The KIVA

Remember back in the 70's when the Kiva was a big warehouse down on 11th, next to a dance hall, and other good stuff. The whole foods grocery if I visualize it right was in the back right hand corner. There were books, and wines, and things--kitchen things, homesteader things, bulk foods. There was an earth shoe shop in a little loft near the front door accessed by a ladder and not tall enough to stand upright in. Remember? And down along one side there were booths and tables and folks hung out there. We ran into friends. I was living down by Cottage Grove then, and would come in with my partner Wayne, and friends from our little "back to the land" farm we called Tanager. I was the only person in our friend group to have a baby one of those years--Day, born in 1974-- in our little home made house on Blue Mountain School Road made from the recycled boards of the old Cottage Grove Hardware Store. There was a bunch of us living there then, maybe a dozen. It was eventful and full of love, work, gardening, goats, and other forms of angst. When Day was born, being the baby of a big household he was a pretty popular item. Everyone wanted to hold him, a phrase was born--"Let me hold 'im", which came out "...hold eem" and then became a nick name for a while. I remember being in the Kiva one day after Day started toddling and he was loose running around. Across the room I heard a happy shout. "It's Eem! It's the Eem beam!" Our friend Michael Forster, Magic Michael had spotted his little darling.

One day not long ago, I saw a young mom with a little kid, blond hair long enough to blow in the wind, wearing a little jean jacket with the sleeves rolled up to let out his baby hands. They were stopped on a street corner she bent over him. I felt liked I'd looked in a mirror to the past. It made me cry for those old days of hope and friendship, before the fall. When a new baby was the hope of the world, our world, the one we were envisioning and building.

I guess what was lost, for a while, is how ongoing that task is. How it doesn't just happen by our hard work and then we get to live in it. It happens, and unhappens, and morphs, and changes, and succeeds, and fails, and births new fears,and new dreams. Some of us are still here, or here again, or left the planet for a while and will maybe be back.

Today, I called the Kiva with a special request, and guess what! Its still here, its still real, its still the heart of the downtown community, and the Kiva came through--the people came through. Because that's always all that can come through. The people. The love.

My friend Sherril Bower who is a clerk there shopped for my groceries for me--cuz I'm house bound--and my son Arlo, born a couple of years after "Eem", stopped by the store which is just blocks from his workplace, to bring me my groceries.

May the circle be unbroken. I'm just spilling over with good feeling right now.

Love to you all.

What Has Happened

I'm back at Arlo and Marina's Eugene house. Marina has her first big, real, teaching job after graduating U of O. Its in a nice charter school in Newport, lovely Newport, on the coast. Arlo spends as much time over there as he can. Aren't they lovely!

What happened, in August, is that I got sick so bad and so fast that a moment never felt like the one I could take to talk to you all. Only those I specifically called for help knew what was going on.

It was pain. I have a great deal of respect for pain, long have had from a nursing point of view, and now its personal having experienced some of the effects of constant unrelenting pain, not only unrelenting but increasing on a daily almost hourly basis. Pain management advises getting on top of it and staying there, because playing catch up once you're out of control is a battle won only after major scrimmages.

Knowing why one is in pain helps determine the approach. One might expect a cancer patient to immediately expect and explore new tumor growth. Instead I immediately said well it probably is not that because I'm doing all these good things and have high positive expectations.

I was invested in being well and continuing to do the things that I have wanted to do. I'd written to friends and professional contacts with the information I'd be coming back to New Mexico--in September or October. I was leaving open for myself the idea that I'd return to a retreat setting for further healing. I corresponded with the New Mexico Women's Retreat--a wonderful place where women teach, learn, and share, healing and building homes, among other planet loving activities in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Unfortunately, pain and other indications of ill health led me to believe that I had some other problems that, frustratingly, I would have to deal with here and now while I am in easy contact with my long time physician, Dr. Cordes, and with others in the medical community, as well as with many of my wonderful friends, sisters and brothers and guides along the path.

Subsequently my various theories surfaced, were considered, treatment instated, and after a hopeful day or two, the repeated result: this is not working. We considered a gastric ulcer, post shingles neuralgia, liver disease, compressed discs, pain from a long time post surgical umbilical hernia. I saw a pain specialist, Martin Kloss, who agreed to advise me and my doctor though he didn't officially see me--I'm on medicare only. He was very very kind and good and suggested the compression fractures which were subsequently found on a new xray the next day.

I was on various medications specific to those possibilities, doing back exercises--passive, positional-- and wear a back brace when I could stand it.

