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not two.

Been a minute. As may be true of your life, after a pause, social connection has renewed in a more literal way, and I’ve needed my downtime to connect with myself. And with my book. They are not two.

Today, I was rendering some of the book’s final scenes. Like a child at the dinner table, I didn’t eat right through, but worked around some parts, saved them for last. I’ve just passed the day where my mother had her words knocked from her from a fall in hospital, and am on the way to her funeral. I type at them slowly, here and there. There is great space around them, true to the time. My mind moved slowly, if at all. There were no other futures, the past was long gone. Nothing else mattered more. Pay attention, life was saying. This is landscape you must know. It’s where you came from, and where you’ll go.

They are not two either, though good luck convincing one’s own mind or a culture created in its image. “Fear, little creature,” evolution said, “Go build futures where nobody falls, not mothers, not you. I’ve a plan for those ruins, a hundred thousand lifetimes long. ”And so we go with bucket lists and savings plans, tracing ants’ patterns in a shifting earth.

This morning I explained to someone close to me what I was writing. “The truth hurts,” I said. “It’s sad at times.”“You might meditate, ask her how she is, what to do with your sadness.”

So I did. After some minutes, unbidden, her visage appeared in my mind’s eye, not gasping, not pale, but smiling, full of joy.

That’s all it took, sitting, trusting, waiting. Her and I are not two, nor me and you. We are part of something much more elaborate, more beautiful, tugged into place like pieces of sand in the elaborate mandala of the universe.

A hundred thousand lifetimes long is the picture we are part of, and by the time it arrives, there will be another, even bigger. Our challenge now is to know despite the dizzying movements around us, the shriek of our fearing mind, what it is to be well, such that our next act is to create a world in that image.

In that spirit, this July, an hour or so outside of Toronto, we will meditate together, peers, deers, sunflowers, birds, and bumblebees at Bela Farm. Come sit with us. Deets below and here: https://fb.me/e/23IpbadFc

A day of meditation, nature and exploration at a beautiful farm just outside of TorontoJoin James Maskalyk* and the Consciousness Explorers Club at the gorgeous Bela Farm and barn for an immersive day of meditation in nature.

A hundred acres of open space, grass under your feet, fresh air in your lungs and all the soothing sounds of the countryside. It’s the perfect place to focus on a deeper sense of wellbeing, which will be the focus of this mini-retreat.This offering is suitable for beginners, adepts, teens, skeptics and lepidopterists.

During the six hours, there will be group meditations, silent practice, and opportunities to explore the environment.Some snacks and drinks will be on offer, but please bring your own lunch and whatever you need to sustain yourself.

Tentative schedule (subject to change):

10:30-11am arrive and settle
11am welcome and introductions
11:30-1pm guided meditation with James Maskalyk
1-2 lunch break and social time
2-3 silent sitting and walking meditations over hill and dale
3- 4:15 guided meditation, music and movmement with James Maskalyk 4:15-5 closing circle

Free parking is available on site. If you are able to offer a ride to/from the farm, or are in need of a ride, please add your info to the RIDESHARE SHEET (https://docs.google.com/…/1OTerzjYEzWrf10qt346x…/edit…)

This is part of a monthly series of meditation days at Bela Farm this summer, taking place on these Saturdays:

June 18 with Jeff Warren
July 23 with James Maskalyk
August 20 with Luke Anderson and Oliver Rabba
September 17 with Stephanie DeBou and Kevin Lacroix
This day is being offered on a “pay what you’re able to” model, with a sliding scale to accommodate all income ranges.

The Consciousness Explorers Club is a registered not-for-profit with the mission of making meditation and personal growth practices fun and accessible to all.

CEC would like to thank Rochelle Rubinstein for her generous support! @bela_farm*

James Maskalyk is an award-winning teacher of medicine at the University of Toronto, and teaches meditation at CEC. He has devoted his life to the pursuit of wellbeing for all people in body, mind, and spirit. He is a best-selling author, and his latest book explores the paradigm of wholeness as seen by different healing traditions, First Nations, Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and allopathy.

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how to find love when all is lost.

choose it.

wouldn’t you just know it, mine turned out to be a most sensitive soul, tender and easily bruised. you would not BELIEVE the route i took my body on to discover that. together we sewed the skin of genocidaires, watched a rash of small graves pass through a town, sent people from warm hospital halls to sleep on cold toronto streets. once i watched a man with a gun shout at a bunch of twelve year olds in the high sun to crawl closer to the ground than they already were, so their enemy wouldn’t shoot them in the shoulders. i certainly haven’t seen it all, but think i’ve seen enough. 

i’ll spare you the autobiography, but conflict caught something in me as a doctor early and hard. a yearning to know peace in myself maybe. if the war that lived in me came from the same place as the ones in cambodia, sudan, somalia, perhaps a deft move could sneak me around. 

didn’t turn out like that. it was too complex, too confusing. identity, power, geography, resources, history, all these at the same time. even the people in the middle of it couldn’t really say how they got there. i decided i was far too small, my mind too feeble to understand. the best i could do was to retreat where it was safe, reconsider the route. maybe if i stayed close to peace, it would seep in, and i could know it that way. i landed in ethiopia, as alive in the koran as the bible, so many languages, so little halloween. people, who eventually became my friends, wanted to build emergency rooms all over the country. i dropped my bags, and found a kind of home. at least for a decade. 

war has arrived there, as it does in countries and people, as it does in me. my friends who i love are in the middle of it, so i am too, me and the part yearning to be safe, the one i share with you and all people.

in twenty years of puzzling hard about how i might do that, trying, failing, trying, in real life and daydreams and nightmares, i’ve only come up with two answers that have stuck around. first, you can’t get around war, in the world, or ourself, only through it. it keeps rising, seems sewn into my nature, wedded to the peace i seek. second, and this discovery feels newer, but to find a way through those days or months when all seems bitter, i must choose love. actively and every time.

sounds so easy. it isn’t, but then one day…if we choose love and then love and then love, in all the valences, every time, of ourself, another, all people, god herself, it becomes where we dwell.

