Anatomy Trains

For one day, the weather finally clears in Oslo, and in the lingering evening from my tiny 15th floor balcony (reminiscent of a hot-air balloon basket – I have the sickening feeling that my evil twin is going to grab my body, leap to the railing and jump wildly for the waterfall) I can finally see more than the pounding spray below me. A sliver of cupped moonlight follows the sun to bed, and far to my left, the harbor – I didn’t know I had a sea view until this moment - reflects the last orange of the daylight.

By tomorrow, according to CNN, it will be cold rain again, and Patreus and Crocker will be tossed softballs by Congress for an easy hit into more war, more lives lost, more disruption for the poor people who were unlucky enough to be in Dick Cheney’s way. The way they got this war started – Rummy and Cheney and Perles and Wolfowitz – that’s got to be a form of cheating? It is hard to keep going sometimes, having faith that the political and the environmental degradation will not overwhelm this human experiment before the work that we do – preparing the next generation of children for this 21st century world - has a chance to take hold.

Each day I travel down the hill to the class in the town center on a five-minute tram ride. The ticket is 30 kr., about $6. No one checks whether you have a ticket,. My American sensibility suggests that $12/day is a bit much, and for reasons too complicated to explain, I have trouble getting Norwegian cash. In any case, I confess to jumping on and off again without a ticket some mornings.

The ethic that we grew up with in the hippie era – it’s ok to stick it to ‘the man’, including the phone company, the government, or anyone corporate, while maintaining a high personal ethic with our fellow individuals. (Supposedly – in fact we were sexist in our treatment of both women and gays.)

Nowadays, this kind of petty cheating is very rare for me – this one was remarkable for its appearance. Nobody wants to pay more taxes than they have to, so that’s simply a form of disguise. But not only can I afford the things I used to rationalize cheating on, but decades have shown me the humans in the corporations – and of course I have a few of those corporations myself these days. I still think ‘the people’ are getting screwed, but the sharply-drawn blacks and whites have all gone for the gray wash like those a friend showed me on some drawings in a museum in Edinburgh.

I have spent nearly $1300 replacing 2 shirts, 2 pairs of pants (a shirt has two sleeves, but it’s not a pair of shirts – why is that?), underwear, and a belt and a toothbrush, toothpaste, and shampoo – and not even high quality clothes. Surely that’s enough? Doesn’t that justify some cheating? But what does the Oslo Transit Authority have to do with British Airways?

In some form of poetry, British Airways coughs up my suitcase in my literal last hour in Oslo – I collect it and drop it onto my flight to Munich. BA offers to pay me £35 ($70) for having lost my luggage – surely that’s a form of cheating? Not even worth filing for, as it will take more time than it’s worth.

As the plane peels out over the rugged and extraordinary coast, I contemplate what constitutes cheating, and rapidly move from the convoluted but navigable pathways of the mind to the wild and stormy uncharted domain of the heart.

I recently had to tell a good friend that he hadn’t made the cut for a team. From the brain’s point of view, it was a straightforward call, but my heart – my compassion and my fear all mixed up – blew the communication, and the friendship was shot out of the sky. I never did team sports as a kid, and I guess I missed out on how to do these things kindly but quickly and clearly.

More recently still, I had to tell another friend - who was much younger emotionally than I ever suspected – that her fantasies about our ‘deep connection’ were just that. This was a blow, as I had thought I had a good friend, with none of the clutter that can gum up the easiest cross-gender friendship (at least in my generation – Misty seems immune to the problem and has equal friends in both genders). But the empathy and charm I use to create the bonds of friendship is all too easily mistaken for seduction, so - all unintended – I was the cheat. I must be so careful, and I hate having to be so watchful, so closed-hearted, so vigilant. Must I so close my heart to live as I am in this world?

But: Thou shalt not commit pain.

And I did.

My dear, sweet, infirm and insane wife understands the pathways of the heart better than anyone I know. A lot of good it has done her (not). Some people ‘get’ her and celebrate her wisdom, some (like my family) see only the surface and shake their heads in disbelief that I am with her, and gloriously happy with her, despite our differences, despite the frustrations, despite the fact that in learning her, I have committed pain.