One weekend it all came to a head. I went to stay with Tricia and Paul who said, "You go to bed and do nothing, we'll do everything. OK?" On the following Monday, I kept an appointment made weeks before to explore the possibility of repairing the umbilical hernia. I arrived at that baffled doctor's office vomiting in his waste basket and clawing the paper of the exam table. Dr. Dickinson walked in took a look and said, "...and What are we here for???" Clearly not his patients' usual presentation!

The good physician however did exactly what had to be done. He called my oncologist, who was out of town, but arranged with the Willamette Valley Cancer Center to do a new CT Scan that very afternoon. The contrast material didn't work out well for viewing inside the stomach because I was retching, but the photos were sharp and revealing: New lesions scattered down behind my sternum, one sitting on the adrenal gland, others across the waist, and one big old grapefruit hunkered in tight behind and between my liver and my stomach.

Dr. Cordes gave me the word, held my hand, waited for it to sink in, discussed the options, got me on real pain medication, got me an appointment the same day with the on call oncologist, Dr. Caton, at the Cancer Center, and sent me on my way with a healing hug.

These tumors had grown very very fast. Barely a month earlier a scan had indicated a tiny possible something-or-other that we had decided to "watch" and a further scan had been scheduled but was not yet due when all this happened. Its terrifying to see something like that in my body. But I did see it, clearly, on the films in Dr. Caton's office. And had "seen" it during a recent middle of the night melt down with my sister. Gwenda, holding me while I cried, asked me what the pain in my abdomen looked like. I said, "...it's...a...cantelope".

The short of it, and hopefully not the long of it, is that the large tumor on the liver was in a position to stop my life fairly promptly and of a very unpleasant shut down liver and subsequent necrotic liver disease. I chose not to opt for that, and the option available, the only thing known to be fast enough, is chemotherapy.

I've had the first of my second round of chemo now which consisted of weekly sessions, once a week for three weeks. I have a "break" this next week to allow my bone marrow to recover, and other damage to recover. Then I go back for another three weeks of sessions. After that the cancer doctors will do a new Scan to see how much we've been able to destroy.

Chemotherapy we know, does not only target cancer cells, the way it does identify the cells to destroy is to destroy the fastest growing cells, so that a cancer, generally growing faster than the rate it takes to maintain a healthy body organ, is targeted in a scattershot kind of way that also destroys other fast growing cells that we constantly need for renewal--nerves, heart, skin, various repair jobs, bone marrow, bone. We walk a narrow line--using a damaging toxic substance and betting on the body's system renewal mechanisms to repair the collateral damage.

That is the important bet: That my body can celebrate the removal of dead damaged material, repair and replace necessary healthy tissues, and return to its natural state of vibrant health. This is my strongly held belief.

Morgen, Day, Rose, and Rebekah

Cancer is a formidable foe. My son, Day, who is visiting me here right now, met a man on the train coming up through the Cascades. The man is living with and soldiering against cancer--he called cancer a "magnificent" enemy. Not sure of that term, but bein' as the man may be a soldier, a warrier, then probably approprieate for him. What bopped me on the head this time around was the mere fact that "my" cancer did not turn tail and run with the very first clobber with a big stick. I really thought it had. I'd turned happily to my alternative therapies and though I'm less disciplined than I ought to be I believed I was succeeding.

I'll tell you more about the alternatives I am using in another post.

Having this setback, and serious enough that I chose another go round with chemotherapy brought out in me deeply conflicted feelings. I've been sad, mostly. Disappointed. I've also felt I've been naive, and that I really did not "get" the seiousness of this disease and its lessons for me. Those lessons are beginning to come and they are good, and I still feel some unnecessary shame for being so difficult to teach. But mostly even that shame is nothing beside the depth of insight that is occurring in me.

When I am well, when I look back on this phase of illness and treatment, shining through it will be a thread of bright illumination, happiness and gratitude for the deep deep gifts that are beginning to transform my life.

What an adventure.

Returning from Socorro to Eugene

In 1973 I lived briefly in a house on Cross Street across from Chef Francisco, near the switching yard, where the great behemoths of train engines sang their unknowable questions and answers, their giant greetings, into the night. It was a house shared with my son Rock, my daughter Wendy, my partner Wayne, his daughter Sandy, and our friends Pam and Mark, while we prepared to move onto a piece of unimproved land near Cottage Grove. We'd come from Santa Barbara, California. I read Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion to familiarize myself with this new land, the Northwest.

