juliannechat

Self care and world care in uncertain times

From my friend Deena Larsen: tools for resilient growth and action in uncertain times.

The website is free: http://selfcareworldcare.wikidot.com/

You can purchase the books from Amazon: World Care - Self Care 

Below is a draft project description (pitch). What do you think? All comments welcome.

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Our Communities, Ourselves

[main project title]

Use the Self Care sections to explore how you can change and grow.

Your communities can use examples and group exercises in the World Care section to focus your current work and develop options for further action.

 

Use our website, or one of our workbooks, for individual and group learning. 

- Use self-care to ground ourselves

- Claim our power to make ourselves and our communities more resilient and effective

- Develop a continuum of options to act on, then choose from among them

- Get moving

 

Some of these techniques draw on Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU), with plenty of examples and references.

The workbooks are available on Amazon: Self Care, World Care

You decide how to use these tools for resilient growth in extremely uncertain times. Here we go!

 

~~~

About Deena Larsen

For 31 years she worked at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation:

• As a team facilitator, she wrote their Decision Process Guide
• As a union member, she was a key author of Federal Workers Keep America Running
• Her team was involved with long-term community negotiation in relation to dam removal at the Klamath River
• She authored the US guidelines for dam removal that Brasil is now using
• Her team was distinguished by decades of presentations of climate science and its implications (2 of the PDFs are online)

I originally met Deena because she is a pioneer of interactive electronic literature. In this and several other fields she has taught, mentored, and facilitated communication and group decision-making.

Deena and her wife MaJe Kindschuh developed Signals with Love, a vocabulary of gestures to help with interpersonal communication, especially among people who are neurodivergent or have difficulties reading faces. Click BEGIN on that page, or view the entire project. Her Rose Language shows a way of adding meaning to words by using letters with individual valences.

Deena has retired from Reclamation and is now consulting. She has been sharing this toolkit informally. It's time to get it out into the world.  

Poems for Darcy and Bennet --> Dogs

At the end of 2023 we adopted a brother and sister, five years old, about 20 pounds each. Their build and coats and ears and teeth and personalities differ slightly in interesting ways. But they both have small sad (sweet!) beagle faces, and tails that curl at exactly the same angle.

Miss Bennet (Bennet, Lizzy, g'girl etc) has gold fur with some black in it. Mr Darcy (Darcy, Fitzy, g'boy) has black fur with some gold. After an initial period of adjustment they are flourishing.

Here are the first three poems we've written for them, in order of authoring. (Val's is third, and its first and the last lines are the same.) Without further ado.

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With your tiny paws and knees,
you can't catch those those since they climb trees. 
You can't bite those since they have wings,
but we'll do other awesome things!

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[for Darcy]

Don't poop under the lilacs!
You know I hate it there.
Why don't you poop like Bennet,
out in the open air?

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I have two doggies that I love
When in bed I have to shove
Them aside so I can sleep
I have two doggies that I'll keep

I have two doggies I adore
They like to bark beside the door
So they can go outside to play
I have two doggies here to stay

I have two doggies next to me
Upon my lap and on my knee
They are a blessing from above
I have two doggies that I love

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Remembering Lola and Luna --> Dogs

Trigger warning: memorial posting. Much better: a "spot the dog" game with Luna's pictures.

If the pictures don't load, here or there, just refresh.

Lola stayed with us because her human pack members were ill. (I think her private Instagram may have been @lola_the_wonder_dog?) We were Luna's fourth and "forever" home. 

Lola was a Lab/Akita mix, and Luna was Chihuahua/Terrier. Their heads had different shapes, but from the front that wasn't as obvious.

Lola's human pack did the official memorial, but I wrote a rhyme:

 

Lola was the leader of the Avenues pack

Once she arrived, didn't want to give her back

We loved her a lot, and we'll never forget

Lola the wonder dog, the world's greatest pet

 

"World's greatest pet:" likely every "dog person" can say the same. 

Click on this link (PDF) to read my poem_for_Luna. Since I have almost no words, it's short. 

 

Here's a photo from right after Lola arrived. Her mom brought her bed, but she liked the cool tiles. Luna is not sure what to make of it all.

 

Watering a tree

It has been a hot summer. The autumn rains are "late." The tree is dropping small green branches, not just brown ones.

Last fall I asked the arborist what I needed to do for the ongoing health of the tree. He said, "Nothing! This is a Western Hemlock in the Willamette Valley! This is its native habitat." Exactly. 

It's part of a grove of older trees. Their roots are deep in the water table. Or were.

