Salem's Story and Thoughts on Therapeutic Touch

As a Licensed Massage Therapist, I would like to share some thoughts and an experience that happened prior to any of my formal training. I share this hoping to encourage everyone to trust their instincts and positive loving intentions.

We are not meant to live in isolation, even if at times we may wish to. We are as interconnected as the parts of the body or as the leaves on a single tree. Physics refers to "the Butterfly Effect" to demonstrate and explain the vast potential of ripple effects due to this absolute interconnectedness of everything.

On an interpersonal level, we each have an energetic field often called an aura, which surrounds us. We impact upon and influence one another whenever these fields come into contact. When interactions are taken to the level of physical contact, the influences go to great depths including but, not limited to, energy, muscles, thoughts and moods. Safe, non-sexual, physical contact is so critical to our total health that I would add it to the list of survival necessities along with food, water and air. Consider both, stories of orphaned Chinese infants who died in large numbers from "failure to thrive" due to lack of touch and the common experience of keeping vigil over a dying loved one only to have them pass when you are briefly out of the room. We find ourselves in a culture which keeps us feeling isolated and disconnected, even within a sea of people. It is an extension of or societal and in turn individual disconnection with nature, our mother. Eastern Philosophy teaches that we have both Mother Earth and Father Heaven, Our bodies being the fullest expression of their union. Disconnected from both touch and the Spiritual, with not even a moment of silence honoring the concept of meditation allowed in most schools, it is little wonder that drug companies are getting away with "pushing" drugs such as anti-depressants with cute cartoon advertisements on the television.

Each one of us does have the power to make changes and be an influence through our daily interactions. It is as simple as being kind and considerate in small ways. We can trust the universe and leave it to "the Butterfly Effect" to carry the ripples of our small actions on to precipitate greater change.

One month prior to my entering Massage Therapy School, I met an eight week old, black manx kitten who had been stepped on by a three hundred pound man on his tenth day of life. His injury was to the neck and shoulder area. Though he didn't move for weeks, his mother fed him and he had survived to this point. The home he was born at was considering having him put down due to nobody wanting to adopt him. He was very challenged. His neck was locked at a ninety degree angle to the left and rotated forward. He could not jump off of, or onto anything, and was one half the size of his siblings. My daughter already had two cats in an apartment that allowed one, so, I found a friend that would take him after I "fixed" him. With this in order, I took him on as a "pet project." I felt a moral obligation to try to help him if I was going to consider myself a candidate to become a massage therapist, thinking I could "learn" any touch healing for my bread and butter. I do have children counting on me! I worked on Salem, as my children dubbed him, three times daily, each session lasting only ten to twenty minutes with very gentle massage and stretching. One must never forget the clear self determination and attitude of a cat and that one will not remain present and relaxed if you cause them pain let alone irritation. By the time Salem was four months old, we had full range of motion back in his neck. I had not yet completed even my introductory classes in Massage Therapy School.

A great deal of massage is instinctual if you listen to both yourself and the individual you are working on, and for this reason, everyone has access to it without actual training. The primary function of training is to bring these instincts up to the level of conscious comprehension and understanding. So please, allow me to encourage you, especially if you have a loved one who could benefit from the touch. Trust your touch and your instincts when done with honest, caring and positive intentions. Intent is so important that I could write of it alone. By all means, do consult with your personal health care provider and massage therapist for any suggestions or any possible reasons not to do certain things based on a particular illness or condition. ("contraindications")

I should also add that I was unable to give Salem away since we had bonded so deeply through the process of the massage work. This was a good thing for both of us since due to what I learned is called muscle memory, he continued to need regular maintenance work at intervals throughout his life. I am a better therapist from knowing him. So, I thank him and honor his memory as both my teacher and my friend.

Identity: Finding myself in Ann's Arbor

To what extent is identity defined by the name?
Actors and musicians take on alter-egos wrapped up like a bow by the name. Women usually take their husband's names when they marry.
Or, as Shakespeare famously put it, is a rose still a rose if called by any other name?

