We Practice

Monthly fire drills 

Lockdown drills 

Shelter-in-place drills 

Like most schools in the US, the staff and students at the elementary school where I work practice all of these drills. 

We diligently, quietly, and respectfully practice. 

We are 600+ students and over 100 staff members. 

We range in age from 5 years to 70+ years old and represent a spectrum of abilities. 

We practice where to go in an emergency; where the 'safest’ part of the classroom or other gathering areas is located. 

We huddle together, in silence, when sheltering in place. 

We report via laptop if anyone is missing. We report via laptop where we are. 

We deal with blocked exits so we know what to do if that happens during a fire. 

We stand outside in silence as teacher-by-teacher reports their class status via walkies. 

We must pass a series of clearances on a regular basis: an FBI clearance, a state police background check, a child abuse history clearance, and an arrest/conviction certification report. 

We know that anyone entering the building must first ring a doorbell at the school entrance where a camera sees who is there. 

We ask the visitor questions and for legal identification before granting entry. 

We practice lining up by class all the time. This keeps things organized but the subtext is safety where we can quickly account for every child if we are anywhere else but the classroom in an emergency 

We practice, practice, practice for all of this. 

We comply with these safety procedures because we value the safety of our children and those who care for them.

We teach and reinforce safety every day.

Yet we fail these same people because the world of guns and danger is real and woven in a hideous relationship with elected officials and money compromising the best intentions of a safe school environment. 

When are we going to turn the tables and make access to assault weapons difficult? 

Our country is horrifically unique in the world when it comes to our fetish for assault weapons and unfettered access to them. 

When you turn 18, an assault weapon can be yours. Just like that. Why? This is not sportsmanship.  This is a weapon for mass murder. 

These very assault weapons make a 4th-grade victim unrecognizable and require parents to supply DNA samples on the worst day of their lives. 

We watch as the collectors of ‘donations’ from the gun lobby/NRA/various political action committees for gun rights in Texas send their soulless 'thoughts and prayers' to the elementary school families.

 

We watch as a Texas senator, Texas governor, and a former president plan to speak at an NRA convention on Friday. 

The Robb Elementary School shooting was the 30th such mass shootings in 2022. 

We are 145 days into 2022.  

In nearly a quarter of those days, a mass shooting took place. 

Brady United lists the elected officials who accept NRA money to support their elections. 

https://elections.bradyunited.org/take-action/nra-donations-116th-congress-senators

It is a non-profit gun control group created after then-President Reagan’s press secretary, Jim Brady, was among those shot in an attempt on the president’s life in 1981. He was permanently disabled and his death in 2012 was correctly ruled a homicide due to those injuries. 

We are strangled by wildly distorted views of gun control instead of liberated and united by sensible limits to what firearm access should be. Step one: ban the sale of assault weapons. 

The answer is NOT more guns. Too many guns have placed us right here. 

Meanwhile, the smallest, most vulnerable of us practice. 

The smallest, most vulnerable of us look to the adults and we fail them. 

Until this country deals with the unchallenged access to assault rifles, mass shootings are not a matter of if, but when.

https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/

https://www.everytown.org/

Depression's Fame

NOTE: This post mentions suicide.  Please call 988 - the suicide/life crisis hotline in the US - if you need/want help and you will be directed to a local crisis center.  

https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/talk-to-someone-now/

Anthony Bourdain.

Kate Spade.

Robin Williams.

Famous.  Successful.  Beloved.  Depressed.

They represented so much of what I love about life- food, style, humor. They showcased themselves on a grand scale, brought artistry into my  'not so grand scale'  life, and enriched it without ever knowing me.  Sure, it made them rich but it made me rich too - rich in appreciating how they saw life's beauty.

Their suicides are crushing.  

Why, oh why, does it happen?  For now, social media spikes with suicide prevention information and reminders of how we are all loved and needed in this unrelenting, difficult world.  Information about depression floods media coverage.  In their isolated deaths, these artists offer one more universal gift: awareness.