I want to tell the tree, I'm here. I will be doing whatever I can to help. On my watch, no one will hammer nails into your trunk to put up clotheslines. Even if I can't fulfill all its needs for water, getting any water to its roots will be a sort of message. Won't it?

It's also frustrating that I can't speak directly to my body. I can only walk farther distances and lift heavier objects. Heart and lungs and muscles, you will be needed.

The tree is on a slight rise, so water from a hose would run down and away. I spent the night dreaming through the issues. At dawn I went out and tried this:

I picked the best pair of big roots to dig between, and cleared away acorns (etc), and dug somewhat below the surrounding soil. In that hole I put a small flowerpot with just ONE downward-facing hole.

My greatest fear was that the water would go sideways, not down. I patted the nearby ground every minute or so ... but the ground immediately beneath the pot seemed to be thirsty. 

I took these pictures at the end of the experiment, when I realized I'd want documentation, after I'd let ~3.5 gallons be sucked down through that tiny hole. That's still a tiny amount for a tree this size.  A wave, "hello."

This next picture shows the size of the trunk (gallon containers for scale). If we decide to pull down that gazebo (currently under review) we'll be able to have parties under the tree.

I'm guessing that "hello" to a tree this size might involve doing this every day or so until the rains return. On weekdays I won't have time to do this in the morning. Restful break before bed? Next summer I could rig up a drip system? 

I will never tire of this view:

The gold is from the sunrise.

 

 

Notes (almost always longer than the posting itself)

Thanks for reading!

I'm using "the tree" because I don't know its name. Perhaps in time it will tell me. There is one more tree, also currently nameless, handling the drought better. I've taken care of its issue, removing the drought-resistant thorns and underbrush around its trunk. Now the squirrels can once again run up and down, chittering. In my imagination it missed them and is quietly glad they have returned.

So far the dogs haven't chased the squirrels, or even seemed to mind them.

Both of the trees' trunks have nails pounded in, with bits of thin time-blackened rope hanging from the nails. I'm now familiar with the DIY stylings of the family we bought this house from; this doesn't seem like their work. 

In the 60s a developer laid out these tract houses around the groves. Yards and streets are shaped so that each yard contains two or three trees. My street is part of a numbered grid but my "block" curves like a pretzel. Lots of this in Portland.  

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Before we bought Canem Lucus ("Grove of Dogs" - I like the English) I drove Dad by to see it from the street. "I worry that tree is dead," I said, pointing to the red/brown sections at the ends of the branches.

Dad said, "I don't think that tree is dead." He gave me the name of his arborist. 

In the previous May we'd experienced a serious heat dome in which air temperatures reached 116 F. (I'd only lived in the PNW for 10 years and it was the first I'd experienced. Likely not the last.) Driving through this neighborhood I could see signs of damage on many trees. Amateur theories: this tree was one of the damaged ones because (1) after an extra-wet spring, it had chosen to unfurl some of its tender new bits that week, so they were more easily crisped, and (2) it was in the front of the grove, so to some extent it took the hit and sheltered the others.

Isaac from Honl Tree Care said that it didn't make sense to send arborists out to the end of each fragile branch (the best way to trim) to clean up the dry sections. "We have about thirty of these that we're monitoring." I said I would check in to see whether they'd figured out anything that helped. The tree recovered somewhat over the winter; the burned bits gradually fell off and the rest kept growing.   

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In the back of Rob's and my house in Needham stood an amazingly tall hemlock. It featured in one of my better poems (not a high bar). Our tree service would "feed" it by sticking a long thin (noun?) into the soil near its roots, to release nutrients. There's more to be said about this house and the years I spent in it with Rob. I find pretending to "own" "property" (two problematic words) both thrilling and emotionally draining. And here we go again. 

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Yes, my version of ST:TNG's The Inner Light. Theirs is stronger. But this is mine.

Now I've got myself thinking of Ann Elk ("my theory, which is mine"). Misogynist belittling of female-presenting scholars, who have a hard enough time of it already? Representation of a non-binary person that was pretty good for its time? Funny because aspects are universal? Let's discuss!

For the record, I am also "the bearded lady" mentioned in Richard Thompson's "Wall of Death." 

Steve Lewis' service

Steve Lewis died on Christmas Eve 2021. Here's a video of yesterday's service in his honor (YouTube, 93 minutes, on MCC Portland's channel).

I have had virtual communion with MCC Portland only a few times since the pandemic started. Today it was a joy to celebrate with the community again. I hurriedly found a Triscuit and splashed some Merlot in a tiny glass that we got at a local Cider Summit. 



[Photo feat. the bag the Triscuits were in, argh.]

