In my last post, I mentioned that I was attempting to be part of a research study on prediabetes, exercise, and metformin at UMass, but that I was disqualified because my blood glucose levels were too high.  After writing that last post, I heard again from Steve, who wanted to know how things had gone after following up with my doctor, and I filled him in.  He suggested, “Why don’t you come in and repeat the glucose tolerance test, this time fasting overnight and coming in the morning?  Sometimes stress hormones can have an effect on blood glucose levels taken in the afternoon.”  So on Tuesday morning, with trepidation, I did. 

The results were much better than the first time.  Not normal, but prediabetic.  My first blood draw after fasting overnight was 112; one hour after drinking the disgusting glucose drink, 165; and two hours after, 139.  It turned out that I qualified for the study after all.  So I will soon embark on a 12-week exercise odyssey, with three workouts a week at UMass (two workouts lasting 90 minutes, and one lasting 60 minutes).  First they will measure my metabolism, and study my body composition, and measure something else that I can’t remember.  Then I will be meeting with a personal trainer who will tell me what to do.

I am scared about this.  On the one hand, I’m sort of excited to have a very structured, supported approach to exercise, where I have an obligation to show up, because I think this will help me get the exercise I need.  On the other hand, I am worried about a whole bunch of other things:

• Will I look like a fat slob?
• Will I have a panic attack, which feels awful, and appear insane?
• Will I be surrounded by lithe 20-year-old undergraduates who will sneer at me?
• Will I feel compelled to shave my legs so as not to feel self-conscious, precipitating yet another bout of feminist indignation mixed with shame?
• Will the time commitment make me feel even more frantic regarding balancing work and family?
• Will I freak out if my body changes even more and people make comments?

I’m not sure how to manage this emotionally just yet.  I seem to be forging ahead despite all of my misgivings, desperately hoping that I will be able to avert a health disaster.

The truth is, we are all living on borrowed time.  I was so gratified by all the comments on my last post, and I was especially struck by Nancy’s offering that all we ever have is the present moment.  This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot.  I took out a book from the library recently, called “Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death” by Irvin Yalom.  Yalom’s main insight is that we all experience death anxiety and that we can work with it to enrich our experience of life.  This doesn’t change the fact that we experience grief and pain and fear, but it means we can value the present moment anyway.  Mostly I’m centering on a desire to experience my emotions and thoughts and perceptions as fully as possible, no matter how painful, so that I can finally reach a full appreciation of the present moment.  Carla has recommended meditation as well as reading books by Pema Chodron, so I am also working on reading Chodron’s “Start Where You Are,” which I picked up on the same library visit.  I think I have meditated for a total of two minutes in the past week, because it is so excruciating to me, but maybe I will eventually be able to convince myself to do it some more.  I understand, at an intellectual level, that the lived experience of meditation can lead to certain transformations, but somehow my whole being passionately resists it.  I do love the phrase “start where you are,” however, so I am trying to focus on that phrase and the practice of unconditional friendliness toward the self, even if I can’t sit down and meditate.

I have been reading a fair amount about type 2 diabetes lately, and so far the most useful information has been about coping and not blaming one’s self.  I have very little patience with the attitude of “you have diabetes/prediabetes because you are weak and lazy and bad.”  And yet, it is a narrative with enormous power.  One of the most valuable things I read on this topic is here.

However, lest anyone think that I am fixating on diabetes, death, and excruciating meditation, be aware that I also got from the library “The No-Cry Potty Training Solution” and a children’s book called “Owls.”

I had been planning to write more on this blog, until I was thrown for a loop fairly recently with scary information about my health.  Now it seems like a good moment to reflect on the past few weeks.

First, some context.  Last June, I had my blood examined and it was revealed that my fasting glucose was a bit too high: 108 to be precise.  I received a note from my doctor in the mail, which said this made him concerned that I was prediabetic, and that I should go on a diet and exercise.  And that was all it said.  No other helpful hints about how exactly to go about this diet and exercise thing.  And I was hesitant to follow up, because we had just lost our health insurance and were still figuring out how to enroll in the state plan that is required in Massachusetts.

So I started with diet.  My friend Brandt suggested that, at a minimum, I should probably consider cutting out sugar and refined grains from my diet, and this made sense to me.  So I did, and I have stuck to it ever since.  No more sugar.  No more sweets.  Nothing with white flour in it, no white potatoes, no white rice, nada.  And I also cut back dramatically on carbs in general, and bought a book called “The Insulin-Resistance Diet” which convinced me to never to eat carbs in isolation but always combine them with protein.  In the process, I have lost 30 pounds.

But this is not a triumphant story.  This is not in the vein of “I lost weight and regained my health and I feel great!  I did it!  I’m so empowered!”  No.  Sorry.  This is not one of those stories.

I changed my diet so radically and stuck to it so fervently because I was scared.  I know very well that I am at a high risk for developing diabetes.  I had gestational diabetes while I was pregnant, and despite being exceptionally compliant with the restrictive diet, and in the midst of terror that I was starving the baby, I still had to go on insulin.  Diabetes also runs in my family; my grandmother had diabetes.  I have been overweight my entire adult life.  And then the words that I was dreading to hear, after enduring gestational diabetes: that I had impaired fasting glucose.  I could all too easily envision a downward slope of ever-increasing illness and disability.

