like her, my mother, forever toting the world around with her in her bottomless basket of good wishes.

I spent days before leaving for Nevada sifting through the mementos of her life again–through all the deep, swirling emotions they resurrected–looking for the right pieces to place inside the box.  Because my mother believed in reincarnation I carefully tucked in the list…just in case prayers carry over from one life to the next.  The coins went in for murkier reasons even I don’t entirely understand; maybe as a token for the wealth she craved, or as an irrational but oh-so-necessary payment to the Boatman for safe passage, or perhaps just because they were made out of metal and would still be there long after the box itself decomposed.

Six of us came to sit around that small, square hole in the ground, drinking water and wine, soaking up the sun and wind, toasting her memory and telling her stories.  We had a folding chair for each of us and an extra one where we set the box.  We occasionally grew raucous, sprinkling wine over it after a toast, because sometimes remembering in the midst of great loss can just do that to you.

Before we placed the box down in the hole, I opened it one last time so we could have a look inside.  The wind rustled the downy feathers and then blew one out, whisking it over the hillside below us.  It floated above the headstones…more like a butterfly really, than the bird it came from…before finally rising higher, then higher, then higher into the sky.  We all stood transfixed and staring, following its lovely escape in surprised silence, but the same thought was in each of our minds.

Look!  Look! There she goes!

Afterwards we took handfuls of dirt, one by one, and threw them into the hole to cover the box, and with each handful we cried or laughed or were momentarily still…throwing our prayers down for her, too, along with the love of others who couldn’t be there.  With the first handful, grief overwhelmed me and I sobbed on my knees, unconsciously dragging my dirty hand across my forehead and cheeks.  I had no idea why I was doing it except that the grit across my skin felt welcome and good; raw and sharp enough to match the scraping of the wound inside me.

It was the leading edge of a brief but wild storm, and once it passed I felt calmer and lighter for it.  Cleansed and good.  Eventually we finished and, after replacing the small square of turf over the loose dirt, we packed up our things and traipsed off to the city park to eat a small picnic and finish the wine.

I like to think of that small box now, pressed down by the weight of dark, moist earth and already starting to decay, its cache of love and prayer, life and joy, seeping out into the ground like something with a half-life of ten thousand years.  It never ceases to amaze me, how relentless this great current of Life is that flows through us, spilling down from one generation to the next like a perpetual champagne fountain, as if we were ever-widening tiers of crystal flutes constantly filling and spilling simultaneously.

My mother is gone but the huge gifts of her life are still washing down through the bewildering number of other lives she altered just by existing here for a while.  They’re inside all of us who loved her and passing on into all those we love in our turn–inside everything she touched and every place she passed through.

And as of a couple weekends ago those gifts are now inside that tiny box, too, buried up in the high desert mountains where they will be leaking their grace for generations to come.

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

The Danger of Blowholes

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

This photo was taken moments before the man behind the water spray was sucked down a blowhole on Maui last week:

Photo from the article in the Daily Mail.

Sadly, he only came back up to the surface once before being dragged under again and disappearing for good.  At the time the article was written, his body had still not been found.

It’s an odd way to go, death by blowhole, but that’s not what grabbed me.  My eldest brother was also sucked down a blowhole, decades ago now, also in Hawaii only on Oahu, not Maui.  It was during a high surf alert generated by an earthquake on the Asian side of the Pacific rim and, as soon as they heard about it, Bro (an occasionally professional surfer), his girlfriend, and another surfer friend drove up to Waimea Bay to check out the waves.

They weren’t going there to surf.  The waves were coming in around thirty feet and big wave surfing wasn’t yet as popular as it is today.  No. They were just heading up to watch, because waves that big are a rare phenomenon and, like solar eclipses, tornadoes, and eagles mating, sightings are a privilege and opportunities shouldn’t be wasted.

