Friends

Sometimes earthquakes throw people into each other's laps and a friendship is formed. Such was the case of the 89 quake that hit the World Series and the city of San Francisco, shaking up Kate so badly that she fled to the Iowa cornfields where it was safe. At least that was the hope, that was the motive, but when she called me and said "Help!" - that was the moment that the falling into laps had arrived, the moment when somehow I managed to give her permission to dance and I discovered the deep soul and brilliance of someone who had been prior to that moment, only an acquaintance. Now she was a sister, folded into my heart in such a way that even chaos, craziness, manic-depression, bipolar - any sort of diagnosis could not override or supersede the baseline truth. While on the surface that was all there, the truth I saw and knew about Kate existed on another level.


What happens when two fiery, cynical, slightly bitter, angry and otherwise good people choose to be friends? Well, it could be pretty short-lived - or it could be that each gives the other truth - a perfect mirror like having a twin. You get to observe and see yourself walking the planet in all your glory and all your pain, heightened to the max - visible in the bright light of truth.

Claiming My Sisters

Kate on Bainbridge Island, c. 2000 - a glorious day!

written 2/8/06

A quiet, unassuming, and kind person – friends from a shared interest in writing, expressing, being vulnerable, being Iowan cat lovers, Claudia. Claudia I see you happy for your release from a body, broken and no longer serving. Kate, Kate, Kate – we play together in the words of the Scrabble Board – neither of us has other words to post to the other, just this sad game where the points flip the scale with – every turn, an evenly matched competition – well, she usually has a 10 pt edge on me, knows how to play those 2 letter words for double/triple points. Kate, living with cancer, living with bi-polar, which, has almost been more deadly, the downs worse than the highs which drove away all the friends. How we became friends – I gave her a counseling session after she moved here, shaken too much by the 89 quake and seeking solid ground in the Midwest. I let her dance and move in her session, gave her permission to be the ballerina the 3 yearold never got to be and is trying to be. She can dance now, move, breathes – shakes a little too loose at times for the comfort of others. Some need that kind of freedom. Some need to break those boundaries. My kids don’t believe she is my sister. And keep asking my brothers if they have another sister, thinking they caught me in a lie. It isn’t a lie – she is my sister, Claudia is my sister, too – I’ll claim her – she deserves me more than she deserves Sylvia. In this circle of women, she has a real home and family.

The Need for Coffee

written 11/30/2001

Kate's sister Linda asks her "Do you really want to die"? Every decision for her at this point becomes an existential question. Whether to drink coffee or not may or may not be a matter of life or death. The sister, trying to be rational – your hormones, sis – think of your hormones, and Kate just wanting the taste of Java, the taste of this one small pleasure of life in the sucking vortex of stage whatever breast cancer. She tells me about her retreat for breast cancer survivors and how they tried to coach her into a decision. That decision of their agenda – get the radiation, they say, is a decision of a knife slice in hard rock, goes nowhere, against the surface with a dull thud, doesn't get to the broken wall of pain. Kate says all the women there had too much to lose, families, children, wealthy baubles of houses in Darien, Connecticut, but she has nothing to lose – can't get behind the belief that there is even one good reason to live, except for the occasional coffee at Starbucks, sitting in the sumptuous chairs staring out at the rain with a friend in conversation waiting for the rain to stop.

Bee Aware

Colony Collapse Disorder is threatening the very foundation of our food supply. When the bees disappear, how will we produce food? Our eco-system is SO fragile! There's a lot of smoke and mirrors around what the culprit is for CCD - cell phones are getting blamed or proposed as a possible cause. That was probably cooked up by Bayer to delay any real discussion about the real cause - rampant use of neonicitinoid pesticides. Another reason to eat organic and fight the big chemical companies. They are destroying the planet as fast as they can.

Evil Monsanto

Click on the title of this post to access part 1 of a 4 part documentary about Monsanto. This documentary shows just how corrupt our FDA really is. They clearly have not been protecting citizens for a long time. If you are still drinking Diet Coke, if you still think that GMO food is safe and don't eat organic, if you use Roundup weed killer in and around your garden, if you drink regular non-organic milk contaminated with BGH and feed that to your kids - you NEED to watch this.

Party Politics It Aint

Because of the recent Iowa flooding, we barely had a quorum at the Iowa State Democratic Party Convention in Des Moines on Saturday. Out of the 2500 possible delegates we had around 1100. I was the only Jefferson County delegate for John Edwards even though there were initially four. I had been an alternate until last week when one of the delegates gave me his slot.

