Murderball is the nickname for Paralympic rugby, the bone-jarring sport played by quadriplegics in reinforced wheelchairs. The wheelchairs are reinforced so they look like battering rams. Actually that’s part of the strategy, guys crashing to each other at considerable speed in order to flip them over.


It’s a demolition derby, played by guys who have all suffered serious injuries or illness in their young lives which left them quadriplegic. Most of these young men broke their necks in the prime of their lives, injuring their spinal cords. One young man suffered severe blood poisoning in childhood that necessitated the amputation of both arms and legs.

But this is not a film about disability, it’s an inspiring story of love, parental support, community action, and a personal commitment by every man to become a full participant in his own life’s journey. These are athletes like all others, who are interested in winning an Olympic Gold medal. They talked about their sex lives (which turned out to be considerable) frustrations, girlfriends, acknowledged their limitations but did not seek pity. Each man acknowledged going through a “dark time” when they first became quadriplegic.

I have worked with lots of seriously disabled patients, and it always interested me how some people faced it and moved beyond their limitations, while others languished and despaired. The movie opened last weekend and featured a Question and Answer session with one of the movies young stars. Scott Hogsett, is a 32-year-old Phoenix resident, a graduate of ASU, who started playing Murderball less than a year after the accident that left him quadriplegic in 1992.

I asked him how he got through his “dark time” and Scott replied, he had always been a fighter. Then he added, that he learned to do more in the wheelchair than he ever did when he was able-bodied. Scott said he would never have played in the Olympic Games if he had not been quadriplegic. “I just wasn’t that good”, he said. He trains four hours a day and over the last four years has only taken off three months. When not competing he and his teammates, visit recently injured quads in rehab facilities, and tell them about the richness of their lives after quadriplegia.

Scott concluded with this thought, that in the beginning of the movie we may have been distracted by the wheelchairs, but he hoped that by the end we didn’t see them at all. He wanted us to leave the theater with this prospective, that he and his friends were something other than disabled, maybe even cool. My eyes welled, as he waved goodbye, reminded again that it’s not the events in our lives that do us in, but the choices we make about how we come to them.

As he rolled up the aisle, and the entire audience stood and applauded.

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I heard Winona La Duke, the charismatic Anishinabe (Ojibway/Chippewa) environmental activist, speak at Oregon Country Fair. Winona is from the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. She is a passionate speaker, writer, founder of Honor the Earth, and was Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential running mate in the 1996 and 2000 elections.

Winona spoke about the Native American concept of “the sacred” and how its meaning becomes distorted when translated into the language of the courtroom. She talked about Bear Butte State Park in South Dakota, one of the most sacred sites for all of the tribes of the Plains. This is where the Cheyenne received the seven sacred arrows from the Great Spirit, the foundation of their spiritual life. This is also where Red Cloud, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull sought vision, and where, in 1857, many Indian nations gathered to discuss the advancement of white settlers into the Black Hills.

Before Mato Paha (Bear Mountain) was declared a state park, the local tribes went to court and argued it would open this most holy place to endless processions of tourists trampling on their vision quest grounds. The court, in its language of evidence and proof, wanted to know how long Indians had been praying there and if there was written evidence. Expert witnesses testified about conflicting evidence regarding how the site was used, and for how long.

The Courts established Bear Butte State Park, for the greater good of all the people, They did acknowledge and make provisos for its sacred use. On the way up the well-marked path, there are signs saying “Do Not Disturb, Indians Praying.” Winona likened it to putting a golf course on Mount Sinai and telling people to be quiet between the sixth and seventh holes because sacred ceremonies were being held there.

A few weeks ago, the U.S. Forest Service gave Arizona’s Snow Bowl, the ski resort atop Mount Humphrey, the go-ahead to make artificial snow. This is the highest peak in Arizona and is central to the spiritual life of the Hopi and Navajo. Twenty years ago, the tribes of Arizona filed suit in Federal Court to halt the development of the sacred mountain, but it was developed anyway. In the ensuing decades, Indian holy places have been desecrated and traditional religious activities interfered with.