Our farm was a miracle--the work of our hands and our hearts--an expression of love. We lived there 5 years in a home we built from materials gleaned from the demolition of the old Cottage Grove Hardware Store, on a foundation of pilings that had been railroad ties. We cleared brush and scrub, grew an acre of garden, ground wheat berries purchased from a neighbor, raised goats and chickens, ate from the bounty these all produced, and sweetened our food with feed grade molasses from Lane County Feed and Seed on 5th Street in Eugene. Others who lived with us, a dozen of us for a while, found us through the Eugene Youth Hostel, or just heard about us--we put out the word. Despite the craziness that occurs among randomly gathered humans, the years on our farm were some of the happiest of my life.

Over the three decades that followed my arrival in Oregon, I lived here most of the time, returning to Eugene when the farmhouse was burned down by an angry drug addicted man. And again when the beautiful house we rebuilt there was also burned (as promised incidentally.)

After a short sojourn in California a few years later, and then three years back in South Dakota with my family of origin, I came back to Oregon with my three young sons and a promise to stay while they grew up. We landed then on land southwest of Dillard on Rice Creek Road, later living in Dillard, and then in Roseburg, during the last year of my youngest son Andy's life. When he died, of cancer, I left Roseburg and came to Eugene to the U of O, with the intent of going beyond my RN, to become a clinical psychologist.

That goal was never reached and my life just went on, in typical single mom style, inadequate income, inadequate social life, inadequate expressions of my arts and skills, until I got fed up and disoriented and just wanted out from under the trees--dripping rain during the major part of the year, and pollen during another significant period of months. There were moments of course, visits to the coast with Day and Arlo, Shumba, contra dancing, Healing Touch, getting my bus, writing a newsletter back to y'all from our bus trip across the country, the spirit group and our visits to Edison Chiloquin's land, celebrating this and that, dancing in the street, hugs from friends. Still, I had to go, I had to get away.

I thought about going back to South Dakota, yearning for open sky and sunshine, but my dreams showed me places that had to be in the canyon lands of New Mexico and I felt myself drawn there. I explored several towns, worked as a traveling nurse in Gallup, visited friends in Arizona, didn't really wanna come back but got called back to a good job and had not really figured out how I would support myself in a new place.

Eventually in a period of work stress exhaustion I stopped working, went on Social Security, and started living with various grown kids. Day, in Parrishville, New York. Rock in Winchester, Virginia. I had got back together with my bus--the Purple Bus--and had an idea that I'd get it back on the road and it would take me to New Mexico. Progress toward that end was made, the bus has a new paint job, and work has been done on the brakes and the engine. But it wasn't fast enough for me. I wanted to go to New Mexico.

I just took off and drove there once, summer of 2006, and blew up the little car I had before I arrived in Albuquerque. I stayed in Albuquerque 3 months and loved it actually but never got to where I could actually afford it, didn't seriously look for work, then did look for work and found it but sabotaged my efforts by making a false move to Carlsbad, New Mexico to pursue a relationship with a man I didn't know--I was there less than a week before I was on my way back to (you guessed it--Eugene!) Hey its not my fault. Two of my sons were going to be here during that winter, and there was a big annual gathering with their father (Wayne)'s family in California and I decided to be part of that whole scene. So I was in Eugene again, and even worked, taught a little class at Pioneer College. I did really enjoy being with my sons and my daughter in law and my grandchildren. It was nice. But the contrast of that winter of 2006 after leaving southern New Mexico...Oh my god! In April of that year I started back to New Mexico, but was sidetracked by the suggestion that the bus might be ready to go, and I landed in Virginia again instead. I spent about four months in Virginia growing increasingly dissatisfied in the steam heat of that summer, and then got wise and did what had to be done.


[Click photo to enlarge]

With divine guidance and the encouragement of friends I took the necessary steps--visited the town I chose from my research--visited twice and found both a job and place to live. I moved to Socorro, New Mexico, last October--October, 2007. My work was with a State of New Mexico program to prevent tobacco use, and encourage cessation. Based in a small office at Socorro Mental Health, my work took me also to the village of Magdalena--26 miles up the mountain, and out to the Alamo Navajo Reservation, another half hour beyond Magdalena, and also out to a community center of almost entirely Spanish speaking people--Veguita. Besides planning and in-office counseling for people trying to quit smoking, my work involved education and resource tables at community events like fairs, rodeos, and sports; participation in community meetings--health coalitions, mayor's anti-drug force, and such; and participation in statewide organizational and educational meetings. Having work that involved out of office events and networking was much to my liking.

I like the size of Socorro too, liked walking to the library and the grocery store and seeing the same people. There's a university there too--New Mexico Tech. The town is mostly dusty and dirty and full of tumbleweeds. Lots could be done with native and sustainable plantings and gardening. I expected to do that sort of thing and spread the idea. But got no chance to more than just begin making friends and getting involved with my new town before I faced this latest challenge.

(to be continued...)