These are interesting questions to me when I consider that my parents got the name Ann from where I was born (Ann Arbor), and then simply tossed a coin (one side for each grandmother's name) for my first name, Virginia instead of Josetta.


Growing up, I felt that nothing about the name Ann stood out except that it blended into the crowd. So very many girls with pretty first names that their parents favored enough to actually use, had Ann as a middle name, like a mere extra syllable to help the first name flow into the last. It certainly didn't give me assistance in defining myself positively.

just an ann

To grow up ann
in rose land...
plain tan and not
planned, like lily
colored sea foam's
murkey secrets;
tree roots hide my
mirrored crying
all dried; when pain
flies and rain feeds
hunger needs of
small weeds that from
seeds seek to climb
in no time to
find crimes of self.
I'm not a rose.
I suppose, I
must close this short
prose, just an Ann.
In my parent's defense, they were young and desperate enough to have gotten themselves into "trouble" with a college pregnancy, and concocted a crazy plan that blew up in their faces.

I was born shortly after the end of spring finals, on May 20.
I grew up with the story that it had simply taken three days for my parents to decide on a name for me, and that this was why I was named on my third day. This never rang with the solidity of truth considering my name seemed to be be chosen by fate rather than their wills.

I wouldn't hear the story of what actually happened until age 38. I'd hear from my maternal grandmother shortly before her passing, though to this day neither parent has wanted to discuss it.

They had married for my mother's good name to be preserved, as that was still perceived a consideration. Then, the plan was to tell the families that the baby had been still born, and put it up for adoption; freeing them to continue with their educational plans. They did in fact tell the families that I was still born.

What they didn't plan for, was my father not to be able to go through with putting me up for adoption. The fact that I naturally carry much of his side of the family's energy was obvious right from the start. His change of heart forced them to have to call their respective families and own up to my being alive, and I now realize that naming me was probably not as looming an issue as owning up to such a lie.

I grew up to be a geek with too many life analogies which reference gardens, plants and trees, leading to my alter ego Mim and her Garden. One sunny day, it finally clicked that an arbor is a special spot within a garden.

Now, there is a hidden place deep within this Mim and her Garden. A meditation spot called Ann's Arbor, where I know that I am more a child of God than a child of my parents, a place where I found myself in my name.

Mim's Poetry Corner: "Sonnet for Sam's Prom"

Lilacs and purple columbine worn by Tom.
No need for lights this starry night.
The chariot awaits to carry you to prom
as Mom's camera keeps flashing so bright.

The perfect champagne dress which fits just right.
Accessorize, gold and pearls, matching shoes,
realizing not, what a glorious sight,
and of your future beauty giving clues.

Festive music plays, dancing as you choose.
With every turn, the smiling face of a friend.
Bittersweet giggles as memories amuse.
Happy school days coming to an end.

Celebrating that childhood is now gone
and your turn to hold the reins will now dawn.


Dedicated to my daughter Samantha for her senior prom 2005
*even though she didn't particularly like the last two lines




My youngest son just rented his tux for his girlfriend's prom on May 7th, inspiring me to share this slightly older poem.

Mim's Poetry Corner: "The Bicycle Wheel"

Imagine this life's world's a wheel,
each spoke a path to Whole... for real.

This bicycle wheel, so fast it spins
as if with glue, to earth it pins.
It makes it hard to walk a path
if we never try to push past math.
Fearing rides end, as if we're renters.
Blind, what Whole's the wheel's true center.

Life cares not to which spoke you cling,
if while you try, Life's praise you sing!

Mike Choi: Be good to our sons too

Gorgeous day!!! So beautiful, it was impossible not to feel energized. I even got out and cleared some dried debris from last fall from the garden in front of my apartment.

Home on a break and taking a look at my blog... wondering what to post next...
but have to leave NOW to get back to work. Quickly get my stuff and go to car.

Turn on car... radio comes on just as the DJ is saying "by the Red Hot Chili Peppers".

"Under the Bridge" plays.
*a song that I associate with Mike since his suicide.


I suddenly feel a weight on my chest inappropriate for the beauty of the day... thinking of Mike. I think about Chiron... how some wounds never heal...
I worry about lifting this emo weight before having to work on my client.