The Snow Bowl has just completed its best year ever, but it didn’t make up for several terrible years because of the state’s drought. Some seasons lasted for less than a month, and the Snow Bowl said that they would have to close, unless they received permission to make snow consistently. Skiing contributes an estimated $20 million annually to Flagstaff’s economy and employs about 400 people.

Implementing this snow-making upgrade will require the removal of a thousand trees and grading the slopes. The Indians are suing again, saying something about the continual abuse of the face of the Earth Mother, and so the recent Forest Service decision has been temporarily put on hold. But we know the outcome in a courtroom . . . talk of the face of your mother versus the potential for its exploitation and impact on the economy.

In the legal language of the courtroom, and in our culture as well, the sacred is too poorly a defined concept on which to base our judgements. The sacred cannot be defined in the language of the courtroom. The sacred is defined only in the language of the spirit. To understand sacred peak speak we have to listen to the language of the heart.

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The Oregon Country Fair (OCF) has been held annually for almost 40 years. It began as a Renaissance Festival and has evolved into an astounding gathering, run entirely by volunteers through a nonprofit corporation. OCF’s mission is to provide an experience that nourishes the spirit, explores living artfully and authentically. And to come together in community to celebrate life in magical, joyous and healthy ways.

Tens of thousands of people attend the Fair, which is always held outside Eugene, the first weekend after the Fourth of July. Volunteers do the PR, logistics, security, medical care, recycling garbage, healthcare, entertainment, speakers, crafts, they are collectively called the Family. It is the OCF Family that provides the vision and energy that fills the Fairgrounds day and night.

Every year, my family gathers at the Fair. Wife, daughters, son-in-law’s, nieces, nephews, brothers and sisters. We camp in the Crafts Lot, in a tight circle of tipi’s, campers and tents, around a central fireplace. Everybody works, and entertains, and when night falls, we emerge into our Country Fair personas. Our troupe has acquired some risqué names, but generally we are known as, The Pinky Sisters and the Truth Fairy. We dress in pink, the girls are vaudeville Burlesque dancers, the boys are bouncers and announcers, I am a giant fairy, with tights, tutu, wig and slippers. A combination stand-up improv comic and clairvoyant, whose name is The Truth Fairy.

Kids try to stump the Truth Fairy, do I know if they are telling me the truth, “Oh, yes”, I assure them, “try me”. Adults will ask a 6’6” fairy anything, things they might have wanted to ask before but been afraid to ask. Sometimes, something I say stuns them, like a bolt of lightning, with a new awareness. The right time, place and people, and they see something in a new light. I’m not sure how it happens, but I do know that at Fair, I allow myself to channel my intuition without conscious interruptions. A spontaneous, unconscious flow between me and them.

There are lots of families here, our friends, the “Blintzes”, are a 3 generation blended familiy that number almost 40. Some have been married and divorced from each other, others remarried bringing their new spouses and extended families. They camp together, work together and parade together. They get along well, because nobody wants to give up their family passes to the Fair. An OCF Family Pass, is a legacy as valuable as, season tickets on the 50 yd. line to Nebraska home games. People finish their business if they want to share the Fair experience. With a community so diverse, and living so close together, is intense so you have to close-knit living so intense, you have to settle stuff in order to feel joy and the healing power of community. Every year, in full costume, we do our late-night show in front of their booth, and it’s hysterical, raunchy, and draws a large crowd.

I leave Fair I feeling inspired, filld with hope for the world. Then I come home to read about the terror in London, and I feel my paranoid shell begin to cover me. I want to run away; my kids tell me there are festivals like this all over the country; “why not get an RV, get comfortable, ride the circuit, you’re the Truth Fairy”. I’m thinking about it.

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There are close to 4 million children in the United States who are diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), an estimated 7.5% of school-age children. Tens of millions of prescriptions are written for these children every year for potent psychopharmaceuticals like Concerta, Strattera, Adderall, Ritalin and the other amphetamines.