The human heart is minefield, a battlefield, a stormy ocean, and a nightmare of phantasms all rolled into one. Of course it’s an Alpine meadow, a calm Aegean sea, and an exhilarating flying dream as well. Right now, though, with my body breaking down and my mind running on fumes from too much travel and too little reflective time, my heart and everyone else’s seems terra incognita, ultima thule, one of Dante’s circles of Hell.

I look forward to time off the road, out of this plane, in the arms of the one who sets straight the paths, calms the storms, and sorts the complexities out in simple, direct, and refreshingly earthy terms. Quan, I celebrate you.

With the typical English superficial horror of / secret delight in inefficiency, the newly opened Terminal 5 at Heathrow went from ‘All hail!’ to shambolic within hours of its grand opening. I had seen it on the news from my hotel in Edinburgh, and so took the precaution of checking the bag only to Heathrow. I fetched it, rechecked it again to Oslo so it wouldn’t get lost, and went back in through security. Since the plane from Edinburgh was an hour late, I was running and puffing through this process and made it just in time for the Oslo flight.

Terminal 5, handsome though it is, is, was indeed a mess – hundreds of men (and a few women) in security yellow coats with BA (British Airways) or BAA (British Airports Authority) on the back - were wandering up and down the corridors, in and out of those doors you and I may not breech, carrying flashlights or clipboards, but obviously lost, trying to look busy so no one would ask them anything or send them on an errand even more foolish and hopeless than the one they were currently on.

Passengers, meanwhile, with no information, no luggage, no signage or anything to help them along, went to pieces in queues or in corners, manifesting all five stages of grief.

I needn’t have bothered with my extra trouble – they lost my bag anyway. So here I am, high in an apartment building over the Aakers Elve Falls with only the sweaty clothes I threw on to make the trip, and BA has no idea, this next day, where my bag is or when it might arrive. CNN says there are 28,000 lost bags in Heathrow, so it could easily be weeks.

Oslo feels a bit lonely and sterile – and I am bound to this apartment for the evening in any case, since I have washed out my only clothes and have hung them to dry for the morning. (I hope). The falls are my straw to clutch at the moment, a beautiful cataract whitewater feature running full force down through the city, the old mills that line it now gentrified into boutique apartments and clever little shops. I look down on it wondering how one would run it in a kayak, a feat I will leave to younger bodies and reflexes.

The constant tumult of white water and spray is a balm to the eye, and background noise so like and yet so unlike the roar of an airplane, which I would welcome if it were the one bringing me my bag with the phone charger, the visual aids I need for class, my shaving brush, and a hundred other things that it will, in the fullness of time, be possible to replace, but I would really rather not.

You can have haggis.  Like the pig intestines in Taiwan, everyone urges me to try it, each assuring me that this recipe or that restaurant transcends the bad reputation to achieve edibility, while each one actually manages to approximate a different kind of cat food.  I will somehow survive without delving further into this line of nutrition.  I don’t expect you to try raw oysters or urchin roe or clam chowder when you come to my house either.

I walked up on Costorphine Hill this dawn, ahead of my presentation for 100 or so therapists.  It was colder and windier than it looked, ruffling my shirt so I buttoned my cuffs and sought out a pathway up through the woods. After a sleepless night (there was a wedding at the hotel, and the DJ had the whole building thumping until well after midnight), it felt good to let the muscles loose and the mind coordinate to the rhythm of feet on the ground.  At the top was a beautiful view east over the zoo to Edinburgh, certainly one of the most comely cities on this planet.

Walking along the ridge among the mossy trees and lichen-covered rocks, I scared up a bunch of rabbits, small like Quan’s, and similarly poised between curious and scared.  The wild rabbits at home – used to hunters and beagles – are seldom seen and disappear like a shot if discovered, but these fat and happy little beings were clearly protected, as they loped calmly out of my sight in the ferns and rocks of the glen.

God knows if I used the word ‘glen’ right.  It means ‘shallow’, as in glenoid fossa, the shallow shoulder joint, but these Scots are as fiercely protective of their language as they are of haggis, so my natural tendency to imitate is not received kindly, but rather with severe looks, declarations, and dismissals.  It is with joy, not ridicule, that I affect assimilation, but they have had enough of English dominance, and American attempts at badly-accented chumminess are about as welcome as ‘MacDonalds’ – a perfectly good Scots name that is known the world around for the bland reliability of its mediocrity. .

