bacteria

  Hi Maggie,

I can't imagine everything that you have been though in this past year. I try, but I know it is no where near what you have had to live though.  I am not surprised that there is still trauma and betrayal in your field. Maye this is part of the continuing lesson that cancer is teaching you.  I expect that you will be making peace with this for a long, long time.  Reconnecting with your body is an essential step...unless you prefer to live in your head for the rest of your life.

It is interesting to me that you feel like you feed and clothe and carry your body. I have mostly felt that my body does this for me.  I wonder if we have separate "me's"??

In shamanism, many times the novice faces death, then has to retrieve parts of self and put self back together.  Maybe that is the spaghetti.  You are a puzzle and you need to be reassembled...

Hmmmm..I look at me ex, I face him when we speak, but somehow I don't "see" him. When I talk to my children, I notice details about their faces. I get an impression of how they are.  But with me ex, I stopped doing that.  I think it is to protect myself...and maybe him.  There are still some angry spots in me, although mostly I am at peace with our mutual lesson.

We went through some very difficult time when trying to find a way to deal with protecting children from child abuse in Friend's Meeting.  We had one attempt where volunteers were asked to sign a paper agreeing not to abuse children.  That was very painful, especially for those of us who had been volunteering for years.  We created a setting where one adult was not allowed to be alone with one young person.  It created an artificial situation and turned the adults into police. One of our teens was having a hard time. Instead of one adult going to talk and listen, two had to go.  We were then policing her and forcing her to rejoin the group.

I came up with a way to have meetings write letters of support for anyone who felt led to work with kids.  The meetings had to share their history with the Friend and to vouch for them. I felt this involved the larger community.  Not only was the youth community deciding who to trust, meetings were involved.  I still think this is a great idea, but I'm not sure if it is legal.  And youth work is at a minimum right now.

I can understand the pain and embarrassment.  Volunteers are basically being accused of being abusers unless they can prove otherwise.  It is painful.  It goes with all the loss of privacy happening to us. We protest, and the answer is - if we are not doing anything wrong, we don't have anything to worry about.  But I am very worried about a system that assumes I am a liar. And that is how this system currently works.

You said recently, we need to be like a cancer, to be immediately adaptable.  I was troubled with that, because cancer works on the premise of unending resources.  It kills its environment by taking everything.  That is our current culture, and it is not sustainable.  Last night I was reading the words of Stephen Harrod Buhner - a favorite herbalist. A friend gave me a copy of an interview published in The Sun in December 2014.  He says that bacteria are highly cooperative.  Once exposed to a new antibiotic, they begin generating solutions.They intentionally rearrange their genome, then communicate it to other bacteria.  They can share genome strands when they touch....think of the communication, the intelligence.

I am in awe...

Hope you are having a better day. remember that I love you!!

Clare