Artist, Dancer...Map-maker? What we're prepared for but never expect...

An Art of Wellness POV

In 1998--when they told me--the daughter of a research and teaching pathologist and a United Nations Secretariat staffer--what chemicals were in the mix I'd been exposed to--and what'd been found in my blood--I was terrified. I was already blind--that was bad enough. I knew how those neurotoxins and carcinogens would operate. I went to my alter lifted up my arms and said "You have given this to me. Now give me the strength to see it through. Give me the wisdom to learn what I'm supposed to learn and then do what I'm supposed to do."

I'd been an environmental activist, early organizer for the California Green Party, and canvassed on Prop 65--a law that controls the way that (a first 65 identified--many more now) common but very toxic industrial chemicals can be used. Ironically--asphalt--used VERY illegally--inside a building--was what did me in. It's on the list.

I understood Medicine and the human body and got into holistic as a child, human development and peak performance as a teen--and had lived Body-Mind-Spirit Balance for so many years. I knew what the law said.

As scared as I was then--the knowing came upon me--that if this terrible thing was to happen to anyone--the parents I was born to, the Masters of many fields that had guided me through childhood and since--all the different things I'd learned--had prepared me to get through this and come out the other side.

A lot of the many Alternative Health Pro's--MD's and Scientists too-- who helped me along the way commented on how even though what I was going through was terrible and confusing--I understood so much about my body-brain nervous systems and could tell them what I was experiencing and how that helped them. Not only with me--but to ask the right questions with other patients who were terrified and couldn't explain or understand what was happening to them beyond "somethings reallly wrong."

I'm an artist. I understood that even if it killed me--I had to document. I did. I learned talking computers to research and document and be able to communicate with wonderful online communities who couldn't tell from my e-mails how impaired I was and how long it took me to put my words and thoughts together. After years of catching up to a life disrupted by disability, I’d really just like to do my work. Make art.

Yet with so many people being told they must suffer with illness or disability "for the rest of your life" maybe the reason I has to go through the fires of blindness, brain injury, and disability--and all the many "systems" that people facing health issues go through--is so I can use the creative gifts from my Muses to provide others a road-map back to Wellness, and tell the story in whatever way I can--so that others who've been given the negative doom and gloom that encourages people to give up the inspiration, to tell what I experienced along the way, and provide some kind of direction for a safer path through their own journeys. No matter what state of health you're presently in--you CAN GET BETTER THAN YOU FEEL NOW. You don't have to be perfect to be Well. You just have to start.