A very wise elder woman

[Lovely. It's amazing how this points out how fragmented daily life encourages us to be. Whole is better. Not separating the sugar from the lemonade water._NS]

The Great Spirit

...went to high school with her grandaughter i met her many times very wise elder woman. Donald Waya.
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How often have you heard or said "I'm part Indian"? If you have, then some Native American elders have something to teach you. A very touching example was told by a physician from Oregon who discovered as an adult that he was Indian. This is his story. 

Listen well:

Some twenty or more years ago while serving the Mono and Chukchanse and Chownumnee communities in the Sierra Nevada, I was asked to make a housecall on a Mono elder. She was 81 years old and had developed pneumonia after falling on frozen snow while bucking up some firewood.

I was surprised that she had asked for me to come since she had always avoided anything to do with the services provided through the local agencies. However it seemed that she had decided I might be alright because I had helped her grandson through some difficult times earlier and had been studying Mono language with the 2nd graders at North Fork School.

She greeted me from inside her house with a Mana' hu, directing me into her bedroom with the sound of her voice. She was not willing to go to the hospital like her family had pleaded, but was determined to stay in her own place and wanted me to help her using herbs that she knew and trusted but was too weak to do alone. 

I had learned to use about a dozen native medicinal plants by that time, but was inexperienced in using herbs in a life or death situation. She eased my fears with her kind eyes and gentle voice. I stayed with her for the next two days, treating her with herbal medicine (and some vitamin C that she agreed to accept).

She made it through and we became friends. One evening several years later, she asked me if I knew my elders. I told her that I was half Canadian and half Appalachian from Kentucky. I told her that my Appalachian grandfather was raised by his Cherokee mother but nobody had ever talked much about that and I didn't want anyone to think that I was pretending to be an Indian. I was uncomfortable saying I was part Indian and never brought it up in normal conversation.

"What! You're part Indian?" she said. "I wonder, would you point to the part of yourself that's Indian. Show me what part you mean."

I felt quite foolish and troubled by what she said, so I stammered out something to the effect that I didn't understand what she meant. Thankfully the conversation stopped at that point. I finished bringing in several days worth of firewood for her, finished the yerba santa tea she had made for me and went home still thinking about her words.

Some weeks later we met in the grocery store in town and she looked down at one of my feet and said, "I wonder if that foot is an Indian foot. Or maybe it's your left ear. Have you figured it out yet?"

I laughed out loud, blushing and stammering like a little kid. When I got outside after shopping, she was standing beside my pick-up, smiling and laughing. "You know" she said, "you either are or you aren't. No such thing as part Indian. It's how your heart lives in the world, how you carry yourself. I knew before I asked you. Nobody told me. Now don't let me hear you say you are part Indian anymore."

She died last year, but I would like her to know that I've heeded her words. And I've come to think that what she did for me was a teaching that the old ones tell people like me, because others have told me that a Native American elder also said almost the same thing to them. I know her wisdom helped me to learn who I was that day and her words have echoed in my memory ever since. And because of her, I am no longer part Indian,

I
am
Indian

FUN: Woman Dancing on a Treadmill!

http://comedy.video.yahoo.com/?lid=24038709&vid=27470019

Woman Dancing on a Fitness Center Gym Treadmill

Baseball: Breaking down barriers, one pitch at a time

By Tim Brown, Yahoo! Sports Feb 21, 2011

Justine Siegal delivered pitches to the Indians and her message to the baseball world. (photo)
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GOODYEAR, Ariz. – The girl on the field spent her 13th birthday last week attending the Justin Bieber movie. She wears multi-colored sneakers with mismatched laces. And she once tried to be serious about baseball, only to discover a diamond was a more wonderful place to chase butterflies and sketch infield pictures with the toe of one of those sneakers.

While Cleveland Indians hitters launched baseballs into an empty outfield, the girl on the field sat cross-legged and pushed her cap back on her head and fiddled with her iPhone, wondering just how long she’d have to be here.

Every few minutes she’d lift her head, study the scene on Field 2, then drift away again.

Her mom was throwing batting practice, something no woman had done before in a major league setting, as far as anyone knew.

“Yeah, I’m proud,” Jasmine Siegal said. “Thing is, I can see her pitch any time.”

Thirty-one years since she first held a baseball with some kind of intent and almost 20 since giving up her dream of becoming the next Orel Hershiser, Justine Siegal, 36, continued her fight Monday to persuade and allow girls of any age to play the game she loves. The game they love.

Just like the boys.

Or, as the case may be, to pursue butterflies.

Just like the boys.

