Party Planning

           The process is underway. I am writing my invitations to the Come to Awake party . We have lined up an art director , an MC ,  some musicians maybe even some kirtan singers, today I order the coffin , a cardboard box that everyone can write or draw or whatever on. Talking about where to have the event and getting the guest list together.
       Got my first chemo of the year a drug called Carbo-taxol . So far so good. Lighter dose so it should be easier to withstand . Also got saline at the same time which does a world of good.
       

Lots of good news

At  last . Yesterday my day was made. My niece after careful consideration has decided to be part of the meditation retreat in Phuket. I have offered her the opportunity to take two months to study with one of best western mediation teachers in the world. A student of the Dalai Lama and someone for whom I have a deep reverence and affection. He was a major force behind the Shamatha Project which is one of the most meaningful things that I have ever done and something that  transcended the mundane and lift part of my life for the service of all . He is a brilliant scholar whose humanity is so bright that it dims the luster of his brilliance.
        His name is Alan Wallace and it is now my goal to introduce this favorite niece to the rigors and rewards of the deep insights and profound satisfactions that two months of meditation will yield.
         She has the courage, strength of character , and  fortitude to do this and I am determined to give her  the opportunity.
         She wishes to be a social worker and this will help her go from being a good one to being a great one.Her clients will benefit from the insight that she gains, she will learn much of herself to serve them better and will make her career that much more satisfying .
           My partner Allie, a retired social worker, is living proof of this to me.
            It is something intangible that I can arrange  or at least try to . Not having much left in life to do this is important to me.
          The other good news is that I have decided to order a cardboard casket  and throw a party where I will have everyone who comes sign the casket or draw on it or create whatever they wish. For those who cannot make the trip I will invite them to write or create or imagine something to be included.
          The party will be called " Come to Awake". The double meanings  will be, I hope, understood and enjoyed by all

Return of hope

        I had a phone appointment with Dr Lam today. Much more optimistic than Gorsch he suggested several different options to pursue. SOme using combinations of old and new drugs, some different combos with chemo , some using old drugs that may still have an effect and the final being some new drugs.
It gives me hope for some life extensions, cure is in no ones lexicon but I have  a couple projects I would like to see brought to fruitions and  this gives me hope that I can live to see  at least some of them established and underway.
Allie's is back from Spain and my cousin/sister  just returned to the frozen wasteland of the mid-west after the phone conference with Dr Lam.
         On Sunday I attended a retreat with my KM group and as is my good fortune was once again rewarded with the spiritual uplifting  and healing that being with  them  has always brought me.
          Another amazing blessing for me is to understand how much care and loving kindness I am being given in the prayers and meditations of so many people whom I have known and loved in my life. It is both a great honor and very humbling.
          I hope everyone realizes how much I revere the love  being directed my way.



           
        

The news and the reactions

Here is a copy of the enail that I sent to everyone to give perspective about the situation that I face.

This morning in my prayer I asked Maharaji to be with me today . He said he was busy but would send Poppy and Mary as proxies. He did!

The construction guys were here and I had to back around them, Stella my car, now has  her first official banged up fender. I hit the water spigot. It does not looked damaged.

Mary, my cousin and Poppy , my neighbor and I went to  see Dr. Gorstch this afternoon and the news is that I have several options in front of me .

 Extreme chemo- good chance of working  on younger people but not for someone in my condition and age.

Milder but semi toxic chemo on  a weekly basis .---- It will maintain the cancer maybe but not improve my condition.

Quit chemo- more sleep , more painful and leave the body in 4  or 6 perhaps months more.Pain management the only therapy.

Call Dr Lam in LA when Allie returns . Get his opinion and thank him for all his good work.

Came home and Mary , Poopy, and I   vaporized . Spent much of  the afternoon laughing , talking about Rebecca, the spirits Poppy and I commune with and having a grand time.

The shock has not hit completely yet and the only decisions that I have made is to await Allie's return to talk this out, schedule a talk with Dr Lam , and involve my spiritual friends   more in the process

Enjoy the beauty of being here now ,it is achingly awesome.

The results are many heart warming responses, for which I am most grateful. But to keep  my life in perspective I received one email that offered me congratulations . The universe does have sense of humor