The three were standing up on the cliffs overlooking the bay, admiring the monster surf, when they first noticed it.  Huge spray coming out of a blowhole none of them had ever seen before.  It clearly had a long tunnel, starting down in the bay and running all the way up through the rock to its exit farther out on the point, and no one had noticed it before because it was inactive in smaller water.  It took seismically generated waves to finally send water all the way up and out the top, and Bro and company were understandably excited by the discovery.  They wandered out to take a closer look.

Now understand, these were experienced island people.  They knew about blowholes.  They understood how strong and deadly water that only reaches up to your ankles can be.  But somehow, in spite of keeping what they thought was a safe distance, the wash coming out of the hole suddenly snaked across the cliff, wrapped around Bro’s feet, whipped them out from under him, and sucked him struggling and clawing back to the mouth of the hole, over the edge, and down inside it.  Just like that.  Blink of an eye.

The Hawaiian Akua are known to be mischievous.

He had just enough time before going under to grab a lungful of air and, because he was a surfer and accustomed to spending long periods of time held under by powerful waves, his lungs could hold a lot.  He began the descent and traveled deeper and deeper down the wormhole, with no idea where it would come out or even if it would remain large enough to allow his passage all the way through.  What he did know was a long, narrow, hurtling slide down through water, rock, and darkness, with a steadily growing pressure in his chest as his air started to run out.

Finally, as he was beginning to think he might not make it, he felt himself whoosh out the bottom of the tunnel into open water. He immediately struck for the surface and when he broke into open air, found he was so far out in the bay he was actually past the surf line.

Needless to say, Bro’s girlfriend and friend were freaking out back on the cliff, and they failed to spot him where he came up because they were looking closer to shore.  But eventually someone sighted him and called the Coast Guard who quickly launched a rescue.  I’m delighted to tell you that my brother survived to tell the tale.  Because he was a strong swimmer, and because he didn’t lose his head, and because our Aumakua were protecting him, and because…well…it just wasn’t his day to die.

Working with hospice is about working with those who die slowly, navigating the process as it gradually unfolds, step by step, over a period of time.  Sudden death is different.  When a person dies abruptly the laws that govern the dying process are moving so fast that it becomes impossible to see the underlying physiological sequence in action.  It’s still taking place mind you.  Every physical body has to go through a shutting down process on it’s way to death.  But while a wasting disease takes us through those stages one at a time, sudden death strikes every point along the sequence simultaneously.

Why is this important?  Because even though these stages of the dying process are the only part we have any control over, we leverage this control into an illusion that we actually have some power over death itself. (We can save lives!  We can!!)  But when a sudden death comes along and collapses the various stages into a singular, catastrophic event which is beyond our ability to influence, then our illusion of control over death is instantly vaporized.

Poof.

The shock of this is absolutely terrifying.  As a people we are very, very, committed to both our denial of death and our illusion of power over it. Pretending like we can somehow conquer it by throwing billions and trillions of dollars into ever-escalating research, treatment, surgeries, medical insurance, regulations, legislation, screenings, hospitals, and drugs has become one of…if not the…central tenet of our modern society.  The pursuit of this illusion has actually now taken over the bulk of our economy.  It’s consuming more and more of the healthy parts of our individual lives.  It’s really, truly massive.

Which is, of course, what makes those moments when the illusion shatters so horrifying.

While medical/technological advances are granting us a greater level of confidence and control than we’ve ever known before, that control is not…and never has been…over death.  It’s over time.  Yet we constantly forget this.

What I’m trying to say here is that dying is negotiable, but death is destiny.  When it’s time to die, it’s just time, whether it’s at the end of a long illness or on the lip of a blowhole.  I realize that saying something like this sounds superstitious in a society that prizes rational thinking, analysis, and control as much as ours does, but only as long as we’re speaking in today’s relatively young scientific language.  In other, older languages this understanding of death as destiny is common.

