Day: September 28, 2014

Lulu decided to join Red for sheepherding this morning. The donkeys are very interested in Red, they all seem to want to join in at one time or another.

Recovery is one of the great adventures of my life, along with marriage, parenting and moving to my farm in upstate New York. Recovery is not one thing but many things, not one chapter but a book of chapters, not one lesson but many lessons.

They say that the thing about cliches is that all cliches are true, that’s why they are cliches. This is, I think, especially true about recovery, from Open Heart Surgery and perhaps from others, I can only speak to my own experience. I have come to see recovery as a spiral, a series of circles, ends that are beginnings, beginnings that are ends. It takes a long time. Don’t be an over-achiever. Be patient, go slow, don’t push yourself.

I am into my third month of recovery, and every day or so, a nurse or doctor reminds me  to slow down, be patient, that my recovery will take months, even a year or more.  This is something I forget, every single day. I want it to be over now, I want to be done with it and get back into my life. Bit by bit, day by day, I see that I am getting there, it is never fast enough for me. When I got home, I could do nothing. Now I am doing most of the things I always did – cooking and shopping, lifting most of the things I could once lift, dressing and driving and monitoring my doctors and medicines. Maria has reached her goal of cardiac rehab – I am cooking almost all of the meals again.

The heart and the body were shaken and stunned, and there is still a lot to do to get everything back on line and in shape. Every day I am disappointed and sometimes discouraged at how much there is still to do. In this surgery, the trauma to the body is still great and there are all sorts of things that crop up, vanish and reappear – fatigue, sweating, fluid retention, stomach upset, some mood swings, surprising side effects and aftershocks. Every day I believe it is over, every day I learn it is not over, nor is it up to me. My heart and my body will take their own time in their own way.

In the wake of surgery, you deal with so many things, others take awhile to get to. I am walking three to four miles a day, going to cardiac rehab three times a week, riding a stationary bicycle four or five times a week. I am in better shape than I have been in for years, walking is a great joy again, as it always was for me. I am handling a dozen different medications, insurance issues, visits to the pharmacy, side effects. I put off looking too closely at food until now, when I am able to focus on it.

I have always eaten well, I have studied nutrition and talked to many nutritionists, I am a diabetic and we learn about food if we know what is good for us. But heart disease is unique and raises it’s own kinds of nutritional issues. One of my favorite snacks for years has been cheesepuffs, special cheesepuffs made by an organic health snack company, low in fat, real cheese, lightly backed, approved by all of my nutritionists, including my cardiologist. Some snacking is great, they all tell me, people who never treat themselves are the first to give up healthy eating, which for me is fruits, vegetables, nuts and fish.

I would snack on my cheespuffs every few days, just a handful, they were a reward to me for all the walking and exercising and hard work of recovery. I needed to eat them, I think they kept me in balance, kept me from feeling grim and deprived. This week I stopped ordering them and stopped eating them. I don’t want them anymore.  I find myself moving – quite subconsciously – on to the next level of recovery, one step at a time, when I am ready. I wasn’t ready before.  I like yoghurt and berries just as much, and the idea of cheesepuffs, even relatively healthy cheesepuffs, have lost their appeal to me. I am  ready to move forward and focus more sharply on the food my heart needs and wants, on the right fuel for me.  My heart and I are on good terms right  now, I intend to keep it that way.

Maria says I have changed since the surgery, and am changing all the time, and I can feel that. My legs are strong now, they are hungry for walking. My body loves to move and needs to move, my balance is returning, my lungs gaining strength, my heart is working well and hard for me. I get that I am not nearly done with recovery, about halfway along if I am fortunate and work hard. I am learning to understand the long haul, expanding my notion of patience, strengthening my own sense of self, and most importantly, finally learning to love and respect my body, after all these years in which we have not gotten along or worked together.

Recovery is a complex things, beginnings become ends, ends are just beginnings, one after the other. Goodbye to cheesepuffs.

As a former journalist, I have watched with great interest the evolution of the news into a medium that gave people a view of the wider world once or twice day into a technological Hydra that is as disturbing as it is exploitive and distorting. Media in America was never as virtuous as it often pretended to be or without it’s many agendas, but it had an ethic of service and caution and balance and it often permitted us to understand the world. We talked often about our responsibility to answer  questions as well as raise them, to resolve arguments as well as promote them. And, for all the shouting, many of us cared deeply about the power of truth and the importance of fact.