Under present conditions it's an epic achievement to have a memorial service at all; I've lost many people for whom we've decided to celebrate their lives "later, when we are able to." I'm rethinking that now. 

For as long as I attended MCC, Steve and Charles were the guys who showed up. In addition to living their own full lives ... ahem, ahead of living full lives with large extended families and interesting jobs, Charles and Steve did the things that Jesus asked us to do, helping the sick, visiting captives in prison, and giving their own coats (physically or spiritually) to people who were cold. They always participated and often led in the hard work of nurturing our community life and challenging us to be better Christians, including engaging with the larger world in confronting hate and discrimination.

The son of a preacher, Steve was never himself preachy, but simply led by example. (Here's to everyone on the Congregational Life Team, one of the beating hearts of the church.) 

Yesterday Charles and Steve's birth family organized a wonderful memorial. Many were there in person and I got to hear musicians whom I miss a great deal. Nathan's preaching (and sung invitation to Communion) were as strong and beautiful as ever. Bernadette's and Charles' tributes wrapped things up. Charles was able to tell a short, fun story because Dave's eulogy and the impromptu contributions of other attendees and a lovely slide show had already sketched the big picture. 

I woke up this morning thinking about Steve's older brother Dave reminding us to "hold onto our fork" (just as if we were at a church potluck) because for Christians the best is yet to come. We celebrated Steve's life of adventure and love (all 4 kinds) and service, and all of Steve's people showed by example (Steve-ishly) the importance of holding each other in community. 

Remembering Marie Equi

In The Nation, Kim Kelly draws on many sources, including Michael Helquist's biograpy, to describe the life and work of Marie Equi. Thank you to Kim and everyone working to keep our history alive.

Good long read: Sundman nonfiction

I'm a fan of John Sundman's trilogy [1], and have written about one part of it.

But I'm writing today to say, my socks have just been knocked off by nonfiction JS wrote in 2003 in Salon. Still totally relevant, with plenty of useful interviews and links and brain twisting questions.

Friends ask me for good long reads and here's just the thing to distract us during whatever extreme weather you are experiencing. Link titles are mine, since the original titles had that Salon archness that today is not working for me.

Part 1: In which JS gives new meaning to "decoding" the human genome
Part 2: ... and continues to do so, with special focus on eugenics

 

[1] Amazon doesn't show them as a trilogy because John published each of them under a slightly different name (which relates to its plot/theme). Here's his own web site with more info.

May Day gratitude and our first Twitch stream

Update for April 30 / May 1: Mom, cancer counseling, Twitching!

A month ago my Mom entered a "memory care" facility. It was past time, as she's suffering from dementia [1] and needs way more care than Dad could give her (even with in-home help, which we tried). My sister and my niece managed the move expertly and I am thrilled with the place they chose and the way they furnished it.

Here she is with a poster from a gallery she managed, and one of her own sculptures.

Every resident has a shadowbox so the staff can get to "know" their history. In the lower left of Mom's you can see a photo of Mom and Dad from Glendale High.  

I'll write more about Mom soon; I'm working on a collection of YouTube videos of her, and coordinating with her collectors and friends (many of whom are in both groups). But tonight I'm writing about Mom and May Day: 

When I was in grade school, for several May Day mornings in a row, Mom led us in a ritual from her own childhood. We cut fresh flowers from our garden [2] and put them in little cups of waxed paper, or the baskets that strawberries came in (which we saved specifically for this), and added "handles" made of bent pipe cleaners. Mom took the lead for this part. Then it was us kids' job to scurry over to our neighbors' front doors, hang a homebrew mini-"basket" of flowers on the knob or knocker, and either knock or ring, and then run and hide. Sometimes they figured out it was us; in other cases I have no idea what they thought! 

So yesterday I was remembering this and I decided to take Mom some May Day flowers. I asked a local florist for anything nice she had on hand, and she mis understood and gave me too many. (Possibly grateful that I was paying cash, as she had requested. Also I had asked for something that could stand on a small hospital table and instead I got a wrapped bouquet suitable for an opera singer's curtain call.) But I wrote a note to Mom and signed it from ALL of us, so she could look at the flowers every ten minutes and get excited all over again (this used to happen at home too so I had reasonable expectations), and I also told the staff to give her just a few of them and share the others out with the rest of the residents.

May Day now has many additional meanings for me but this year for the first time in decades I honored the family tradition of, "Flowers appeared and who knows how?"

 