My fears were fueled by previous contact with diabetic patients.  In the early 1990s I was a nursing student for a time, and one of my patients was an older woman with diabetes.  She was blind, had both legs amputated at the knee, and was on dialysis, all as a result of diabetes.  Now, I know that many of the worst effects of diabetes can be staved off through strenuous effort and blood sugar control, but the image of this woman remains engraved on my brain.  I have known other people with diabetes as well who have avoided these complications, but of course, it is the worst-case example that my mind tends to seize upon.

So, I was driven by fear.  You must understand that it takes quite a lot of fear for me to relinquish certain foods, such as pasta, which makes me feel like I am being deprived of the comfort of my Italian heritage and identity.  You must further understand that I have a lot of issues around weight, food, and exercise.  (I don’t know a single woman in this culture who doesn’t have at least some issues around weight, food, and exercise.)  I was not interested in losing weight.  My extra weight felt like an insulating barrier between me and the world and I’m not all that pleased to feel increasingly vulnerable.  I have a history of trauma.  I don’t like receiving extra attention for losing weight.  I don’t like people praising me for losing weight when it was motivated by fear that I will develop a terrible disease.

Several weeks ago, I came across an item in the newspaper about a study at UMass focusing on prediabetes.  Participants have their blood tested and, if determined to be prediabetic, are placed into one of four groups: placebo, metformin, placebo and exercise, or metformin and exercise.   I was intrigued because I figured I would probably qualify for the study, and I like contributing to science by being a research subject, and I could have the possibility of being guided through a structured exercise regimen for free, and I could get $2o0 at the end.  So I contacted the researcher, Steve.

Eventually, after some schedule juggling, I ended up at UMass for several hours for an oral glucose tolerance test.  I felt pretty upbeat about it, figuring that either my numbers would show I was prediabetic, or even show some improvement after the months of dieting and weight loss.

I was devastated and horrified when all of the resulting numbers were solidly in the diabetic category.  I tried not to show it too much; I had to stay there until the final blood draw, and I didn’t want to fall apart, but Steve could tell that I was upset.  I cried a bit.  Steve tried to reassure me somewhat, reminding me that he couldn’t diagnose me, that I would need to follow up with my doctor.  But I could see from his face that he felt pretty bad.  He talked to me throughout that whole final hour, telling me about his mother who has diabetes, and how motivated he is to change things for people with diabetes.  He was really kind.  I held it together pretty well until the end, when Steve told me that I didn’t qualify for the study, and I wished him luck with his research, and left the building, and shakily got into my car.  And cried like crazy.

I already had my yearly physical scheduled with my doctor for a week later, but I went ahead and called his office and he arranged for me to have my bloodwork done before the appointment.  That whole week was awful.  I was sure the other shoe was going to drop and I would walk out of my doctor’s office with a big D branded on my forehead (or maybe on my pancreas?).  I felt so defeated.  I had put an enormous amount of effort into changing the way I ate and it felt like it was all for nothing, that no matter how hard I might try, I was going to end up sick and ailing and dead.  I couldn’t stand the thought of how this was going to affect Tom and Lily.  I couldn’t stand the thought of Lily growing up with an ever-weaker, ever-sicker mother, or worse, no mother at all.

Most people I confessed these thoughts to were of the opinion that I was blowing things out of proportion.  I had a few people tell me that it was nothing to worry about, that plenty of people with diabetes live a perfectly normal life.  I had to stop them and say, excuse me, but it didn’t feel perfectly normal to me when I had gestational diabetes and I had to prick my fingers four times a day and give myself insulin injections and monitor every single bite of food that went into my mouth and feel like I was being somehow encouraged to develop anorexia.  No, that didn’t feel normal at all.  Nor does it feel normal to have to worry about blindness, amputation, kidney failure, and death as outcomes of this particular disease.

I think a lot of people were so nonchalant about it because of a few factors.  First, diabetes is becoming increasingly common in the “developed” world.  It has become somehow normalized, when in reality it is a devastating chronic illness that usually gets worse over time.  Second, people have become comfortable with the idea of a ready supply of insulin.  I think it is a mistake to assume that everyone will always have access to insulin when they need it, whether because of lack of money, or because of interruptions in production or distribution. 

Looking at the larger picture of economic-environmental-energy decline, diabetes appears to me to be the ultimate disease of the Age of So-Called Prosperity.  Diabetes is often a symptom of a culture that eats too much sugar, doesn’t get enough exercise, and endures chronic stress.  Combine this with genetic predisposition, and it isn’t surprising that the numbers of diabetic diagnoses keep increasing.  Now that the Age of Prosperity is winding down, where does that leave all the people with diabetes and every other chronic illness?  Who will pay for the medications?  Where will the healthy food come from?

I believe my body was designed to function best as a hunter-gatherer who was outdoors most of the time, getting tons of exercise, eating good protein and whole foods, and not a speck of refined sugar cane or sugar beet, high fructose corn syrup, or white flour.  I believe my body was not designed to endure the levels of stress that I have endured in my life, that all of those stress hormones have taken a huge physical toll on me.  I believe that the cultural rewards for being overly intellectual came at the price of extreme discomfort with physical activity and a tendency to feel alienated from the natural world, including my physical body.  In some ways, I feel completely set up.

But back to my visit to the doctor.  I had a fasting plasma glucose done a few days prior, then came down with an awful cold and stomach bug, then dragged myself to the doctor’s office, bracing myself for the worst.  I was shocked again, this time because my fasting glucose was in the normal range, at 99.  And not only that, but the rest of my bloodwork was stellar, with my cholesterol and triglycerides looking amazing compared to how they used to be.  My doctor said he couldn’t diagnose me with diabetes based on my results, but that I should still be concerned and that in all likelihood I was kind of borderline.  He congratulated me on my dietary changes and said he was sure that they were helping, and that now I just needed to add exercise to my routine.  He told me to schedule a follow up appointment in 6 months.

