YOU'RE GOING TO MAKE IT

Willamette Valley Cancer Institute

On a chilly Friday afternoon, I decided to go downtown to pick up three books the library was holding for me. As I traversed the crosswalk from Marquis to the bus stop on the other side of the road, I noted someone already seated there. Getting closer, I saw a pair of blue sweatpants sticking out into the sidewalk - one leg strapped into a black brace. Approaching the figure, I said in a friendly manner, “Looks like you have a bum leg.” A dark curly head nodded slightly from the figure’s chest. Passing carefully so my cane would not bump his leg, I said, “Been there.” 

As I read the posted bus schedule and checked the time on my phone, I noticed that my companion for the ten-minute wait was in fact a young Black man. “Have you been waiting long?” elicited a nod and a mumble, “I’ve been here since 8:00 this morning.” Puzzled, I said, “Waiting for the bus?” The figure stirred and a youthful, brown-skinned face with sorrowful eyes lifted from the sagging chest. “I’m waiting for my ride.” 

 

Having forgotten to put my hearing aids in, I went closer. “Oh, you’re not waiting for the bus?”

 

With a shake of his head the young man sat up straighter, saying “I’m tired.” He pulled his clothing slightly down to reveal his right upper chest. I saw a metal ring swimming in reddish medicine and a piece of deteriorating surgical tape. “They put in a port and today is the first time they used it.” 

Chemotherapy Port

Instantly I knew, since we were immediately in front of Willamette Valley Cancer Institute, that he had just come from his maiden chemotherapy session. I looked into his eyes and said, “You’re going to make it!” Pointing to the cancer center, I said, “They know what they’re doing. You’re going to make it.” He was startled. Then I pointed to Marquis and continued, “I live over there because I come over here (pointing to WVCI) once a month for treatment.”

 

Stirring himself on the bench, he announced, “Here comes my ride.” I looked up to see a beige older model car make a U turn and drive up to the curb. A Black woman was at the wheel, speaking to someone in the back seat. A tall man, a bit older than my waiting companion, emerged and began walking around the car. 

 

My companion had already gotten himself into the passenger seat. As the door closed, I said, “I’ve been dealing with cancer since 1997. You’re going to make it.” 

 

The tall man seated himself in the back as the port-wounded young man lowered the car window. His eyes were glowing. He was smiling. He was a picture of intelligence and grace. Indeed, he was a handsome dude! Pulling away from the curb, he called, “You have a great rest of your day!”  

 

“You, too.” I replied.

 

A week later I realized. “I’ve been dealing with cancer since before that young man was born.”

Heros Are Here

VIVA LES GRAND MÉRE!

Living Matter LiDoña Wagner

Frozen in place on the second floor of the humongous HUMAN EVOLUTION MUSEUM in Borgos, Spain, I stared incredulously at hominid and human skeletons and their accompanying back-lit prose, writ large, reading and rereading about how ancient grandmothers in Africa changed the course of human evolution. 

Skull Front LiDoña Wagner

Days later, I returned to the same space and read again about how our human ancestors gradually shifted into settlements when they discovered that by cultivating existing plants, especially grains, they could have a steady supply of food. As settlements grew, our ancestors evolved into homo sapiens whose life span increased enough for an overlapping of generations.

Skull Side LiDoña Wagner

Grandmothers began to outlive their hunting partners and as they aged, ever in tune with their environment, they began caring for and training infants and young children, allowing mothers to go into surrounding areas to gather plants and cultivate life enhancing grains. This accelerated the homo sapiens population. 

Skull Back LiDoña Wagner

Human Lifespan Adds 30 Years 

In contemporary society, who among us is alive today because of scientific advances in cancer treatment, fitness expertise, and technological aids such as pacemakers and prosthetic limbs? I am! 

Yoga Pose LiDoña Wagner

A breast mastectomy and chemotherapy at age 57 allowed me to outlive my mother’s 55 years. Radiation and chemotherapy for metastasized breast cancer at age 79 allowed me to outlive my father’s 75 years. A pacemaker at age 82 allows my tired heart to keep me going and might allow me to reach 95, the age of two now deceased great aunts.