I walk into the spa just as "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" by IZ begins to play. *I've told my children that I want that song played at my funeral.
It is so wistfully happy and tropical that the weight immediately lifted.

I put my purse away, and made sure my room was ready as IZ's song played... the next song came on just as I was going to go get the intake card for my client...
"Under the Bridge" came on again.

My logical brain fried out on the spot.

While working on my client, I kept getting the picture of Mike sitting in my room as we would talk... he kept telling me that he was sorry for hitting me up right now, but that the shift in the weather had finally charged my energy enough for him to get my attention.

???
I know that I've been intending to tell his story, as it has bothered me that he would otherwise go to the grave w/o the truth being told... but, I didn't expect him to push on me to get on with it already.
(but then, I could just be making too much of co-inki-dinks)


*********************************

To put it bluntly, the first time I saw Mike he took my breath away. I found him physically beautiful; his dark hair and smooth complexion hinted to his half Asian heritage. He so resembled Keanu Reeves in "the Matrix", even wearing almost exclusively black, my children gave him the nickname "Neo". Mike was also strong, flexible and full of energy.

But upon meeting Mike, you could tell that there was something very deep as yet unresolved within him. It left him with a nervous energy which made silence painfully uncomfortable for him. He also had a difficult time staying in one place for too long. He never went far from where he grew up as he held close to those he trusted as a teen, but had difficulty maintaining a home base.

Mike had a Cancer sun. This is a difficult sun placement for men in our culture, as they are not encouraged to be so in touch with their feelings, and Cancer is all about feelings, home, and the "mom" archetype. They tend to love their moms or hate their moms, often with it being an intense confusing jumble of both. Mike manifested this to the extreme. And with good reason.

Mike was the product of a rape, and his mother never let him forget it.
He was the dark troubled high school teenager who preferred to fail than have to change for gym. Little did anyone know that the reason was to hide the bruises all over his body from his mother beating him on a regular basis.

Despite this, Mike refused to speak badly about his mother, or even express anger toward her. He believed that most women wouldn't have even borne him due to the means he was conceived, and that he owed her.

To say the least, this affected Mike's approach to love, and oh how he wanted to find love. Only women with real issues who couldn't treat him well need apply for intimacy; if a woman treated him too well, she was a life long friend instead. He wasn't able to receive such friendship from his romantic relationships.

I was a friend. He would periodically just show up to chat, usually when things were either going particularly well or particularly bad. Since I know astrology, friends will often do this, asking "So what's up with the planets lately?"

Mike turned 37 on July 20, 2009.
I hadn't seen him in months when he came to see me shortly before his birthday. He came by to tell me that he was staying somewhere new. He wasn't sharing details, but he sounded hopeful. He was clear that he was trying to stop drinking. It would sadden and upset me to learn later that he had partied hard around his birthday and been arrested for drunk driving. This would have been bad enough, but the police didn't keep him to sleep it off. They released him right away, without making him have someone pick him up. He was still drunk, got in his car and drove away. The police picked him up immediately and re-arrested him, this time guaranteeing him at least some jail time imposed when he would go to court.
*something still seems wrong to me, as though he was set up, in how the police just let him go after the first arrest*


Saturday April 2, 2009
A young couple that has been friends with my oldest son since high school, Mikey and Brandy, came to visit that Saturday shortly after noon. Brandy was a bit hyper. She shared that she had been in the car with her mother that morning, and that they were going to take the Old Bridge from Portsmouth to Badger's Island. She shared that they were unable because the bridge was closed due to someone having climbed it, threatening to jump. Her mother had turned the car around, both not wanting to watch, as well as knowing an alternative route to their destination, so Brandy was not sure of the outcome of the morning's drama. We ignorantly joked about how she should have had a video camera with her.

Monday April 5, 2009
I stopped at the corner Mobil store near my neighborhood. The employees here know just about everyone from the small neighborhood, as everyone eventually stops for snacks, soda/beer, cigarettes or gas, at least once in a while. Some of the employees even live there, as this day Karen is working the cash register, and she lives just a block from me.