Try talking to soldiers who’ve seen active duty on the battlefield, or emergency room personnel working long shifts in busy, urban hospitals, or 8,000 meter mountain climbers who’ve seen a lot of companions die climbing, or morticians, or clergy who work with the bereaved, or anyone else who’s been around it a lot and gained an intimate knowledge of the mechanics of sudden death.  They’ll say pretty much the same thing I am; while devastating to watch, the experience also grants one an expanded perspective of reality, an aching grasp of the limits of life, and a deeper understanding of mystery, than all the long, hallowed hallways of science strung together will ever be able to deliver.

To close, here’s an outrageous video from Neptune Surfing.  It was evidently taken at Waimea Bay in 2009 during a storm surge that was creating more monster waves.  Yeah, baby.

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Hospice in Louisiana Prison is Decreasing Levels of Violence

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

Photo from the award-winning photographic documentary Grace Before Dying

What transformed the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, one of the most violent prisons in the South, into “…one of the least violent maximum security institutions in the United States”?

A hospice program.

If you get a chance, check out this website that Linda over at What Comes Next? turned me onto.  It’s called Grace Before Dying and is inspiring (which is saying a lot with all the turbulence in the world right now) and is about the photographic documentary by Lori Waselchuk that chronicles the prisoner-run hospice program at Angola State Penitentiary, Louisiana’s maximum-security prison.  Evidently, a life sentence in Angola means both life and death.  85% of the roughly 5100 inmates die there and, up until the hospice program was started in 1998, that meant dying alone in the prison hospital.  But now they have a hospice ward where the terminally ill inmates are transferred, and once there the dying are tended almost entirely by inmate volunteers who are serving life sentences themselves.

It seems to be this most basic act of simple humanity that’s transforming the prison population…which comes as no surprise to me.  Tending the dying in hospice transformed me, too.  It transforms everyone who does it.  From the website:

“The hospice volunteers’ efforts to create a tone of reverence for the dying and the dead have touched the entire prison population.”

Frankly, the prison system we’ve set up in this country has always puzzled me.  I’ve never been able to figure out just what, exactly, we’re trying to accomplish.  The focus on isolation and torture (because really, I don’t think you can call what happens in these hell-holes simple punishment) and then release for godsakes, strikes me as short-sighted.  It’s like capturing a dog doing damage near a downtown cafe, locking it up in a small cage, systematically brutalizing it for five years, then taking it back to the same sidewalk cafe, telling it to behave, and turning it loose again.

What do we expect?  Lassie?

In this country, we’ve coupled justice with revenge and their offspring have been multiplying for years now.  Our prison populations have swelled to the point where they’re wreaking havoc with both our public safety and economic stability, (look at what California’s currently dealing with.)  Doesn’t it seem like now might be a good time to consider trying something different?

Well, some prisons are.  There’s a growing trend to team with animal shelters, allowing inmates to help care for and train abandoned and/or abused dogs.  Another program in Mississippi called PACT partners inmates with abused horses.  Like hospices in Angola and other prisons, these programs structure relationships for the inmates that cultivate bonding, vulnerability, kindness, responsibility, and empathy, all qualities that naturally deepen our innate humanity.

Like tends to beget like.  Cruelty begets cruelty and inhumanity begets inhumanity.  If we really want to create a better, safer, kinder world, then we should probably be trying to foster everyone’s humanity, not destroy it.  By instituting a hospice program, the prisoners at Angola have been given the opportunity to foster theirs.

Dying is generally regarded as the ultimate destructive force…and it is.  I would never argue with that.  But what most people don’t understand (yet) is that it also has a profound ability to heal.  Everyone acknowledges that a “good death” is important for the person who’s actually dying but it goes much farther than that; a good death is also critical for the well-being of those left behind.  A bad death creates scars, the tentacles of which usually spread far and deep through the lives of survivors, and it embeds a terror of the future that eventually infects everything.  Everything.

A good death, on the other hand, tends to nourish our compassion, deepen our humanity, expand our understanding of life, and lift us out of that underlying sense of loneliness and individual isolation that defines so much of modern life; all things that ultimately serve to ease this fear of the future rather than aggravate it.

