Proof of Heaven - Book Review

Proof of Heaven: a Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife, by Eben Alexander.

Dr. Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon. A near death experience changed his life. This is a fascinating book, not just for the science (it’s mostly not about science), not for the biographical descriptions, not for the hard-to-explain experience, but for the totality, the wholeness that glows through it.

Dr. Alexander had a nearly fatal illness and found himself in the realm and wonder of God. Not the God of Christians or Muslims or any other faith, but the God behind everything.  As a scientist, he said he had believed, and had been taught, that the brain determined everything. His journey into the afterlife changed that. He returned to our world and said that the summary of all he saw and felt while in what he called “the core” was love.  He learned that thinking “outside the brain” brings us closer to our genuine spiritual selves, showing love and compassion. He learned that our world has more good than evil. He learned that everyone is part of a great wholeness.

I found this short book to be a page turner. Not preachy. It didn’t make him into an evangelist. He wrote it because he was filled with the wonderful experience that he needed to share.  I thought his attempts in a few pages to reconcile the science he knew well with his new knowledge of the spiritual realm less easy to read; I believe that it was difficult for him to express it.

After reading this book, I was more able to understand things like post-death appearances of loved ones, as well as the post-death, post-Easter appearances of Jesus which were put into our New Testament.  However, Dr. Alexander doesn’t connect his experience with any organized religion or dogma.

Read it. It’s short. It’s worth taking the time. It was published in 2012.

Kathy and Sasha's Excellent Adventure

Remember the song, “You’re so good to come home to?” That’s how I feel about my new home now that Sasha, my cat, and I are finally situated in it. The song may be about a person, but today it’s about my house. I left condo land and moved into a real neighborhood with kids, noise of lawns being mowed, dogs being walked, and my grass needing mowing.

It’s wonderful to have a yard that I can do anything (legal) with without thinking about condo association rules. It’s great to be able to sing in the house without expecting commentaries from neighbors in my former condo building. Speaking of yards, there is a rectangle of dirt where no grass is growing in my new back yard where I think they buried Jimmy Hoffa.

I chronicled my move on Facebook, with postings about different phases of the project. First I started to pack. Then, after hearing bad financial projections from three moving companies, I moved a large amount of possessions into a rented storage room in order to keep moving company costs down. Then the moving company came and loaded my furniture onto their truck and took it away. Steve and Greg were diligent and personable. I was not to see my furniture again until the next day. Sarah graciously allowed me to spend that homeless night at her home. The next day, after closing on the sale of condo and purchase of house, Steve and Greg reappeared and unloaded the furniture. After that John, Laura and Ian helped me move possessions from the storage room; it was a big job. Finally, possessions were put in some kind of order, which is to say, Dede, Sarah and I unpacked a mountain of books and a lesser one of kitchen items, plus various other things. I had plenty of help. Dede and Sarah helped with putting things in preliminary order.  Daughter-in-law Sherry gave me dinner when my children weren’t having meals with me.

It was stressful for me but worth the headaches and sleepless nights. Sasha, my cat, had her own kind of stress. She spent the weekend at the veterinary clinic’s boarding facility. I brought her home and she sped to a spot under my bed. She has come out sometimes and is settling into her new home by sitting on my lap and kneading my legs like a kitten. This kind of affection is very unusual for her. I am sure she will get back to biting soon.

Here are my Facebook postings that were the news reports about how the relocation was going:

Packing up for moving can be very interesting. You find stuff you forgot you had. You also wonder how you ever could fit so much stuff into one condo. Garbage day is tomorrow and the bin is full. It's almost time to move.

Whoopee! I am now in my new house. The unpacking is beginning. Ate supper with Sarah Whitt, who brought in Thai carryout, but we hadn't yet found plates. We had found some baking dishes so we used them. Moving is such an adventure.

Tomorrow I plan to rescue my perishable food from the freezer and refrigerator of Barbara Boone. Then maybe eating can become normal again. Thanks, Barbara.

Posting from Sarah during moving: Here is a bottle of degreaser mom says is older than Dede. It's from when mom briefly sold Am Way like 50 years ago. I counted up & I think it's been moved 9 times - Preble, Allouez, Green Bay, Beloit, Fond du Lac, Seymour, Madison Prairie Rd, the condo, and finally the new house. Except it never quite made it to the new house. It now resides in my trash bin. 