Ducking into the men’s room in the midst of the Schipol polyglot after my ride over the pond, I came across something I had heard about, but had never seen.  The report said that putting a fly in the urinals improved men’s aim.  Sure enough, they had etched or somehow engraved a black insect shape into the white ceramic.  Despite the fact that it looked more like a trout fly than a real one, and despite the fact that I clearly knew it was a simple image, it was irresistible.  One’s aim is indeed truly drawn toward trying to hit the fly, even though one ‘knows’ it will do no good.

Of course it does do some good, because the fly is placed where it is on purpose, as this is the spot with the least ‘sprayback’, so aiming there reduces cleaning and public hazard.  So simple, and such a strong psychological effect.

We’ve been pooping and peeing for 350 million years, and we’ve been dealing with the result of waste accumulation due to crowding since Hammurabi wrote out the first law of sewage.  We’re still not doing every well.  As I walked away from the from the wall of gleaming porcelain mouths, my unit tsked, clanged, and whooshed a couple of gallons of water through, mixing a pint or so of liquid waste with perfectly good water, and then dumped the whole lot into a system that produces nothing but cost.

We do the same with solid waste, and back at home, we are about to spend a great deal of money for the privilege of mixing our waste immediately with tons of good water and running it gradually out through our dense Presumpscot clay ground to filter it.  The first builders of latrines and privies had to deal with the smell, which isn’t, of course, pleasant.  The invention of Sir Thomas Crapper’s toilet, on which modern toilets are based, had the wonderful advantage of allowing you to void waste inside your shelter without having to put up with the smell.

Today, the waste of good water is more a problem than the waste itself.  What we now have available to us is technology that could rapidly dry out the waste (thus eliminating the smell also) which would give is a net gain in good water, and incidentally, give us the basis for a dry composted material.  This may sound disgusting, but the composting toilets my father installed in 1972 still produce, over time, a dry and odorless dirt that can be added to a garden without penalty.

Why should we mix our bodily waste with clean water and then run it underground to settle out without using it again?  It is another of the ways of human beings that make no sense.  Pollution is just a resource in the wrong place at the wrong time.  If we could capture some of the resources we waste, everyone – even the poor Zimbabweans trying to vote today – would succeed.

I have been stuck, unable to add to this blog because I must write about this experience before I can move on to others, but its essence keeps escaping me, and its implications for my work are tremendous - fundamentally disturbing and exciting.

For the first time, I have been present for a dissection of a so-called ‘fresh tissue’ cadaver, which is essentially a fresh frozen person.  The glib comparison is the difference between tinned peas and fresh frozen peas – but this undersells the impact. Under the direction of Todd Garcia and the Laboratories of Anatomical Enlightenment in Denver, a group of us explored the Anatomy Trains with an unembalmed cadaver in June of this year.

The evidence of this exploration is featured or will appear elsewhere on this site; my purpose here is just to report the subjective experience.

I am accustomed to handling an embalmed cadaver, and can quite calmly explore the most intimate innards of another person in this state.  (Though I am not as sanguine about looking at my own blood – nearly passed out when I looked into my own finger that I attempted to chop off while making kindling in the dark – see the entry ‘Hatchet’ in Jan, 2007).  ‘Victoria’ (so we named her, and we felt quite close to her by the end) landed somewhere between these two experiences, and the juxtaposition was fundamentally disturbing.

A common word for embalmed tissue is ‘fixed’, and the precise difference in Victoria was she was unfixed.  Joints moved – a little sluggishly since she was constantly kept very cold, but they moved through the normal range.  The skin was supple, and moved on the underlying tissues.  With the blood present, her skin had normal hues, and, though incisions would not bleed like surgical ones, blood was present, and would pool under her sometimes.  Cutting through the skin was more rubbery and resilient than embalmed tissue, and the underlying muscles, fat, and fascia had normal coloring and normal responsiveness.

But oh, how much responsiveness there was!  Pull on the tissue – any tissue! – and an ‘anatomy train’ appears.  Take any tissue off the body and put it under the microscope Eric Root brought, and watch the structure that was evident on the body disappear into amorphous vacuoles and bubbles.  Put a new stretch on the tissue, and new structure appears – complete with lined up fibers and resistance.