or we can choose fear, or lust, or hatred, or greed, or anger. as we do, the route becomes riven. unbidden, it starts to choose us, and the narrower, ancient view do their perversely successful evolutionary thing: shake us into individuals instead of interconnection, and we feel alone on the losing side of a zero-sum game, with no option to but to fight. nowhere is safe, no home will fit, at least for long. the devil only needed the one move: deceive us into seeing scarcity in the face of plenty. with that inversion, anxieties treble. gunshots too. stock markets. take what you can, the little man says, before someone takes what is yours.

nothing is. ours i mean. not even us is, not a single atom sticks around save for a few in whatever teeth we’ll have left. everything else just flows through. anions, identity, scrambled eggs, love, hate. thank god to the holy highest, in that that magic mindbodyspirit land of ever-shifting awareness, she placed her answer to every one of the devil’s tricks: we get to choose.

i wake up every morning, and i choose love. and when i have forgotten what it is, i do what my friend dave courchene taught me: go into ceremony, prayer or solitude or fasting or meditation or nature or or or, and keep on doing it until you realize your life was a ceremony this whole time, and on that day, when you glean that truth, all you see is spirit, and because you are it and so is everything that ever was, there is nothing to hate. 

and the next day it’s gone, and there is nothing to love. ever-shifting. so we choose again, every day, in every way, and when we commit to love, commit to peace, in a forever-way, the billion bells built into our bones chime, and mother nature does a double-fist pump, and her tears of joy fall from thunderclouds stacked a mile high, because another of her children found the way. how much closer could the breadcrumbs be, she asks, for the 80 billionth time, and goes back to waiting. 

thich nhat hanh, a living buddha, says that we don’t have peace because we don’t choose it. peace talks as they are done now, he says, are doomed to fail. they should never be attempted over anything less than two weeks. the first week, no talking about what you want, only being with each other, each other’s families, making food. at the end of that week, you start to talk about the people you love, how they are suffering. we choose love, and peace follows.

i lost my mother last year, to a fall in hospital. she hit her head hard. i almost wrote “never got to say goodbye”, but i mean …never got to hear it. i said goodbye for days. in the last of them, when she seemed disturbed, in pain or confused, i would lean into her ear, smell that first smell, my favorite in the world by a fathom, and whisper:

….shhshhhhhshhhhhh
peace peace peace peace
love love love love love
rest rest rest rest rest
peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace
lovelovelovelovelovelove
what a beautiful home
do you see it? what a beautiful home.
peacepeacepeacepeace…

her brow would soften, then smooth. one morning, she found that beautiful home, and stayed.

she dwells there, yet somehow is still with me. not just in my nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, but if you can believe this, science please forgive me, in her spirit, sweeter than ever. i wonder why no one tells you this about grief, that it is a healing thing, growing over the hole a body leaves behind in our heart, but after it’s done, we are left alone with the spirit, and the best of it, it’s clearest signal, for it has nothing to fear, and the chimes on our side become louder than ever.

as i wait to see what type of world approaches for my friends in ethiopia, i send them the same wish i did for my mother, the same one i had for myself when i stepped onto the tarmac in phnom penh twenty years ago, and have still : peacepeacepeacepeace, lovelovelovelovelove, restrestrestrest. may we abide in the most beautiful home we can know in this lifetime. as we choose it, it chooses us.

i miss you. i worry for you. i trust you will be well, because you have always chosen love, and by doing it, taught me how. i will be with you soon, learning from you how to find space, for the sick and the worried, how best to place all of this love.

Ethiopian leadership conference in emergency medicine

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the king has no clothes.

with no other qualifications save the immense wealth created by proprietary access to technology, bill gates has anointed himself king of global health policy, where he argues such barriers must continue lest they upend the hierarchy. I need no grand conspiracy to make this claim; it is happening in full view, with complete permission from the law.

https://observer.com/2021/04/bill-gates-oppose-lifting-covid-vaccine-patent-interview/

he didn’t create the pandemic, despite what you might be inclined to believe, but he seems willing to perpetuate it at the altar of financial profit. listen, I’m not saying him and Melinda haven’t done great good. I know they have. I have seen it. I’m saying the ground on which it is built on is doomed from this attitude, that knowledge is power, and some people deserve to hold it more than others.

before people spin out, I want to tell you: vaccines work, and everyone should have the chance to take one. many people who aren’t sure, often have the intense privilege of not knowing anyone in their family who has died from an illness that could have been prevented. ask your great-grandparents if you can. my great uncle died of measles as a boy, before I could know him. people still get crippled with polio. it has saved many women from cervical cancer.


https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2020/hpv-vaccine-prevents-cervical-cancer-sweden-study

denying their importance and effectiveness is a magical type of thinking, more suited to the middle ages. denying them particularly to the poor, while claiming an interest in global health, is a modern curse, and is not just hypocritical, but delusional.

no wonder people don’t know what to trust. certainly not bill, sadly, at least for matters to do with your wellbeing. his heart seems too centred in his 100 million dollar home than to be in the right place. what you can trust, though, is his interest, and those of the drug companies, in power and wealth. in many ways this reliability is good. it means the vaccines are likely to be smithed to near-perfection, pharmaceutical grade, pure and effective, then sold to the highest bidder, then once they prove capable, raised in price. what they also want to sell, along with the vaccine, is the idea that only they are uniquely capable of doing it. it is this latter part that is impossible to believe. how would they know? even if so, we’re fast learners. teach us.

are the vaccines safe? of course they are. should you get one? from where I stand in the emergency room, my answer is a pretty resounding “duh”. you don’t have to worry about them hijacking your immune system, only your collective wallet. despite much of the basic research for mRNA vaccines being funded by your dollars, you still get the privilege to pay.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-billion-dollar-covid-vaccines-basic-government-funded-science-laid-the-groundwork/

but hey, $ provides access, right? for it, you’ll get the booster, a new one for the variants that might be on the way, an all-access pass. if you aren’t in one of the countries that can afford the billion dollar subscription fee, though, all you get is sick.

bill gates, in my opinion, has told you who he is. you don’t need to look any deeper, anoint him as part of a secret cabal. he’s no secret. more than being seen as a “good guy”, he wants to be seen. and truthfully, I don’t know his position. I trust in the goodness of people, and think in his own way, he things he is doing it. his role certainly includes greater access to information than I will ever know, but I can’t help but feel, that is part of the problem, believing that like we can’t handle vaccine production, we can’t handle the truth, and should just trust.