Unpacking. Arranging. Happy to be in my new home. Dori Becker is here to help today. Sarah Whitt was here last night when we put away kitchen stuff, so now I can actually eat on a plate. Small things are so important.

The Whitt family moving team has been laid off. I spent a lot of time today shopping for curtains/draperies. They don't make them compatible with the colors of my bedrooms: fuschia (really!), lemon yellow, lilac. I found white curtains but not in appropriate size. Didn't want black. I think I will be making curtains. Better than repainting the rooms to match available colors of curtains.

Comment on same post:

 I considered hanging up towels. Not a good choice.

I'm considering trying the Dig & Save next. I bought a $4.00 lamp at Goodwill yesterday and didn't find a shade that is compatible with what the lamp will share the room with, and I think there is some incongruity with buying a $30 shade to go onto a $4 lamp.

My cat's response to living in a new home is to stay under the bed.

Musings About Access to Food

Marie Antoinette said, “Let them eat cake.”  How about revising it to “Let them eat junk food?”

The thing about food is that we all need it. The other thing is that…..well, some people can have better food than others. Or more food.  Or less food.

Madison is a foodie place. It has restaurants and carry-out places for every preference and ethnicity. We can read blogs and columns about the wonderful meals available to anyone who has transportation and enough cash. It’s a wonderful environment of gastronomic experiences.  Madison also has food stores, including the usual chains and big box stores and also some specialty stores that sell organic, free range, locally produced, top quality foods. We are blessed.  But wait a minute.

Last summer I was told by none other than the mayor of Madison that my neighborhood is a food desert. A food desert is a place where the grocery store is not within a couple of miles of home, and food products at the convenience stores in the vicinity are largely manufactured items. The choices are limited. We have several sizeable grocery stores a few miles away, but they are not easy to get to without transportation. We have some convenience stores in the area. That’s okay if I want to exist on dry cereal and Twinkies. However, I want to live on real food.

Because I have a reliable car and enough money, I can choose to go to the big box food store or the specialty food store. I can choose food products of good or poor quality. I can choose from a large variety of food products from many places in the world. I can choose organic or conventional foods. I love being able to shop at the Willy Street Coop, Whole Foods and Brennan’s.  I can go to not-very-nearby restaurants and eat plenty of good or bad food, depending on my choices and my pocketbook. I can bring home carry-out foods of many delicious descriptions.  I am one of the fortunate ones.

Why is it that I can have almost any food I want and my neighbor who has no car, little money and few resources is stuck with a diet of white bread and junk food from the convenience store? Of course, it’s our economic system. It’s not the moral character of the person who has few resources.

Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me” (Matthew 25:45). What if we actually had some equitable distribution of food that nourishes body and soul?

Beans and Fake Sausage

The best news in food is this: what we eat has a lot to do with our health.  Enter the lowly bean.  Beans are a much derided carbohydrate. Well, let’s get finished with the jokes about beans and gas and deal with a positive thing about beans.

I discovered Dr. Joel Fuhrman on the Dr. Oz Show some time ago. He was there to tell us about resistant starch in healthy carbohydrates. We have heard about simple and complex carbs, and now here is something else. Dr. Fuhrman wrote a book called Simple Immunity, which is about strengthening the immune system, with, among other things, beans. The resistant starch in beans and other vegetables  including greens, fruits, nuts and seeds, gives us some benefits.  (1) these foods’ glycemic index and caloric density are low; (2) they are resistant to digestion, which means they do not break down into simple sugars in our systems, so we are less likely to become diabetic, unless we have a lot of dessert and other delicious bad foods in our meals; (3) these foods are full of fiber, which is good for what we do in the bathroom. Just remember to drink lots of water with the fiber. To sum it up, beans are good for us. Just read Dr. Fuhrman’s book. He also inhabits YouTube, where we can hear him talk. He backs his statements with some science.

I have discovered that I can have meatless sausage using beans. It is easy to make and tastes like sausage. It’s a good way to eat those resistant starches. I think this sausage is good for an imitation product. It won’t satisfy a determined meat eater, but has a place in the vegetable kingdom. It’s simple and plain, not elaborate and filled with layers of sophistication.  As some of you know, I am about simple foods.

Fake Sausage

This makes enough for one person.