I took my Smartfood cheese popcorn to the register and grabbed a roll of spearmint Lifesavers, and put them on the counter. Karen's face darkened, and she said, "Ann, I know you were friends with Mike, I'm so sorry."

"What about Mike?"

"Oh Ann, I thought you would have heard, he died."
She didn't need to tell me how.
I suddenly remembered a couple of years ago, Mike jokingly (or so I thought at the time) telling me that he thought it would be fun to climb the old bridge like a jungle gym.

I could barely breathe, and was barely aware that my face was wet with tears as Karen apologized for my hearing in such a manner. I told her that I had to hear somehow, and that she certainly had nothing to apologize for, though I hardly remember getting back into my car and driving home.



Mike was buried, and had a memorial thanks to the caring and generosity of his employer. His mother refused to even claim his body.




I may occasionally vent about fathers who prefer their lives to their children, but to be fair mothers can cripple their children as well. Mike had to be able to express his anger to even begin to heal, instead he chose to jump off a bridge.


John Mayer's beautiful song "Daughters" fits the other foot as well...
so moms... let's make sure to be good to our sons too.

My Missing Leg

Legs leave footprints where ever they tread.

When I was just a child, one of my legs was surgically removed. Like many who experience such a loss, I too, continued on my journey through life despite my handicap. In fact, with time it was all that I knew. It became my reality to such depth that I was no longer even conscious on a daily basis of my missing leg. I was no longer aware of the curve in my spine from putting all of my weight on one leg while standing. Most of all, I was completely unconscious of how I would position my body to make sure that people would not notice my empty space. Especially whenever a camera came out, making something as permanent as a photograph, I would hide it so that I would not have to see my empty space. This did not prevent me from being happy. Without a doubt, it compounded life's normal difficulties, and yet, I had an uncanny ability to lighten my mood, in no time at all, with such things as music. This worked very well for me, or at least I thought it did, until one day when my leg returned...

I was surprised that my leg had not died! I would have expected the doctors to have disposed of it. With this realization, my first thought was to wonder why my leg had stayed away for so very long. It made me feel very unimportant no matter how my leg tried to express that I was missed. I was in fact overjoyed to see my leg again, but my happiness was masked by my reaction to being confronted with this validation of my empty space. Aware now of this space, I was challenged to know what to do with this leg that I had been forced to learn to live without. I had always harbored fantasies that my leg would return and reattach itself to me, but, here it was after so much time that the wound had had time to heal over. Reattachment would be possible if the wound was fresh, but little is known of the methods of reattachment after too much time. Though time can be a great healer, this is not always the truth. Time also allows decomposition or growth in different directions. As much as I wanted to try to reattach my leg, I also feared it leaving me again after I readjusted to walking with two legs. I did not have a solid base of trust to begin with and this would require trust. Unlike in fantasies, in reality, separate lives and time get in the way.

To my dismay, when my leg and I met for short strolls, my leg had no tolerance for the effects to my gait because of the curve that had developed due to that very leg's absence. It did not understand why I could not run and left me feeling blamed for my lack of wholeness. The more aware that I became of the myriad of ways that my leg's absence had affected me and changed me, the more I wanted my leg sorry for staying away. My leg was not sorry since it had been happily following it's own heart to it's own adventures. It certainly did not think that I should focus on what I was missing and it certainly did not accept any responsibility for the changes that had occurred in me. My leg thought that I spent all of my time aware of my curved spine, awkwardly slow gait and empty space since in it's presence, these things were brought to the forefront and into my clear view. My leg did not get to see me when I was distant from this view. It would take time to learn to walk together again; and even when we did, it would never be quite the same.

Earth Day

Happy Earth Day!!!

In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, we were quite aware of Former Senator Gaylord Nelson’s proposal of a day to be set aside to focus attention on environmental concerns. My father, who I affectionately refer to as the Lorax, has been an environmental activist for as long as I can remember. I knew that there would be an “Earth Day,” well before my third grade teacher, Mr. French, explained it to our class. He added that our class would join university student protesters by collecting garbage after lunch on that day.

