Emotional Alchemy

Emotion

1. an affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate, or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive and volitional states of consciousness. 

Alchemy

1. a form of chemistry and speculative philosophy practiced in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and concerned principally with discovering methods for transmuting baser metals into gold and with finding a universal solvent and an elixir of life.
2. any magical power or process of transmuting a common substance, usually of little value, into a substance of great value.

Many Middle Age and Renaissance practitioners, and indeed Sir Isaac Newton a few centuries later, were focused on this quest, the transmutation of base metals to gold.  Why gold?  I venture that it is because of its beauty and malleability coupled with its incorruptability.

My gold wedding ring, seen in the picture above, is an example.  It was able to be shaped into the form desired and I wear it every day with no concern of tarnishing or rusting.  Twenty years from now, it will retain its pure beauty.

Would that I could experience an emotional state like that, eh?  It would be an emotional state that was beautiful and retained that beauty through the day regardless of the corrosive efforts of events and interactions with others.  It would be malleable and formed to fit my core, my individuality, my world experience.

So, this would be the quest of emotional alchemy, the transmutation of base emotions to emotional gold.  It would be a mood elixir, a universal solvent for experienced problems.  There are two fundamental aspects that would need to be answered to find this emotional gold:

1. What emotional state is this gold?
2. If we can define that, how do we get there, especially since we said the emotional was not volitional?

Well, I propose that these are two questions that individuals have been trying to answer for themselves since time immemorial.  Selling the answers in various ways has become quite a thriving cottage industry.  Some say the answers are to be found in religion and giving oneself to God.  Some say the answers are in meditation, some in philosophy, some in wealth and acquisition, some in competition, some in withdrawal ...

If you came here for an answer, I fear you'll be disappointed.  I don't think there is a universal answer that can be defined.  But ... every so often ... ah, there it is.  Oh, that golden moment!

How does it appear for you?  Do you have a path of return?

My good friend and fellow Loose Blogger, Ramana Rajgopaul  encouraged me to come back and write a piece, something I haven't found motivation to do for a while.  Good news!  I enjoyed it and that is part of the path to return, so we shall see ...  Go visit the members of our consortium to see what they came up with,  Ashok, gaelikaa, Maxi, and Shackman, good eggs and dear friends all!

Peek a Boo

My granddaughter Danica, 10 months

Ashok brought us this topic and I immediately thought of my newest granddaughter and of the game of Peek a Boo.  That made me think of her development and started my research.

Piaget felt that Peek a Boo, and the fact that it delighted the child so much, was an indication that the child had no sense of object permanence yet, that when you covered your face, the infant felt that you were really gone!!!  But, science doesn't allow a theory to stand on the merit of its beauty of though alone and observation with clever experiments and better ability to observe have thrown this into question.

When a train is moved behind a screen after a small child can see a mouse is in the way of the train's progress, then the mouse is moved when the train and mouse are behind the screen and the train emerges on the other side with the mouse still in place after the screen is removed - uh, I couldn't think of a way to say that more awkwardly - the child should show no more interest than when the mouse is not there if they had no sense of object permanence.  Yet, as young as 3 1/2 months, they do show more excitement, indicating that they have some awareness of the objects impending collision behind the screen!  They must still be aware of the objects to show that excitement.  Or some such.

Does this change your world?  Perhaps not, but for me, I found it fascinating, just as I found it fascinating that a dog has much greater sense of object permanence than a cat and that a crow develops a sense of object permanence fairly much on the level of a human.

Now, who'd have ever thought that the word Peek a Boo would elicit such wonder??? 

Personal Debt

This topic was brought to us by the sage of the Loose Blogger Consortium, Ramana Rajgopaul of Ramana's Musing fame.  And, since he did so, of course synchronicity immediately came into  play ...

Ben Bernanke has a mortgage on his home in DC, a domicil valued at $815,000.  Bernanke gets $250,000 per speech and just signed a book deal for seven figures.  But, he just changed jobs and he was turned down when he tried to refinance!  What was the job he formerly had, you might ask.  He was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve for America.  Yes, it is that Ben Bernanke.