Jeff Linn warned me against conflating anatomy with structure.  At the time, I dismissed the warning – anatomy is to structure what money is to love – maybe you can’t buy it, but it doesn’t hurt the process either.  Anatomy may not be structure, I thought, but it sure is a useful way in.

I still believe that, and will continue to insist that my students know their anatomy, but clearly structure is something that only occurs in context of the spatial tensegrity of the body.  In other words, you need the tensional and compressional forces to make the fascia / myofascia organize.  (Having written this, I say ‘of course, that’s what we’ve been saying all along, but to see it in action is a different experience.)

We were attempting to dissect out myofascial continuities, and the result were gloppy messes that looked (and by Friday were starting to smell) like flank steak.  Removed embalmed specimens are fairly stiff and could be draped over the classroom skeletons we use to photograph them.  The ‘real’ Anatomy Trains were so gloopy that they would immediately ooze off the skeleton unless held there with pins or hands.

The naturalness of the tissue, and its disconcerting lack of structure when removed from the body were bad enough, but the constant lifting of Victoria in and out of the freezer (under the knees and under the shoulders) emphasized her humanity, and the feeling of being somewhere between Hannibal Lector and Jeffrey Daumer persisted, actually growing through the week as the butcher-shop odor surpassed the formalin as a smell to be reckoned with.  Although it was a fantastic learning experience, this encounter with death – even in the same situation as many I have done before – a lab, the coats, the scalpels – was a quantum leap closer, and the hollow voice that says, “This way all men pass – even you, even your children” boomed hollow in my mind’s ear.

Many thanks to Todd, the staff, and all the students, but most of all to Victoria, who gave us such a gift.

British Rail is a thing of the past, but the British railroad experience is alive and well. It was more than a four-hour ride up from Leeds to Edinburgh, sliding through flat country carpeted with the spring grasses, sweater-pills of sheep, with four black threads on the bottom, angled on the hillsides. Change trains at Newcastle, an old mill town unexpectedly clean and bright – you might even want to carry some coals here, just to dust it up a little. Makes me think of the Mark Knopfler song, Sailing to Philadelphia – Mason and Dixon came across from ‘the coaly Tyne’ to survey the line drawn between the slave and free states, an abortive attempt to forestall the civil war.

Elsevier treats me nicely, and Sarena has booked me into a great hotel down by the Leith docks, Edinburgh’s port. My window overlooks the water, soothing – so I walk along the canal before sleep. It’s 11:15, and though it’s dark, I can still see twilight in the west. The sun awakens me at 5 am. In a month it’ll be scarcely dark all night.

Climbing the hill of arguably the world’s most beautiful city, sheathed in grey stone as solid, large, and soft-complexioned as the Scots themselves. Edinburgh’s streets wind around – overhead walks and tunnels revealing spires above and low doors all lend an air of mystery – you really could find a wizard’s shop right ‘round the corner. You don’t get long views until you reach the Bridges between the old and ‘new’ (15th century) city, where it opens up the high medieval castle and the observatory capping the hill.

Sarena presides over issues of the artwork and production schedules, and then the book designer joins us, a woman of such quiet spiritual power she fills the room immediately on entering. She rounds the table awkwardly with a limp, and forces me to shake her left hand, and I notice my offer has been to a gnarled right hand, with the flexed arm in a splint, held to her side. Sparked by the splint, I ask her what she did before I catch myself – that hand is not injured, it’s contractured – and indeed Charlie had a stroke at 29.

Without surface beauty or eloquence, and an unsure new employee to boot, Charlie nevertheless holds the room for the entire time she is there. I like her ideas, I want her to design my book.

After work, I ask her ‘round to the hotel, and we sit outside in the sun and the lapping waves for a drink’s worth, talking poetry and her history. Poor girl, she had too much power to be contained within her body, though she says the stroke was a gift – a benefit it may have been, but she paid for it. The sun fading and the drinks empty, we go in so we can work with her arm. Nothing to be done with the brain damage itself, but so little rehabilitation is done with the compensations for these brain injuries, so we set about mobilizing her neck, back, shoulder, and then centering in on her cranium – looking for the avenues of availability in movement. It seizes up whenever she thinks too hard – I can track her mind in the tension in her arm as I unravel it.

It was a gesture to a large but wounded soul, I would have to see her regularly to really move her up to her level of potential, and it would not be easy work. I want to help, make it better, fix it, but I am accustoming myself to play only the role as it is written in, not to try to write scenes on my own.