It has been quite an experience to receive all of this bad news and good news all at once.  I don’t think I’m out of the woods by any means.  I don’t get to suddenly throw caution to the wind and eat pancakes with maple syrup.  (And it kills me that the season for maple syrup is fast upon us.)  I don’t get to forget for a moment that this dreaded disease still looms over me.  The good news is only that I may still have a chance to stave off the worst, that I can pull out all the stops in an effort to be as healthy as possible for as long as possible.

I can’t begin to describe how daunting it is to face the knowledge that I have to get more exercise.  Much more exercise.  How can I do this?  This is no simple task for me, in a number of ways.  First, I am pretty terrified of exercise.  Sweating and feeling like I can’t breathe have been known to give me full-blown panic attacks.  If you’ve ever had a panic attack, you know that it feels like you are going to die.  I’m pretty motivated to avoid panic attacks.  Second, there is Lily to tend to.  I could either have Tom watch her, which makes me feel guilty for constantly asking so much of him in so many ways, or bring her with me, which is difficult in winter.  The only kind of exercise I think I can get at this point is walking, because it’s free and doesn’t give me a panic attack.  (A few people suggested that I join the Y, which has child care, but we can’t afford it right now.)  If I try to walk with Lily, I pretty much either have to put her in the stroller or in the backpack carrier, and then I worry that she’s getting too cold even when I bundle her up, and I have limited options with the stroller because of all the snow and ice, and carrying her on my back inevitably leads to a lot of back pain after a while.  I know, this all sounds like a lot of excuses.  I just wanted to illustrate why exercise is so daunting for me.  In addition, I have been feeling sick for weeks, which doesn’t help.

I am tempted to begin this post with a long lament about how crappy things are.  However, as I have been recently inspired by my friend Amy to focus on what I am grateful for, I will try not to give in to this impulse to wallow.  Let me start instead with a list of rays of sunshine:

• I am so immensely grateful for my daughter Lily.  She is a fountain of love and teaches me every day to be more engaged and authentic.  Today she is 22 months old.  I am stunned by her beauty and thirst for discovery.
• I am endlessly grateful for my husband Tom.  He is the sweetest person I have ever met and possesses unparalleled patience, kindness, warmth, and cuddliness.  He is a wonderful companion and a superlative daddy.
• My kitty-cat Ophelia, she of the voluminous, luxurious fur, she who has never scratched the baby in 22 months, she of the placid purr.
• My extended family who always hold me in their thoughts and love me without reserve.  And Tom’s extended family and their open-heartedness and kindness.
• My friends and their many gifts and twinkling eyes.
• Good food from local farms, nourishing me and my family, body and soul.
• Shelter from the winter, a well-insulated house, a cozy wood stove, several cords of wood stacked neatly outside.
• Functional transport (but don’t get me started about how we had to resuscitate the car several times in December and how much it cost and how much it upsets me to still be dependent on the car…)
• Reasonably good health at the moment.

Okay, that really did help me get into a better mood!  And I only kvetched about the car.

Now I can get into the harder stuff.  I want to write a bit about how complicated it is to make decisions right now.  I do a lot of reading and thinking about peak oil, climate change, economic disruption, and shifting cultural priorities at the larger scale, but often long for more personal accounts of how people are integrating this information into their lives.  Sometimes the personal stories that make it out to a wider audience are the stories of people who have done incredibly remarkable, ambitious things, such as Sharon Astyk, or the Dervaes family, or other inspirational figures.   But I am also interested in the stories of people who are more average, like me.  People who are struggling to figure things out the best they can, imperfectly, unimpressively, in ways that would not catch widespread attention.

Right now Tom and I are trying to figure out a lot.  We have been thinking and analyzing and slumping and bumbling our way through it, rallying with bursts of energy, slinking off into disheartened passivity, and everything in between.   We are planning to move out of our cohousing community, but don’t know yet where we’re moving or with whom, nor do we know how we will swing it financially (at the moment there is no way a bank would approve us for a mortgage, for example).  We could rent, of course, but we want to move toward some sort of long-term cooperative living arrangement, and we would like to be in a more stable situation on a bit of land that we could grow food on.  We are also trying to navigate the world of work and figure out how to have livelihoods that integrate into our lives in a way that feels healthy.  We don’t want to pin all our hopes for the future on the conventional economy and yet we are still trying to operate within that economy, while attempting to transition to a very different economy.  We feel a great deal of urgency in taking action as soon as possible, and yet we don’t want to leap into a void without thinking carefully about all the implications.  This is a problem.  In the meanwhile, I continue to feel too isolated and craving more daily connection, and I am not sure how much longer I can stand it, and feel stymied in how to move forward in creating the conditions to have this basic need of mine met.

There is a lot more I want to say on this topic, but it has taken me all day, intermittently, to write this.  This is another conundrum in figuring out a way forward: not being able to focus.  Parenting a toddler is not conducive to protracted, deep contemplation.  Nor is starting my annual epic journey of doing our taxes.  But in keeping with my desire to post more frequently, I will end here and try to pick up where I left off another day.

For nine days, I took part in a Wilderness First Responder course offered by SOLO at Amherst College. This was no small task for me. Bear in mind that this was an 80-hour intensive. Also bear in mind that I am still nursing a toddler. I was terribly nervous about spending most of my waking hours apart from Lily for nine days, worried about how she would fare, worried about how Tom would fare with the brunt of child care upon him during the daytime, and worried that I would discover that my brain had atrophied since the last time I studied so intensively, or that the demands on my body would be too great in terms of sleep deprivation and physical activity. However, I am immensely proud to say that I am now a certified WFR (pronounced “woofer”). The course was fantastic and we all came out alive.