How stupid is this?  Is there no human intervention or common sense left at all?  Can you imagine anyone who is a better bet to successfully pay his mortgage off in time?

It used to be individuals who had the corner on insanity.  Now it is the system.

All's Well That Ends Well on a Dead End Street

Two weeks ago, Maria brought us All's Well That Ends Well and this past week Maxi/Rummuser - which must be an interesting hybrid individual! - brought us Dead End Streets.  Since I am behind and since my life refuses to slow down, I thought I'd be clever and combine them just as Maxi and Ramana have somehow managed to do!

Life is fairly literally a dead-end street.  I mean, there is really no other exit than to die.  Makes things interesting.

Of course, unless you really get deep into physics and spirituality, life is also a one-way street.  You are born, you grow, learn and age, then you exit.  You don't get to change the order.  That means you really are commited and really need to figure out how to deal with it.  Otherwise, it really isn't going to end well, is it?

So, what does ending well mean?  Well, it means that all the journey to this point is redeemed with meaning and value.  At least that is what I get from it so far.  If we are lucky and persistent, it may also mean that we enrich those sharing the journey in some loving way or another.

But, there is also another way to deal with the end, a way which is also consistent with the first view I've given: change your perspective on the dead-end.  A living example from my own literal street is the description of it as not a dead-end street, but instead as a cul-de-sac.  A cul-de-sac, as nearly as I can tell, simply differs from the dead-end in that it is easier to turn around on and is designed to let you range back through the entry path by design.  The life equivalent of a cul-de-sac is the ability to revisit one's past at will as the end nears to heal relationships left hanging, to enjoy bucket-list items of things undone and to heal one's own regrets and wounds so they don't continue as burdens.  It allows viewing life in a more flexible manner allowing gentle correction.

It does something else, though.  It allows the view that not all is futile.  It means merely that it is personal and, as with all cul-de-sacs, there is a privacy so important to peace.  And it means that you have neighbors with which to share that quiet privacy without the hurry and the noise.

I like our cul-de-sac.

I like the cul-de-sac that is my life.

Are the Mystics Right? Is Time an Illusion?

I am late getting this piece to press, a rather ironic statement considering the topic.  And considering that I was the one to suggest it to the LBC.

We have been told by mystics since what we perceive as the beginning of time that time itself is an illusion.  Annoying isn't it, when they tell you things that are obvious balderdash.  Every one of us experiences time ... well ... all the time!

In the days of the earlier scientists, time and space were separate, set entities like we observe in our everyday experience.  Then along came Einstein  and he did a funny thought experiment.  He asked himself if he were sitting on a light beam, traveling with it at the speed of light and the light hitting his eyes were from a clock face, what would he see?  Well, he reasoned, if I am traveling at the same speed and in the same direction a the light coming to me from the clock face, then I would never see the hands move!  The image would always be the same image!  Does that mean that time would stop????

Excitable guy that he was, he started going off into mental journeys pursuing the implications.  Kind of like Lewis Carrol projecting his imagination into Wonderland to see where it took him, Einstein had found his own Wonderland.  Most people would have left it at that, a flight of frivolous but fun fantasy, but Einstein wasn't made that way.

Before he was done, he had worked out theories of Special and General Relativity that turned our understanding of what was constant and what was changing totally on its head.  The beauty of it was that he created predictions of experiments ALL of which had to come out as he predicted or the entire theory was invalidated!

Rather than go through the proofs, I will give you some of the proven results.  An astronaut that has been in orbit is slightly younger than he would have been had he stayed on the ground.  It is proven by sychronizing two atomic clocks, putting one in orbit for awhile, and then comparing the two after the landing.  And, just precisely as predicted at the turn of the 20th Century, the clock put in orbit would show a time slightly earlier than the one on kept on the ground.

But, just as the mystics have told us in their pronouncements about time, Einstein did not replace certainty with the random.  In fact, by Einstein's theories, we have greater accuracy in measurements of time and motion than with Newton's.  In fact, I have read that he originally wanted to call his theories the theories of IRRELATIVITY, because they showed what was irrelative to the motion of the observers.