Later I realize I could have contacted my signing editor Mary Law, and gone to see her and Hamish in retirement, but it is too late. Along with Leon Chaitow, I owe her so much.

Putting paid to what I wrote a few days ago, the plane comes right up the Thames toward Heathrow, over the flood barricades, sneaking over to the left side of the plane I can see the blackened hull of the clipper Cutty Sark, burned out yesterday morning, they think by vandals. Greenwich, with the observatory, Gypsy Moth, and the Cutty Sark, was a favorite haunt of mine when I was in London – take a boat from the Embankment right past St Pauls, the docklands, and all the strange oddments of architecture that hang off the houses and walls,

Over Tower Bridge, St Paul’s itself looking so uncharacteristically small the spiky Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, #10, The Mall straight from there to Buck House (no sign of any queens), which is linked to St James Park, to Hyde Park, and ultimately to Kensington Gardens where Diana lived… London has so many large swatches of green. Track then up and north and my old haunts come into view – Soho for music and theater, Regents Park and the zoo and wide bridle pathways, Primrose Hill where, for a summer, I tried to throw the Frisbee left-handed. Highgate Cemetery, Hamsptead Heath, Parliament Hill, and Golders Green – a linked triangle that was my Sunday walk. Karl Marx’s grave usually began my route – the inscription runs something like: “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world in many ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

And I thought I would give it a go…

But the rude truth is that it’s a day-to-day world that requires a lot of changing. Kew Gardens - huge arboreta and flocks of deer - is the last spot for this nostalgia tour, and we’re down from the north, back into the Mainstream, swim with the fish toward Terminal 3.

It’s a four-hour drive (1.5 usually) into London on Monday morning, the M25 a slow-moving worm – how do people do this every day? – so Julian and I are late (and stiff) for our own dissection course.  Down in the bowels of a those institutional National Health hospitals – but the course is great, with four ‘soft-fixed’ legs to work with, a friendly if skeptical doctor, and the students are delighted to experience ‘fascia!’  Julian and I bat the ping-pong ball of questions back and forth to each other.  He is a madman with a passion and a wicked mimic and piss-taker with a relaxed insouciance that leaves no doubt where he stands – an outsider.

Back in London, it feels grim – grimmer and harder than ever before.   Even the rain, which creates such a lovely soundscape among the walls and trees of this city, is not enough to dull the raspy edge to its voice.  London, always cosmopolitan, has shouldered three huge immigrations from the east.  The first from the sub-continent – Indians and Pakistanis.  The Indians were predominantly Hindus, of course, and the so-called ‘Paki’s’ were Moslem.  But both these groups were former colonies, part of the British Raj, and however much the home-grown Brits might have complained at the time, these holders of British passports loved English culture and endeavoured to fit right in – and ultimately did.  More recently came the Arabs in large numbers – an immigration of a people who don’t like England.  They are nevertheless being absorbed and everyone is slowly learning tolerance, though the bombings last year did not help that process; nor has England’s participation in the Iraq War..

But now the Arabs are being superseded by a new immigration, this one from an even nearer east – the former communist bloc.  The coffee shops are stocked with girls with the round accents, hardened souls, wide-set eyes and shoulders, and enigmatic smiles of Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Belarus.  My friend in the sex industry says it’s been overrun by these girls who, some for fun and some in slavery, will do anything for a few pounds.

These immigrants do not dislike London, they simply don’t care.  You can see these young Russian men on the streets – hungry, watchful, as menacing and cowardly as packs of dogs.  Will they be assimilated?  Am I displaying the prejudice that slows such a process, just nostalgic for an earlier, simpler time - one that was not so simple anyway?  Maybe - nevertheless, I want my old soft city back, but London is pretty large in all senses, so perhaps – as I wrote of Tokyo earlier – it can absorb everything, and need concede nothing. But meantime it feels hard.

I leave my phone in the cab, and spend an evening tracking it down and getting it back.  Slippage – I am getting tired with the relentless days of teaching, lonely hotels, rain, questionable food.

While I am here, Tony Blair is in the process of resigning, and Gordon Brown has been (finally) given the green light to ascend.  Labour or not, the government is out of touch with its people – increased surveillance, increased taxes, decreased services – and it’s incredibly expensive in London – for me, of course, at $2 to the £, but also for Londoners, squeezed by VAT and other taxes – but the English, they muddle through.