Why did I decide to pursue Wilderness First Responder training? Let me start by explaining what it means. The course essentially focuses on backcountry emergency medicine. (See here for a full run-down of what was included in my studies.)  There are certain key differences between wilderness and urban emergency medicine: wilderness emergency medicine assumes that you won’t be getting to a hospital very quickly, and it relies much more upon improvised materials.  There are also differences regarding decision-making and standards of care; for example, an urban first responder might not be overly concerned about environmental threats such as hypothermia, whereas a wilderness first responder would be extremely concerned.  These elements– the assumption that hospital care is not around the corner, the reliance on skill and improvisation rather than lots of technology and equipment, and an emphasis on backcountry issues–are what drew me to WFR training as an important skill set both for immediate use and for a future threatened by economic recession and resource depletion.

WFR training tends to be the province of wilderness guides and leaders, adventurers, backpackers, hikers, paddlers, and the like.  I am as enamored of such activities as they are, and look forward to introducing Lily to hikes on nearby Mt. Tom and Mt. Norwottuck and such, and as she gets older, to longer and more challenging hikes in the Green Mountains and White Mountains.  She is still only 21 months old, but I can dream, right?  I want her to experience the peace of the mountains, the camaraderie of the trail, the satisfaction of physical movement and self-reliance, the delight of immersion in the natural world.  But it was not my love of mountain hikes that drew me to becoming a WFR, although I am very glad to have the skills for that setting.

No, I became a WFR because it seemed like the logical path to follow due to my concern about the economic/environmental/energy conundrum we are facing as a species. 

For starters, I wanted to leverage my existing knowledge and skills in the field of health care.  It started when I was a child, pestering my dad, a physician, for tales of patient care.  It continued with a few jobs working in physician’s offices (a cardiologist, who taught me how to take blood pressure and hook up patients to EKGs; and a pediatrician).  Then I had my own adventures as a patient in the health care system in the early 1990s and learned a great deal that way.  Subsequently I decided to major in nursing, and although the course material fascinated me, I decided that the actual business of nursing was not so appealing.  However, I darted in and out of involvement in the health care field in various ways– as a research assistant on gender and health; on a research team focusing on gerontology and end-of-life issues; and as a health librarian for the Holyoke Consumer Health Library, when I would train folks on how to use MedlinePlus as well as set up my roving librarian tent at the Holyoke Farmer’s Market (see pictures here).  Currently, in my position at Living Routes, one of my tasks is to review student medical forms for anything that needs follow-up.

All of this exposure to the world of health care has made me very aware of how utterly vulnerable the modern American health care system is to the vagaries of economic recession and resource depletion, in particular depletion of oil.  Not only do we rely almost exclusively on oil for transport (think ambulances, commuting health care workers, people traveling to see their doctors, equipment and medications being transported, etc.) but a lot of medical equipment and pharmaceuticals are manufactured using petroleum.  Think of the energy it takes to provide electricity to a hospital, or to heat and cool it.  Think of the energy it takes to power an MRI machine or any of a multitude of high-tech tools.  There is a growing international consensus that we are at or near the peak of oil production worldwide (see the Energy Bulletin Peak Oil Primer for a quick summary of what this is about).  Combine this with the reality that we are perhaps entering the Second Great Depression, and it becomes apparent that even if we keep some of this health care infrastructure running, a whole lot of people won’t be able to afford to use any of it.

I am lucky to live in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which is the first state to mandate universal health care access (and is also fabulous for being the first state to legalize gay marriage, but that’s another story).  As a result, my family is able to afford health insurance through Commonwealth Care, despite our severe underemployment.  However, I am concerned about the state’s fiscal woes and have to wonder how long this arrangement is going to last.  The health care system in this country as a whole is not financially sound and is not meeting basic needs.  This is a problem that can only be exacerbated by further economic turmoil and lack of resources.

I have been influenced by the writings of Dan Bednarz, who examines the impacts of energy decline on public health and medicine.  See for example his essay Energy, Climate Change, and Complexity in Health Care available on his blog, Health after Oil.  Bednarz tends to focus on the big picture, the policy implications, and I appreciate that.  However, I am impelled to translate those implications into the immediate, mundane realities of everyday life.  So, while I continue to look at these issues from an intellectual standpoint, I also feel an enormous urgency to take action, say, by knowing what to do if someone has a mid-shaft femur fracture and there is no ambulance in sight.  Or knowing how to perform CPR.  Or knowing how to prevent certain accidents or illnesses from occurring.  Or knowing how to stride into the midst of a crisis and take the lead.  I have a deep need to balance these macro and micro levels of knowledge and skill.