1 cup cooked white beans

½ teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon pepper

½ teaspoon crumbled dry sage

1 egg, beaten slightly

1 tablespoon or more flour (I use brown rice flour)

Drain beans if they are in water from can or cooking. Mash them with a potato masher, or process in food processor until they are mashed. I don’t make them perfectly smooth textured. Add seasonings and stir all together. Then add egg and stir. Correct seasoning until it tastes like sausage. Stir in enough flour to firm the texture but still have it somewhat wet. With spoon, shape the mixture into about three patties, or more or fewer, depending on how big you want them. Saute the patties in a small amount of oil, at medium heat or lower, about five minutes, turning them once, until they are somewhat brown on both sides.

Thoughts About Lent

Lent is here again. It creeps up on us every year between Christmas and Easter and stays with us for a little more than a month. It is a season in the calendar year for traditional Christians.  In our pluralistic society, we can choose to observe it, ignore it, or know nothing about it. We give up something or we don’t. Or we say we will, and we don’t make it through the season with our good intentions. Or we decide to take on a good work, something to make a better world. Or we do nothing.

I have known about Lent for a long time. As a child, I saw it as a time to give up something I cared about. I didn’t know why. In my early adult years I didn’t care about it. Later in my life the light bulb went on and I came to some understanding of it. The Church taught me that Lent was a time to prepare for Easter. Ok. This is a concept that involves not thinking about rabbits and colored eggs, but rather a time to go without something in order to be ready for the Resurrection. It’s like fasting before the feast.

None of this makes sense without some inkling about fasting. I don’t hear much about fasting in today’s affluent society, either from the Church or American culture. Fasting has a purpose and a history. It’s there in the Old Testament.  Jesus did it. He went out into the wilderness, and Matthew tells us that he deliberately fasted before his temptation and the start of his public ministry. The Oxford Companion to the Bible says, “Fasting in connection with prayer, penance, and preparation for new ventures has been practiced from early times in many cultures and religions….normally it involved abstinence from all food to show dependence of God and submission to his will.” Huh? Even in church I’m not hearing much about that.

Historically, the approximately forty days of Lent are days of fasting, either partial or entire, so that we can take part in the new annual adventure of the Resurrection. Lent has come down through the ages with a set of rules.  Somewhere along the line, Lent became regulated. It’s there on the Internet, at Catholicism.about.com. Just point your search engine to “Lent season.” Everything is online, even rules for Lent. The website hits us with a list of questions that tell people how to “do” Lent if they are Roman Catholics. First it tells us, “Lent is the season of penance and prayer before Easter.” Then it proceeds with a FAQ about Lent, with questions about liturgy, diet and whether to fast on Sundays.  Since I am an Episcopalian, and we also observe Lent, all these rules are optional and, to me, stultifying.  The Why question is still there.

Here is my answer to the Why question. In today’s affluent culture, giving up something for Lent is a good exercise for us, for the planet and for God. We spend our lives in dietary and other kinds of gluttony, eating a lot and taking advantage of the many things around us.  We fill our stomachs with junk food. We fill our landfills with waste. We fill our lives with possessions. We can live another way, even a little bit for a month.  My son gave up Facebook for Lent. I gave up complaining, which is almost impossible for me to accomplish. I also gave up some kinds of food. The point is to impose some discipline into our busy, thing filled lives, so that we can go through our month and come out at the end a little bit more appreciative of the plenteousness around us, and unclutter ourselves to make us ready to share in the love of the resurrected Christ.

Cottage Obituary

Our cottage is gone. Well, it is still there, but it has a new owner. We have the memories. He has the future.

My parents bought the little A-frame in the woods on the Lake Michigan shore at Washington Island in the early 1970s. They loved it. They helped us to love it. My brothers and I and our children crossed the Death’s Door passage and entered a different world every summer. Our children grew up and brought their children. My parents died and we continued to spend time there after we inherited it. It has been part of us for about forty years.

My father added a living room to face the Lake Michigan shore, plus a deck.  Some years later my mother added a second bedroom on one side. We still had to close the cottage every fall, and drain the water system and turn off the power. It was not built for winters. Our little home in the woods rested during the winters until we came in spring and turned on the water and power. And everyone came back to stay for weekends or weeks. It was wonderful.