Life Transforming LiDoña Wagner

Put this in the context of scientific evidence that everything in the entire universe is continuously undergoing evolution – millions of experiments are perpetually going on to find the ‘fittest’ forms of existence. 

Life Rising LiDoña Wagner

Put bluntly, what are you doing to promote human evolution into a species that can continue to exist on this blue marble in its vast universe of being-ness? Are you a wise elephant without ivory tusks or an extinct Dodo bird? 

Life Morphing LiDoña Wagner

I am grateful to Ukraine for continuing to send grain to all parts of the world. I am grateful for every action taken to address climate change and care for Mother Earth.

 

Elephant or Dodo Bird?

As I reached the exit door of the Marquis fitness room, the person on the treadmill next to me and with whom I’d been chatting said, “I’m eighty-four years old, but when I exercise, I feel 70.”

During my neighborhood walk, this comment kept rattling around in my head. It resonated with my own sense of who I am. Whatever earlier generations have thought about people who crossed the 80-year mark, it is clear to me and others in the contemporary octogenarian class that we have energy, commitment, purpose, and staying power. In fact, we are an aspect of humanity’s evolution on planet earth. What do I mean? 

A recent TED hour on NPR radio set my mind swirling. For each TED Hour an NPR host collates three-to-four TED Talks that address a common theme and interviews the presenters. This one was on ‘Vacancies: What happens in spaces (or species) that have been diminished?’

 

One example was of elephants in a remote nature preserve in Africa. For decades poachers have been decimating their population for the purpose of selling their tusks on the black-market. Recently, however, these elephants have been making a comeback. How? The mama elephants have been birthing babies that do not grow tusks.

Elephants are extraordinarily empathetic, family oriented, and highly protective of their offspring. It seems that after years of watching humans 

kill their kin, brutally remove the tusks, leave dead carcasses bleeding on the ground, and drive off in a cloud of dust and raucous laughter, 

MAMA ELEPHANTS had had enough. 

Using their brain-body wisdom, 

they told their bodies to produce elephants without tusks.

Reflecting on this recent research of elephants adapting to a devastating change in their situation, put the contemporary turmoil around sexuality and human propagation in a bigger framework. Younger generations have made it clear that they are fed up with school shooter drills, static gender roles, and desecration of the environment. 

Likewise, older people are rebelling against being relegated to ‘retirement camps for the elderly.’ At either end of the age spectrum, humans are taking actions to assure the future existence of humanity and a healthy environment to sustain it.

If you or someone you know has or soon will reach eighty, know that you and they have a choice about whether to take the route of the Dodo bird or that of the innovative elephant. Be an elephant. Reimagine humanity, a healthy society, and our shared home. 

 

Breaking Rules

Crepemyrtle seriously blooming in spite of topping it off last year.

Needle-nosed pliers had come to my rescue numerous times when my shiny silver shredder jammed. But after twenty years of diligently chewing through hundreds of pages, the plastic around the metal grinding teeth inside the machine had become brittle. When bits of it began breaking off, intensifying the frequency and intensity of jamming, I acknowledged it had reached a stage of total stuck-ness. 

One to three year Maples from my tree nursery.

This was not unlike the personal stuck-ness that had forced me to sell my townhome and move to a 55+ community. Letting go of the intense stress leading up to and culminating in the sale and then moving turned out to be more challenging than I expected. So, I retreated; spending June unpacking boxes and moving into my rented one-bedroom cottage and July settling in – hanging pictures and setting up the garage studio/classroom. Focused on settling in and not knowing anyone in this community, I unconsciously went about making my rental cottage comfortable and exploring transportation options. Having chosen to avoid the community café to resist unhealthy temptations, I seldom ran into other residents.

