“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity” Martin Luther King Jr.”

I learned something at a late age a few days ago. I had a sore on my face and wanted to cover it with a bandage. I walked to my local Walgreens in San Francisco and bought a package. They matched my skin tone perfectly.

Later, the thought occurred to me, what if I were not a ‘white’ person? Surely these days, it must be easy to get bandages to match all skin shades. Guess what, it’s not. With a little help from Google, I found out they do exist (marketed under names like Ourtone and Tru-Color) They can be ordered online but only one ‘Target’ store currently has them in stock in San Francisco. So you can’t just walk into your local drugstore to buy them. I wonder which clinics, hospitals and schools have them.

From a 2013 article by Sebastian Malo in the Atlantic:

Orundu Johnson, a 66-year-old African American woman living in Harlem, remembers. “The bandages would say flesh color, and I’d explain to my kids, ‘Well, that’s not your flesh.”

Entrepreneur, Michael Panayiotis was frustrated by the placement of his product, ‘Ebon-Aide’, which usually ended up on separate shelves dedicated to satisfying the needs of Afro-American customers. “If you don’t show it to people, how are they going to buy it?” he said. He lost his investment and his company folded in 2002.

About Crayons

Then I remembered my first crayolas having a color labeled ‘flesh’ , a pinkish beige. It did not occur to my baby brain that there was any other color for skin. In 1962 the color was permanently renamed ‘peach’ due to the efforts of one smart woman, June Handler, who wrote to Crayola. They changed the name almost immediately.

June was doing doctoral research on “An Attempt to change kindergarten children’s attitudes of prejudice toward the negro”. She had always been concerned about black/white prejudice, especially in young children. In her abstract, the children who were five would make derogatory remarks about those who were black and she tried to help them understand prejudice and what it does.

In 1992 Crayola introduced a special crayola collection called ‘Colors of the World’ including 24 crayons to reproduce different skin tones. You can purchase them online. I do remember as a kid being frustrated trying to portray skin colors even for different ‘white’ people.

I did a statistically insignificant survey of my friends. One caucasian, a little older than me, who had been a teacher of special needs kids and had never before thought of the flesh color discrepancy, just took it for granted, like me. Another, a little younger, who came to this country as a child from India was always aware of the discrepancies. She simply started wearing dinosaur and cartoon bandages.

What else is there still for me to learn?

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/06/the-story-of-the-black-band-aid/276542/

http://crayoncollecting.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-real-tale-of-color-flesh.htm – post by Ed Heller, the crayon historian

As I’m editing this issue of the Healing Circles Newsletter, the air in San Francisco has been smokey for over a week. Each day I see more people wearing respirator masks a reminder of the growing toll of people who have died in the Camp Fire and other fires in California. I also witness how people open their hearts to one another in dark times and this reminds me of circle practice. I am slowly learning that grief and gratitude coexist  I am excited about gathering with family next week for Thanksgiving. I hope the resources we share with you in this issue will foster resilience in your life.

The first is Beyond conventional Cancer therapies (BCCT) website https://bcct.ngo developed by  Michael Lerner and a team of researchers and patients to provide a guide of sort to all the options people, caregivers, loved ones want to navigate to give themselves the best chances of thriving in their changed circumstances and also support in making decisions in an area where sometimes there no overall right decisions, only the ones you feel are right for you.

After I was diagnosed with cancer I was afraid and motivated to find the best treatment options. I have been lucky that good conventional and integrative options are available to me Through trial and error I ended up combining both. Support was crucial and I got it not only from my family and caregivers, but also through the other people affected by cancer that I met through Commonweal. I have used my intuition when it has been available to me and think it and it has been a strong medicine for me. I still sit with uncertainty every day. I get regular follow-up with my doctors and still sit in circle and practice complementary therapies

BCCT does not recommend any specific therapies, The choices will be up to you. If this seems daunting find a trusted friend, doctor or integrative practitioner to guide you through the process. I wish it had been available to me 10 years ago.

No matter what therapies you choose there are some things that are nurturing and healing for everyone. Eating food is the basis of nurturing yourself. Eating makes me happy. One of the saddest things for me about going through cancer treatment was periods of losing my appetite.

Rebecca Katz and her Cancer fighting kitchen cookbooks and lively blog https://www.rebeccakatz.com helped me get through some low times. She is such a great ambassador for good nutrition and fun eating. Her lively attitude and love of Yum helped me to learn to nurture myself better.

Pelosi Statement on Supreme Court Shadow Ruling on Texas Reproductive Rights Case

SEPTEMBER 2, 2021  PRESS RELEASE 

Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued this statement after the Supreme Court ruled in the middle of the night to leave SB8, the most restrictive abortion ban in fifty years, in place:

“The Supreme Court’s cowardly, dark-of-night decision to uphold a flagrantly unconstitutional assault on women’s rights and health is staggering.  That this radically partisan Court chose to do so without a full briefing, oral arguments or providing a full, signed opinion is shameful.

“SB8 delivers catastrophe to women in Texas, particularly women of color and women from low-income communities.  Every woman, everywhere has the constitutional right to basic health care.  SB8 is the most extreme, dangerous abortion ban in half a century, and its purpose is to destroy Roe v. Wade, and even refuses to make exceptions for cases of rape and incest.  This ban necessitates codifying Roe v. Wade.

“Upon our return, the House will bring up Congresswoman Judy Chu’s Women’s Health Protection Act to enshrine into law reproductive health care for all women across America.  