To close I’d like to leave you with this last quote from the website:

“The hospice volunteers must go through a difficult process to bury their own regrets and fears, and unearth their capacity to love. Grace Before Dying looks at how, through hospice, inmates assert and affirm their humanity in an environment designed to isolate and punish.”

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Where the Natural and Human Worlds Meet

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

Okay.  As a wild thing myself, I’m an unreserved, unabashed lover of the natural world.  Always have been.  Since my earliest memories (and even before that according to my mother) I’ve gone to the trees, the rocks, and the waters…the storms and the stars…whenever I was confused or unraveling.  I’m not sure why exactly.  It’s just where I felt better.

My relationship with the human world, however, has been more complicated.  Initially, I was pretty enthusiastic about us.  But then hard things happened and I went through a middle phase, struggling with some disillusionment and bitterness before finally, during the hospice years, finding my way back to a vision of people that’s good.

Again…I have so much to be grateful for, to the dying who let me be with them.

Then this morning, I watched a trailer for BBC One Human Planet (I know, it’s been out forever and you’ve probably seen it already but still, wow.  I mean really, wow…) and visually it seemed to pull together the love I now hold for both worlds in one beautiful, jaw-dropping, mosaic of cinematography.

Which is a powerful…not to mention valuable…thing to do.  I don’t think I’m the only one that views the human and natural worlds as distinct.  First, the industrial age and next, the technological/information one have been terrific for shielding us from the cosmic brunt of natural forces, but in the process they’ve separated us from them, too.

Modern homes are now designed to cut us off as much as possible from fluctuations in just about everything–temperature, wind, light, smells, noise, wildlife, microbes, radiation, crime, neighbors–while our cars strive to prevent us from feeling like we’re even touching the ground.  Somewhere along the line we all agreed on what was the safest, most comfortable environment, and then we built it into everywhere we were likely to spend time; homes, office buildings, vehicles, planes, ships, hotels, malls, banks, airports, restaurants so that, if we wanted to, we could now live sans contact with most of the natural world, most of the time.  And some people do.  Did you know that roughly 80% of people in the U.S. have never seen the Milky Way?

We’ve come so far and so much of its good.  But even so, sometimes I feel like I’m living in a pillow.  It’s wonderful and amazing and safe, for sure, but it also feels like I can’t get quite enough air.

This trailer captures glimpses of some of the non-pillow people all over the world–wild people still living in wild places.  The ones who haven’t been separated into our modern, second world yet.  They’re still creating a lot of their miracles without technology…and I forgot how inspiring and amazing those kinds of miracles are, too.  With as hard as their lives must be in some ways, I’ll bet at least they have plenty of air to breathe, every day.  I wish there was some way to weave these two worlds together again.  It’s hard always feeling like I have to make a choice.

The video is 3:20 minutes long but you’d never know it.  And please…you have to watch it full screen.  (In the name of all that’s good and right, you have to.)  For those who don’t know what that means, look down in the bottom right hand corner of the video box below and click the four arrows pointing in different directions.   The video box will expand to fill your entire computer screen.  Then just buckle your seat belt, click play, and you’re good to go.  Oh…and if you want to see the actual series, I found the DVDs on Netflix.  I imagine they might be available other places as well.

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Saving Valentina

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

And finally…on this blog devoted to talking about dying…here’s a story of something that didn’t die.  This big, beautiful girl came very close but was ultimately saved from drowning by a handful of people (who took a huge risk in doing so I might add.)

On Valentine’s Day earlier this year in the Sea of Cortes down in Mexico, Michael Fishbach was in a small boat with his family and a couple of friends when they came upon a young, humpback whale severely entangled in fisherman’s netting.  At first she appeared to be dead.  But then they saw her exhale and realized she was exhausted and frightened but still alive.  Her tail was weighted down about fifteen feet by all the fishing gear, both pectoral fins were pinned to her sides, and the net went up over her back forward of the dorsal fin.  I can only imagine the thrashing and rolling she must have initially executed in her attempts to get clear of the net that led to so severe an entanglement, or the terror she must have experienced as it tightened around her.