Enter the stupendous WFR course I just took.  I was one of 11 students: 9 college students, the Amherst College outdoor coordinator, and me, the oldest person in the room at the ripe age of 36.  Lovely bunch of bright, motivated folks.  We were taught by Jon, a guy who clearly knows his stuff and loves teaching, which was a pleasure.  Each day was a combination of classroom lecture and hands-on practice, complete with mock rescues, fake blood, fake bruise make-up, and one spectacular fake compound tibia fracture.  We also got to see some excellent slides that elicited strong reactions, like certain images of the effects of frostbite, trench foot, a de-gloved finger amputation, and brown recluse spider bite havoc.  By far the best parts of the course were the scenarios, when we took turns being patients and rescuers and quickly learned some crucial lessons: a.) be very precise and thorough in assessing your patient, in the exact order of priority (establishing scene safety, body substance isolation, airway, breathing, circulation etc…); b.) make sure you have the necessary materials at hand (sleeping pads, cravats, a long pole or stick for a traction splint, a SAM splint, etc); c.) don’t forget to ask all the questions required for proper documentation in a SOAPnote and to really get the whole story of what’s going on for a patient.  Most of our scenarios took place outdoors on the Amherst College campus, in the snow, in mostly frigid conditions.  I was exhausted a lot, particularly because Lily seemed to want to nurse half the night every night so as to make up for my absence during the day.  I pumped breastmilk at lunchtime each day for Lily to have the subsequent day.  Pumping is a pain in the butt, or rather, a pain in the boobs.  On top of that I was also pumping in the evening to give milk to a pair of twin babies in the neighborhood who otherwise lacked access to breastmilk. 

But I made it through nonetheless. (And Tom and Lily made it through as well, and Tom deserves endless thanks for his patience and awesome Daddy-ness.) I did really well on the final written exam and also built a kick-ass ankle splint out of a Thermarest sleeping pad, various bits of clothing for padding, and a bunch of well-placed, tightly knotted cravats, and wrote a great SOAPnote.  My classmates and I were all very pleased and justifiably proud to become certified WFRs.

Now that I am certified, I hope to continue expanding my knowledge of wilderness emergency medicine as well as exploring other health care fields that I think will be especially useful.  I would like to learn about herbalism but have not yet decided to what degree.  Time and expense are two limiting factors I’m confronting.  I was able to do the WFR course because it was a 9-day course.  It was still expensive for us, considering my family’s financial situation, but we considered it a priority for the future, so we allocated funds to it.  With herbalism, I’m not sure I could find something that would allow me to parent a toddler and work part-time as well as study, and I am worried about the cost.  I know there are correspondence courses, and maybe I will end up doing one of those, but I think there’s a tremendous amount of value in the hands-on approach and I worry that I would miss valuable sensory lessons.  I am also very interested in the use of food as medicine.  If anyone has any good suggestions for how to pursue studying herbalism in a way that I can manage, please leave a comment.  I also want to learn a lot more about managing chronic health conditions in backcountry settings.

I highly recommend the WFR certification as part of a comprehensive approach to preparedness for the future.  Are there others out there becoming WFRs for the same reasons as me?  I would love to know.

Meanwhile, I want to offer my classmates a hearty congratulations on a successful course.  I would be honored to be on a rescue team with any and all of you.  And I also want to thank Jon Clancy for his wonderful teaching.

Someone recently left a comment on my blog asking, “Why haven’t you posted anything since July?” This comment was from someone I didn’t know. He said that he liked my writing and invited me to check out his website.

I was incredibly moved by this comment, and it has caused me to break through certain barriers to post again. It was simple and short, but carried a powerful message: some people actually believe I have something worthwhile to say. Some people are actually wondering why my blog has been growing dusty with lack of use. And someone, a stranger to me, went right ahead and asked, why?

I want to answer why. I want to answer because even one pair of eyes will make this blog redeemable.

I have been going through a difficult time. It can be hard for me to identify the past few months as “difficult” because there have been periods of my life that were much more dramatically difficult, obviously difficult. But truly, 2008 and especially the latter half of it have been occasions for serious tooth-gnashing.

For starters there is the larger context of our crazy world… I am trying to see the silver lining, in that I hope the insane and destructive elements of industrial culture are in their death throes, but I do hope it won’t take everything I consider beautiful and worthy along with it. Do I really need to explain this? You do all see what’s happening now, right?! I guess it’s still disheartening to me that in the midst of economic/energy/ecological troubles, clear and obvious troubles, there are still people who refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation.

Then on a more personal level, there is my husband’s employment situation. He does not want me to write about it, so I won’t, but let’s just say it isn’t good and is a source of enormous stress to us both.

Then there’s the small matter of parenting a toddler and wanting desperately to do a good job at it, and often not being certain what that means, and feeling quite certain that sometimes it takes acts of resistance, large and small, that other people do not understand. My experience has been that being a parent today is opening one’s self up to criticism no matter what one chooses. I wish I could say that I have felt consistently supported as a parent, buoyed by family and friends and community, but the truth is I have often felt incredibly alone.

And there is the most crucial decision that we made a few months ago: we will not continue to live at Rocky Hill Cohousing. We do not know yet where we will go. We are trying to figure it out and there are no blueprints to follow. All we have determined is that probably we need to share a home with people, rather than live with just our nuclear family in one house; we need to feel like we have a core group of people who we see daily or near-daily; and we want to pursue a life based on sustainable agriculture/permaculture.

I believe most of my Rocky Hill neighbors have heard this news through the grapevine already, but if you are a Rocky Hill neighbor learning this for the first time, and want to know more, I invite you to knock on our door and talk to us. I have decided that I will not discuss the decision to leave Rocky Hill via email or other ways that can be so easily misconstrued, and I will also not discuss it in a large group meeting. So if you are a neighbor wanting more information, you will need to talk to us face to face. All I will say is that, ultimately, this is not about any individual(s) or particular interpersonal conflicts at Rocky Hill.

But all of the preceding reasons are merely an accounting of external events. They do not address the deeper reasons why I haven’t been posting to this blog, the fears that have kept me from writing.