Driveway Garden

By August it was time to shift gears from hiding in my home to meeting members of my community. I discovered that, like the worn-out shredder, I had become stuck in life patterns that had to be dispensed with. Enter Scott Thorpe’s How to Think Like Einstein, Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius. What Thorpe helped me see was that the rules I need to break are ones I created and upon which I have depended. One old rule had to do with ‘hiding myself’ so as not to ‘stand out’ as being peculiar. 

Three-year and two-year Maples.

Meeting neighbors and making new friends is not unlike being a young adult going through the awkwardness of leaving home and finding oneself among strangers whose life experiences are different and whose patterns of relatedness are downright weird. I soon discovered that: Oops! Hiding isn’t working!

 

Porch Buddha

No one else has a three-foot Buddha on their front porch or takes the bus for grocery shopping. There aren’t other ceramic-planter gardens on driveways, other tree nurseries, or other women dragging a seven-foot-tall Japanese maple from one side of their property to the other. I have met no one else exploring surrounding streets on foot to get a bigger picture of the neighborhood.

 

There is no doubt that I am exposed and I am peculiar. My ‘hiding’ rule was broken by happen-chance. Now I am trying to recognize other self-created rules that I need to break.

 

Three-year Maple hosting a three-month Maple.

 

Mysterious Unopened Box

A narrow three-foot-long box packed in Victoria B.C. during spring of 1997, accompanied me for 26 years but was never opened. 

In 1991, a Victoria art student taught a community class on basic
techniques. For the painting session, we used house paint and brushes
on cheap paper. I was 51 years old. Another student asked,
"How could you not know you had this talent?"

The box and I went first to Meadville, PA where I had a housesitting gig but ended up requiring a modified radical mastectomy. Four months later UPS shipped my Victoria boxes to Eugene, OR where some friends were putting me up while I underwent chemotherapy. Six months later the Victoria boxes went into an apartment storage closet while I set up an art related business. 

My daughter’s January 2000 death precipitated my taking a job as a university administrator - a job that allowed me to purchase a townhome four years later where the unopened box moved to another storage compartment at my first home ever! There it stayed as I worked to develop a financial base, wrote three books, taught creativity classes, and created multimedia artworks.

On Sept 29, 1994 I made a collage on a file folder to represent
"What it will feel like to have my first book published."
It took until 2011 for that to happen.

Nineteen years later I sold my townhome and on June 2, 2023, the mysterious unopened box joined fifty or more others being moved to my newly rented cottage. It ended up in the garage (studio to be), completely ignored while boxes containing the essentials of living received priority. A month later a commitment was coming due; I had promised my grand-daughter that I would create a memento of her mother that she could carry during her August wedding ceremony.

Lorne Loomer, my seminal art teacher,
 taught me to make a bark brush and to use it
 to express energy - internal and external.

Was it needing to fulfill that promise or anticipation of my deceased daughter’s birthday on July 11, that finally nudged me, after 26 years, to slide a knife along one end of this narrow three-foot-long container still wrapped in the once-white paper used for all boxes packed in Victoria, with markings to and from Meadville?

After a year of figure drawing classes, when we switched 
from charcoal and pencil to paint, it was my love of energy
calligraphies that expressed itself.

Inside was a tightly rolled sheaf of papers. I had to slit one side of the box to remove its contents: my fledgling art making and several of my daughter’s masterful figure sketches. Suddenly I was transported to Vancouver Island where I dropped 30 years of social activism, changed my name, and began a tenuous creative journey. I was stunned. 

Moonlit Barn LiDoña Wagner 1993.
Alan Bruce was my first watercolor teacher.

Unfurling curled papers revealed seeds that were planted during six years on an island where 60% of Canadian artists lived. In the process of supporting myself as a Shiatsu therapist, I had ... 

• lived alone and loved being independent, 
• discovered that I could create a successful business, 
• reconnected with nature and took up gardening,
• launched dream groups that matured my dream inquiry skills,
• developed women’s personal growth workshops,
• conducted my first artful play creativity class,
• enhanced writing skills by completing an autobiography, and
• discovered methods for reinventing one’s life.

