Freddie deBoer’s article, The Resentment Machine, speaks of the monetization of human practice, specifically, consumption as achievement. Caught in valueless times, products of competitive households, the current Internet generation having nowhere to go, seeks solace in investing consumptive cultural goods with meaningful importance. Could it be true that they have gifted away their passions and with that, any hope of revealing a true self?

Just recently, my son called to say that he was dropping a theory class to join a salon for poets. Prior to reading this article, my response would have been quite different. I would have hedged on the side of resume, grad school, and job possibilities. Only now can I recognize the urgent need “only to create for the sake of creation, to build something truly your own for no purpose and in reference to the work of no other person.”

Of course, I gave him my blessing. ~ Sdukes

Image: Tdukes, 2011

Could studying the placebo effect change the way we think about medicine?

In 2011, Harvard created an institute at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center under the direction of Ted Kaptchuk: its sole purpose being Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter. Can placebos when given deliberately, be employed in clinical practice; could placebos possibly replace medicine?

Something has to change the chain from illness to pill – the simple solution to a single problem.  Somewhere we have to acknowledge the healing power of being witnessed and held in relationship by our doctors: honest words, a pat on the back, encouraging, empathetic resonance. At some point, we have to question the unquestionable: can our expectations have a profound impact on our ability to heal and, if left to its own healing, can the brain produce its own pharmacy? -Sdukes

Image: Tdukes, 2011

Narrative Medicine is about the telling of the story, the listening and the empathy that accompanies the witnessing. Greg Sarris’s biography of Mabel McKay (1994) takes the reader into the life of Native Americans, their spirituality and their ways of medicine. Written from his close relationship with Mabel, we, as readers, become privileged participants in the medicinal weavings and spiritual healings of her people. Mabel was the last of her tribe, and the last to know the Lolsel Cache Creek Pomo language and history.

Mabel only asks that we listen; a skill that kept Greg Sarris returning time and again. In her story Greg heard his own, and when he asked Mabel, “Why me? Why did you do it for me?” She simply replied, “Because you kept coming back.”

Listen deeply and keep coming back. The simple lesson of revelation.

Image thanks to: http://www.sourcememory.net/womanshaman/pomodreamers.html

If you wanted to deal with only the positive, then Chris was your perfect match. However, as his client, if you knew suffering and needed help understanding the lessons contained in your pain, what to do differently in order to change the patterns that perpetuated your discomfort, Chris was not the guy for you.

Chris was not the guy for Mary, his wife. She tried to make it better. She even spent years as his assistant, putting her own medical career on hold. It wasn’t until she started having children that she felt compelled to recover her own path and, in time, develop a psychological understanding of Chris.

Christmas Eve in New York is a timeless event. The three children and Chris and Mary had spent several days with family shopping, tea in the afternoon and of course the Nutcracker in the evening. Mid-afternoon Chris had scheduled their trip from the city to The Vineyard where they intended to spend their Christmas morning. Upon take-off, Mary began to question Chris’s judgment. Fog was setting in around the city and the weather report called for heavy snows and winds along the coast. It was early afternoon, and as they emerged above the fog the skies were already blackening. The flight time in good weather would have them landing on the island just before dark. Chris’s single engine plane did not have instruments. Chris was licensed to fly using vision only.

After registering her concern, Mary was made to feel as though she didn’t know what she was talking about. In a very real way she “died” to her concerns. Or, better put, Mary’s concerns were killed off by Chris. He was in control, he knew what he was doing and no measure of reality would cloud his vision, including blackening skies, hours of heavy snow, high cabin-shuddering winds, Mary’s expressed concerns, and finally the tears and screams of his frightened children.

This story opened a floodgate of other equally disconcerting stories about the risks Chris would take to maintain the world of his own making. There was the time he and Mary and their newborn weathered a storm in an old, family cabin that Chris heated with a makeshift, wood-burning stove. Not mechanically inclined, Chris would solve problems in ways that put others at risk. For various reasons known only to him, Chris wanted the wood stove at one end of the cabin but the chimney was completely at the other end, more than 30 feet away. To solve this dilemma, Chris simply piped the flue with a horizontal run of metal pipe suspended from the joists with coat hangers, the seams duct taped. Through the subzero nights, Mary would watch as the pipe above the stove glowed red with excessive temperatures and shuddered as the exhaust cooled during the long, horizontal run of the pipe. When she expressed her concern, Mary was diminished as Chris relentlessly maintained his fabricated world of falsely manufactured self-perfection.

Chris’s psychological damage accounts for much of this destructive behavior. However, his denial of this damage and the maniacal drive to continuously create and preserve a world of his own making displaced the need to “die” into those around him. In avoidance of finding his way into the natural life cycle of birth and death, Chris continuously drove into a world of perfection by creating and preserving a world that only mirrored who and how he needed to experience himself. In other words, Chris constructed his own reality. This manufactured world completely and universally disallowed the simplest acceptance that life is impermanent: things change, and in order to be conscious of this, one must naturally suffer. We all suffer. In Chris’s case, others suffered in extraordinary ways so that he would not.