What am I afraid of? I am afraid of being deeply misunderstood. I am afraid of harsh judgment and feeling exposed. I am afraid of opening my heart to a faceless readership who might attack what I have to say, or that no one will care enough to read what I have to say. I am afraid of my own vulnerability.

Recently I noticed that a blogging friend had taken me off of her list of blogs that she finds interesting. I think, possibly, that she had done it originally out of a sense of obligation, since I find her blog interesting. Or it could be that my blog was not in keeping with the theme of the other blogs she listed. In any case, when I saw that I had been deleted, I felt bad. I thought, “Of course she deleted me. My blog is stupid. I never post to it anymore. The blog has died.” It made me want to become a bitter ex-blogger, burning with words that had to remain unexpressed.

Then I received the comment asking “Why haven’t you been posting?” This made me think, maybe my blog is worthy of resuscitation. Or maybe I can at least offer some words of explanation.

Either way, I am troubled by how much my self-esteem rises and falls on the responses of others. It’s always easy for others to say, “Oh, you just shouldn’t care what other people think.” I don’t know how to explain how important it is to me what other people think. I am still trying to be true to myself and live in alignment and integrity with my highest truth, AND I care very much what other people think. It is also easy for people to say, “Don’t be so sensitive,” or “You need to develop a thicker skin,” or similar things. I have long ago resigned myself to the fact that if I were to somehow become less sensitive or more thick-skinned, I probably wouldn’t be me anymore.

My sensitivity and thin-skinnedness seems to be compounded by isolation and communicating with others largely through electronic devices. This makes me seriously question whether blogging is a good idea for me. I want to spend time with people face to face, in the flesh. I want to be outside much more. I want to touch plants and trees. I want to make things with my hands. One of the reasons I am so madly in love with my child is because she is so utterly corporeal, delighted with her own body. She is all soft hair and baby skin and sweet dimples and loveliness. I want to be as grounded in my body as she is in hers. I want to be with other embodied people– much as I love the internet, and email, and the wide vistas of opportunities to meet other people and ideas that they open, they still offer only disembodiment unless people are willing to take the next step.

There is more to say, but the hour is getting late, and I want to post this before I change my mind.

I published my previous post in a reverie about Gigi and Bologna and the great poet Carducci and never got around to the “prosperous words” themselves.  In any case, I think I want to offer images more than words.  This is my blooming Lily.

(Click on images to make them larger.)

Sometimes there is no recourse but a good Italian idiom.  I was raised speaking English and Italian, and Italian, for me, is a language that goes right to my core, that sidesteps most of my frontal lobe and goes straight to my emotional self.

In reflecting on the tone of my previous post, and the tone of recent times, things have felt exceptionally difficult.  This is when the phrase “diciamo parole prospere!” popped into my head.  The phrase, translated literally, means “let us say prosperous words.”  It is an exhortation in the face of difficulty and despair.  It is an acknowledgment that one must change focus.

When I think of this phrase, I imagine it being uttered by my late grandfather Luigi “Gigi” Foschi, an inimitable figure of giant proportions in my memory.  Gigi would say it with great verve and conviction.  He was a man of great energy and passion, a self-taught scholar and independent essayist and historian, and a great lover of the art, architecture, and history of Bologna, my ancestral home.  Gigi could be counted on for prosperous words.

I just did a search for the phrase online, and lo and behold, it is from a poem called “A Febo Apolline” by the great Bolognese poet Giosue Carducci.  The full stanza reads:

Ma le dolenti imagini

Si portin gli euri in mare:

Diciam parole prospere:

Benigno Amor ne appare.

 

My grandparents lived in Bologna right near Carducci’s house, in Piazza Carducci.  There was a statue of him there, in the pose of The Thinker, sitting and pondering.  Carducci was always a good one to go straight to the emotional core of things.  I am happy that my mind decided to channel his poetry.  He has darker words as well, much darker, which make me appreciate his “diciam parole prospere” all the more.

These are times that require poetry.

I am tired, feeling unwell, and emotionally depleted today, but I feel like it is very important that I write anyway.  It has been a while since I last wrote on this blog, and I’m feeling all kinds of resistance to saying what’s really on my mind.  I think I need to go ahead and do it anyway.  In the past few weeks, I have come up with all kinds of excuses not to write on this blog, mostly because I’m afraid of being judged.  I need to set that fear aside now, or rather, be fearful and write anyway.

My inner critic/editor is already scanning that last paragraph, frowning about how many times I used the word “anyway.”  And I am steadfastly refusing to modify it.  Let it be messy.  Let it be just the way it is.

I am really exceptionally sad today for a number of reasons.  First, I learned a few days ago about the death of a former neighbor by her own hand, whose ex-partner and daughter still live at Rocky Hill.  I am saddened beyond words.  She had such fierce depressions.  I understand how it feels to be that miserable from my own experience.  It will take some time for her death to completely sink in.

The last time I saw her, maybe a month or two ago, she was walking around Rocky Hill, looking despondent.  I asked her how she was doing, and she said things were hard.  I don’t remember exactly what we said during that brief conversation, but I remember saying to her emphatically, “I’m really sorry that you are feeling so bad.  Please remember, it’s not your fault, and you deserve to feel better.  You deserve all the love and support you need.  You really do.”  Her eyes filled with tears and she thanked me.

Now I just feel bad that I wasn’t able to offer her the support she needed.  I feel so sad for her suffering.