At this point they had to decide whether they were going to watch helplessly as she slowly drowned or try and help her.  Amazingly, as you’ll see in the video, Michael slipped on his snorkel, grabbed the one small knife they had in the boat, and swam slowly over to where she was floating to assess the situation.

At this point in the video I heard a weighty, entangling, and suffocating voice in my own head begin it’s droning about how stupid and dangerous it was for him to even try, but then the girl with wild hair inside me who adores the sea slipped past and ran to the edge of the boat, pumping her hand in the air and cheering Michael on.

Because sometimes safety just isn’t the most important thing.

What follows over the next few hours is a series of courageous attempts and lucky accidents that lead to the saving of a gigantic, and unspeakably precious, young life.  There were so many things that could have gone wrong, things that would have made the situation far more tragic than it already was.  But surprisingly, none of those things happened which confirms yet again what my grey and grizzled father–career warrior, survivor of three major wars, and witness to countless weird and miraculous events on the battlefield–has always told me:

Dia, if it’s your time to die then it’s your time to die, and nothing can save you.  But if it’s not your time to die then it’s just not, and nothing…nothing…can kill you.

Clearly, it wasn’t anybody’s time to die in the Sea of Cortez last Valentine’s Day.

Here’s the video, Saving Valentina, if you get the chance.

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Going Light

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

John Grey, a thoughtful and entertaining blogger/smallholder over at Going Gently, mentioned in a recent post that “going light” is a Welsh phrase for the accelerated wasting process that happens during the last days and hours of dying.  During this time it often looks like they’re starting to disappear right before your eyes.

The phrase really struck me, not just because it’s the loveliest way of describing this transition I’ve ever heard, but because it’s also the most accurate.  That’s exactly what the rapid changes look and feel like with both the body and spirit of someone who’s dying.

I’m going light now, Ma.  I’m going light.

Beautiful.

(Image: dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

“The Good Short Life”

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

The New York Times ran a great opinion article by Dudley Clendinen last Sunday called The Good Short Life.  Great title.  It’s about just what it sounds like.

Mr. Clendinen has A.L.S., the best known of the motor neuron diseases which are generally held to be one of the most difficult ways to die.  It involves a gradual shutting down of the involuntary nervous system which, when left to its own devices, leads to a very, very slow suffocation.  The disease takes years to play out and is beyond horrible.

In the article he talks freely, openly, and gracefully about the good and bad involved with dying…and I love him for it.  He’s refusing to disappear into that cloud of gray mist where we so often relegate our dying–that place where we don’t have to see them or deal with them or think about what they’re going through.  Instead he’s speaking up (or writing up in this case), doing his part to maintain a normal, ongoing, comfortable chat about the whole thing.  About dying, that one other universal reality besides being born and drawing breath that we all have in common.

The article is two pages and worth a read.

He broaches a number of controversial topics including the overwhelming costs involved with long term medical care for a condition such as his and the moral question of who’s going to pay for those costs (…the respirator and the staff and support system necessary to maintain me will easily cost half a million dollars a year. Whose half a million, I don’t know…)  He also talks about the choice he’ll have to make about when he’ll die because that’s something those with a motor neuron disease always face; when to fight it, when to manage it, and finally how to either surrender or escape it, whether through the blessing of pneumonia or other infectious disease or a method more proactive.

Of course these are extremely loaded subjects to address, ones which tend to invoke some very strong emotions in people, but that doesn’t mean we don’t still need to talk about them.  Our medical system has advanced to the point where most of us are eventually going to have to face the same kind of choice as Mr. Clendinen.  A lot of people don’t understand this yet but most of us won’t just die anymore.  Medical advances have made it possible to sustain the barest physical functioning for indefinite lengths of time, usually far, far longer than anyone desires.  This means that sooner or later someone has to actively, consciously decide that we’re going to die.  Either we decide to forgo further treatments, our loved ones decide to withdraw life sustaining measures, or somebody else decides they’re not going to pay for it or provide us care anymore.