Drugs always come with a price; they are aimed at a specific constellation of symptoms, but invariably they exacerbate others. A child diagnosed with the ADHD may get better focused but get more depressed, aggressive, sleepless, and even suicidal. Often the drugs don’t even work. In a recently completed national study, the New York University Child Study Center reported that 28% of parents with kids between the ages of five and 18 who gave their ADHD kids psychoactive medications on a daily basis, said it didn’t work. But parents are giving it anyway. Why? Because mental health professionals, teachers, and administrators encourage it as the most expedient solution, suggesting it’s just a matter of finding the right dose or combination.

Don’t buy it. If the medication doesn’t work, stop taking it; we are chemically straitjacketing too many kids. Try other options, such as:

1. Talk to someone who can help you look at yourself and your symptomatic child from a new perspective. A therapist who doesn’t believe the drugs are the only tools to change behavior.

2. Set limits. It is an ego-corrective experience. Saying “no” or “you can’t have it” is critically important for our survival as a species and a planet. It is crucial to be available to your kids, but just as important is setting and enforcing consistent limits.

3. Restore the evening meal to the status of family ceremony. Get together around the dinner table with special food, stories, traumas, jokes, and stuff that’s important/happening to you.

4. Watch less TV. Go somewhere as a family where cell phones don’t get reception, and batteries run out. A place where you can suspend yourself from the ordinary and learn to appreciate the healing power of magical connections.

If we did these things, I believe we could eliminate the need for 90% of the psychoactive medications now being prescribed for children.

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Summer weekends are a time to get away from the triple-digit Phoenix heat and head up into cool country. With my sons and grandsons, I went up to the Mogollon Rim. A two- hour drive from the city and you find yourself on top of a mile-high plateau with the mountain lakes and Ponderosa Pine. The Yavapai Indians call this “the top of the world,” and it is also held sacred by the Navajo, Hopi and the Apache.

What could be finer than camping and fishing with my boys for a weekend? Fishing with little girls was certainly easier—the boys forever need to be redirected. They hear nothing the first time, perhaps a word the next time you get their attention, but it’s only by the third time when the volume escalates that they hear an entire sentence. By Saturday afternoon, I needed a couple hours alone in the mountain air to read, write and sip good bourbon.

But nighttime is my time with the boys . . . storytelling time around the campfire. My grandsons love to hear scary ghost stories in the woods. When the night sky begins to sparkle, I tell the stories of unspeakable horrors. I start out with the truth about these sacred cliffs and how the tribes came here to conduct spiritual ceremonies. Then I expand a little and add how sacrifices were sometimes performed here.

“What kind of sacrifices?” the boys want to know. I tell them the facts about the unspeakable violence foisted against Indians over the last 200 years, from forced conversions to monetary payments for Indian scalps and ears. Then I said that sometimes Indian warriors got even. The Apache, for example, often brought back prisoners as slaves, sometimes even sacrificed them.

“That’s so bogus,” my grandsons said laughing. That’s when I told them that not far from where we were sitting Indians used to sacrifice human beings by tying them on an altar and then dropping a huge stone to crush them. That stone is actually on display in the National Museum in Mexico City, which one of my son’s acknowledged seeing there. The boys want to know what happened to the splattered victim. I told them their blood ran down gutters carved directly into the altar and was collected in a silver bowl by ceremonial priests, who later drank it.

This proved too much for my sons, who chimed up about my hypocrisy — I who rails on endlessly about the destructive influence of media violence on children telling my grandsons about crushed prisoners, who sacrificed their blood for priests to drink.
My grandsons wanted to know what happened at the ceremonies conducted here on the Rim. I told them the Apache especially liked capturing young fair-skinned boys.

“Why?” the boys asked. “Because you can watch them grill better over the fire,” I said, adding, “They still conduct ceremonies here.” They say you can’t hear an Apache until he is already on top of you. They can sneak up to a campfire, pluck somebody out, and the only way you’d know it is when you heard a kidnapped boy’s screams disappearing in the night. Just then a gust of wind rustled the trees, and I turned, then screamed, “They’re coming for you now.”

All right, it smacks a bit of cruel torture, but at least it’s not an everyday bombardment. Once a year, alone in a sacred place in the woods, they face their fears, with their Papa.

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