So, this is not an effort to be loose in thinking or to lose ourselves in some fun fantasy, it is an effort to tie down physical truth as far as possible.  The underlying, proven truth is that time as we experience it is in fact an illusion.  There is instead an unobservable combination called spacetime - and no, space is no more constant than time - and the truth lies below the surface of our five senses.  In other words, spacetime is a proven reality, but time as a separate thing is an illusion.

That we can be fooled so completely about the nature of our reality should usher in a profound humility.

Be sure to check out what the other members of the Loose Bloggers Consortium have to say.  The active bloggers, give or take a topic or a day are: Ashok, gaelikaa, Maxi, Ramana and Shackman.

Teaching Values

Disclaimer: this piece relies heavily on cultural stereotyping.  Sorry about that, but I need archetypes to illustrate my point.  My bad.

When I was in my early 30's, I went to a seminar for mental health professionals about child care.  It was led by one of the leading sociologists from Europe, a woman of fine academic / practical pedigree, and the presentation was very well done indeed.  Out of this, I learned something that has stuck with me ever since and it goes like this ...

There are many types of mothers in many cultures in our world.  Some of the most notorious are Jewish mothers when it comes to passing along values, conscience and ethics to their children.  How do they do this?  By suffering with every move their children make and every change in the world, they guarantee a little guilt to continuously monitor activity and ethical concern.  The world is no longer an abstraction, but encapsulated in the mother and there are consequences to actions.  And, sometimes, it isn't even possible to solve.

Question: How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Answer: That's OK, I'll just sit in the dark.

Gee, Mom!  I try so hard to make you happy.  You are with me always, everywhere.  There is only one mother in the world more effective than you in creating guilt, a tremendous motivater of ethical restriction, the Japanese mother!  She ALWAYS suffers silently.  The only thing more potent than the tangible is the imagined!  My Japanese friend must carry the weight of his mother's imagined inner agony in all situations.

Well, our family is not like either extreme.  We don't generate all that much guilt, we just romp together.  But, heaven help us, look what we've fostered:

Now, enjoy the entries by the other active LBC members.  I think I have their links on the right, but will check that out as I slowly get my act back together, LOL!!!

An Honest Effort to Restart

Blogging, short for Web Logging, has migrated into something a bit more than logging for most of us.  It has become a philosophical and life values platform for people often having little past public profile.  We all become authors, pundits and leaders, for doesn't social media offer us "friends" and "followers" from all over the globe.  It really has some dramatic pluses.

However, what really matters in terms of life responsibility is what we find right in front of us, our families, our jobs, our face-to-face contacts on a daily basis.  That must come first and it can be quite a challenging thing here on the mortal coil.  People around us age, natural disasters happen, illness can befall even the young - and all of these things can lay claim upon our most precious resource, time!

I have always treasured my friends of the LBC.  That is the real reason I make this effort to restart, sitting on a bench in a developing back yard with a silly golf driving setup which works and was used yesterday by my son and me.  Soon, where I am sitting will be covered by a pergola and more dry climate plants will find their place as befits the changing water needs of California.

I invite you to sit with me and share with me as you would a friend or acquaintance in your tangible world.  Let us treat one another with respect and support, even when challenging ideas we share.  Whether you are Republican or Democrat or Independent, believe in God or not or, like me, have a more nuanced view of it All, I can treasure your right to your well-considered personal views.  Likewise, I ask that you have a tolerance and respect for mine and know that both of ours grow with time.  Otherwise, it is best that we wish one another well on our journeys and part in peace.

Is Negative More Honest?

This is my re-entry into the LBC after an abscence explained in my previous post.  The Universe decided to call itself Ramana and tug me back!  So be it! :)

With the journey we have taken with so many since December of last year, a bumpy rollercoaster ride, the Lady Fossil and I have had ample laboratory situation to try out our beliefs regarding this hypothesis.  Add in the comments that have come in on social media and the mix of approaches by so many, it is a fine Petri dish of assorted organic material.  To this point, these are the results:

When it comes to challenging the beliefs of others, the negative is definitely more annoying and often not productive.  It seems to be a failure of grace and imagination, for the same challenge can often be put forth in a way that pulls the other to your side with some enthusiasm generated in the process.  Verdict: the negative is less effective in expression, but allowing it may be more effective in skeptical analysis.