I’m sorry. that’s not how trust works. we don’t trust people who hold things back. we need transparency, and openness. we need to let the knowledge go so it has its highest good. the truth is the only thing that will set us free, alone and together.

over the years, this is the only organization I’ve learned enough about to trust to tell it. the reason? the pay shite and all we do is argue until it gives you a headache. I would follow them into a fire, again and again. https://msfaccess.org/covid-19-action dig, if you will, on their #nopatentsinapandemic campaign.

while I was away on my first mission with them, in Sudan, I was also working with doctors and academics who left CMAJ, because of incursions on editorial independence, to form open medicine.ca (though defunct, it lives forever in pubmed central, tanks god: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=%22open+medicine%22). we knew open-source/access medical publishing was a rough ride because we decided to refuse Pharma and device advertising. we could figure no way around the slippery slope it would put us on, fearing a bias that tilted us away from the inequity that caused so much of the world’s sickness, and towards profit. we called a relationship with industry “dancing with a porcupine”, dangerous to get too close, because you’ll get hurt.

at this point in our human history, we need industry to innovate. it is awesome at it. we don’t, however, need to give them permission to let their pursuit of excellence cost human lives. there is nothing wrong, inherently, with the pursuit of healthy growth, even of a company. I think that bill gates and Pfizer, for instance, are just mired in an old way of thinking, that the best way to make money is through barriers to access. for a windows update, or an RNA sequence. it may have even been true at one time, I don’t know. I think, though, there is a bigger opportunity now, and that is to profit by distribution of knowledge, transfer of expertise. you simply increase the possibilities for innovation, which is both so much more bitching to believe in, and likely to occur.

so the question of profit from innovation, vaccines or otherwise, is not one of good and bad. it is definitely a hardcore YES. as that profit is interpreted only as $, then the morality comes into question. should Pfizer or Moderna make a financial profit? yes, of course. and, once they have, they should open their methods, such that the profit continues for all humanity.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2021/04/02/profiting-from-success-the-future-of-covid-19-vaccine-pricing/?sh=4e83f7b71bf5

during my tenure at Open Medicine, I think my favourite article to work on was with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Heilman and Wikimedia Canada, as we proved that diffusing knowledge into the hands of people was not only safe, but better than any other alternative. as I wrote in preface to his article on #denguefever (sadly, not the band): “With an Internet connection, you don’t need to talk to the brightest people in the room to get the information you need. With the right access, you are one of them.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4242788/

let us light the way to a world where everyone who needs a vaccine, can get it. such an endeavour, possible in our lifetimes, will make us realize we are richer beyond our wildest dreams, and the equilibrium it brings will herald the peace we have spent our whole lives chasing, tasting on the tips of our tongue. The movement will need more than loosing of patent laws; it will need active, equitable distribution of expertise. This will allow for places like Ethiopia or India to be foci for production, and as their ability grows, the likelihood that someone there will create a solution for your mother’s troubling cancer, because it is troubling theirs.

https://theprint.in/opinion/why-the-trips-waiver-unlikely-to-solve-indias-covid-19-vaccine-shortage/653979/

What can you do to support such a transition? Well, if you’re in Canada, write your MP. You can find yours here: https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en

If in the US, here: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

Click on “contact”, then send them an email with the subject heading “TRIPS waiver for COVID vaccine technology”, and put in your own words why you think it important to your safety as a Canadian. Not just that, of course. The quicker we squash this, the more we save money, and our lives return to one’s in which we can face each other, unmasked and in love.

or, heck, write them and tell them that you think patents are the best, and you want even more. I’m not the boss of you, I just think that if you read around the issues, you might agree that they are there because they are successful in creating wealth, and we are reluctant to let go of something that works so well. I trust, though, that as we do, we will see that profit will actually increase, just be directed towards innovation and efficiency, rather than access. First COVID, then the carbon capture.

all this to say, grateful for yet another chance to not write on my book. thankfully, it is f__king freezing cold yet again in Toronto, and there’s nothing really to do so I’ll probably have the yawning hours of this afternoon to get to it after all. if you’re up for it, I’ll see you for meditation Sunday, 9PST/12EST. holler if you have anything you want me to bring up. love.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/26/preserving-intellectual-property-barriers-covid-19-vaccines-is-morally-wrong-foolish/

ps. these pictures, which I shared before, are of the pharmacy in black lion hospital, first when I arrived in 2009, at Addis Ababa university’s request, to see if we could help with setting up a training program in emergency medicine, then again 2017. we never brought a single medicine, only the thirst for them, then we stood by their side. the other pictures are from graduating classes, the first with five, then the others from leadership conferences that helped them imagine the many directions their growing number can take their careers.I can’t wait to travel there again, to see what they’ve done. now, I don’t know the type of profits bill gates is into, but I can tell you the ones I have accrued: I never have to worry about a place to sleep in Ethiopia, for something to eat, or to be surrounded by people who want the best for me. the Ethiopian Emergency And Critical Care Physicians have done so well. from being once upon a time, my students, they are forever more my teachers. I miss you. see you soon.

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Indigenous communities are denied the most important medicine people can receive: Kindness – Globe and Mail

James Maskalyk is an emergency physician, associate professor in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine and author of the forthcoming book Doctor: Heal Thyself. Dave Courchene is the founder of the Turtle Lodge International Centre for Indigenous Education and Wellness and chair of its National Knowledge Keepers’ Council.

Emergency department visits are down across the country because people are not sure they are safe. For First Nations, the uncertainty is familiar, but has little to do with COVID-19. The hesitation comes from reports that continue to emerge suggesting the care one receives in hospitals depends on who you are. Or aren’t. Like Joyce Echaquan. Lillian VanasseSarah Morrison’s unborn baby, who died en route to a distant hospital in British Columbia after being turned away from her closest one.

If you need other stories, read the 2020 report on racism in health care, “In Plain Sight,” commissioned by the government of British Columbia. Some will argue their details, that these deaths would have happened even if these people weren’t First Nations seeking medical care. Even if true, it misses a larger point. The Indigenous community is systematically denied, more than any other group, the most important medicine a person can receive when they are suffering: kindness. Their fight for it is one that will lift us all.

