My Daughter the Chinese Doctor

   My beautiful, daughter, Dawn, graduated in December 2010!  I'm so proud of her!  She received a Masters Degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine (Acupuncture) from Five Branches University in Santa Cruz (she'll actually be a doctor in one more year).  She received her Bachelors Degree from UC Santa Cruz in 2004.  After completing a course in massage therapy, she returned to Santa Cruz to continue her studies in the healing arts.  I can see that this is her calling.  She decided on this field herself and followed through, four years, to completion.  I know she will make a wonderful doctor, her compassion for others is a keystone of her character. 
   Before she returned to Santa Cruz, Dawn embarked on her study of acupuncture at the College of  Acupuncture And Integrative Medicine in Berkeley.  She was not happy with the Maoist philosophy of the school that separated the spirit from the body.  Dawn believes that the spirit and the physical need to be treated as one in order for healing to be complete.  That is why she has been concurrently studying medical Qigong and Daoist philosophy at the Institute in Monterey.  She told me that studying Qigong is like studying magic.  We tease her about going to "Hogwarts".  Dawn has also been to China a couple of times to follow this course of study.  I learned about a year ago that on these trips she has been initiated into an ancient Daoist order.  I am so impressed by her accomplishments.  
   Her dedication to this course of study is particularly gratifying to me personally.  I lost my faith in western medicine at the age of twenty when I realized that my own father, a medical doctor for 50 years, was out of touch with the real causes of health and disease.  At that age I also gave up my beliefs in traditional religion. 
   When you give up your belief systems, life becomes scary... It's like you are floating in the void.  You can no longer rely on others for answers.  As much as I wanted to believe that someone had the answers, someone in a white coat or a white beard, I just couldn't.  I had a mind opening experience working with a naturopathic physician in Sacramento.  I saw people with cancer that the medical establishment had given up on.  One man had a huge scar the length of his abdomen where the doctors had opened him up and then closed him back when they realized they couldn't help him.  I believe that chemicals, surgery and radiation do more harm to the human physiology than good.
    When Dawn was a child, I wanted to teach her and her sister, Gaea, about religion and spirituality.  But I didn't know what to tell her.  I let her know that I believe there is more to everything than we understand.  I also gave her a book about Edgar Casey, a documented healer, who saw his deceased grandmother as a child.  I guess not teaching her what I didn't know helped her to find her own path.  How exciting for her, a mature adult now, to embark on this new life as a professional healer.  Where this path will take her in life is anyone's guess.  Dawn, my beautiful darling, I am so proud to have brought you into this world.  Your gifts and light will be welcome where ever you go! 

http://www.fivebranches.edu/

The Next 1000 Years: Problems

   Herein is the continuing blog about about the Next 1000 Years...  It was a cold dark December of 1999, I was lying in our rope hammock under the clear starlight of the Sierra Foothills.  Gazing across the light years, I thought about the hype of the upcoming y2k thing.  Why was everyone acting like this was such a big deal?  Who cares about the stupid computers having a melt down?  People should be more concerned with how mother earth, Gaea, can survive the scourge of civilization. 
   Our oceans are being polluted with oil spills, and dumping of low level radioactive waste.  Then there's the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists, composed of mostly plastics and plastic bags.  Chlorine is purposefully added to the drinking water (for what? to keep us healthy?) and the pvcs and pharmaceuticals in our drinking water are added unintentionally.  (I own the best water filter I can find, drinking lots of clean water is essential for good health).  Concrete and landfills are taking over the surface of the earth while the rainforests are being destroyed at the rate of more than an acre per second.  It's ironic that most babies born today will have contributed about 5000 non degradable diapers to the local landfills and the national debt they will inherit averages to about a million dollars per American worker (or 50,000 dollars per American citizen).  The air we breathe is polluted with factory smoke, vehicle exhaust and particulates from combustion of fossil fuels and garbage.  Surprisingly, the hole in the ozone from hydrocarbons at 22million sq km is actually the smallest it has been in a decade. Then there is global warming, or are we overdue for another ice age?  Who knows?  ENOUGH Already!!  Ok,  so what then?   The artist and print maker in me yearned to rise to the challenge ...  In the past when I wanted to publicize or promote something I made numerous screen prints as posters and/or bumper stickers.  The Next 1000 Years....   I thought to myself, if I made 1000 bumper stickers, a limited edition, with that phrase, in tribute to the new millenium... I could travel around and post them where they would be seen by others.  I wouldn't need to say anything more, merely

the next 1000 years

that is enough to make people think, to question, what does it mean?  All I wanted to do is plant the seed of thought.  Thought comes first... awareness, then action!!!!