One neighbor expressed to me that at least she isn’t suffering anymore–she released herself from her suffering and is free of it now.  This is bothering me quite a lot.  I know that most people who survive suicide attempts are later glad that they lived.  I know that most people who commit suicide don’t really want to die, they just want to make the pain stop.  I know that being deemed mentally ill with a major mood disorder does not have to be a death sentence, even though it can hurt like hell.

Basically, I am taking this logic of “she is free from suffering now” and applying it to myself.  According to this logic, I should be dead right now, and people should be relieved that I am free from suffering.  Now, please understand, I am very fond of being alive, but there have been times when I have experienced excruciating emotional pain and wanted to escape it so badly to the point that suicide seemed like a good idea.  I am profoundly grateful to be alive today.

My former neighbor could be challenging at times, in cohousing meetings (when she lived here) and in various interpersonal interactions.  She was not necessarily easy to relate to.  She rubbed some people the wrong way.  I am worried that in the wake of her death, some of my neighbors might seek to assuage their guilt at not liking her or not reaching out to her by claiming that, really, she is better off now because her suffering was so bad.

I don’t buy this, not one bit.  She deserved to live.  She deserved to be supported by a loving community.  I am not saying that that community should have been Rocky Hill necessarily, and in many ways I think Rocky Hill was not a great fit for her.  But nevertheless, as a fellow being on this earth, she deserved compassion and support.  Of course, deserving something is no guarantee of actually getting it.

By saying this, I am not seeking to absolve her of the ultimate responsibility of self-determination.  She made a choice, and we will all have to deal with the consequences.  I am especially sad for her young daughter and angry that she would inflict this kind of anguish on her.  But I also know that she probably wasn’t thinking especially clearly.

Although she made this choice to end her life, I don’t think it would be fair to her memory to just dismiss her as crazy and call her death a blessing.  She had gifts.  She was a spiritual seeker.  She understood that we live in an insane culture, and I, for one, am not willing to let that culture off the hook for the ways it contributed to her suffering.  I will never forget that she always took me seriously; when other people were dismissive or hurtful when I would express my concerns about peak oil and the converging crises of our time, she always let me know that she was concerned too, and glad that I spoke up.

The context of her death, for me, has been jarring, to say the least.  There was another sudden death at Rocky Hill not long ago, a renter who mostly kept to himself.  That was also a jolt although I didn’t know him well.  This weekend Tom, Lily and I went to Boston because my sister and her husband and their four kids were in town; we hadn’t seen them in a year, since they live abroad.  In the midst of the weekend, with all these kids bouncing around, I saw the email about the most recent death.  On top of everything I’ve been having abdominal pains and headaches all day.  My body and mind are confused and don’t know what to focus on.

It has been difficult to find time to write on this blog.  At least a dozen times in the past week, I have had some burst of inspiration, usually after reading the news, but then find it just about impossible to focus on writing.  Right now I am forcing myself to write although I’m very tired, Lily is asleep on my lap, and I am typing with one hand, my non-dominant hand no less.

I’m going to ask you, dear reader, for a little help.  Which of the following topics do you find compelling?  Which should I take the time to expound upon?  Leave a comment below, and I will be grateful for your input.

1. In today’s New York Times Magazine, there was a fascinating article on equal parenting that made me think a lot.  In particular, it made me reflect on how the oppressive expectations and habits of the larger culture have a way of insinuating themselves into the most personal aspects of individual lives.  How can an avowed feminist and questioner of gender stereotypes push back against this?  How do the families that are profiled in the article push back?  Do they have advantages that others don’t, or rather, that I don’t?
2. I am a fan of Carolyn Baker’s blog, Speaking Truth to Power, and she recently posted about her relocating to Vermont as a way to prepare for collapse.  Also, Sharon Astyk wrote a post recently titled City, Country, Suburb? It Isn’t Where You Live, but How You Live There.  These have given me much food for thought.  For quite a while, I have been wondering if my family is in the right place to weather the collapse, both in terms of our geographic location (the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts) and in terms of our current living arrangement (at Rocky Hill Cohousing).  We are also in a transition period as a family, as Tom is looking for a new job.
3. I always have a boatload of reflections on living in cohousing, or at least living in my particular cohousing…I try to balance the positive and negative feelings that come up, but I confess that I often feel disillusioned.  Sometimes I feel just plain devastated.  Mostly I direct my blame at the larger culture of Empire and how it interferes with the well-intentioned plans of good people.  Sometimes I blame myself.
4. I am still thinking a great deal about birth, death, grieving, and joy.  You may have already read my post about Charlotte and her thoughtful mama, who writes so eloquently about the depth of her loss as well as her joys.  I have been mulling over the idea of pursuing joy as a necessary spiritual duty, as serious as grieving the beloved dead.  The wonderful Patti Digh blogs about how to make the most of life and death over at 37 Days and I am so inspired by her thoughts.  There is so much more I want to say but I’m not sure where to start.  I also think about this in the context of severe mood disruption, non-theistic spirituality, and psychological adaptation to the Great Turning.
5. I came across an intriguing website by someone in Calgary called Annie the Nanny who writes about Peak Oil Parenting.  Intriguing topic, I thought, as the parent of a 14-month-old, as well as a peakist/peaknik/whatever (okay, I wish there were some better terminology around).  I was a bit surprised when she went on to attack Attachment Parenting as something that would never work in a post-peak world.  I was tempted to write some kind of rebuttal, but then a British woman named Fiona apparently beat me to it in a letter that Annie posted and then responded to.  Annie now says it’s not Attachment Parenting per se that wouldn’t work, it’s Child-Centered Parenting, and really, most of the AP parents she deals with have got AP all wrong.  I still have a bunch of thoughts about how AP might work better in a post-peak world, not worse.