If you’ve listened to Ms. Echaquan’s last video, the absence of empathy is glaring. She is told she doesn’t belong in a place all governments have pledged to flex beyond capacity to accommodate those infected with the coronavirus. For many First Nations, the sentiment is familiar, as it is to other deliberately oppressed groups. To whomever it is directed, the message sent, and received, is that in these shared spaces, some people’s pain matters less.

It is not true. We are all beautiful, down to our last cell, and deserving of grace. Suggesting otherwise, especially as a final injustice delivered to a person after a lifetime of them, eats away at the safety of the people who mourn them. While there are innumerable examples of kind and effective care delivered to people, regardless of background, that a person never knows which she might encounter, creates chronic stress and a reluctance to seek help. Further, the refusal to engage at a human level means the system can neither learn about, nor meet, her true challenges. These echo against each other, and emerge as worse health outcomes in individuals and their communities, including from COVID-19. To remedy this, the cause must be addressed.

The root of these erosive attitudes, whether is it formed around race, sex, age, income or some other arbitrary line, comes from the colonial belief that nature is a pyramid, with humans at the top, animals below, bugs near the bottom. This type of hierarchical thinking continues within each stratum, with some members of the human family certain they occupy a superior, or as worryingly, a less deserving position. This attitude of dominance, first over the earth, and by extension one person over another, kindles pandemics, climate change, insurrection, violence, inequity and addiction. Only by appreciating our true place in nature as equal to and dependent on every other part of it, will we know freedom from these.

There is no greater goal than safe spaces centred on respect and compassion. With that intention, particularly to address anti-Indigenous racism in health care, a meeting occurred in late January between provincial and federal governments, with representatives from Inuit, Métis and First Nations. At its conclusion, the federal government promised to develop legislation devoted to improving Indigenous health, and strike a National Consortium for Indigenous Medical Education.

These are familiar steps. No law, so far, has succeeded, and if a more effective one was written, the behaviour it prohibits will emerge another way. Further, the problem is larger than health care, and the education must address all manners of discrimination woven into our institutions. They are, after all, made only of people.

A national curriculum should be developed for Canada’s youth, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, teaching natural laws seen from a First Nations perspective, as passed down for thousands of years. Developed and led by First Nations across the country, it would do more than introduce the youth to the depth of a culture right in their midst; it would teach them, through experience, ancestral ways of stewardship, and kindle in them a spiritual relationship with the planet. To live in peace, a person must learn the kindness of the Earth as directed toward all living things, for when we feel that love, it grows through us to include all of humanity. Once this occurs, it is not possible to look at another person, particularly one who is struggling, with anything but kindness.

This is not the ground Ms. Echaquan’s pleas found, but we maintain her aim as the only thing that makes sense for all of us. As we change, our system does with us, and everyone will be included in our healing.

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The real cure for COVID is renewing our fractured relationship with the planet

JAMES MASKALYK AND DAVE COURCHENE
CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL PUBLISHED DECEMBER 18, 2020

If humanity is to endure, the coming months must hold healing, not just of populations across the globe from the coronavirus, but of the Earth herself. As is true of many zoonoses (diseases that jumped from animals), this virus emerged from pressure humans put on a global ecosystem.

A lack of healthy, natural habitat weakens the immune systems of animals and the resulting sicknesses pass rapidly through them. Birds, prairie dogs, pigs, bats. With each infection, a chance for a virus to mutate into one that can sicken humans, and sometimes, global livelihoods. As such, a vaccine alone, no matter how effective, will not tip the balance toward health because COVID-19 is not a disease; it is a symptom of an exhausted planet. The renewal of a healthy relationship to our one shared mother, planet Earth, is the cure.

There is good news. We do not need to wait to determine how, because the answer is already here, and has been known for thousands of years. It is in the wisdom and sacred teachings of Indigenous people across the world. They have the deepest connection to the spirit of the Earth and its history, and from this intimacy, healing can occur.

This is neither speculation nor fantasy. A 2019 study from the University of British Columbia, looking at biodiversity in Canada, Australia and Brazil, found more species of birds, animals and amphibians on land managed by Indigenous people, even greater than in national parks. In the same year, a collaboration involving 50 countries and more than 500 scientists, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), concluded that human activity and the resultant lack of biodiversity allowed for five new diseases to emerge every year with the potential to infect humans. They noticed that Indigenous land, though it faced the same pressures, was eroding less quickly. Capturing their knowledge, and expanding their stewardship, was cited as necessary for a healthier world.

No one created the problems that threaten to overwhelm us from malice. Not the plagues, nor climate change, nor extinctions. They have occurred as side effects of a system whose rapid growth is both encouraged at all costs, and blind to natural limits.

If the Earth is as alive as both climate scientists and Indigenous peoples say, and like a body, kept well by a diversity of cells, deeply connected, then the medical diagnosis that fits most neatly our modern sickness is not an infection, but a malignancy. If unaddressed, it threatens to use every last joule of energy, not from need, but from appetite until only it, and a husk, remain. As the IPBES concluded, we must “decouple the idea of a good and meaningful life from ever-increasing material consumption.” This must be the priority of our Group of 20 leaders, who met recently to talk about “recovery.” The solution will not be found by beating back the symptoms so we might return to business as usual, but fanning the flame of aliveness of the beautiful and healthier world beyond them that is in retreat.

This past summer, at Turtle Lodge in Manitoba, a sacred Anishinaabe lodge of traditional teaching and wellness, Indigenous knowledge keepers from coast to coast met and discussed challenges affecting their communities and the world. Their main concern was a disconnect of people from the land and its lessons. In that rupture, like a break in the body’s immune system, sickness has crept. Opiate and alcohol addiction, anxiety and depression. COVID-19. We can learn from the line of inquiry of some traditional healers, who instead of asking their patients first about their pain, start with a more direct question: Who are you?

We have forgotten who we are. There is a remedy held in the gathering statementof the Turtle Lodge National Knowledge Keepers’ Council, and endorsed by Indigenous people across six continents. On Dec. 21, as the Earth reaches equilibrium and begins its solstitial yaw, we are all invited, Indigenous and those of us displaced from our traditional lands, to light a sacred fire, and keep it burning throughout the day. A fireplace, a candle. In its flame, the sun’s light, the Earth’s gifts, and our own spirit. It is the first step toward knowing our nature, and that of the planet, as not two, but one.