Grief

            I am the only son of a couple who deeply wanted a child. It is a great blessing that I have paid for over and over.
          My parents were older than most of my contemporaries my father was 42 when I was born and my mother nearly 37  , My father's mother my grandmother was also a member of the family and she was 78 when I arrived.
           My father had retired from active employment and spent his time studying the stock market and investing.My mother  was a member of the Eastern Star which was mainly a group of ladies who were older and did good works in the community.
           My father's friends at the market were almost exclusively elderly retired men who pursed investing  and were successful or not as the world would give them the insight to do so.      
           This background narrative is to illustrate why aside from my contemporaries  many of the people that I knew were considerably older than I was.
           When my father would take me to the brokerage firms office. ,in those days called bucket shops after the quaint custom in their early beginnings of overturning buckets to sit on.
           As a small child in the presence of so many elderly men who were often grandfathers themselves I became something of a mascot .
           One of the examples  of many stories of joy that come to me from that era was of an retired Chicago Irish cop. He was 6' 4" in his seventies , he and his wife had  had no children and he loved kids. He wold place me upon his shoulder and we would wander around the office  and as a little  seven   year old I got to look down on and into all of the inner workings of the world around me,
          I loved him.
         As is the way of all things he died  several years after I was in junior high school and my parents wishing to shield me from the horror of death , a common practice of the era, did not let me know of his passing.
            His was one story of many, all of these old men and the wives who I got to know have proceeded me in death and I have not had a chance to say goodbye.
            I am now the age that many of them were and their  memories come to me more and more often.  Especially when I have been weakened by the latest set back in my bodies relation to cancer.
           A good friend and I were conversing about the subject and during the conversation she reframed  what I had been calling sadness into grief.
           I have never really said goodbye to so many of my lost friends who I loved so dearly.
           One would ave thought that a hospice volunteer of so many years would have seen it in a flash but  such was not the case for me.
          So now when these wonderful old friends appear to me in my memories I do what I did not do for so many years,  I grieve.

THe fruits of contemplation at Duck N.C. about global warming

            I am venturing on foreign ground for this blog. It is around my reasoning on the subject of global warming . It is not the type of material that I have ventured to write about in this blog but that is about to change.
            At the retreat on the outer banks I contemplated this to try to extract what my understanding of the subject is and to formulate a way to process material  that is presented, Below is the fruit of that exertion.

I have had time to crystalize my thought about global warming this is my current state.

The levels of scientific proof that exist are hypothesis and theory , wiki can give a more complete definition of these manners of proof but it is accurate to say that an hypothesis is not as accepted  as fully as a theory and an hypothesis is proven through rigorous testing in a manner appropriate to the hypothesis. Statistics are a methodology used to do those proofs.
As it used to be said ,it doesn't take a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.
I looked a graph that combined the prognostications of 117 of the computer models that predicted the rise in temperature that the earth was going to endure. Against that were the actual temperatures recorded over the time frame. None of the graphs predicted what was happening. Therefore the proposition remains as an incomplete hypothesis at best or fallacious at worse. I patiently await further data and /or a better hypotheses.
In those circumstances I am and we are as a society  brought calls for action;  expensive ,  with a loss of freedoms ,and a  consolidation of power into the hands of unelected officials. Many of these  calls are often  ill conceived and impulsive.
Those proposals are not scientific , they are social . Richard Feynman said that " a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.  To decide about those proposals I fall back on the legal levels of proof as they are designed to judge social questions and how I think about global warming  

                      The levels are ,first ,probable cause ,global warming certainly and easily meets that level of proof.

The second level is preponderance of evidence, and from my observation that level of proof is also quite easily met.
The third level is clear and convincing , for me global warming has not reached that level. As example I have not had a decent explanation as to what were the causes of both the medieval warm period 800 AD-1400AD or the Roman warm period approximately 200 BC to 400 AD and why they differ from what we are currently enduring .
Another example : I read yesterday of the rise of the oceans , this is sometimes attributed to global warming or even that the acceleration of it is due to gw. The graph I was looking at started in 1880  it  showed a sea level rise  which the trend of the moving average  showed a steady increase. The question which emerged was : what was causing the sea level rise in 1880 and since the graph did not go back farther, my assumption was that it has been going on even longer, which reiterates the question of cause.  These and many other questions have not been satisfactorily answered and I also  believe that for the society they have not been answered,  or there would not be the resistance to the hypothesis that currently exists if they were answered. I later learned that a period of time known as the little ice age end in the early 1700's it is safe to assume that the seas began to rise as the planet became warmer and the ice melted. Why did that happen and since is began over 300 years ago how much of the sea level rise is attributed to anthropogenic causes and how much is attributed to natural causes ?
This and other questions therefore in my mind do not raise the level of proof to clear and convincing.  I do not deny or affirm gw but I am not convinced that the hypothesis is valid and that all the social action is at all valid.  Some action might be , I would encourage private experimentation and  public research into various technologies for instance but neither  I nor the society are  prepared to spend vast sums of money or commit to any actions  beyond the most simple and logical. Such as telecommuting and various energy efficiencies.
Each call for social action also has to go through the levels of proof . I believe that the society is best served by asking that those levels be addressed and convincingly answered.
The final level of proof is beyond reasonable doubt, that is doubt to which one can assign a reason. Global warming hypotheses are not even close to this point and therefore extreme social action is totally unwarranted  

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