Fire on the mountain

There’s a huge fire on the Columbia river gorge right now. Many of my FB friends are posting about it so I’ve been seeing articles, pictures, thoughts and opinions about the situation across my feed for the last couple of days. I’m just starting to get a fuller picture of the devastation that this fire is bringing to a beautiful natural resource and one of the most lovely parts of a state that is pretty beautiful at baseline.

This is making me think of the attacks on 9/11. On that day, I was home with an 8 day old infant. I was focused on mastering diaper changes and figuring out how to gently wake a sleepy baby for feedings. I was in a gauzy cocoon of the 4th trimester. Of course we spent the day watching things unfold on TV, but the scope of the disaster did not fit into my brain. Tim had to go into work for some disaster management meetings during his 2 weeks off. He came home with stories of soldiers on the streets of DC, of quiet skies and meetings with Secret Service representatives who honestly said they never wanted to open National airport again. Ever. It still didn’t fit into my brain. It took me a while to catch up to the nation’s trauma because I was shielded on that day by my baby.

I’m not in a baby haze now, but the problems of my own life are very pressing, making it hard for me to process much that is happening outside of my personal existence. I feel disconnected from the world, from things that matter to me. I want to act - against the racism & bigotry that has been given license to freely express what has been fomenting under the surface of our nation, against the political environment that is acting against the best interests of our nation, for the many public health issues that mean a great deal to me personally and professionally. But I’m squarely in a “making the trains run on time” mode - do we have groceries, did you do your homework, what’s my laundry situation, crap when’s payday. I’m mired in the minutia of keeping my family operating, there’s no time for the top of the pyramid. It feels painfully self-centered but there isn’t much to be done about it except continue to console myself that This Too Shall Pass and some day I will have the space to act on my principles. Not acting doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

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This week one of my FB friends posted about the passing of a woman who has affected my life quite adversely. She was a new age guru author person who wrote at least one book (I’m sure there were more, but the one was enough for me to loathe her). The premise of this book was that physical ailments were manifestations of psychological...something. I don’t know what because I never actually read the book. And she wasn’t in any way qualified to be dishing out medical nor psychological advice. She was a voice for “alternative healing” during the AIDS crisis who claimed that a “lack of love” caused people to contract HIV. I really dislike this woman. In hindsight, I can see that her presence in my home was a sign of things to come, 2 roads slowly diverging. I don’t consider myself to be radically or unreasonably advocating for mainstream medicine, but I was too conventional for my partner. Our ideas of how to manage real, chronic health problems were fundamentally incompatible. That the problems were mostly experienced by one of us was not the issue. Rather, it seemed our differing adherence to Ms. Louise Hay’s notion of “dis-ease = disease” was the beginning of a wedge that took years to cause a split. I will confess, there were times that I saw that damn “You Can Heal Your Life” book tucked under a couch or about to fall behind furniture and I just left it where it was. Maybe even nudged it a little as I walked by, tucking it safely out of sight. I have no feelings about Ms. Hay being dead. I have only feelings about what she chose to do with her life and how it affected my own. And I have feelings about unqualified self-help gurus.