After delivering the flowers I drove across the river to Compass Oncology to meet with my surgeon and her team. In March 2020 they removed a chunk of endometrial cancer (via a total hysterectomy) and I haven't told most people because there was so much else going on at the time! The operation was almost cancelled due to the local hospitals reorganizing to deal with Covid-19, then the operation was re scheduled but at a different hospital, so Dr. McCluskey had to drive across Portland at the last minute ... anyway, I was extremely fortunate to have health insurance and good medical care together, and now it's time to do all the following-up that I postponed because of the quarantine.

For the next phase of treatment, genetic counselors are going to determine whether the mutations detected in the tumor were local to it or indicative of something more serious, which will determine which other sites on my body I need to watch, and how often. They think I am at higher risk of skin and digestive and reproductive cancers generally; no details or photos here, but I'm being vigilant. Again, gratitude is paramount because everything could have been so much worse.

 

And then to wrap up the evening I helped launch Val's Twitch channel, Couch Co-Op Couple. She bought the PS5 game "It Takes Two" and we avoided spoilers and dove in. We have found that co-op board gaming has helped our relationship (Spirit Island as a way to practice communicating) and so, if we tried playing co-op console games, what could possibly go wrong? 

(I warned her that when my nephew tried to teach me the Wii we both cracked up laughing and abandoned the project. Here's her channel description:

One's a gamer. The other isn't. They're playing together. Will their relationship survive?

But I will say I like the way these newfangled controllers vibrate in the players' hands. Since we can't ride rollercoasters right now this is the next best thing.)

So we'll play this game together, Tuesday and Friday nights, until we finish. There is NO need for friends to watch unless you already like this kind of thing. And if you do watch "It Takes Two - take one" (which will be up for 2 weeks, then be replaced by the newer ones) in the background of your own life, here are the three areas where I'm working to improve. 

(A) Most of the games I've tried to play on a PlayStation are the ones where I'm looking over my character's shoulder, like Dragon Age: Inquisition and No Man's Sky [3]. Those move the camera for me when I walk or run, so I just ignored the camera button. (And then there was Katamari Damacy which is a whole 'nother type of interaction, and I didn't master that either.) So our first stream has lots of, "Jules hasn't figured out the camera yet." 

(B) I'm also over-pushing the direction buttons. Wall jumping is easy because of Fitts's Law: a wall, like the Windows taskbar, is effectively of infinite size and therefore you can't overshoot it no matter how hard you "run" in its direction. But when I had to jump up on something small I kept over-shooting it.

One of the puzzles was a perfect storm for the camera problem plus the jumping problem, so please skip from 55 to 1:18 unless you want to watch me try to jump past two spinning fans and die over and over again. (Tried being petulant. Tried spinning the camera wildly. Neither of them helped. Here's a picture of the bit immediately after the spinning fans ... Val's character thrilled to be moving forward again!)

(C) Although I've watched many, I've never actually been in a "boss fight." (A bit early in DA:I where the main character closes rifts and reveals themselves as the Herald of Andraste is the closest I've ever come and it took me ages ... dragon ages ... to get through it.) At the end of last night's stream I hit my first real boss fight ever, and it was unpleasantly reminiscent of nightmares where I clock into work and all the tools are new. Val gave me some coaching at the end and here's where we are picking up on Tuesday: 

That's all for tonight! (they said, gratefully.) 

UPDATE from our second Twitch stream: (1) I couldn't hear Val as well (maybe the game sound was too loud) and I realized how helpful her coaching has been, and (2) she sounds proud / happy when I actually "jump jump dash" correctly the first time over an obstacle, which is not very often, but it's motivating, and (3) we ran into another puzzle (like the giant fan blades) that challenged my coordination so that's where we ended our second session, so (4) we're thinking of stopping a bit earlier so we can start each stream by welcoming people and not immediately fighting flat out. Oh, and we were having fun talking to each other so we probably missed some clues ... but we did beat the vacuum cleaner and solve some of the toolbox puzzles so that's where we'll resume tonight.

One of Val's best pieces of advice is to say "game physics!" when I think it's irrational that pushing the jump button again when I'm already in mid air would actually work ... 

 

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[1] My Mom's dear friend Liz died in the first wave of Covid-19, but her friend Darlene is still alive. They don't seem to remember each other now, but Darlene's family and ours are exchanging pictures so they can see each other if they want. Both of them have had full, hard-working lives, and the best way to describe where they are now, is that they have sloughed off the past and are living in the moment, just reacting to whatever beauty is around them.