We are of the Earth, and have everything we need to heal. The cure for COVID-19 is here. It is us.

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my greatest fear.

yoyo. in the hospital til 5, but should be back home by 6pm EDT for an update.

couple of things i would like to remind people. first, this is a very contagious disease that is continuing to spread. now is not the time for victory laps, nor to emerge even if you are tired of this routine. i know you are. so is everybody. our hands are raw, our faces too. we hold steady until new cases become intermittent, which can happen if everyone remains committed and careful. the vibe of “oh, i’ll just go hang out with friends because its just me, and if everyone else is loosening up, then….”. it’s whack. until another strategy emerges that is as safe for your loved ones, vulnerable family and friends, this is what we stick to. the virus needs larger circles to spread, so we keep ours tight. sorry.

second, my greatest fear is not this virus, neither getting, nor succumbing to it, though it would be sooner than I would like. my greatest fear is that after we figure out our winning strategy, we go to back to the “business as usual” that allowed this thing to emerge in the first place. the homeless we housed get moved to the street when higher paying customers bid for their bed. we coop animals in cages, smaller and smaller forests, eating them as we go because we like the taste even if it hurts our body, and they live in such constant stress that viruses pass between them and then to us. the masks we started to make in canada, that so many of you offered to send me and still do, get ignored, and instead of growing our capacity to produce our own, get them shipped across oceans again, the sound of the ships making whales so deaf and frantic, they continue to beach themselves while smoke pours into the sky. instead of learning how to create/mend/reuse the things we have, we jump back on amazon because its easier, and our dollars flow to people who already have so much they couldn’t spend it in a hundred lifetimes. lebron james makes 100 more million playing a game while the long term care worker takes 3 buses to be able to afford traveling to the nursing home to take of your mom. people take planes for an afternoon meeting, and the myth that a growing economy, despite its destruction, is a sign of healthy one, rather than the malignancy it represents, continues as dogma.

these things are viruses too. covid didn’t come from nowhere, and it won’t go anywhere until we work on the conditions that led to it, and support the strategies that mitigate it. forever. caring for the vulnerable, forever, supporting health for all people, forever, refusing to sicken the planet in order to temporarily soothe ourselves, forever. peace, forever. sounds like a tall order, i know, but we’ve never been collectively closer to change than we are now, so nows the time to create a world we most want to see on the other side of this.
how? i don’t know. i’m no doctor. oh wait. i am. so i’ll stick to that, and let you figure out what you’ve learned from this time in isolation about what you need, what you don’t, and how to carry it into the months and lifetime that will follow this time. i must go back to work. see you soon.
pics: 1) india from above (me!)2) mitosis of human endothelial cells(https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2019-photomicrography-competition/bpae-cells-in-telophase-stage-of-mitosis

Categories
essay

The story of a lifetime.

The story of a lifetime.
essay by Dr James Maskalyk

(for the Consciousness Explorers Club)

“RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.” 
– Some Rules for Students and Teachers by Sister Corita Kent and John Cage 

Here’s what it’s like for me at the start of this blank page.  Thoughts circle like clouds, move in then away. If I can glimpse another behind, a shape emerges.  Sentences become paragraphs, clouds line the sky.

“Start in the action”, editors say.  “Show, don’t tell”. Write “a woman wept” instead of “people were sad”.  Better still, follow her into the parking lot, wiping tears from her cheeks, and watch her fumble with her keys as she leans against the car.  They drop in the dust, and she looks at them for a long second, then follows, sits hard in the gravel, her dress bunched around her knees. Rocks bite into her skin. “Why?” she says, softly.

I’m at my ancestral home in Alberta, listening to the clock tick seconds. Outside, the needles of a spruce tree I planted as a boy, now tall and wide, swing softly.  It’s strange to wake up here, so far away from Toronto, and Kensington’s busy-ness. No beep of backing trucks, nor muffled voices through the drywall. It’s quiet. Nothing is happening at all.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  I already told you about the clock, so time’s happening. And there’s the faintest roar of a highway two miles away.  Out the front window, a bird flies from the feeder. I stand to see it better. Beneath its black flat tray, a squirrel picks up a seed, twitches his tail, then moves to another.  A chickadee dives in beside him.

Aside from them, I’m alone.  My father is on the way to the hospital to be with my mother.  She is there for a month, in a hospital gown, her immune system wiped clean by drugs in clear bags, dripped into her neck.

Her pale face. Clear tubes passed through machines. Drip-drip-drip.

This past winter, my dad’s faint voice, over the phone, over her shoulder, just as I was about to hang up.

“…(You’d better tell him)….”

“Tell me what?”

“Well,” she said, “they didn’t find anything on the CT scan to explain my back pain, but in my blood, they found something called…blast cells?”

Oh no. Nononono.  Anything but that.

They are trying to kill those blast cells now.  There are too many, lost, without a purpose except to copy themselves until there is room for no others, and since science has no way to be specific, at least not yet, we’re razing them all. Yesterday, her hematologist told her to expect her hair to fall out.

“I’ll just ask a nurse to shave it,” she said. “It’s better than pieces in my mouth.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.  I thought there was more time. I had a book to write, and a year off from the ER to do it.  I was to travel the world, exploring different views of the body. From India through the Himalayas, into China, to the Amazon and its millions of plants and plant medicines, our indigenous North and what wisdom first people gleaned from thousands of years on this land.

Instead, I’m in the hospital without a stethoscope, waiting hours for doctors to come.  I didn’t know irony could be so tedious. Yesterday, I pushed my mom in a wheelchair, half my body hers, towards a concert in the foyer.  People listened, tubes in their arms and noses too.

“Jim, I’m tired.  Push me back.”

My dad has left the bedroom door open.  Only his side of the bed has been used. Her bathrobe lies on the chair. The house is quiet, but for the clock.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

And I catch myself.  Finally. Months. Since that phone call in February.

This is exactly how it is supposed to be, always was.  All the forces of the universe, the same ones hammering stars into stars into stars, every chemical collision and thought pattern has made it come true, and there’s nowhere else to be, no other place worth trusting except this one. What matters most is not what was lost or what might have been, but what I’m losing wishing the story in front of me away.