Of course, famous folks are not inoculated from depression.  We all carry it.  We all struggle with it.  The weight of it unevenly fractures our thoughts.  Most of all it isolates even the most exposed of us. And that is what makes it so frightening.

The subtext of their singular deaths is, that if it can happen to them, with all of their resources, then it can happen to anyone.  Indeed.

As my grandmother would say, everyone puts their pants on the same way every day.

Their fame makes them known to us in a way that is, after all, unnatural.  It is a false connection that strangely reassures us.  Let's face it - we work years on cultivating personal relationships, enduring the pitfalls of connection as well as the rewards.  We invest in and love our families and friends with ardor knowing it is a challenge.  But, as a dear friend would always point out when you consider the alternative, there is no other choice.   

So why do we allow famous strangers to inhabit this sacred life space? I think they help fill a universal desire to feel nourished, beautiful, and happy.  Their positive offerings to the world resonate via their notoriety and fuel their own life's purpose.  It can be the quintessential win/win because we each get something from the experience.  

This is what makes their suicides so jarring.  If we are supposedly winning in the give-and-take of talent, how can this happen?  I don't pretend to know the answer, but I am strangely grateful for the reminder these humans leave behind:  depression is everyone's demon.  Whatever tools we need to keep it from taking the steering wheel of our lives must be readily accessible.  Depression doesn't care if we are loved or not.  Depression just wants the steering wheel.  

Depression has taken my steering wheel countless times and in differing degrees: after an unspeakable betrayal by an old flame, after a house fire, after the death of a younger, robust friend, after my daughter turned 17, after motherhood felt anemic.  Sometimes I walked out of it.  Most times I crawled out with help. 

I don't think we can eradicate it.  Authors (and goddesses) Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Gilbert each reinforce the belief that we need to learn to live with depression.  Their non-fiction writing is one of my go-to strategies. They have taught me that depression gets a seat at our emotional table along with the more desirable guests of kindness, joy, empathy. (sort of like Trump at the G7 meeting, but I digress.)

Depression gets a voice but not the microphone.

  

Our very human work is to love without rules, without fear, and to listen. To reassure everyone that they matter.   I don't know that I do any of these really well.  But I am thankful for the unbalanced, unfair, excruciating reminder these deaths blast home, yet again.

I'd love to kick depression's ass.  I will settle for shoving it into the trunk, muffling its voice, and taking the goddamn keys.  

Wishful Thinking

 Years ago, my twenty-something niece, Catie, introduced a little wishing game to us when she would stay at our house, usually to  babysit my kids.  When the clock displayed time by repeating the same numbers, it was time to make a wish.  So at 3:33, it was wish time, as it was at 10:10 or 5:55. Bemused by the simple magic of the idea, we made our wishes.  This little game stuck.  So, at the turn of the new year, when my daughter noticed that the time was 1:11 on 01/01/11, I texted Catie to alert her. She replied, in kind, saying she and her friends just made some powerful wishes on this notable, momentary event.  I smiled at the sweet simplicity of it all. (I also marveled at how perfectly a text can connect me to loved ones.)

It made me consider wishing and the tricks we may choose to employ as vehicles that contain our intentions, sending them out to the universe - what do we hope for? dream for? wish for? and why?  So many toasts over the holidays held hopes and desires at the end of a raised glass.  Christmas cards and holiday greetings filled our home with all sorts of wishes- a merry, happy, peaceful, blessed, holy, safe, healthy, joyful holiday.  I love the change in how we greet one another in December - we go from Good Morning or Good Evening to Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Hanukkah - we are transformed into veritable wishing machines. All of those aspirations shower the molecules that bounce and collide invisibly around us and make me think anything is possible.