On the last free morning, I find I am a tourist in my old home.  I left almost 20 years ago – most friends I might pop in on would require advance notice, a gift, and something to say.  I am a stranger, unable to cop a good accent any more, and with nowhere quiet and secret to go.  So I will make a virtue of a necessity and do touristy things I never did while living here.

On the southern Embankment of the Thames, I search out the New Globe – the copy of Shakespeare’s original - and look for the ironmongered flowers that my nephew Eben contributed to the gates.  The tide is running strong under the graceful bridges that lead to the baroque Houses of Parliament, to the broad dome of St Paul’s, to the new office tower called the Big Gherkin (Pickle) – it looks just like one.

The Eye is a total tourist attraction, a big Ferris wheel with gondolas instead of seats.  It moves slowly, gradually revealing the bird’s eye view of London – so slowly it loses dramatic impact – this is a trip best made with friends, not alone.  My gondola mates are all fellow tourists who make predictable noises like herd animals. Though to look down on so great a city from the peak of the wheel is still an unforgettable view, since the planes never fly in over the town any more.

Down from these heights into the Tube – more grimness, though the quality of busking musicians is much better than I remember, judging by the snatches of blues and jazz I hear as I schlep my suitcase through the gritty resounding corridors from one platform to the next.  Don’t take a suitcase onto London trains – no elevators, no ramps, and gushes of people flowing around your slow progress.

Dear Olde Englande!  Despite the sterling efforts of its best and brightest, the malady lingers on.  And a haunting, plaintive, lilting tune it is.  With a 60-hour hiatus at home in between, I have moved from the luxuriant rain forest of Central America to the luxuriantly rainy gardens of an English spring.

Cold and wet – no surprise, really - and that’s holding the blossoms up nicely, all perky and rigid, as if cold predisposed them to eroticism – poisonous yellow labernum, fragrant lilacs, a gnarly pink chestnut, redolent honeysuckle, golden gorse, and, just outside my window, white (and literally ephemeral) sistus – the hundred blossoms on this bush die and fall each evening, but a hundred more appear by the time I return each night.  All these and more nod in the wind around the thatched-roof cottage called Stapleton’s Chantry, where Julian, my sponsor and head of the European College of Bowen Studies, has put us for the weekend.

From Heathrow to Paddington, from Paddington out into South Oxfordshire, with easily satirzable names like Didccot and Aston Upthorpe, Tiddington and Wittenham Clumps, Blewbury and Shabbington – hard to even say them with a straight face.  But a morning walk is always a pleasure in UK, where the automobile has not yet stamped out all sense of humanness.  Past walls of brick and flint, strangely-angled corners of homes poking into the tiny roadway, an old church mottled with lichen and numerous repairs – who owns a Boxster way out here and parks it on the street?

Everyone names their house here – here’s a sampling from my morning walks:  Cobbles, Cromlix, The Apples, Chapeley’s, Riddle House, Seton Cottage, Forge Cottage, Orchard Cottage…

Last night it was up to the pub in the dark and the rain for a $7 glass of beer and a tough sirloin drowned in chips (fries) for a mere $35.  Tonight was a long drive for a pale imitation of an Indian curry.  There is no respite from bad food except for the breakfast at the B&B.  In the rooms, tiny TV’s, repetitive condescending news, a slightly musty smell, the tatter of the rain on the window.

Not having internet connection here, this is written after the fact.

Venice of the north, Amsterdam of the east, New Orleans with snow - St Petersburg is a vital European city in Russian overdrive, with an understandable but entirely unnecessary inferiority complex.  A mass of contradictions, historical, cultural, and economic – and my visit was too short to sort them out – so, a few impressions:

My workshop here, primarily with osteopaths, many with previous medical degrees, shows a level of osteopathy above what I have experienced in Germany, and just below that of England.  No surprise, in retrospect, as Russian osteopathy has deep connections with the British schools – Maidstone and the European School.  As usual, European osteopathy is a mule between two bales of hay – dedication to its holistic healing roots on one side, and the need for mainstream recognition (and thus procedures, verifiability, and bureaucracy) on the other.

The Russian students are argumentative, but in a friendly way – great dialogue.  The Russians are prepared to go deep in a way the Asians will find it culturally very hard to match, I feel.