Rose C Schwartz “Campus School” was one of the last elementary schools that was part of a state college university; the University of Wisconsin, in Oshkosh. (And yes, Oshkosh is where they make the overalls.) Mr. French allowed us to sit where ever we wanted as long as we paid attention. We were allowed to get up and move around the classroom: we were not restricted to our seats. It was the era of streaking on college campuses and the push for freedom was in the
air. My mother would be diagnosed with paranoid psychophrenia within the next two years and this too was in the air. I was given an over abundance of art supplies, but was not allowed coloring books, because they “make you stay in the lines.”

A protest demonstration? This was right up my alley, or so I thought. I would make a poster. (Aside from having an eternal love of art, to this day, I can dress in my sternest “lawyer/librarian look” and people seem to still see the hippie chick underneath; often calling me on it.)

I went home after school and started thinking about my project. I was not sure what to do. I got an after school snack and sat at the picnic table that doubled as our dining table. My father had left his newspaper open on the table and I could not help to notice the pictures on the page. Being an environmentalist, he had been reading articles about Earth Day and the paper was spread open to these pages. The political cartoons mirrored the subject matter within the articles on the pages and I noticed one in particular.

In the middle of the page was a dark cartoon of an oil slicked and polluted landscape. In the foreground was a single flower growing up through a crack in the paved and polluted ground. Covered in grime himself, a man on his hands and knees was looking at this single flower like a dehydrated man at death’s door who realized the water was a mirage. The image had a powerful, simplistic clarity and heaviness that I could actually feel. I asked if I could have the cartoon and was told that I would have to wait until after my father had finished reading the paper. He did not finish until after my bedtime, so I would only have one afternoon to complete my project. I still was not sure just what I was going to create and this gave me time to think about it.

My father’s soul yearned for years to express the artist that he really is, but the home he was raised in did not support the humanities as an appropriate career path for a man. It took retirement for him to begin to express himself regularly through his painting. He took the time to explain to me the idea of leaving blank space to draw the eye to the heart of your message when making a poster for the purpose of a demonstration. He was the first to teach me the motto K.I.S.S. - keep it simple stupid (or for the sensitive, "silly"), as an artistic tool. He would say, “the best artists know when to stop.”

I was trying to think about what I thought that the cartoon man would say. It suddenly came to me that the man wouldn’t have very much to say at all. The sadness on his face said volumes. I thought that all he would have to say is “help.” This single word was all that I had to write on my poster. I knew that it worked the moment that I thought of it, and I got right to work.

I glued my inspiration in the upper center of the piece of tag board and got to work stenciling my letters. Being young and not having mastered straight lines, as of yet, the “p” and exclamation points drooped downward, below the invisible line of writing. I was frustrated and angry at the gap between what I had intended and viewed in my mind and what my hands had actually been able to create.

It felt the same as a stained glass lamp that I designed and made fifteen years ago. Despite how this lamp keeps winning prizes, all that I can see in it is what I would do differently if I were to make it again. It was an experimental piece, so I just used glass that I had in my studio rather than investing what I would have chosen if given a budget.

As dissatisfied as I was with the result of my effort, I had no choice but to use it. I had no more tag board.

The History of Claiming Mim

My only daughter is the middle child of three. And, being smack dab between two brothers, she learned quickly to hold her own despite her petite stature.

She is now 22, and I credit her with being one of the more self motivated and self directed people that I know. I am tremendously proud of her for this, but it earned her the title as my "agenda" child. She was always up to something, and quite often her goals required assistance.

Around the time she was going to be entering middle school, whenever she wanted something from me, she would come and find me...
stand coyly at the doorway, and start with, "Mim?"

Always followed by some butter or sugar,... "Have you lost weight?"... "You look pretty today."...

To which I would laugh and respond, "ok Sam, what do you want?"



She finally did this often enough, that I told her when she has the children she claims she is never having (despite having chosen names Lily and Willow btw), I want to be called Mim instead of Grandma. I may be admitting to a bit of a dark side despite my love of the sun, but I like that Mim was Merlin's nemesis crush in Disney's "the Sword in the Stone".