This is why we practice, or at least why I do.  It’s not to take the edge off of anything, or get a good night’s sleep.  It’s not to get enlightened, because that’s just another narrative that sits between me and the true place worth trusting, fierce and unsentimental, from which all action bursts into the terrible beauty of being alive.

I meditate so I can write the story in front of me, conjure it from laws of physics yet to be discovered, from the clouds that surround, from thin air then again.

My mother’s cells have stopped growing.  I’ll cut her hair. *

I’ll be gone for a while, from Toronto and CEC, working on this story, watching it unfold, unfolding it.  Not sure where it will go, because like yours, it’s yet to be told in the history of things. I’ll do some writing along the way, here and here, if you want to come along.  Otherwise, I’ll tell you about it when I’m back, and you’ll tell me yours, about the impossible things that happened right before your eyes.

The woman stands up, rock falling from the dimples in her skin.  She reaches beneath her dress, brushes the rest of the stones free, picks up her keys, opens the door, drives away.  Actually, you know what, fuck that. She can fly. She leaves the keys where they are, looks around, and seeing no one, takes off like an arrow into the sky.

* Didn’t get a chance.  My sister-in-law did it, and it looks cool.

*****

Meditate with me at Mosaic Yoga: 225 Sterling Rd, Toronto

DATE: September 16
TEACHER:  James Maskalyk
THEME:  The body is a dictionary of all words in all languages.
MEDITATION: Potential energy
INTERACTIVE:  Trigger practice vs. Mixtapes Vol XVI

James: There are at least as many bits of advice about how to meditate as there are on how to write stories.  The most important rule, though, is shared by each: ass to chair. Or cushion, depending. From these, answers emerge.  Questions. Characters. Plot lines. There’s something else that helps with both too. Vocabulary. Not words, necessarily, but discrimination, knowing at  an increasingly subtle level the small things that make up the large. It makes a story richer, more vivid, helps orient us towards the truth. For the first part of the sit, we  will dial up the gain in our body, feel into its electric possibility, and in the second, tune it, write down what we find, where we feel it, what it tastes like.

Categories
interview

“In many ways, it is just one body, hurting from different things.”

19 January 2019

James Maskalyk (MD) is a noted Canadian doctor and author of a new book titled, “Life on the Ground Floor”, which is to be translated in Amharic. The book is a reflection of his experience working as a medical doctor in Ethiopia as well as in Canada. Here, he reflects with The Reporter’s Samuel Getachew on his long attachment to the nation, on mentoring and teaching the next generation of Ethiopian doctors, on his interaction with the vulnerable and shares the powerful wisdom shared to him by a mentor that have given him a renewed purpose in life. Excerpts:

The Reporter: James, you are a noted doctor in Canada and you have spent some time in Ethiopia and being exposed to the local health care scene. Tell me about that?

I arrived to Ethiopia for the first time in 2007. I was working with the medical organization Médecins Sans Frontières, in Sudan. At that time it was one country, and the fighting between the future nations was vicious. I was taking care of a small rural hospital at the intersection between North and South, and as part of the activity, was running a small tuberculosis program. There was a Tuberculosis training in Addis Ababa, and I was asked if I wanted to attend. I hastened to, not simply because I was keen to improve the outcomes of my program, but because I so desperately needed to get away from the conflict and the heat and the dying.

I landed in Addis Ababa, and as soon as those airport doors opened, it felt like home. I’m not sure if it was the humidity, the friendliness of the people, or whether on one of my previous lives I had walked its streets, but I knew, in that in instant, I would come back. Over a week, I learned from teachers from Addis Ababa University about tuberculosis, and their gift to me of their knowledge and experience, saved a hundred of lives. When I returned, watching people get better with tuberculosis, rather than worse, changed my experience of Sudan.

Though I left it with deep sadness, commensurate to the suffering, I did have one bright spot. Not even a month after my return, I received an email from my director at the University of Toronto who told me that Ethiopia, interested in making a large transition in the health of its population, wanted to open its first emergency rooms, staffed by its own expert’s. Would I help? I agreed, not simply because I had this early affection for Ethiopia, but because I was so distraught from the problem In Sudan, I could imagine no other way to solve it than to work on the root causes of conflict from nearby, with a group of physicians and nurses who might one day, take what they’ve learned and pass it on to their neighboring country.

So at the beginning, my first work in Ethiopia was largely born from my exposure to conflict In Sudan, and realizing that you can’t fight war with war, but that one must take the long view of what engenders it, which is poverty, illness, and inequity.

In the decade you have been in Ethiopia, what have you learned about the local health care scene, in particular at the Black Lion Hospital and what has changed that have impressed you most?

Without doubt, what has impressed me most in Ethiopia, is the commitment of the Ethiopian men and women, not just doctors, but nurses, cleaners, security guards, who despite adversity, and lack of remuneration, show up to the ER on days, nights, evenings, and weekends, and work in a dangerous, dark environment to help people who can either afford to pay that much, and whom they don’t know.

While l this happens in Canada to do some extent, many of us accrue a significant financial benefit in addition to a spiritual one. This is not true in the public system of Ethiopia. I watch many other specialists migrate to the private system, where they perform tests on the wealthy so that they can join their ranks. At the public hospitals where my former students and current colleagues work in Addis Ababa, Jimma, and Hawassa, they struggle with their patients to find the money to get even the most basic ones.

They fight a battle for recognition by their peers, who see such work as lowly, but their hearts, like mine, are full even though their pockets are not. There is never a question, when standing by the bed of a 14-year-old with a rheumatic heart, gasping for her last breaths, that their knowledge and experience is being used In the purest way. In my opinion, it is the wanting of that girl’s life to go on when much of society has passed her by, that will transform not only the nation, but our notion of humanity.  There are a few successes, and many failures.  But they strive, and on the rare days they win, they leave the ER with no questions about what life is for.

One of the difficulties with helping Ethiopia move forward is the lack of capacity building and knowledge transfers. You have been working on training Ethiopia’s pioneering emergency doctors in the nation. Share with me the highlights?

If you are as good as your teacher, you are half as good. It has been the most humbling and beautiful experience to watch my former students become twice as good as me. The strongest leaders are turning out to be women. And In Ethiopia, like it is in Canada, women have many more invisible barriers to break, even just to be equal, but there they are, leading the charge on behalf of their colleagues, and millions of Ethiopians.  So they are three times as good.