Do we really feel the power of making wishes, whether we blast them out into the universe or keep them protected in our psyche? I think wishes and prayers are twins separated at birth.  They contain the same bones and wiring, yet travel different paths by their users. I try not to get mired in wishing for actual things - like being one of the lottery winners in the recent $355 million lottery jackpot. (Of course, actually buying a ticket would have helped nudge that potential wish along.) How many of us staring into a birthday cake of candles have really taken that moment to make a wish worthy of the day we arrived on the planet?  I become so overwhelmed by hearing the voices of loved ones singing the familiar birthday song for little old me that the wishing part gets jammed up in my mind.  The singing chokes me up every time.     

When we wish, are we practical or does wishing by its very nature impel us to go toward the fantastical, beyond our every expectation?  Are we trying to push away some, what I like to call, 'bad ju ju' that may be weighing too heavily in our lives?  Do we ask for the tools to make the negative go positive or do we bottom line it, and say, "make this happen?"  And how do we react when our wishes don't come true? What is it in us that gives us what it takes to survive life's unfortunate events?

A recent article in the New York Times Health section reports on a few studies done recently regarding the role that any number of adversities may play in our resiliency. 

Titled "On Road to Recovery, Past Adversity Provides a Map," there was a surprising 

outcome in one of the cited studies. Of the 2,000 people studied between the ages of 18 and 101, 194 people answered "none of the above" to questions regarding upsetting life events that happened to them before and during the study. Of the 37 choices offered, which included but were not limited to, divorce, death of a loved one, a serious illness, 194 people answered they had not experienced any of the events.

Nothing.  Nada. Zippo.

Now this got my attention. The article notes, "We wondered: Who are these people who have managed to go through life with nothing bad happening to them?” Dr. Cohen Silver, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, said.  “Are they hyper-conscientious? Socially isolated? Just young? Or otherwise unique?”  It turns out the answer to these inquiries is no. These individuals had a sense of well being that "was about the same, on average, as people who had suffered up to a dozen memorable blows."

Interestingly, it was the individuals who were somewhere in the middle of having had anywhere from six to twelve negative life events who were the most resilient. The article notes, "In short, the findings suggest that mental toughness is something like the physical strength: It cannot develop without exercise, and it breaks down when overworked."  People with twelve or more of these events struggled the most with their ability to cope and had the ragged emotional edges to prove it. 

While the degree of suffering will vary from person to person, and event to event, the studies suggest that recalling the tools used to weather difficulties creates a coping memory that can serve us time and again. If we decide to see what we learned about ourselves and how we built some emotional muscle, the next difficulty along life's road may be more manageable.   

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist, psychologist and author, who suffered the devastating mind and body cruelty of the Holocaust wrote in his book, "Man's Search for Meaning," that "everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."   Frankl noted that we are not just human beings, "we are deciding beings."

Making our wishes come true is within our grasp when we decide how we are going to choose our way. We decide our thoughts and our feelings.  This is more than wishful thinking and loads more powerful.  Here is to a thought-filled 2011.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/health/04mind.html?src=me&ref=general

As We Grow

It was a cool, damp evening as I stepped out from my kitchen into the backyard, barefoot, to snip some herbs.  The moon’s gorgeous crescent seemed like a cockeyed smile while I pattered across the moist grass with flashlight in hand. The tomatoes, herbs, and peppers are planted among the portulaca, zinnia, and purple sage so it is a bit of a search party to find the edible plants after sunset. The slim flashlight handle wound up in my mouth (blaaach!) as the spotlight so I could see what I was picking. The simple harvest created a little bit of magic as I looked at the uncomplicated garden bed and was tickled that I could still pluck some produce in mid-October.  With basil, sage and rosemary in hand, I snagged a few nasturtiums to top off a salad and turned my back on the garden marveling at the sweet simplicity of it all.



