Weekend: January 29-30

The weekend events with family and friends are still fresh in my mind this Monday morning. Here is a brief recounting.

Saturday was our usual "chore day," a time for all of us to pitch in with the cleaning and organizing. That afternoon, while I was on the grocery shopping run, the kids, Annette, and a friend from Homer went ice skating at Westchester Lagoon. In the evening, we extended my birthday celebration--which was last Wednesday, January 26th--by sharing a meal and cake with a couple friends. I prepared the vegetable stew; Costco baked the bread; and Annette made the Lady Baltimore cake, a family favorite passed down from her great-grandmother.

On Sunday, after sitting zazen at the Anchorage Zen Community in the morning, I hung out with kids--Asa, Eva, Zena, and one of their friends--for a couple hours while Annette attended a board meeting.The kids made paper airplanes and hats, played with cars and trucks, and created music with drums, bells, a recorder, and their voices. In the afternoon, we all went for a ski at Russian Jack Park, joined by another family. Asa has become quite the skier, thanks to training with Jr. Nordic and regular outings at his Waldorf school. Yesterday was Eva's first time on skis, but you wouldn't have known it given the ease at which glided along the trails. We ended the day with a wonderful dinner at another family's house in our neighborhood.

Pointing to the Sky

Driving to school yesterday morning Eva intently searched the sky for the “stairs to heaven,” convinced they were simply waiting for her to discover. Thanks to a neighbor friend "sharing her faith," Eva had the details of this fairytale down pat: the stairway, angels, spirits, god--they were all there, "just up there," she insisted while pointing to the sky. When I told her she is already an angel, she quickly corrected me, “No I’m not because I don’t have wings…but when I get to heaven I will have magic and can fly without wings.” Later in the day, she expressed her dismay that god had not given her wings...

...Outside my window, I see a plump raven perched on a light pole next to the church’s white steeple. It flies away leaving a steeple pointing to the sky.

Healthcare Repeal

Last week House Republicans repealed Obama’s healthcare reform. All their ranting about keeping promises, fighting Big Government, and preventing “socialism” silenced the deeper moral and political questions about health care in this country. Questions such as: Who should have access and who decides? Is health care a fundamental human right or is it a commodity reserved for the privileged? Is it okay that providers get rich by exploiting human suffering?

The last question is especially intriguing to me because I never hear it mentioned by mainstream politicians, yet it is such an obvious example of injustice playing out daily in every community throughout the US. I realize not all providers are greedy, self-serving bastards, but in a capitalist healthcare system, by default they are vultures positioned to prey on humans in a most vulnerable place: our experience with sickness, pain, and potential death. For the docs these feasts-on-suffering supply their bank accounts with thousands of dollars each year. Are we okay with a healthcare system that creates and perpetuates such blatant exploitation?

And what if the patient can't pay? The system allows docs the option of refusing care, which happens all the time, for example providers refusal to serve patients on Medicaid. But there is also the magic of credit, and I don’t mean the provider offering a personal payment plan as a service to the patient. No, it's a credit system that ensures the doc gets paid. For instance, a provider recently explained to me that in his office he offers a credit card option to those “can’t pay” patients. The credit card company pays him and gives the patient a few months to pay-off the balance. If the patient fails to pay-off the balance in those few months, he is hit with an astronomical high interest fee that is retroactive! All the while the doc has either spent or invested the money without having to give second thought about the economic repercussions to the patient.

What would take to reframe the health care debate, shifting from political rhetoric to an engaged dialogue about the purpose of the healthcare system and who it should benefit? What actions can we take to create a healthcare system that serves human needs rather than greed?

Snowing

It’s snowing this morning. Although I've lived in Alaska 20 years and seen hundreds of inches of snow, it still evokes delight. Don’t know exactly why—perhaps it’s the way it silently falls and quiets a noisy city; or how it magically transforms dirty streets into lanes of soft-serve icecream; or the way it reminds me of my grandfather and his stories about tracking rabbits in the snow when he was a child. Whatever the reason, I’m grateful for snow this morning.

Last Day in Hawaii

Today is our last full day on the Big Island. After some condo cleaning, we'll soak up a few more hours of warmth and sun. It has  been fun but looking forward to returning to our little red house on Wintergreen Street.