“SB8 unleashes one of the most disturbing, unprecedented and far-reaching assaults on health care providers – and on anyone who helps a woman, in any way, access an abortion – by creating a vigilante bounty system that will have a chilling effect on the provision of any reproductive health care services.  This provision is a cynical, backdoor attempt by partisan lawmakers to evade the Constitution and the law to destroy not only a woman’s right to health care but potentially any right or protection that partisan lawmakers target.

“When the Supreme Court takes up its reproductive rights case this year, we urge it to uphold, as Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, ‘its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule of law.’”

This post originally published Feb. 2020 refers to DTs nomination to the Supreme Court of Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice and prior to that his nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

An excellent article by Laura Bassett in the Atlantic magazine o out lines the history that led up to these shameful events. Let the protests continue. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/trump-supreme-court-abortion-ban/619963/

My words:

Nancy Pelosi dressed in white holds up her copy of DTs speech and standing tears it in two. Then she puts it down quietly, deliberately. It’s a slow, slow dance she is doing. It is Kabuki. 

I feel I can hear the paper ripping

She is acknowledging something broken. Some trust, some unity which we have always reached back for in the United States is revealed as a lie. We are divided and jumbled together. White sheets with black writing. We make as much sense jumbled as we did in the supposedly together presentations.

Did the republicans or democrats touch each other as they were pronouncing their “testimony”? No, they did not.  That was a room devoid of oxytocin, devoid of living plants, light or anything which makes life worth living. Just one woman nursing a baby could have made a difference. One gurgle of delight.

The only things that touched were the pages as they got handed from one person to another. A theater of question asking, which at least stretched out a silence. When people could contemplate the words being transubstantiated would they realize a farce was being enacted? 

How will we look back at this week a year from now? Will we see the opening of a funnel forming that will suck us all down. Or will we see the opening that will make way for fifty brave women dressed in white and Romney ( who would’ve thunk it?) turned into a superhero by drinking chocolate milk.  

Could oxytocin reconcile me to DT republicans? I don’t believe so.

I will comfort myself with the sound of slow ripping, with the soft edges of the pages. No hard lines, no splits, no graphs. 

I want a softer world.

Karen is still with me

Once in a while I think I see her walking down the street

A tall white blonde woman

There must be others with her hair color but I don’t see them

Yesterday I had the feeling of her body walking  down the lane

I see her daughter who is also my daughter often enough

I don’t think of Karen the way I would if she was alive

Maybe I think of her more now.

I wasn’t actively thinking of her in Norway

She was just there in the pale blue shadows

In the cucumber sandwiches

In the northern lights

Gustavo’s altar- an artist and friend who died Oct 1st 2014 on his 70th birthday

and we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love- William Blake

Wow, for two years I have been silent, i don’t know why. My last post at the end of 2013 was titled Patience

I’m  still here and don’t know why I’ve been silent for so long. On dec 31 2013 I conjectured that  I might be in the  cocoon stage of recovery. I had no idea how long that phase would last. I have no idea if i am living well with cancer or being a good cocoon or just living.  My health has been decent. One reason for writing now is to avoid only starting to write again if cancer should return to me.

I lost my sister Karen to cancer several years ago and the time I was able to spend with her before her death remains with me as sad and beautiful memories

Thia, by opening yourself to your death whenever it will come and discussing your wishes with your dearest ones you are honoring them and allowing them to share what can be shared.  (Thia died and since then her granddaughter has been born and bears her name.)

I regret that my sister Karen and I were not able to speak openly about our wishes and fears surrounding her death because neither of us, at that time, was able to fully acknowledge what was becoming inevitable. While we couldn’t speak of it in depth, we were able to be open and deeply connected with each other in  nonverbal ways. it allowed healing of other family relationships also and brought those of us who remain closer to each other and more willing to forgive each others shortcomings. I wish my sister were still living every day and what she shared with me in her dying has helped me to accept  what I have no power to change.

“Patience is also a form of action.”
― Auguste Rodin

This is what I tell myself as the weeks have turned into months and I have not updated this blog in spite of my conscious intentions.  Today as 2013 reels off into history, I write to let you know I’m still here and in good health.

I feel much the same as I did in June still in post treatment limbo impatient with myself for taking too long to ‘get over it’ and move on with my life.  I read a lot and I don’t write much. I don’t feel I have anything to say but I hope I will write anyway because really there is nothing new under the sun and yet its all new from moment to moment.  My granddaughter lost her first tooth recently and I was amazed by this commonplace miracle. Now her permanent tooth is visible and a second baby tooth is getting very wobbly.  I lost another dear friend to cancer last month, and  that still seems impossible even though it is another commonplace miracle. It is stunning and will always seem too soon.

‘Living fully with uncertainty is an  art I have yet to master.’ I wrote that back in the fall of 2010.  Now, I find the notion of mastery I thought possible, naive. My healthy coating of protective denial has been stripped away.  My substitutes of choice have turned out to be lumpy security blankets of avoidance, numbness and inertia.  Maybe if I just lie under these blankets time will stop and nothing bad can happen- Whoops, too similar to the the stillness of the coffin. Maybe this is yet another stage of recovery, the cocoon stage and with enough patience I can emerge with renewed creative energy. That’s what I’m going to imagine.

Soon it will be 2014 here in California, so many are already ahead of us. The sun will come up just as it did today and we’ll roll though more predictable seasons and uncertain events. Wishing you, and yours, health and love.