When I walked through Black Lion the first time, there were few curtains, no monitors, and the drug cupboard was bare. We made a decision early on, despite the difficulty, to not bring drugs or supplies that we couldn’t find in the country. Instead of bringing the critical medicines or tools, we taught the doctors and nurses to ache for them. They did, and argued for their addition to the hospital’s budget, found suppliers, and now, when they run out, instead of hoping that more may arrive through the door, they go to the store room and ask for more.
As it has been from a very early beginning, they have become my teachers. I look forward to learning from them for many years.

You are certainly a man of privilege and a medical trained doctor in Toronto. Why do you think it’s important for such people to venture outside of their comfort zone and help in societies that they are, perhaps, needed most?

When I was learning medical ethics, that I was supposed to take care of the sick ones, no matter when they needed me, or where, I traveled to a developing country, and saw that poverty, conflict and sickness twisted so tightly together, you couldn’t tell the two apart. I understood that my work, if I deserved the title of physician, was at least in part, in other places. I still believe that is true. If you are a true believer in medicine, enjoys the position and authority it affords you, you must work on the social problems that manifest the diseases you have learned to treat.  Otherwise, you are doing only half the job.

I also believe that if we are to claim the title of being truly human, we will realize that those medicines shouldn’t stop at the invisible lines in the ground that we called borders, nor stand up to the commonly held truth but these patients are too far away from us, when planes fly overhead in greater numbers, taking entire families to Disneyland and Australia.

I believe that human life is sacred, truly, no matter what color your skin is, what tribe you identify with, or where you lay your head. All life really are! I can see no downside to this approach because I get to include myself in that grace. Mine is actually the selfish approach, because I want to believe that my life is special, my life is sacred.

So the only way I know how to do that, is by treating all life as if it was a tremendous gift, that all suffering was my suffering.  If we have a chance to save the notion of what a human being is, at great threat in our life times more than it ever has been because we have all the tools to solve even our largest problems.  We will only meet our true selves when we can give the child in the ER in Gambella, Eritrea, Canada, Laos, the right treatment for their sore throat, so their heart doesn’t grow too big for their chest, and they die breathless and their mother’s arms before they have a chance to work on these challenges with us.

In your latest book – Life on the Ground Floor – you compare your medical experience in Toronto and in Ethiopia – the similarities and differences. It’s hard for anyone to link both, the experiences of one of the most affluent nations and one that is one of the world’s still developing nations. What are the similarities for you?

The human body is always the same. Suffering, pain, similar. A big difference is that in Canada, I would consider it both unethical and unnecessary, to offer the president of the Royal Bank of Canada, any different treatment then I would a homeless woman who sleeps on the street. That is a big difference. The glimmer of electricity on in electrocardiogram is the same in Ethiopia and Canada, and in that poor woman, as the rich man. In many ways, there is only one body, hurting from different things.

You see, emergency rooms are more than spaces with tools.  They are a way of thinking.  Once you cross the threshold, and sit down at the triage desk, if we are pure in our activity, it doesn’t matter whether you are young or old, rich or birrless, Amhara or Oromo, Muslim or Orthodox, only where it hurts, how much blood you’ve lost.  In my mind, this is a global view, and the more places that hold it, the better chance we have of discarding our other way of thinking, and working to manifest a new one that includes us all.  That’s what my latest book is about, “Life on the Ground Floor”, how principles of aliveness in the body, carry into the system that cares for it, both searching to be free.

How has your time in nations such as Ethiopia, South Sudan, Kenya and Cambodia impacted your private and professional life?

What private life? Ha ha. So much of it has blended into the other, but it’s tough to tease the two apart.  I think it was my own mother who told me a quote, I believe from Seneca that says something like, “Why do you search so much for rest?  You were put here to work.”  I travel so much, I haven’t found time for a house or family.  When people ask me, I say “I’m only 45! I’m too young.”

I have many friends, all over the world, but my work as writer and global doctor suits my personality. I am fond of long periods of solitude, whether they happen to be on a plane, or walking through the Mercato where no one speaks my language. I remember when I stepped off the plane into Sudan, my first long mission; my coordinator Maurizio asked me if it was my first. When I told him it was, he said “Oh, I’m sorry.  You’re ruined now.  I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but ten years later, I think I understand.

You have also worked with Medecins Sans Frontieres, in particular are Dadaab refugee camp as well as in Sudan. Tell me about that?

Wow that’s too big of a question. What is it like to watch no just one child, but dozens, starve to death, and then 36 hours you a ride back home where newspapers talk about the epidemic of obesity. That’s what it’s like. That’s what Maurizio was talking about.

To a young doctor who intends to follow in the footsteps of yourself, as a “Pearsonian Canadian” citizen perhaps, what advice do you have for that particular person?

There is no other work. You can spend your life amusing yourself, insulating yourself from the difficult parts of the world, but deep down, in your secret and true heart, you will always know that this is what needs to be done. There was never any such thing as Canadian, or Ethiopian, only human beings on an increasingly shrinking earth. You were put here to discover who you are, witness beauty, and move this thing called life, at least incrementally, towards it.  I recognize the intense economic, and many other types of privilege I have that allow me to engage internationally, so I don’t expect everyone to follow such a prescription, but I do believe, once you get your own house in order, you can begin to work on our shared problems.

I would leave this person with the answer I was given when I asked my mentor, when I returned back from Cambodia, sick and disheartened at the immensity of the challenge, why I should bother to continue the work.  He said “because it’s your bloody duty, that’s why”. It truly is. And with that, to laugh, love, and feel free, but none of us are until all of us are, so hasten.

Categories
essay

It’s always been this way – CEC essay #155

CEC #155 It’s always been this way.

“Each of you is perfect the way you are … and you can use a little improvement.”

― Shunryu Suzuki
**

Happy new year, we say,as the earth, at a hundred thousand miles an hour, whips a full ellipse around the sun. Happy new day, headlines claim, in whatever side sees the starshine and billions of beings blink on, rub their eyes, and stare at the ceiling as if it was the start of something.