In the past decade or two the news has become a disturbing and personal, psychological and spiritual challenge for each of us. It is frightening, disturbing, it promotes anger and division. Cable news has become a social and pathological cancer, closing the American minds to understanding and change, shutting the angry and narrow-minded into their intellectual cells – the “left” and the “right.” My friend Pam White, who is a spiritual counselor, raised this question about watching the news on her blog – blogs now perhaps the only place where you can ponder this issue – she said one of her spiritual advisers advises people to avoid the news, it is so unhealthy and aspiritual. Pam is not comfortable with that idea, she wants to know what is happening in the world.

Me, too.  If you watch the news regularly, it is easy to forget that there are good people in the world, peaceful places, wonderful news and beautiful things. I believe it is imperative to come to an individual understanding about watching the news, in order to be peaceful, safe, healthy,  and to have anything approaching a spiritual center.

I don’t think there is a black-and-white answer about watching the news, there is not one solution for all. We are all different, we all need to find our own way. In the past 30 years, almost all mainstream media has been corporatized, which means the primary ethos of journalism is to make money and reach the greatest numbers of people. The people on the “right” are trying to make money off of our fears and concerns, so are the people on the “left.” It is not about principle.

Cable news channels have become fear and anger machines, dividing the country, promoting rigid and enraged discord 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They have poisoned our democracy and tainted the well of civic discourse, all for money. They are a disgrace.

New technologies have made it nearly impossible for us to avoid this perverted idea of “news” – we are bombarded with awful images – shootings, beheadings, wars, fires, natural catastrophes, bitter argument and anger – all day every day, on our computers, at screens on gas pumps, in our smartphones and tablets. Bad news is in the air we breathe.

I have tried to be thoughtful and careful in my approaching to this new news, it can undo so much good, love and peace of mind.

– I understand that this news is “their” news,” it is not the whole story of the world, it is not my story. Their news is generally the most lurid, disturbing and sensational information that can be seen or heard, gathered to appeal to the lowest and most elemental emotions of manipulable people. The world has a lot of awful things happening right now, but this is by no means the worst or most dangerous the world has seen, historians will tell you that in many important ways, the earth is safer and healthier and more tolerant than it has ever been. If you think the earth is on fire, consider 1939, a conflagration that killed nearly 100 million people over years, the earth was truly on fire.

We didn’t used to see only the bad news, and we didn’t have to see and hear it 100 times a day, an evolution that is disturbing to the psyches of people, it promotes both anger and fear almost continuously.

An older friend down the road told me recently it was less disturbing to read the awful news of World War II every day for years than it is to turn on the television for five minutes today.

Modern news depend on presenting a product that is both frightening and disturbing – there is a lot money in it, as cable and weather channels learned some years ago.  And we are a capitalist culture, we have become a Corporate Nation. There is really no other ethos or ethic involved than profit and loss.

– I do not wish to avoid all of the news in the world, like my friend Pam, I want to have a sense of the wider world. And this is the challenge, it takes some work to find news that is real and true and which actually informs rather than argues or condemns. I can’t just push a button and take what they give me. Once or twice a week I will check into publications, sites and sources that are less about screaming and argument and more about perspective and known truth. They can be disturbing, but they can also be grounding and informative. It is a very different experience to read an account of an honest journalist than some idiotic screaming anchor on television. It feels very different.

I never watch cable news, any media that promotes the idea of their being only two ways to look at the world, or news organizations that rely on horrific imagery to sell information.

– I make my own news. I look for the delight and wonder in the world every day. I try and take beautiful photos every day, talk to my animals for perspective and balance – they do not need bad news all day to survive, they do not need to argue and judge. I seek out the company of my friends, take a walk with Maria, read a beautiful book, listen to Roy Orbison or Van Morrison or Bonnie Raitt. I meditate, walk in nature, and celebrate the really big stories – births of children, I cleanse myself in the joy of creativity, poems and paintings and mindful thoughts from places my like Creative Group At Bedlam Farm on Facebook. I read Thomas Merton or the Dalai Lama or a poem by Mary Oliver. I cook a good and healthy meal, walk up a hill to celebrate my refurbished and pre-owned heart. I kiss my donkey on the nose, herd sheep with Red.

I will watch the news from time to time, I do not wish to disconnect from the world around me, it is not a good thing for a writer to. I will remember always that this is one narrow prism through which the world is seen, one often distorted for profit and gain. I will not succumb to anger or fear, ever. I have been on that path, it leads to nowhere. We all have to live with the news and watch it in our own day. We do not have to live in their news and watch and hear it all day.

Like all of you, I am confronted with change every day, and what I have learned is that I can accept and embrace change, but I will never become a prisoner of it. Ultimately, I am responsible for the news I watch. I make my own news.