Example in point is the situation with two surgeries from two doctors over the past few months for Lafawnda.  The initial surgery was by a doctor who is not a specialist in endometriosis, while the second was performed by a surgeon who is not only a specialist, but is world-renowned in the field.  The first surgery was an abject failure.  The second was a great success.

Some feel positive thought requires that the first surgeon and his followup pronouncement that the problem was in Lafawnda's head since he could find no reason for her to be having that much pain be looked at in the positive light of his unawareness of the bigger issue.  The problem with this is that Lafawnda and her mother and I are left at the mercy of an inept authoritarian figure if we stop there and basically we acquiesce.  Instead, we viewed it with a proper perception of a negative reality with the surgeon and sought immediately to seek positive alternatives with Lafawnda's health.  Had we remained with "negative as more honest" as a bias, we would have hampered our search for the postive.

The followup, however, could be a hatefest that would yield no good result.  We have a daughter essentially healed, but we want the next patient to not be in the same helpless situation needlessly.  Therefore, a nurse who is a patient of the Lady F's will help Lafawnda write an uncompromising but thoroughly professional letter to the first surgeon to let him know the ultimate outcome and his negative effect on the patient's state of mind, to let him know that further training is available to him in this area to make him more effective in treatment, or, as an alternative, that there is another surgeon available who does specialize in this ailment and it very effective in its treatment.

Secondly, when it comes to the healing process, the positive is necessary, for it is a long process, filled with pain and discouragement, and often it is the positive encouragement that brings the patient through it.  The positive has to be authentic, though, and that is often where the believers in the negative mistake it for greater honesty is they see the positive as inauthentic.

My view after all of this?  The negative is on an even playing field with the positive when it comes to honest assessment and should not be hindered, but it should not masquerade as the end of analysis.  It may be equal in honesty as expression issuing forth from that assessment, yet still have less value in improvement of a situation.  

Belief in health of any kind is positive.  Assessment of illness can be honestly negative, but it needs to seek its positive partner ASAP to find health.

Writing From the Edge of the Continent

Being the clever fellow I am, the continent in the title is both literal and metaphorical.  The Lady Fossil and I are returning from the Central Valley with Lafawnda to the Bay Area - and anyone acquainted with California knows that is the equivalent of turning on the air conditioner - and I have good things to report!  But, first the background since I haven't written anything since forever ago ...

All continents have many locales and my metaphorical one is no exception.  It is a continent of events and a rather large land it is.  It formed long ago, back when my daughter's neice drowned in the swimming pool and was revived thankfully with no residual damage whatsoever.  On top of that, it uncovered an unrelated developmental deficit that is now being addressed to her considerable benefit.

We moved to another countryside very quickly (the next week) when our newest granddaughter was born.  This is what she looks like now:

Baby D is healthy, cute and doing just fine, thankyouverymuch!  She is kind of vacation country for us you might say.

So, the country was nowhere near explored yet and within two weeks of Baby D's birth I was unexpectedly gven a job offer that I never expected to take.  The job is quite challenging and if you want to see the products I am working on as a programmer on the most challenging work I've ever done, check out this link:

http://www.finelite.com

Between formal business accounting automation and vector mathematics, I put in a full day!  Four days, actually, because I didn't fully close down my business and I take care of other business ventures in the meantime.  Among them is a new educational tool that I hope to unfold to you soon that shows great promise.

Busy, busy, busy.

So, in February, Lafawnda developed severe and debilitating pelvic pain that was diagnosed after several visits to the emergency room and the OB/GYN as Endometriosis.  But, hold that in your mind, for you have to realize this was so severe she had to stop her Dietetic Internship.  And walk away from a job position just offered to her.  And postpone her Master's Program.  But, life keeps happening - did I tell you I was now working slightly more than fulltime? - and our next door neighbor girl needed to get married.  And she had asked me to officiate.  You get the picture.

The wedding went very nicely indeed and they are a well-suited and beautiful couple who have been together as a couple for years:

Congratulations!