[2] My parents' house on Santa Barbara in Glendale CA, where I lived when I went to elementary school, was the first home where Mom really "had her own garden," after decades of helping her mom and grandmother with theirs. When Dad started to earn sales bonuses at IBM, Mom put in dozens of rose bushes. When Dad moved us all to San Diego in 1969, Mom had to leave her rose garden. Her story about this made a great impression on my first husband Rob Landry, who referred to it when I got an offer from Borland to relocate us from New England to Northern California, and ultimately we turned that down.

Speaking of which, here's video of my Mom's final garden. And here she's trimming the roses in front of my sister's house. Both of these were taken for 2010's "Life in a Day" project in which they asked everyone to shoot video of what they were doing on July 24th. I was pretty new to video (and was using a borrowed camera) and the only one people actually search for is this view of the vintage comics at Excalibur. But now I'm glad I have that video of Mom.

[3] I loved it - even the first release. Which might be because I'm not actually a gamer. As an electronic art person I was blissed out by the randomly generated planets and their flora and fauna. The NMS problems echoed a game in my long-ago screenplay: setting was beautiful but players abandoned it because they couldn't figure out what they could do. (A common game design problem so I can't class it as a prophecy. This was my only full length screenplay, an R-rated chick flick about software development. HitRecord and my paid work both have me writing scripts again - much shorter pieces though)

Adopting a forest road (for the Sage Foundation)

My company gives us paid time to spend volunteering in our local communities. Last week (ending on April 23rd) Sage Foundation connected us with Solve Oregon to help pick up trash in our local communities. 

I broke up the Foundation hours by starting with short daily walks picking up trash in my neighborhood. For the day itself, I drove to a beloved park and "adopted" a stretch of road. Here were my tools:

Trash bags - headphones to listen to something while I picked up trash - disposable masks - disposable gloves.

As it turned out I didn't use the headphones; there were birds singing, and I also enjoyed eavesdropping as pairs of walkers passed me. (How I've missed eavesdropping along with all the other elements of "being in crowds"!) When I thought anyone was staring I would wriggle my free hand in its blue glove and try to look serious and determined. 

It was a beautiful day in Mount Tabor Park. I've put these next pictures in tables; click to see versions of them un-distorted. I couldn't get an entire tree in my camera viewfinder so here are the trunks ... followed by some of the treetops ... 

This is the stretch of road I adopted (basically "all the road I could see from the car in both directions"). 

The prize for the most interesting piece of "litter" goes to this clothing tag. Sage makes software to help small businesses, and so I'll support this one by showing you both sides of the tag. It had been stepped on but was still in pretty good condition (high quality card stock):

 

Cards / sign / flag

Four years ago I recorded my grim pre-election thoughts. Today I'm settling in for a long wait (assuming we will not have a firm outcome for awhile). Rather than a bunch of links, how about some pictures?

Ever since we moved in and I unpacked my flag from storage, each day after sunrise, I have put out my flag. (Val is strict about flag etiquette and makes sure I bring it in at sunset, or turn on the porch light.) It's for all of us, not just people waving it as a symbol of hate. 

It's not a HUGE gesture, as our balcony doesn't face the street. (Personal note: that double window to the right, with the tree reflected in it, is open to our sunny dining room, which holds both my office setups. And that horizontal platform is for dogs to lie on.) 

But of the three balconies shown here, we're definitely the most political and the least organized-looking (even though the people on the ground floor moved in way after us).

The placard is a more recent addition. I like it because it explains the implications of Black lives mattering. What are specific actions we can take, to start to unravel the way white supremacy is baked into US culture and institutions? 

(Baratunde Thurston says a good starting question each of us can ask is, "What does my community need in order to thrive?" and then work on that. Regardless of the election outcomes. More links, too many links, next time. Today only pictures.)

I am fortunate to be able to work from that sunny dining room, so I've been quarantining since the beginning, first so that I wouldn't get sick before my own cancer surgery in March, then so I could safely visit my parents who need some looking after, and now redoubling our family precautions as my wife has either Covid-19 or regular flu and just today took a test for the latter. (Update 48 hours later: the Covid-19 test was negative. Now they think it's bronchitis.) I sent 300 postcards to Arizona through Vote Forward in Chicago (with thanks to them for being so organized) and here are photos of them on mailing day, a week and a half ago. 

I got to use some of my hoard of commemorative stamps.

I'll end with a few pictures of dogs, also waiting. First here's Ciarda, on that same balcony, watching the sunset. I'm glad that we had such a dog-friendly apartment complex for our last summer with her.  

Ciarda from the front ... 

And here's Luna, waiting for Val to come out of the second bedroom (aka office and game room). With more file boxes!

Now Luna from the front. Olympic rings behind her head. Greetings from our pack to yours!