More men than women, but Larisa – in looks she could have been a housewife from Cleveland, but was instead a powerhouse of questions and organization – used her new-found freedom to argue with my points on comparative anatomy to insist that the up-and-coming view was that the world was created in an instant.  What I would have regarded as a troglodytic arrival from Christian Kansas if I encountered it in Amerika was, in this context, her statement of faith in opposition to the oppressive atheistic culture she had grown up in.  I let it pass.

Translation, however, was a bit of a problem – the first day a Russian osteopath, Galina – a stately woman with a mobile face above a huge and ornate amber brooch, interpreted my ideas in terms of her own views of osteopathy.  The second two days were with Georgy, a pale, thin cardiologist, who does translating on the side to earn some money (even a specialist doctor in the Russian system earns only a few hundred dollars per month).  Georgy was quick with the medical terminology, but had trouble with the structural concepts.  Even so, the workshop was running very well by the middle of the second day, and a good time was had by all.  I even got a few jokes across, which is difficult in this culture, even though within their own language they have a ready smile and no small wellspring of irony, which is a strict requirement of Russian life.

My hosts, Julia and Dmitriy, have been working very hard to promote my ideas and get this workshop to happen. He is soulful, Russian, dedicated to osteopathy and healing, young and a bit unsure.  She is erudite, fun, and takes no prisoners. The daylight is long – though we are not yet in the ‘white nights’ of June and July – and I never make it back to the hotel before 11pm.

The Christians celebrate this springtime urgency as a triumph over death - Christ is risen; He is risen, indeed. This year, I celebrated twice: once with a sunrise service on a dramatic point over the ocean. Nearly 100 people made it this year, a thin line of cars wending down the peninsula, to gather companionably in the darkness, saying our yearly hellos quietly as we recognize each other under hats, scarves, and gloves - it is blowing 15 from the northwest, and it is still well below freezing. This is a service to the sun as it rises over Monhegan, in hopes that its growing strength will fill the land, melt the snow, ease the oil bill, and signal the start of our brief but glorious summer. Even though it is a Christian ceremony with a hymn and benediction, this feels like earth magic, and though I do not turn myself out of my warm bed every year, I feel no internal dissonance in attending this service.

Later, I go with my Mom to the small local church, where resurrection is in full force - people showing up (like me) who are never seen on any other Sunday. This fully Christian service - choir, old and new testament - grates my nerves - why should it?, it’s just a small town festival, even the same thoughtful and enthusiastic minister as the earlier one - but this triumph over death seems to mirror the human domination of nature. Our particular chosen religion allows us to escape death, so we are superior and therefor exempt from the cycle of death and rebirth that would require us to look at recycling, renewable resources and energy, the true cost of oil consumption and the rest of our wasteful practices.

Somehow this small church comes to represent - for me in this moment - all that is wrong and detached in our headlong rush toward planetary destruction and the denial of the truth of the body. I long for the delicacy of Ursula’s gender-bent planet, I welcome the ceremonies to the sun and connection with the natural world, but this organized balm for our sense of self-importance seems just wrong, and it is all I can do to sit it out in peace, stifling a protest would be totally inappropriate, self-indulgent, and completely misunderstood.

Of course, like all good stories, Christ’s resurrection can be interpreted in many ways. But any therapist or philosopher has to answer for himself the question: “Where did it all go wrong?” I have just returned from a non-Christian part of the world, but Asia is nonetheless infected with the Western itch for technology and domination of the natural world. I trace this tendency for domination 3.5 billion years back to the necessity for all living beings to eat and shit (and thus competition), 5 million years back to the advent of the bicameral cortex in humans that allowed the detachment necessary to separation (and thus sin), 70,000 years back to the Promethean taming of fire (and thus domination), and most recently 1600 years back to the interpretation of Easter as a license to flout natural law (the Tao) in our new-found divinity and victory over death.

I got news for the Christians: we’re all still dying, and we still don’t know what happens when we go. One person rolling away the stone (if it happened) does not mean that you have merited the same, even if you have accepted the baby Jesus as your personal saviour. The attitude that death has been vanquished is a very dangerous one, and should be handled with extreme care, lest we end up with leaders who count not the cost, and see themselves God-sent to vanquish sin (and maximize profit).

Oooops, too late!