 One of my favourite koans to puzzle over took place between Hyakujo and Baso, who startled some wild geese as they walked by.  “Where did they go,” Baso asked his student. “They flew away, Master”, Hyakujo answered. Baso grabbed Hyakujo’s nose, twisted it.  “They didn’t go anywhere!” he yelled. At this, Hyakujo had a realization: he needed a change. Get a girlfriend or something. Hanging out with Baso was getting weird.

The whole world is shouting. Baso, the tap of your heart, the purr of planes overhead. Every movement an arrow towards some unfound place, reminding us that we have always been here, like the geese.

 Happy new instant.

It’s always been this way.  The world’s always been on fire, fear about to outpace hope, love seemingly swallowed by death, our darkest notions locked ferociously to our brightest nature, the power to illuminate ourselves married to  one to immolate. And yet we are here, all of us, together, always have been despite a million odds against it. So what do we do?

Pay attention. That’s it, really. To our experience, what beats through our body, for it has lived a million million times, and is right now, whether we will it or not, catapulting us all like bright, hot stars into a place more beautiful and terrific than our deepest dream.

We devote January, at the CEC, to concentration, the eternal beginning. We spend the month pouring our attention at  our attention, directing it again and again towards the spot t, falling forever in front, where each beginning is welded to its end, perfect as it is.

And in need of improvement.  Our lives, the relationships that make them.  The mud from our past clinging to our cleanest feeling. The planet, its hurt rivers and oceans.  It’s ok, don’t worry, we’ll get there. If we pay attention, we can see that what we need has always been  at hand.

Once, I watched Thich Nhat Hanh explain death to a dervish of 5 year olds.  They twisted, wrestling, at his feet. He smiled, took a matchbox from the table next to him, struck it aflame.

“This fire is your father,” he said.  They stopped, panting.

“And, this candle is you” he added, pointing at one on the table beside him.  He held the match as it burned down, and with the last of the fire, lit the wick, set it down on the lip of the candle holder until it sputtered flat.

“So, is your father dead, or is he alive in you?”

Alive.  Alive. Alive.

“Yes.”

He went on.  Clouds, rain, river, his tea.  He took a sip. No beginning, no end, only this. They understood.

“Now go play.”

He turned his attention to us, the children who knew too much.

School starts Monday, explorers.  Now go play.

***

DATE: Jan 7
TEACHER: Dr. James
THEME: New year’s revolution
MEDITATION:  Knowing the one thing we can know.
INTERACTIVE: Holding the one thing we can hold.
James: Riffing off Baso and Hyakujo’s goose fest, we will explore what the riddle points to, begin with the simplest taste of concentration, trying to pour our awareness as fully as possible to an object of attention, see how much real estate it can take up, taste the flavour of absorption (licorice!).  During the interactive part, we’ll see how much we can hold, as we turn up the world around it. Look! The geese!

DATE: Jan 14
TEACHER: Dr. James
THEME: Will not be televised.
MEDITATION:  Knowing the two things we can know.
INTERACTIVE: Holding the two things we can hold – mixtape version .
James: Waiwaiwait.  I thought it was one thing?  It is. But it’s also two things that are the same thing.  All the things really. Sound opaque enough? Great. We’ll make it literal, yaw from one point of awareness to the fringes of the spacious edges on which it hangs.  In the interactive part, just because I’m wont to do it, we’ll hold these as we join the rivers and lakes of our cymatic bodyscape, rolling wherever the music takes us.

DATE: Jan 21, 2019
TEACHER: Jeff Warren
THEME: Valuing Simplicity
MEDITATION: Relaxed awareness
INTERACTIVE: Gratitude letter
Jeff: Many times I’ve heard Shinzen say how we begin with trying to fit meditation into our lives, but over time, a figure ground reversal can happen: our lives become more meditative. In part, that means they become simpler.  Amidst the growing complexity of our entanglements, we find ourselves beginning to appreciate simple things. Things well done. Simple pleasures once overlooked in the momentum of our busy days. This Monday, we slow things down and explore how relaxing our awareness and valuing simplicity can change our experience of meditation. Then for part two, we explore a simple and powerful way of creating and sustaining happiness: the gratitude letter.

DATE: January 28
TEACHER: Erin Oke
THEME: Power of Concentration
MEDITATION: Babysitting
INTERACTIVE: Concentration in Motion

Erin: Zen master Cijiao of Changlu wrote “…at all times use whatever means expedient to preserve the power of concentration, as if you were taking care of a baby.” Babysitting sitting practice tonight! We’ll open wide our lens of concentration, noticing the minutiae of sensory experience arising and passing on the vast canvas of awareness. In part two we’ll bring concentration into motion with a special secret guest movement teacher who has yet to manifest.

 

Categories
mix music

2018 mixtape – it was times.

Happy new year. Happy new day. Happy new starshine, a billion billion beings blinking on, and on the dark side a billion billion blink off as if it was the end of something, but it’s always been this way.

The worlds always been on fire, fear about to outpace hope, love seemingly swallowed by death, our potential locked behind glass, unable to break fast onto the hallowed ground we can see, but on which we do not yet stand.

And yet, and yet, here we the fuck are, all together, despite such impossible odds, drawing a map with no idea of the territory to come, only this vague and persistent feeling that it might include some tidying up before we move on.

What? Well, the detritus of last night’s party. The round rings of spills sticking to the coffee table, speckles from Erin’s shiny pants. What’s left of the season. The cards. The tree to the curb, sweep its needles, pluck the one stuck to the back of your pant leg. Our lives, the relationships that make them. The mud from our past sticking to our cleanest feeling. The planet, its hurt rivers and oceans. And as we do, there is not sadness, but great joy, for each beginning is welded to its end.

It’s always been this way. We’ve always been stuck to the music that life is blaring through us, bursting us like catapulting stars into the future, more truly beautiful than our deepest dream.

Let’s lean into the beautiful. Now’s always been the time.

Here’s some music, some of my favorite tracks from last year. Sorry I’m a few hours late on posting it. I had some celebrating to do last night. And forever more.

Glad to share this puzzle of living with friends who have such fine eyes, catch all the colours mine miss, pull the pieces closer together. May you get everything you need in this, difficult and lovely life.

https://soundcloud.com/doctorjames/2018-it-was-always-this-way