She calls her ideal (and her website) Baseball for All. And after spending her prime stubbornly refusing to go away, Justine Siegal rolled her baseball pants to her knees, rubber-banded her hair into pigtails, stood on a back field, palmed three balls in her left hand and aimed, in her words, “To throw a four-seam fastball straight over the top and right over the plate.”

The Indians, the team of her youth and her father and her grandfather’s youths, were kind enough to grant her the stage, a platform behind an L screen maybe 50 feet from home plate. She wore a dark blue jersey, No. 15, for the day in February her daughter, Jaz, was born. The team had committed to a kind of tryout, allowing Siegal to give it a go against a handful of minor leaguers in shorts and T-shirts.

Turned out she did, indeed, throw like a girl. Like a strong, loose-armed, athletic girl who’d been doing this forever. Half hour later, she was re-warming in a game of catch with Indians manager Manny Acta and then pitching to big leaguers, throwing strikes and getting hammered like any good BP pitcher should.

As she strode to the mound, Indians general manager Chris Antonetti said to outfielder Chad Huffman(notes), “She was good earlier.”

“She was?” Huffman said.

“Yeah, she was good.”

“That’s great. I love it. Got a little swagger to her, too.”

Minutes later, catcher Paul Phillips(notes) stepped from the batting cage and said, “Is it bad when you’re going into a round of BP and you’re thinking, ‘Don’t strike out?’ ”

The goal was to hit as many bats as possible. The mission is larger, borne of Siegal’s own experiences growing up in the Cleveland suburb of Cleveland Heights, for years pitching (and occasionally playing third) for whomever would give her the ball, then as a coach for male teams, both for Springfield (Mass.) College and later the independent Brockton Rox.
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Justine Siegal says, "If you tell a girl she can't play baseball, what else is she going to believe she can't do?" (photo)
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Her organization is non-profit. Her message is about choices, and the freedom to make them. Whether her own Jaz ever caught the baseball bug or not, whether any girl did, Siegal believes they should have a place to play, a team around them and a way to earn it, regardless of gender.

“What I want is girls’ baseball across America,” she said between batting practices. “So when I throw, now all of a sudden we have a dialogue [about] how much girls and women love baseball and how they want to be a part of it.”

Beyond that, she said, “I think it’s fairly simple. If you tell a girl she can’t play baseball, what else is she going to believe she can’t do?”

To her uniform sleeve, Siegal had duct-taped a patch honoring Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old girl killed in last month’s Tucson shooting. Green was the only girl on her Canyon Del Oro Little League team.

As Siegal pitched, she calmed her nerves and dried her palms by singing to herself, a song by U2 called, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own.” And she thought of all the people who should have been on the mound beside her: Grandfather Alvin, who’d turned her on to the Indians of Municipal Stadium, father Michael, who loved the game like she did, and Jaz, whose precociousness, well, had to come from somewhere.

“At the same time,” Siegal said, “I feel all those people who told me ‘no’ are with me, too.”

She’ll throw more batting practice Wednesday, for the Oakland Athletics. In the meantime, Justine and Jaz almost certainly will find other things to do. On a rainy Sunday, they’d spotted a rainbow over Scottsdale, and through the puddles chased the end of it in their rented Volkswagen bug.

They got close enough for Jaz to take a picture on her iPhone, which she held up with a grin, her brown eyes sparkling.

There’d be time for baseball later.

“We should do and be whatever we want to be,” her mom said. “If baseball’s it, then go for it.”

Tim Brown is a national baseball writer for Yahoo! Sports. Follow him on Twitter. Send Tim a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.

Bill Johnson (Story Is Promise) on "Twilight" Prologue and More

Notes on the Preface of Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

"I saw the film before reading the books, and my first idea--in reading the Prologue--was that it was film editing.

"The brief tantalizing teaser at the beginning to get you to realize, oh, it's not just some teen whining about her devastatingly cute boyfriend; but something that is life and death and even spiritual.

"I was glad for it.

"Mushy stuff--and dear Bella is a mushy, mis-thinking lover, who is at her best when she BRAVELY FEELS, not thinks.

"The prologue immediate says this. Great hook. "

--Neale Sourna


Story is Promise Deep Characterization

"Writers do often write THEIR lives and fears to the detriment of their characters, no matter age, gender, or expertise.

"Woman author, 50+, who should've known better with NY editors to correct her error--and didn't.

" 'The Witching Hour' takes about 90 or so pages to get to the main characters who can actually do anything. Why the previous bits weren't cut or moved deeper in is painful to read.

"My first Rice. And a slight insult/compliment, as I was told my "Frames" script reminded them of her.

--Neale Sourna