 Okay, that’s probably enough potential topics for now!  Leave me a comment if any of them sound interesting to you.

“How are you?”

This question seems fairly simple and straightforward, doesn’t it?  I was just thinking about the usage of this question recently, and I’ve pondered this before and discussed it with others before, but I think it bears more contemplation.

I am losing a bit of patience with the use of “how are you” as a social nicety, that is, when all that is expected back is a cursory “fine” or “okay” and that’s it.  Certainly, social niceties have their place, and I am not one to suggest eliminating them entirely, but it’s the eviscerated “how are you” that gets me.

In any “how are you” scenario there are two parties, the one inquiring and the one replying.  Supposedly, the one inquiring should actually be curious about how the other person is doing, and the one replying should be glad to be cared about and honest in replying.  Right?

Except I think that a lot of the time, people ask “how are you” because they feel they’re supposed to, and people respond “fine” because it’s expedient and standard.

Would our experience of the world be significantly different if each and every time we asked “how are you,” we really, truly wanted to know the truth?  And correspondingly, how different would it be if every time we were asked “how are you,” we were honest?

I can feel the resistance and excuses arising in my own head as I write this.  Who has the time to actually talk about what’s happening in their lives and how they are feeling?  Wouldn’t it be awkward to respond honestly to virtual strangers?  Who could possibly remember to care?

Maybe this is the root of everything that’s toxic about our culture.  When we are too busy to check in with each other, or even check in with ourselves, isn’t something seriously wrong?  What is standing in the way of people being receptive to hearing each other’s stories, or being honest about their lives?

In that spirit, I want to ask, with sincerity, How are you?  Please, let me know.  At the end of this post should appear the words “0 comments” (or 1, or 2, or however many comments there are)– go ahead and click on that.  Then scroll to the bottom of the next page.  (Or, if you are not on the homepage but on the individual post’s page, all you need to do is scroll to the bottom.)  (Instructions provided for my mother, and possibly others unfamiliar with blogs and/or WordPress blogs.)  You will see a box where you can enter a comment.  (About the request for an email address–it’s not publicized, I’m the only one who sees it.)  All I ask is that in your reply to the question “How are you?”, you are truthful.  It doesn’t have to be lengthy, or short for that matter, just truthful.

Here, I’ll be truthful too.  How am I?

Right now I’m a bit weary of listening to baby Lily shrieking intermittently.  She seemed like she was going to nurse to sleep but kept rolling off my lap, and all of this on and off and on and off the breast is making me sore.  She is also fond of putting her foot in my face while nursing.  Sometimes this is cute, and sometimes I’m annoyed when she digs her toenails into my cheek.  I’m frustrated about how long it takes me to compose a blog post while mothering a 14-month-old.  At the same time, I am flabbergasted at her beauty and wonderfulness, and keep thinking about her radiant smile and boundless baby energy.  She is my sunshine.

I am also sort of continuously stressed and anxious these days.  Okay, maybe not “sort of.”  (I will speculate about the origin of the “sort of” later.)  Tom is now trying to find a new job.  We are not in immediate trouble but it’s worrisome.  I am still working two days a week but it’s hard to know what the future will bring.  What are Tom’s job prospects?  Will we find ourselves having to move?  I would be devastated to have to move.  So much of our decision to move to western Mass. and live in cohousing was specifically about NOT just living somewhere because of work, but because of a very deliberate decision to live in a particular place.

I am also in the habit of considering worst-case scenarios, as you may have noticed.  So I am also thinking a great deal about the accelerating pace of the Great Turning.  Sharon Astyk recently wrote about this acceleration here, where she muses on how her new year’s predictions are coming true more quickly than she anticipated.  I have been rather stunned at the pace myself.  Given that we are in a recession from which we may never recover, gas prices are only heading up, the housing market is going down, Israel is saying an attack on Iran is “unavoidable,” you know, all the news of the day, how can I presume to be optimistic for job prospects for Tom?  I’m also worried about my own job at a study abroad organization which depends on our students being able to afford airfare; how long will that last?  I think it was Jeffrey Brown, aka westexas on The Oil Drum, who said something like “Get thee to the non-discretionary side of the economy.”  I have been thinking about that advice a lot lately.  I’m also reading Dmitry Orlov’s excellent Reinventing Collapse and getting ideas from that. 

 Dmitry’s book, in fact, is part of what spurred me to think anew about “how are you.”  I am certain that as conditions worsen, the quality of our relationships to people in our immediate vicinity will be of utmost importance.  This is also part of the reasoning over at The Community Solution.  In this sense, engaging in dialogue with our neighbors is not only the thoughtful, kind thing to do, it is also pragmatic.  It would be useful for us to know each other, care about each other, and work through conflicts before we are thrust into a situation when we depend on each other, when there is no time left to build goodwill and trust.

Back to that phrase, “sort of.”  Why did I feel compelled to include it while discussing how I’m doing?  I think this is the ever-present tyranny of the positive, and the consequent hedging of the negative.  Americans are notorious for this; we are famous for espousing the belief, “If you can’t say something good, don’t say anything at all.”  This is a problem, my friends.  Stuffing feelings into dark, unreachable corners, last time I checked, was a recipe for explosive consequences.  We are not trained to accept our pessimism, anger, disappointment, and grief.  We are not trained to regard ourselves with compassion or others with compassion.  When we are honest both with ourselves and those around us, when we acknowledge the suffering, we are paradoxically on a path towards joy.  This is the core of the work I see before me.

And how are you?