This is the darker underbelly–the turbulent, terrifying, whitewater rapids–we’ve created with our brilliant, modern, technological capabilities.  For better or worse, these are the kinds of choices that now go with the territory and we are all going to have to learn how to navigate them.  There’s no such thing as a gift–however miraculous, however blessed–that isn’t also accompanied by a burden of responsibility.  In this case we now need to learn how to bear the burden of miraculous choices.

Not everyone will agree with the particular choices Mr. Clarinden eventually makes–which is fine, everyone doesn’t have to–but we can all benefit from studying the way he’s willing to talk about them.  Each of us, when faced with the unique circumstances of our own dying time, is going to have equally difficult choices to make, and simply knowing how to talk about them with our doctors and loved ones will make them far easier for everyone to navigate.

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Going To Jail For Growing Veggies? What next?

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

Update 8/13/11:  Evidently, media attention and public opinion does have influence on a city’s prosecutorial discretion.  Following the international outcry stirred up by Ms. Bass’s blog and Facebook page, “Last month, City Prosecutor Eugene Lumberg dismissed the garden charges.”  Article from the Detroit News.  Good for the city of Oak Park.  I’m happy to see they could be reasonable. 

Bureaucracies are hardly famous for their flexibility and here’s a glowing example straight from the annals of the absurd:

Oak Park, Michigan Resident Julie Bass Faces 93 Days In Jail For Vegetable Garden

Evidently, Ms. Bass is being actively prosecuted for the crime of growing a vegetable patch in her front yard.  Not pot, mind you.  Not opium.  Not noxious weeds.  Her house isn’t sporting a dead lawn that she can’t afford to water.  She hasn’t piled up a rusting heap of garbage and she’s not parking her car in some rutted, dried mud just over the curb.  The woman is growing food, in attractive raised beds no less, but officials are digging in because veggies don’t conform to the city ordinance.  From The Huffington Post article;

“According to a local ABC affiliate, city code states that “all unpaved portions of the site shall be planted with grass or ground cover or shrubbery or other suitable live plant material.”

Now clearly, there’s a lot of wiggle room here.  “Suitable live plant material” is about as ambiguous as it gets but officials have nevertheless decided to take a hard line.  They want Ms. Bass’s yard to look like how other yards “commonly” (read traditionally) look.  They want grass, they want shrubs, and they want flowers.  Not this:

Julie Bass has taken her battle online, and now news outlets are picking up the story.  I’ve nosed around a little and am pretty sure that, with the widespread outrage brewing over the incident, the city of Oak Park has a PR nightmare on its hands.

Shall we count all the ways that pressing charges in this case is stupid, if not outright offensive?

1)  With food costs soaring, home vegetable gardens are now very common.

2)  With a growing concern about food safety, home vegetable gardens are now very common.

3)  With the growing obesity epidemic, growing a home vegetable garden is being encouraged at the highest levels of government.

4)  The White House has a vegetable patch in the middle of it’s lawn for godsakes.

5)  At a time when cities, counties, states, and federal governments are shutting down essential services and affected citizens are experiencing genuine suffering, wasting taxpayer money on a frivolous prosecution like this is repugnant.

6)  This prosecution diverts desperately needed resources away from real criminal activity.

7)  It limits the amount of land a family hit by the recession can utilize for growing food.

8)  With food stamp use at it’s highest rate in history, (think escalating budget deficit) being willing to prosecute someone for growing their own food actually creates a skewed incentive favoring food stamps over food production.

9)  Fill in the blank with your own favorite: ___________________________________

Oak Park officials?  Please.  Cultivate a little openess here.  Home gardens as a national activity have returned, and you need to incorporate that reality into your system of governance.  I suspect the city code you’re working off of was originally intended to protect the property values of your homeowners and that’s certainly a worthy goal.  Nobody wants to drive around their city and have it look like shit.  But if you think outside the box, I’m sure you can find a way to adapt your ordinance that would ensure any home garden sited in a front yard still meets required aesthetic standards.  That would preserve the original purpose of the code while allowing for the changing needs of a community struggling through difficult and changing times.