And, Lafawnda in the meantime has had a surgery.  An ineffective surgery.  She insisted upon attending the wedding of her "sister", but she was in severed pain.  And we were in a search for a doctor who wouldn't tell her that he saw nothing that should be causing this much pain and telling her that she could go back to school!  Pretty difficult when you can't walk, but, you know, doctors know more than the patient about what they are experiencing, right?

Well, we found the right doctor, a man practicing right in the Bay Area - not the last time we are happy to be living here - and he came to the situation with world-class expertise, but also a humility that was very refreshing.  He had patients coming to him from all over the world and has written an authoritative book on the subject.

Finally, the Master was able to do his work on April 22.  He found extensive endometrial tissue in her abdominal cavity and discovered that the scarring had even caused her colon to be adhered to her abdominal wall!  He found and removed tissue from the colon, the Fallopian tubes, the outside of the uterus, bladder, ureters and rectum.  It amazes us that the other doctor found none of this!

And that brings us to this trip at the edge of the continent.  She has now healed enough to be able to attend her fellow interns graduation and in another four weeks she will be back completely enough to work on the completion of her own program.

This is a dreadful disease experienced in greater and lesser degree by millions of women.  If it was a man's disease causing this much pain and debilitation, it would have become a subspecialty years ago and money would have been poured into its solution.  Doctors would be trained and certified rather than simply insisting they know what they are doing.  Unfortunately, though, my daughter was born a woman and they have a ways to go to achieve equal footing in this land.

But fortune has traveled with us and now we drive along the sunny edge of the continent looking forward to what the morrow will bring!

A Little Explanation

I have not been posting or making the rounds lately in the blogosphere and I want to give a bit of an explanation as to why.  I promised everyone a ways back that I had a surprise announcement and then was promptly upstaged by the birth of my newest little granddaughter!  How rude!

Everyone assumed that was the new announcement, but that one was scheduled for the second week in January and just came a bit early.  The good news is that Newbie Fossil is doing just fine and I am going to rename her Peanut Fossil at this stage.  It just fits her better!  But, back to my surprise announcement ...

I took a job!  There is a company that I did initial contract work for beginning in September of 1995.  Eventually, they hired one of my employees in 2001 to handle their needs onsite - and this was done with my blessing - and now they have run into some programming needs over the past year that I was best suited to help them with.   They then, at the end of the year, put together a package they offered me to see if I would come to work for them as an employee and it was definitely worth my time.

I have been way busy!  And now I have to board a flight!  Later ...

Give us this day our daily ...

This painting hung on a wall in our dining room - or that of my grandparents, perhaps, before that - for as long as I can remember.  It is, of course, an old man in prayer, saying grace over that which he has received and that which he treasures, the items of true sustenance, food and the written word.  It is very Christian at its best, a beautiful visual portrayal of simplicity, humility and gratitude.

As children, we were taught The Lord's Prayer with its line, "Give us this day our daily bread." and I cannot count the number of times in my life I have repeated this prayer in private and in communion with others.  This, I assume, is the source of the topic brought to the LBC today (yesterday, really, but among friends ...) by Padmini.  It embodies a very interesting stance toward the world, saying that sustenance is not earned as capitalism portrays, but rather that it is a gift of the divine to be appreciated, a gift to be shared and multiplied in our caring one for another.

For those who cannot see their way past the fact that Christianity was incorporated here, it can be stated with some variation of meaning in a different context by Omar Khayyam in his Rubaiyat:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness--

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

It is a good way to be.

Religion and Me

I posted this as a response over at Ashok's blog to his avowed atheism coupled with appreciation of the beauty of spirit shone him by some believers:

I am not an atheist, but I do not believe in “an omnipotent person looking over you,” for there are very different ways to construct being and its roots. Indeed, I have never seen any of the descriptions of ultimate reality to match my vision in any of the religions, but I can see all of them as local representations of it, each with greater or lesser distortion and none of them complete. I am nonetheless appreciative of the truth of the serious believer when shone in love and humility.

And, I love that we all share seats in a magnificent mystery!