At some point I recognized myself as having become
FIRE WOMAN, embracing the loss of previous identities.

Everything in REINVENT YOURSELF with Dreaming & Artful Play 2022 came directly from living six years in the creative cauldron of Victoria, B.C. during the early nineties. Now in a new home, new seeds are bing planted for a future me that I do not know.

Temple Bells, LiDoña Wagner 1997

What new seeds are you planting during this time of radical global change?

 UNWINDING THE SHRINK WRAP

A vaulted window brings light into a one-story cottage at Marquis Eugene

A decision to sell my home of 20 years and move into a rental cottage in a 55+ community, something that I had never considered for my future, was prompted by ongoing stress fram an alcoholic MAGA neighbor creating constant chaos and disruption. 

Front Porch

Stress manifested as a sense that my life was shrinking: fewer human contacts, less reading, limited gardening, sporadic art creation, fewer calories absorbed, reduced steps taken. Plus, every nook and cranny of my home was stuffed with paintings, unsorted files, unsold books - nooks that were separated by a staircase, a storage unit off the back patio, and another at the front. And my excitement over helping create a community garden, a ten-year dream, had waned as the strain of maintaining it ensued. 

Buddha Welcomes All Visitors

Although I had begun downsizing my library, reducing my wardrobe, and giving away art materials, once my home went on the market with a plan to sell within 30 days, serious packing revealed that I would be moving not only a home, but an office, a studio, a gallery, and a garden that included my tree nursery. Like Psyche with a mountain of seeds to sort, my heart sank before such a challenge. 

Buddha's view includes the North Star rising each night. 

Had not a covey of friends lifted me up with their generous energy, I would still be at 1586 Fetters Loop. But from June 1 to 5 the move to 435 Sahalie Way was accomplished and the title of my former home transferred to a young family of two teachers and two small children. 

Studio Entrance Garage)

 

Once at 435 Sahalie Way, the shrink-wrap protecting my life began to unfurl. I met the couple with whom I share one wall - a Thai couple from Pennsylvania. He’s a former pediatrician. How refreshing! People here at Marquis have come from California, Mexico, Arizona, places in Oregon, and more. An energetic 93-year-old woman leads a water aerobics class and a physical assessment by a personal trainer laid out a path to adding strength to my resilient agility.  

Tree Nursery & Garden Outside Bedroom Window

 

A months-long process of unpacking and divestment lies ahead, but having all the art in one place and boxes of files in a different space but on the same floor makes the task doable. An uninsulated garage-studio presents challenges but also new opportunities for teaching. As I feel the shrink-wrap lessening, I find myself opening to new possibilities. 

 

Quiet Victory LiDoña Wagner Watercolor pens

 6 Secrets of Living Fully and Long by 102-year-old Dr. Gladys McCarey

1. Know your purpose. And if you don’t know it, seek it. “We have to always keep reaching for our sense of purpose, our unique contribution to the world around us that brings us joy, meaning, and what I call ‘the juice,’” she says.
2. Be fluid. “Life is always moving, and we have to be sure to focus on the ways we’re moving with it,” she says.
3. Love deeply. That old saying that love makes the world go round? According to Dr. McGarey, there’s truth in it. “It’s crucial to remember that love is life, and that putting our attention on love brings us health and well-being,” she says.
4. Build community. At the end of the day, the world is so much bigger than ourselves. “We can’t forget the role that community plays in amplifying our life force,” Dr. McGarey says.
5. There are always lessons to be learned. Some people will say that once they reach a certain age, they’re set in their ways, or there’s nothing left to learn. Dr. McGarey disagrees. “Everything that happens in our life is here to teach us something, to show us the way forward,” she says.
6. Prioritize people, places, and things that make you feel your best. “When we invest our energy in the things that give us energy back,” says Dr. McGarey, “life force courses through us, quite literally keeping us alive.”