In the meantime, if anyone is interested in helping Ms. Bass out with her mounting legal fees, you can make a donation here: https://bitly.com/pPsDbe

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

Crisis in Paris: How Modern Telecommunication Technologies Saved The Day

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

Remember this?  Anyone?  Anyone?

(image by Stromcarlson)

Our daughter is in Europe as part of her post-college graduation celebration.  Should be wonderful, no?  Well, we all thought so during the six months of planning involved, but unfortunately the trip hit the rocks on the three-stage plane ride to Spain.

Beautiful Child of our Hearts planned all along to travel with a good friend who has a mild anxiety disorder.  This didn’t seem to pose a problem because, up until boarding the plane, Friend had always managed it successfully with meds.  However, all that changed with the prospect of hurtling approximately 12,000 miles through the sky in a giant toothpaste tube.  In spite of everything her pharmaceutical interventions had to offer, Friend still collapsed and wound up crying for the almost seventeen hours it took to get to Madrid.  Things were somewhat better on land, but by the time the two of them limped into Paris, Friend was experiencing a full-blown meltdown.  It was at this point we received the phone call alerting us to the fact that we now had a mental health/medical crisis on our hands.

Enter:  The godsend of modern telecommunication technologies.

I don’t remember now the exact sequence involved, but at the crescendo of the next three hours of crisis management we had myself in Boise, my sister in Seville, my wife-in-law in southern California, my nephew in southern France, Friend’s (frantic) father somewhere else here in Idaho, an airline phone representative who was God only knows where in the world, and of course our two, inexperienced travelers in a tiny, internet cafe/closet in Paris, all tied together by an intricate web of technology, working on the common goal of getting this fragile, at-risk, woman-child safely home.

Even in the midst of the major stress involved I was struck by how amazing it was; the bewildering complexity of communication taking place.  This was so not the world I grew up in.

We utilized telecommunications capabilities provided by Skype, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, Telefónica, France Telecom, a couple of land-line phone providers, and whoever the telecommunications company is in Estonia.  There was a staggering array of computer and hand-held device makers involved as we all furiously worked online; talking to the girls, researching various train schedules and flight options, and firing notes and links off to one another through email and instant messaging capabilities.

Now, I’ve seen all the commercials.  I know that what we were doing barely scratched the surface of the mind-boggling communication possibilities available in today’s world.  But it was still amazing and miraculous and wonder-filled to me.  Twenty-seven years ago when I made my first trip to Europe, the only way to communicate en-route was with collect calls on an ancient system of randomly placed pay phones. Today’s situation would have been far more difficult (and terrifying) to negotiate back then.

My father-in-law regularly bemoans the way technology is taking over the world.  He feels that it’s gobbling up increasingly large chunks of our lives, smothering so many of the old pleasures that used to nourish our hearts and minds.  He thinks people should spend less time in front of a screen and instead get out in nature more, talk to each other more, read and attend lectures and go dancing more.  And he’s not wrong.  One of the modern disciplines we all need to develop is getting up out of the chair and walking away of our own volition.

That said, my daughter and her friend would have been in a lot more trouble than they were without all the advantages that have also come to us through technological developments.  There’s an old proverb that says something like Everything is both a blessing and a curse.  I think it’s always our job to reap the blessings while keeping an eagle eye out for the curses.

Long story short, together we found a way to get Friend onto a plane, out of Paris and…a mere twenty hours or so later…safely back home again.  Beautiful Child stayed behind in Paris, a little scared but stubbornly determined to see the city of her dreams anyway.  But finally, a bad case of bed bugs drove her out of the hostel in France and down to her aunt’s house in Seville for help with the infestation.  (A whole ‘nother episode of fiasco that deserves it’s own post.)  C’est la vie, no?

copyright Dia Osborn 2011