For once, I expressed well what I feel within.  I am like the new Pope, if a person is atheist and lives well, with compassion, caring and justice, I have embrace them.  If a person is a believer and lives poorly in terms of caring and love, I don't see salvation in their belief.

Broken

This is a sad post.  We as a family have been incredibly blessed this holiday season with the healthy birth of our newest addition, Newbie Fossil.  We had a much closer flirt with disaster, however, with the drowning and resuscitation of Innocence Fokker, my daughter's neice.  The doctors said she only had a 7% chance of even survival, so we count her full recovery as blessing beyond belief!  Our experience with Innocence made us very sensitive to the plight of kids in danger and, unfortunately, of kids dying.  

On the same day that Innocence drowned, 2 other children drowned in the same area.  Innocence was the only one to survive.

On the day that Innocence was released from the hospital, a 13 year-old girl was brought into the same hospital for a routine tonsillectomy.  But, routine or not, she began bleeding and went into cardiac arrest over the next few days.  She has been declared brain dead by several specialists.  Still,the family refuses to have her removed from life support and now it has been announced (as I've been typing this piece) that she will be transferred to a long term care facility.

The sadness we feel and the empathy runs VERY deep!  However, the scientist in me no longer has any hope, for brain death cannot be recovered from.  If ever she recovers, it will indeed be miraculous.  Short of that miracle, I fear that this will be a source of further pain for the family in ways hard to imagine.

Rarely, something like the recovery of Innocence happens.  Unfortunately, all too often, broken is broken and there is no repair available.  And there is no broken worse than that which happens to your child.

I hope that the other members of the Loose Blogger Consortium, listed on the right, have happier takes on this topic.  Nothing in me would be happier than being wrong about this 13 year-old.

Determination

In this holiday season - and a quite unusual, intense and busy one for me and mine, I might add - I am running a bit late on my LBC blogging.  But, Maria / Gaelikaa brought this topic to us and I am determined to do my part!  Today, I will be channeling another person, a little person who will be a regular participant from this point forward.

Hi, I'm the newest member of the family, Newbie Fossil!  It isn't easy coming out of one of the nicest spas in the universe to the harsh light of day.  The responsibilities they lay on a kid!  Wake up.  Eat.  Poop.  Sleep.  Repeat.  I mean, it is unending!

Oh, and did I tell you that they packed me up from the hospital and brought me to some place they call home?

I think this is more work than it's supposed to be, right?  I mean, it even wears out my Dad:

I mean, Mom is carrying a load right now and I get how she could be tired:

Still, all of us women in this family hang together and she seems to be doing great in spite of it all!

If they can do it, I can do it!  I'm determined!

But, there are times ...

Is Global Peace Possible?

Ramana can at times throw a hard one at the LBC for the weekly topic.  Wow.  Well, here goes.

The optimist and the realist in me live in different time periods on this one.  In the present, there seems to be no viable path to global peace.  Human evolution just isn't at that stage and I can only see it happening with a few more millennia of progress.  If we can possibly survive to that point.

There is the rub.  Survival to the point that peace could be global.  We are on several collision courses in the path to global peace, and the most alarming is the one capable of triggering all the other disasters we fear most, the one that can truly bring the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse - Conquest (or Pestilence), War, Famine and Death - into our presence.  That single source is not JUST iniquity, although the true believers of the literal will no doubt fault me on this, it is the inevitable collision with reality that an unsupportable population brings.

At our current acceleration of population, we are heading for a collapse of the bridge to the human future, for we will be unable to supply the resources necessary to sustain ourselves.  This, under present reckoning, is an unavoidable fact.  The result is the entrance of the Four Horsemen and the less literal interpretation is that these are the necessary forces that will come into play as the conflict of over populating hits the full tipping point.

We are already well on our way and can see the results all around us.  We have global warming.  We are polluting.  People are starving.  We have wars.  Ultimately, many people will die on a mass scale.

But ... this is where the optimist in me walks in, my internal version of the True Believer.  Given mankind's drive to survive, it will become apparent even to the ignorant that extinction is a very real possibility.  Existence itself will become intolerable on a more massive scale and humankind will either need to mount a massive defense of its viability ... or die.  When confronted with these options, it is amazing what people can do.