We broke out into preference groups and caucuses first thing in the morning. Rob Tully, the chair of the convention was also the head of the Edwards camp. He informed us that we weren't viable, that is, we didn't have the 15% needed, but that Obama had offered us a deal. We could nominate 3 delegates from our camp that would go to the convention as Obama delegates. This gave us the opportunity to send strong Edwards people to the National Convention in August.

I understand that the same deal was offered to the Clinton camp, but I have no idea what they decided on. The Edwards people, for the most part, were happy with the deal.

An interesting note is that most of the platform committe was made up of Edwards people and some of them missed our first preference group meeting and were a bit hot-under-the-collar about the deal until Rob explained it to them and they got it. We could have no delegates or three - which do you really prefer?

So what happens at a state convention? Well, mostly you sit on your butt most of the day listening to speech after speech, Tom Harkin, Chet Culver, Jean Carnahan, and various others including my former step-sister Becky Greenwald. Becky is running for the U.S. Congress in Iowa's 4th District. If elected she will be the first woman ever elected in Iowa to the Congress or Senate. Iowa and Mississippi are the ONLY two states in the nation that have never elected a female congresswoman or senator. Isn't that pitiful and unexpected? You'd think Iowa wouldn't fall in this category, but it does. GO BECKY!!!!

What you also do is cast a lot of votes and do the work of democracy - building some kind of concensus. Not only did we vote for delegates to the National Convention, we also voted on who is going to represent Iowa on the DNC, we voted who would be chair of the affirmative action committee, and who will be going to the electoral college and be the electors from Iowa. Each position had numerous people running and usually we would get a one minute speech from the candidates on who they were and why they should get the position.

Sometimes there were so many people that it would take several votes to winnow down the field to where we had a winner. The rules were such that we needed to have 51% for a winner and it would take awhile to get someone to that point. We were given a packet of ballots and ran through quite a few. We also got to vote on the platform - all the "planks" on the platform and also voted on the top 3 priorities of the party, which turned out to be: 1. universal health care 2. environment 3. civil rights. We debated various minority positions on platform issues and various revisions in wording. The most heated debate was over the wording of the Israel/Palesinian issues.

The work of democracy is work - it isn't a party. But thankfully, I had Judy Stevens cracking me up at every turn. When the big burly guy from Iowa City got up and started making a speech to the last 2 rows (which at that point in the day consisted of the Jefferson County Hillary contingent and myself because most of the Jeff County Obama delegates had split hours before) about how to be an effective precinct captain, Judy asked him if he sold Amway. I don't know why he thought he should make a speech, and why he chose us as his audience, and why he kept going on an on about it. Maybe he just was tired of sitting there all day listening and maybe he got frustrated with some vote that didn't go his way. I don't know.

The one vote I wasn't happy about was the vote not to include wording and support for a Department of Peace and Non-Violence. This is Kucinich's baby and apparently is not well-received "out there." Sigh. But the good news was that we passed every plank on the platform with at least an 80% majority.

Obama as Lightworker

I really like this article and do feel it is true so I am publishing it in part, below. Obama does seem to be cut from a different cloth than most politicians.

Barack Obama and good vibrations
by Mark Morford - SFGate.com

"I find I'm having this weird little debate with colleagues, readers, liberals and moderates and deeply depressed Republicans and spiritually amped people of all stripes and, in particular, with those who seem confused, angry, nonplussed, as they all ask me the same thing: What's the big deal about Obama?

I, of course, have an answer. Sort of. It goes likes this:
Barack Obama ain't really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.

This is what I find myself offering up in response to the whiners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae, to all those who just don't understand all this chatter about Obama's aura and MLK/JFK-like vibe, and, therefore, even if they're liberals, they're refusing to vote for him because they just aren't feeling that deeper connection or, worse, they actively dislike Obama, believing him to be a slick and dangerous pawn of some sort of sinister machine they can't quite define.

To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the draw, the ethereal thing that keeps drawing millions of people in from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally unaffected by politics? No, it's not merely youthful vigor or handsomeness or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways.

It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn't have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a high-vibration integrity.

Dismiss it all you like, but I've heard from far too many smart, spiritually attuned people who've been blown away by Obama's presence - not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence - to say it's just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile, soul-sucking lobbyist whores with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.

Here's where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) I know identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of calmly enlightened being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of connecting with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a high order, and they reignite the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually empty stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this is why he is so often compared to JFK and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose compelling vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.... Read the rest at the source.