Reflections

Suffering is an innate component of the cycles of change that naturally occur in life, and life continuously invites us to change right along with it. It is when we, for a variety of reasons, refuse to cooperate with this organic ebb and flow that problems emerge.

As the movie opens, the screen is black and in white letters there appears a sentence stating, “It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you have been playing all of your life.” Although this relates to the game of baseball, it can certainly take on other meanings as well. As we pass through this lifetime, we learn and concretize certain methods for survival, just as in the game of baseball where players were consistently and historically chosen for their high averages. No questions asked. That is until Beane, with a budget of less than 4 million, needed to “think outside the box,” for any hope of victory against teams with budgets over a hundred million.

With the help of Peter Brand, Beane realized that the teams were not asking the right questions and analyzing the right data. He also knew from personal experience that few scouts are actually able to go inside the mind of a young man and be confident that he will become the next hero on the plate and in the field.

‘We are card counters at the blackjack table,’ declares Beane surrounded by veteran scouts, adding: ‘If we pull this off, we change the game. We change the game for good.’ (Beane in Moneyball)

How many times have you had to stretch to succeed? When all seems futile, have you had the courage to disregard the norm and believe in something so strongly that you actually change history or at least a piece of history as you knew it?

Beane did just that; although, at the time he was so caught up in the count that he did not realize the implications of his actions. Just like Jeremy Brown who hit a home run and didn’t even know it, Beane changed the game. He changed the game of baseball for good.

Courage keeps one grounded in the natural world and provides one the strength to maintain a mind open to the many mysteries that present themselves as one peers deeply into the folds of all that is and ever was. As a teenager, by creating his own living “Code of Honor,” Tim has had to fight hard to walk the ridgeline of his life. This being a heartfelt set of beliefs, Tim’s “Code” holds meaning only to him; therefore, it is only he who can attain true mastery. For him, self-mastery comes from a place of power within ones-self that engages with the world through presence, self-knowledge, experience and wisdom.

What you do, may you do and never abandon.

But with swift pace, light step, unswerving feet,
so that even your steps stir no dust,
go forward
securely, joyfully, and swiftly, on the path of prudent happiness,
believing nothing
agreeing with nothing
which would dissuade you from this resolution
or which would place a stumbling block for you on the way,

so that you may offer your vows to the Most High

in the pursuit of that perfection

to which the Spirit of the Lord has called you.

by Clare of Assisi (1193? – 1254)

Children have big dreams, and as a youngster, Weber’s dreams were of becoming a farmer. He even went so far as to study agriculture in college. So it came as no surprise when Weber returned to the land to become a caregiver of the soil and a legend in his “field.” A forefather of the Marin organic movement, Warren Weber and his Star Route Farm  has played a key role in our current farm-to-table dining experience.

Having chosen a path different than the one he originally set out to undertake, surprisingly Weber is living the life of an academic. The only difference being that his farm is his classroom and his students are people like you and me who line up at the farmer’s market to purchase his organic produce. And ironically, Weber’s farm abuts a schoolyard where he shares his knowledge and product in real time with the students of Bolinas.

Warren Weber built a kingdom by walking the ridgeline. Each step of the way, Weber has had to remain conscious of the horizon, checking his compass for direction and the sun for shadow lines. He began as a pioneer and has slowly, over the seasons, become a master. ~ Sdukes

Without guts or drive, according to Buck, you will be lucky just to be ordinary. On the open road, traveling alone, ranch-to-ranch, horse-to-horse, Buck breathes his authenticity, his humanity into each soul, be it human or animal. He is not ordinary nor is he necessarily unique. He is simply a master.

Having survived abuse at an early age, Buck made the conscious choice to live in the present. “You can’t live in two places at once,” he reminds us. If you do, the wounding of the past will clearly tarnish your vision of the present. With each step, Buck walks the ridgeline.

Buck doesn’t maintain this delicate balance in spite of his emotions but rather in relationship to them. He knows what it means to feel, and to Buck, feel can have 1,000 differing definitions. To feel, to respect, to respond, these are the dance steps that keep Buck positioned.

And yet, at the end of the day, at the end of the circuit, all Buck really wants is to walk barefoot across his living room floor, because, believe it or not, even cowboys get the blues. ~ Sdukes

Please…

After picking up my car from the dealership, by recommendation I stopped by an independent auto body shop. Seeing me walk tentatively into the garage, a man leaning over an open hood stood fully upright and without hesitating, made his way toward me. Could he look at the scratch on my car I inquired? Dropping everything, he followed me down the street to where I had parked.

“Bring the car into my driveway,” he said, “I’ll have a go at it.” In the middle of his workday, in the middle of a job with other vehicles clearly calling for his attention, he took on my scratch as though I was one of his best and favorite customers.

With steady hand and tiny brush, slowly my scratch disappeared.

“How much do I owe you?” I asked.

Looking me straight in the eye, he replied, “Nothing, it is Christmas.”

At a time when every penny counts and independent, owner-operated businesses struggle to stay afloat, one man clearly cares more about his customers than his cash flow. A master in the moment, a Santa in disguise, in one generous act, Steen at Campbell’s Auto Body in San Rafael made me a believer. ~Sdukes