Is global peace possible?  Yes, I think so.  But it looks like a great deal of trauma may be necessary to truly awaken us to a better potential.  Do you agree?

The Brain of Innocence ...

... suffered no damage!  The word just came in from the neurologist.

And, more good news: she is now walking around on her own!

Innocence's Hero

If you have not read the prior article on what happened to Innocence Fokker, I encourage you to read http://instantfossil.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-death-and-resurrection-of-innocence.html so that you can appreciate what is to follow.

When Innocence was discovered not breathing and without a pulse floating in the pool, she was immediately brought inside by her father.  An immediate call was made to 911 and her grandfather began doing cpr.

What was unknown to the family was that two experts were walking in their neighborhood at that time, a firefighter and his wife, a nurse.  American firefighters are very fit, very strong people capable of fighting fires in the greatest of extremity.  But, as I have been told in the past, over 90% of their calls are EMT (Emergency Medical Treatment) calls and they are very advanced in emergency treatment.

As this firefighter received the call on the radio attached to his belt, he realized the address was close by.  He immediately took off at a sprint with his wife following.  He arrived at the home and entered, immediately beginning emergency medical treatment of Innocence.  I do not know the details, but I know that he was maintaining a regimen of 100 compressions per minute and sustained that until the ambulance could arrive and even in the ambulance, then going with the ambulance to the hospital. From there, the earlier story picks up the narrative.

As Ramana commented: "At a cynical age when the medical profession is getting flack for negligence, this is a welcome change."  Agreed, but there are those around us ready to be heroic at a moment's notice, people geared to act and help.  There is not enough gratitude in the world for what they do for people they have never met just because it is the right thing to do, because they have huge hearts and great courage!

To a man I have never met, to a man I do not know, "Thank you!"

The Death and Resurrection of Innocence

This week, our whole family has gone through Hell and returned to tell the tale.  Everything I am going to tell you is the truth as reported to and experienced by me and only the names have been changed, because I don't want anyone unfamiliar with the people to invade their privacy at any level.

My son-in-law, Flash Fokker, has a twin brother, Twin Fokker, and Twin and his wife, TwinWife Fokker, have a beautiful little girl, Innocence Fokker.  This story is so poignant and so troubling that I am going to give you the spoiler that the ending is pretty good, because I don't want it to tear you up like it did us.

This past Sunday, the Lady Fossil came down the hall with cell phone in hand to tell me that Innocence Fokker had been found in the swimming pool unbreathing and with no pulse!  Lafawnda and Flash had been at a shopping center shopping for Christmas gifts when they heard and they had immediately set out for the home of Twin.  They learned on the way that Innocence was being airlifted to a regional children's medical center about 15 miles from our home.  All of us had started the trip to Hell.

Lafawnda and Flash actually arrived at the medical center before anyone else, including the copter with Innocence.  Soon, the direct grandparents gathered along with Twin and TwinWife.  Innocence arrived and was taken in for emergency treatment.

The doctor emerged to tell everyone that the chances were high that Innocence would not make it.  No one knew how long she had been in the pool and she was discovered clinically dead.  She was intubated and a pulse had been restored, but there were no guarantees of survival or of safety from severe brain damage if survive she did.

The doctors fought like the warriors of peace that they are with this little girl and by the morning, she was stabilized in a medically induced coma.  She had tubes and IV's everywhere and she was wrapped in a special cold blanket designed to keep the body temperature low.  Her temperature in the pool had dropped to 83 degrees Fahrenheit and it had returned to the normal 98.6 degrees.  This hypothermia was a possible saving grace for one so young, because it can prevent brain damage and tissue deterioration.

For the next two days, she was kept unconscious.  She was on a ventilator, but the doctors noted that her organs were still functioning.

The next day was her second birthday (can you think of anything more poignant) and the staff and other parents of very ill children brought her all kinds of presents.

A brain scan was conducted for 12 hours and the neurologist only said that during that time, she had no seizures.  Still, everything was looking as good as possible.