It’s not that we did a lot. It isn’t Wisconsin Dells. My brothers, their wives and children found things to do, as did Rick and I and our children. We had fish boils. We ate junk food at the Albatross. When we weren’t swimming in the lake at our property, we were swimming at the Sand Dunes Park and School House Beach. In later years, as the lake receded, weeds and other vegetation grew along the shore and became smelly from decay, but our weeds didn’t smell. Our immediate family didn’t fish in the island waters, but others did. At least once every summer we took the ferry to Rock Island where we walked on the trails and swam in the lake with its big waves . Back at the cottage, Rick cut up downed trees, and we had plenty of firewood for the little cottage fireplace and the one on the beach. The kids had woods adventures. We spotted and exclaimed about the deer and other animals that called the island home. I exhibited my paintings at the Art and Nature Center.  After Sarah grew up, she participated annually in the Washington Island Music Festival. In recent years I attended the Island Forum, sponsored by the Wisconsin Council of Churches. These activities will continue. We will be back on the island and stay where we can find space.

Finally, we sold our little island home. Brother David, sister-in-law Marcy, and nephew Eric and I went back last week for a winter trip on the ice breaking ferry. We spent a day working with no heat, no water and no electricity. Our little cottage wasn’t built for winter use. It was very cold. We were working during daylight hours.  No, we didn’t sleep there; we stayed at a little hotel. We enjoyed the camaraderie that went with the end of an era.

That day on the island we threw out four pickup truckloads of possessions we no longer needed. The island dump has long been called the Island Exchange. Maybe someone else will use the items that didn’t go into the crusher, such as the world’s oldest microwave oven, or used up chairs that can only be called grade B quality. Most of the furniture is still there for the new owner, who is willing to have it. We donated bags of books and games to the island library. The next day we returned to the cottage to load our vehicles with items we wanted to save for ourselves.

We said goodbye to years of enjoyment, gave the keys to Butch, our realtor, and went back to our other lives.

You Can't Afford to Get Sick -- Book Review

“I believe strongly and passionately that every American has a right to good health care that is effective, accessible, and affordable, that serves you from infancy through old age, that allows you to go to practitioners and facilities of your choosing, and that offers a broad range of therapeutic options. Your health-care system should also help you stay in optimum health, not just take care of you when you are sick or injured.”—(Andrew Weil, You Can’t Afford to Get Sick, p. 4).

That says it all. Dr. Andrew Weil, one of our best known physicians, takes on the American medical system in You Can’t Afford to Get Sick: Your Guide to Optimum Health and Health Care, a book published in 2012, as an updated re-issue of Why Our Health Matters: a Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future, a 2009 publication. The book is readable and persuasive.

Weil points out that at one time American medicine was the best in the world but it isn’t any more. He tells what is wrong with it and what to do to make it good again. Remember, this man is a doctor who has been there. His specialty is integrative medicine, a field that he heads at the University of Arizona.

The book is organized in three parts: Where We Are, Where We Need to Be, and How to Get There. He discusses the dysfunctions of the American medical system and puts blame on medicine delivered via the profit motive, especially the pharmaceutical industry and insurance companies. As a physician, Weil says he has heard many misdiagnosis and mistreatment disaster stories from patients, colleagues and others. He suggests that the system be repaired like this: “Our long-term goal must be to shift our health-care efforts from disease intervention to health promotion and disease prevention….the time has come for a new paradigm of preventive medicine and a society-wide effort to educate our citizens about health and self care” (p. 9).  His two main objectives are: “(1) Change the focus of health care in this country from disease management to prevention and health promotion. (2) Minimize interventional medicine’s dependence on expensive technology” (p. 10).

That is what Weil’s book is about. He goes into how to prevent disease and promote health, which he says will greatly improve medical services delivery, prolong lives and save millions of dollars. In the last chapter of the book, which is not in the 2009 book, he offers “a Two-Week Plan for Taking Greater Responsibility for Your Health and Well-Being” (p.224). He calls the 2010 Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare) a step in the right direction that does not go far enough. He lists good features including providing insurance coverage to more Americans, and denial of fewer preexisting conditions, but is distressed that the new law does not reduce the high cost of medical care. He offers a path for American people to use the available services selectively and wisely.

This is good reading for those of us who are distressed about the dysfunctions of current medical services delivery and hope for improvement.