The next morning in the sun’s full light, however, I noticed how tired and scruffy the garden looked.  It said to me “You’ve really let things go here and after all we’ve given you!” The lettuce has long since bolted with no re-seeding done, the basil is blackened in spots, the tomato branches still bearing fruit look like a jumble of dancers' limbs overlapping on a ballet bar.  And the zinnias so tall and erect in August are still blooming but in a weighted, horizontal recline.  This autumn garden was much sexier by flashlight. 

The Mina Ohana

It did make me appreciate those who do not lose garden interest; those who do not wane when the sun’s presence diminishes from our autumnal days.  About 5,000 miles away one of my brothers connects to the land and the life it gives him every day.  He is an organic sprout farmer on magical Maui.  Before you get a vision of acres and acres of tropical land bearing a fine harvest, picture a modest one story single family home on a small plot of land (7,000 sq. ft.) that includes a 1,200 sq. ft. shade house which does bear a mighty fine harvest. His farm produces around 260 pounds of several organic sprout varieties per week.  This family farm has been growing healthy greens for sixteen years.  As kids, we lived in a Delaware County rowhouse with a postage stamp front yard in which my brother was the ‘head farmer,' planting lettuce and, perhaps, tomatoes each summer.  He did not know then that he was also planting the seeds of his interest in organic farming. His Maui endeavors are the result of his sheer will, infectious enthusiasm and the persistent listening to the vibrations in his soul.  His wife, son and daughter’s dedication to this ‘family farm’ rounds out their success story. 

Since 2001, he has organized and sponsored a “Body and Soil Conference” in Hawaii that merges how one feeds the other and what we can do to make this dependent relationship between our body and the soil the healthiest it can be. The collection of speakers and their topics reveal the profoundly diverse nature of farming and its impact on health.  Photos and information about past conferences can be found on the Maui Aloha ‘Aina website: http://www.mauialohaaina.org/  I thought about my brother’s farm that night in the garden and silently breathed in our shared, albeit distinctively different, agricultural experiences. 

On a much more local level, it is interesting to see our school district, Great Valley, get dirt under its collective fingernails with the creation in 2009 of a one acre plot dedicated to growing vegetables and herbs on the grounds of an elementary school.  Students plant seedlings and, along with community volunteers and school staff, tend the land.  The harvest is part of the school food service menu planning and kids see what garden foods make it to the lunch line each week. In addition, two retired teachers are the Farmer’s Market ‘veggie ladies’ and stroll the lunch room in the middle and high schools twice monthly and butler huge trays filled with items such as butternut squash pizza, made from the homegrown produce.  So many things are being served with this clever, hands-on farming – kids get a full circle look at food being grown, harvested and prepared in the place dedicated to learning. This front row seat to farming nurtures the whole student.    Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer, Dan Hardy, notes in his recent article about Great Valley, “The aim is to get children interested in growing and eating healthy food and to educate them about its nutritional benefits.” http://www.philly.com/philly/home/gardening/20101012_Great_Valley_schools_make_healthy_food_fun.html

Even in cities blighted by job loss and a decimated tax base, the common thread of food production persists in stubborn fortitude. Christine Muhlke, food editor of the New York Times Magazine cites Detroit as one of the strongest examples of a food community she has seen.  “In a neighborhood that is a true food desert — there are no national chain grocery stores within city limits; more than 90 percent of food providers are places like convenience and liquor stores — I watched young men and old women socialize while picking collard greens in abandoned lots brought back to life by the Urban Farming organization. There was no fence, no supervision, no charge. ” She sees this doggedness as the basis for a prolific food community – people making the source of their body’s energy a primary focus. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/magazine/10FOB-WWLN-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=growing%20together%20how%20the%20food%20movement%20jumped%20the%20plate&st=cse\

Whether food is produced on an Hawaiian organic sprout farm, from an acre tract at a Chester County elementary school, or from the ashes of a city searching for its communal soul, the relationship between the body and soil is inextricably woven.  We are what we eat.  So, with flashlight in hand, I head out back to my meek garden, tend to it with more thought, appreciating the modest bounty with profound gratitude.