The next day, they started lowering the sedation and she began waking up.  And she smiled at her Daddy!  She had a long way to go, but she was able to recognize the people around her before she lapsed back into a deep sleep!

Well, each day has involved all of us watching the recovery of Innocence and helping our kids with the experience they were having every evening.  It is one of the more taxing stretches we have ever experienced, for none of us were in a situation to falter.

Innocence is exhausted as I write this, but she is out of the ICU and has started going through rehab, and the team working with her are some of the best in the world.  We are soooo relieved even though we don't know still if she will have any damage and aftereffects.  We know that she watches her favorite movies and laughs at her favorite spots.

Now I show you Innocence Fokker, a little girl who has been dead and has returned, as she looked yesterday:

And THAT is beauty!  Thank you Delores for bringing this topic to the LBC this week.  Your sychronicity was perfect!

I will have a followup, for there is a true hero in this story and I want him to get his due.  But, for now, this is enough.

Daydreams

When I was a child, daydreaming was a delightful habit.  My mind would just take off for the hinterlands and I could construct my own internal novel at will.  Indeed, I at times would construct a fantasy story line that I would essentially pause when my attention was needed for the "real" world and then restarted at that point as I returned to it.

Those internal stories had super heroes and I was, oddly enough, an observer, almost as though it was a movie.  It made me an easy child to take places, because I didn't need my parents or other adults keep me entertained.

Don't get me wrong, I was not a withdrawn child and I only enjoyed my inner landscape in this way when there was nothing of interest for involvement at the time.  Now, I don't daydream in that manner at all, but that doesn't mean that I don't use the same inner tools for adult purposes.  I am involved in a project that requires me to imagine lighting fixtures oriented in space and what it takes to turn this into an input system for a salesperson and an output system for a manufacturing facility.  Different use, same tools.

I also use a more freeform version of this for my spiritual questing.  Instead of directing inner imagery, I try to present an inner medium awaiting spontaneous "projection" as it were.

I'm sure all of us have some version of this.  I am curious.  What is your version?

Check out the other writers of our Loose Blogger Consortium to see what they have produced for this topic.

My Favorite Book

This topic brought to the LBC this morning by shackman.  It seemed impossible at first, but with a little thought and consideration …

It was 50 years ago today.  It seems so long ago and yet it seems like yesterday.  Every American can remember where they were.

It was in June of 2011 when word came to me that my father had fallen and would not recover.  It seems so long ago and it seems like yesterday.

It was about 4 1/2 years or so ago.  An idea came into my head that sprouted into the Loose Blogger Consortium.  It seems so … well, you know the rest.

What ties these together?  Emotion, caring and personal impact.  Jack Kennedy’s assassination is etched in every American’s psyche indelibly because we embraced him.  He had impact just by being and acting out who he was.  His charisma and his family’s ushered in a new vision of America.

My father and I shared many memories and reflections on JFK over the decades just as we shared so much else.  Both of their losses impacted me deeply, not to speak of the impact on my mother, who shared 63 loving years with my dad.

Now let’s close this circle.  Along with the LBC came relationships of a type that I would never have anticipated at the time.  We were few at the beginning, but we were very much into the idea of trying an experiment where each blogger would simultaneously write on a single topic and THEN go see what the others had written.  The core group was really Ramana, myself – and this long legged lass from the Emerald Isle.

Well, over time and over sharing and over caring, we all became closer and began communication on the side in a variety of ways.  We have had a surprising number of ups and downs over this period, for that is the lot of mortals.  And the loss of my father to me and my mother was no exception.

What most don’t realize is that one of the true stabilizing forces for my mother at that time was this lady that I became acquainted with on the Internet, this charter member of the LBC.  Marie – Grannymar – talked on many occasions through those early days on Skype with my mother and helped her through.  And helped me through.

Now, this lady of Ireland who has become what we think of as our cousin for we are almost half Irish, is hanging up her LBC pen on this the 50th anniversary of the death of our Irish President.  There is a poignancy to that, and I want to deeply and humbly thank my friend for all that she has done and all that she has meant.

And that brings me back to our original topic with this choice as my favorite book: