During the annual Peruvian clown trip we take Sunday’s off and relax. Some of us swim in the Amazon; others go into the jungle, visit butterfly farms and animal rescue centers. This year a small group of us took a half-hour canoe ride to see a ‘traditional’ Bora Indian village. The traditional Bora live far up river and rarely come down this far; those who have yielded to the pull of the city to create this village rarely return to their homeland. The families here speak mostly in Spanish, their children bilingual but losing fluency in their native tongue.

A large sign welcomes us to the landing site announcing the Bora Indian village. We walk up the path and announce our arrival by beating drums at the entrance. The Chief comes out to greet us and leads us into a large ceremonial structure; a palm thatched circular building with a pitched ceiling at least 30 feet high and capable of holding 100 people. We sit on benches facing the Chief, and behind him stand a handful of women. Traditionally, they would have all been bare breasted; now most are demurely attired in beaded halter-tops. Behind the women a handful of men and boys complete the ensemble.

The Chief announces that they will perform three dances, during the last one we will be invited to join them and after that we would buy things that he pointed out were hanging on the outer perimeter it was all a pretty perfunctory, well rehearsed but soulless commercial show of gaily attired natives performing for tourists.
When the third round came, the women came for us and pulled us into the circle where we joined in a two-step around dance… until Patch Adams started feeling his own rhythm. He started bouncing to the drumbeat and the rest of the clowns joined in. There were floating balloons and volleyball games, Patch lifted kids on his shoulders, I drummed, we sang, the Bora giggled.

At one point Patch goes over to the Chief and motions for him to bend over. Patch pulls a battery operated portable fart machine out of one of his pockets and presses the loudest one. The chief starts laughing hysterically and gets up and makes Patch give it to him. Then he motions for Patch to bend over and presses all of the varieties on the machine. The Chief gives it to his wife who repeats the entire repertoire with Patch wriggling and jumping in accompaniment to the flatulent serenade.

Dancing and farting, it was pandemonium. Clowns and Bora laughing and dancing to real music, sharing our authentic souls as people not actors. When we come together this way it binds us in shared humanity.

Every year on the annual Gesundheit!/Bola Roja clown trip to Iquitos, Peru, I spend a couple days doing some psychiatric consultation at a medical clinic run by Amazon Promise. This amazing nonprofit organization gets medical volunteers (doctors, nurses, dentists, medical students to treat the Amazon’s indigenous people. They helicopter into the deepest jungle where they are still greeted by blow-gun armed warriors, they also run clinics in Belen, the poorest area in the city.

This year’s clinic was conducted in a single-story, brick, elementary school building that’s elevated on 20 foot concrete pillars. It is the only building in the community of San Francisco that won’t wash away during the annual flooding. In the large central corridor a registration table, waiting area, three examining tables, a pharmacy, laboratory, a dental area at one end, and me seeing patients at the the other end. The clinic took place while school was in session, clowns were painting murals on the walls, and Patch Adams MD, perhaps the world’s most recognized humanitarian clown, was teaching kids the Bunny Hop in the waiting area. The noise level was intense, the privacy non-existent,

Patients were referred to me if the screening clinician thought they might benefit from a visit, and wrote my name down in the place on the intake sheet marked for referrals to the Shaman. I sit in a small circle talking to them through my incomparable translator Rosa. We have been together for a couple of years, and she has the remarkable heartfelt talent to translate my words into a story that means something to her people. There was no privacy, kids were moving past us whenever the bell signaled classroom changes. The noise level so loud that we had to sit almost face-to-face, but people had no difficulty getting into their stories with as much intensity as in my private office.

The first time I came here I was so overwhelmed by the insoluble problems that accompany poverty and powerlessness that I wondered what service I provided at all. But it turned out that the simple act of spending 20 to 30 minutes listening to people was therapeutic, and the brief, directive treatment I provided gave Rosa tools for when I wasn’t there.

I saw the now expectable array of the battered, abused, and desperate. A woman in her late 30s who was raped and impregnated as a 12-year-old and relives that trauma every time she has sex. I told her to speak to women who had been similarly traumatized and found a way to move beyond their suffering. Rosa made an appointment for her to meet with a group at a shelter for sexually abused women.

I saw a mother and her 10-year-old son (the boy disappeared moments after we met to mingle with the crowd). Mother told me the boy was inattentive, hyperactive, and always getting into trouble. I wrote out strategies for limit setting and how to reward good behaviors.

Lots of depressed mothers whose greatest fear was not being able to feed their children every night, whom I commended on their resilience and ability to persevere. My last patient Lupe, an 80-year-old woman who when I asked her what the problem was that brought her to see me, she laughed and said she didn’t have a problem. The nurse asked her if she’d like to talk to somebody about how she was feeling, and Lupe said sure, I always liked to talk to people. She proceeded to tell me she came from humble means, but she was happy with what she had. She’d been married to a good man for many years, raised four children, had 12 grandchildren most lived close by. We live together, we cry together, we celebrate and laugh together, life is good to me. I had tears in my eyes when I hugged her goodbye, and thanked her for reminding me what it meant to be healthy.

Stay connected in loving, supportive communities that inspire the spirit. Gesundheit! Good health lives in Belen.

I have written about my persona as the Truth Fairy (Schlagbyte Archives 7/17/05; 7/24/06; 7/20/10), a magical character who makes an annual appearance at the Oregon Country Fair. The Truth Fairy is a 6’6″ ballerina who wears a pink wig, leotard and tutu and answers peoples most serious questions; the kind you’re afraid to ask because you’re not sure you want to hear the answers.

The Truth Fairy’s entry into the fairgrounds is heralded by a small ensemble called the Blueberries. They tell the audience that they can have the extraordinary opportunity of spending 3″ with the Truth Fairy and ask him a question, something they’ve been thinking about but been afraid to ask because they don’t want to hear the answer. They get to do it privately inside a roped off enclosure and even though it’s not a very long time they often find out something they need to know.

I love this opportunity to channel my intuitive soul and let my spontaneity flow. People will ask this clown some personal questions (sometimes cleverly disguised). For example, a young man, maybe in his late 20s, asked me to reveal his future. I said, I’m not a fortune teller, I am the Truth Fairy, and went on to tell him that I sensed what he wanted to ask had more to do with an issue he was dealing with right now. He nodded and said that he was with a woman and was thinking he might like to spend more time with her, but his history with women was always short-term relationships. He like to stay with her a while, but was afraid that if he stayed she might interpret his decision as readiness for a long-term commitment.

The Truth Fairy told him, if you have to know it before you do it you’ll only do what you’ve already done. Spending too much time preparing for the future makes it hard to appreciate the present. And did you ever think she may not want to be with you long term either?

He wanted to talk more, but his three minutes was up. He tried to get back into line but the Blueberries told him it’s only 3″ with the Truth Fairy but you can think about it much longer.

A 10-year-old girl, with a flower painted on her cheek asked this serious question. “What does whale poop look like?”. The Truth Fairy said, Great Question! and broke out into a Cole Porter tune… birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, you do it, I do it, everybody poops. This was followed by a spontaneous rendition… it could be big… and a lot… it could be small like a dot… it may be smelly, maybe not, but it’s always good to poop.

Then the Truth Fairy leaned forward and whispered in her ear, when whale’s poop it’s a lot but it floats away on the spot. The most important thing to know about poop is that you never want to keep it locked inside, keeping it in will hurt you. The Truth Fairy loves you.

Took my 16-year-old grandson to a remote lake in the Arizona mountains to fish and sit around the campfire at night; it was a heavenly retreat.

It had rained for hours before we arrived, finding dry kindling was a challenge, and then we enjoyed my signature first night dish, Mac and Cheese Hamburger Helper, which my grandson thought was an epicurean delight (all food tastes better in the woods). We sat around the campfire and talked about everything from family to philosophy. In between we’d look up at the night sky, and before our eyes accommodated from the dazzling flames to the darkness we could see only a few of the brightest stars. Then, more and more stars emerged until the sky exploded with light. The Milky Way was so thick with stars it became a celestial highway on which chariots rolled, warriors marched, and shooting stars drifted downward bringing us messages from on high. It was a magical evening.

We fished the next day taking a midday break for lunch after which watched my grandson become absorbed in the whittling of a marshmallow stick. He carefully removed all the bark, and crafted a tapered point carefully leaving a little bump to prevent the marshmallow from falling off the tip when it became soft and mushy. Gazing at his handiwork, he decided it needed some notches into the handle so that he could grip and turn the stick more easily. Finally, he carved his initials into it.

This process took an hour and a half, and it was the finest marshmallow stick I have ever seen. During the whittling he said to me “this is the ultimate irony”. I asked “ what do you mean?” and he said, “ in the city I have my laptop, cell phone, IPod, access to friends, movies, games and I still get bored. Here in the words there’s no reception and there is nothing to do, and I don’t feel bored at all. How am I going to explain to my friends that I spent an hour whittling a stick. This is the ultimate irony, when you have everything you can get bored, and when you have nothing you can find everything to do”.

In the midst of governmental ineptitude, fiscal despair, and random acts of mindless terror, with tears in my eyes I thought that our civilization may yet survive.

Get away to a place without wireless access, and you can whittle away at the familiar and with nothing to do you can see everything.

David Oaks is always in the audience when I speak at the Oregon Country Fair. He lives in Eugene and is the founder of Mind Freedom International (MFI) a global, activist coalition, united to promoting alternatives in mental health care, and human rights for mental patients.

David knows what he’s talking about, he is a former psychiatric patient, who at age 18, in his sophomore year at Harvard, had a classic psychotic breakdown, hearing voices and communicating with God. He was hospitalized, medicated, and when he was discharged told that his disease was chronic, and that he would be on drugs for the rest of his life. Over the next 2 years David was hospitalized 5 times, and his experiences are a harrowing tale. (www.mindfreedom.org).

Before graduating from Harvard, David wrote his senior paper on community organizing with psychiatric survivors; he has made activism for the rights of psychiatric survivors his life’s work. David is now 55 years old and in 2009 was named by the Utne Reader as one of the “50 visionaries who are changing your world”.

We both decry the pervasiveness of medicating every facet of human behavior. We are making too many diagnoses and we are prescribing too many pills. One in four Americans is now diagnosed as suffering from a mental illness, and one in six children is labeled as mentally disabled. This is the direct result of the psychiatric profession deciding to label unacceptable behaviors as mental illnesses. The bible of psychiatric disease is called the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). It first appeared 40 years ago and contained 100 diseases; the next one DSM # 5 will be published in 2013 and will have over 500.

In our culture, if you’re feeling anything other than wonderful in every moment you could be suffering from a disease, which drugs can cure. The pervasiveness of this norm saddens me, because with time and support most people will recover and learn to take control of their lives.

David and other mental health activists are planning a global demonstration on the day the DSM 5 is published. They call it MAD PRIDE DAY, and people all over the world will come together to say we are all vulnerable, and we need to find alternatives to a dangerously coercive mental health system that is fragmented, discontinuous, and often unavailable. On that day I will stand with them (maybe in my colorful clown persona), and say “we’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore”.

It’s that time of year…my annual family reunion at Oregon Country Fair (OCF). This is the longest running hippie fest in this country, a community that is committed to creating experiences that nourish the spirit, explore living artfully and authentically on earth, and transform culture in magical, joyous and healthy ways.

Always the first weekend after the Fourth of July, I go with my wife, kids and grandkids to join 6,000 other volunteers who make up the Fair Family. A month before fair begins the pre-Fair crew readies the grounds, rebuilding structures and paths.. By the time fair begins the volunteers will do everything from running a health clinic to controlling traffic, collecting garbage, providing entertainment and speakers who will entertain and educate approximately 50,000 people. When the Fair is over a post-Fair crew spends a couple of weeks cleaning it up

OCF is a living repudiation of what our culture says is how life works; that life is a struggle and we have to be vigilant against others who would take things from us, and where we move from one crisis(terror/environmental/monetary) to another. The OCF family is a community that gets along with each other, because no matter how different people are, we believe it’s possible to live in a community that does not see itself as separate from each other, and that our hearts do not beat painfully alone.

The culture is changing however because quantum physicists are now telling us the universe is not a collection of separate things and beings jostling around to protect itself from threatening forces, rather that all matter exists in the vast quantum web of connection.

All living things are an energy system that is involved in a constant transfer of information with its environment. From the intracellular level to the cosmic, we survive because we maintain contact to things other than ourselves. Nature’s most basic impulse is not a struggle for domination but a constant, irrepressible drive for connection and wholeness.

In the dreamtime that is Oregon Country Fair, I celebrate a vision of life that reminds me people can live in peace with common purpose.

Last week ended one of the most unusual crime scenes in American history. More than 50 people crawled into a make-believe Native American sweat lodge, and three of them died inside.

Participants paid self-proclaimed financial and spiritual guru James Arthur Ray $10,000 for a 5 day retreat that would make them “spiritual warriors”. What they bought was a motivational speaker and salesman by profession who promised a safe, life-enhancing journey of discovery. This learning process came with a steep price both financially and personally. Participants had to trust Ray completely, place themselves in his hands and do what he told them (this included how much they ate and drank, to keep up the grueling pace and how to respond to the increasingly intense demands).

Bright, well-educated, competent people stayed in that faux ceremony even as they got sick and collapsed. His defense attorney’s argued that Ray never physically prevented anyone from leaving the lodge; they all knew it was dangerous and signed waivers acknowledging that fact. Why did these were bright, educated people not pay attention to their crippling distress? Participants said Ray made it clear that leaving the lodge would be a dishonorable exit, a failing of spiritual courage.

Ray’s lawyers maintained that these deaths were a regrettable accident, and if anyone was responsible it was the builder of the lodge, or the owners of the Retreat Center because they stored the lodge coverings in a shed with pesticides and that could have killed the victims.

After three months of testimony the jury knew who and what James Ray was, and what he wasn’t. They knew he was not trained or initiated to run sacred Native American ceremonies, did not have the medical knowledge to recognize when people were in trouble, and ignored all the warning signs of impending death.

It took the jury less than nine hours to find him guilty of Negligent Homicide. They said James Ray contributed to the deaths of Kirby Brown (age 38), Liz Newman (age 49) and James Shore (age 40). Ray will be sentenced this week, and will probably serve some prison time (although as a first time offender it may not be a long).

How much time he gets is less important to me than if he will stand and take the warriors path, acknowledging his responsibility rather than the coward’s way of blaming others. Will he tell the families of his victims…I know I presented my skills and experience in a grossly exaggerated light, and that I made promises that exceeded my capacity to fulfilI. I will live with my complicity in the deaths of your family members, who were my friends and whose trust I betrayed. I pray that I might find forgiveness in their eyes and in yours.

I think he won’t do it because throughout the trial Ray has continued to offer advice on the Internet and social networking sites. It doesn’t matter how long this con artist is out of commission, James Arthur Ray will resurface with another program that will appeal to a waiting audience looking for another secret to enlightenment.

Let this be Ray’s lasting legacy… be careful before you make a leap of faith and place yourself in somebody’s hands. There are many good, credible, authentic guides and healers out there, but there are also many charlatans. Due diligence, do not surrender your life into somebody else’s hands unless you know them by more than just their words. And know that no true spiritual guide or healer would ever tell you to ignore your truth and follow theirs.

Anthony Wiener, Democratic Congressman representing New York’s Ninth District, Tweeted a photo of his underwear clad crotch to women he met through online chat rooms. His photo was accompanied by explicit sexual messages, and in which he bragged that he was a US Congressman. First he lied, and as the truth emerged it became fodder for comics, late night talk shows, and now a bandwagon of politicians shouting for his resignation.

Weiner hasn’t resigned and instead decided to enter a treatment program to work on his problems. You can be sure that at this facility he will receive a psychiatric diagnosis for which drugs will be recommended. He can now attribute his behavior to his newfound mental illness. Anthony Weiner does not suffer from a psychiatric disorder, he is just a schmuck.

I love this Yiddish word which means penis but is used to connote a man who is more than just a jerk; it’s someone who is obnoxious, stupid, does things that invite head-shaking disbelief, and when acting this way don’t realize what assholes they are.

Every man has the capacity to be a schmuck, and all of us hope we have the capacity to acknowledge when we are and change our behaviors. But I think being a schmuck enough reason to resign. Whatever Weiner’s ego and/or stupidity in this escalating sideshow, the question is does he represent his district well?

Weiner’s constituency, the people of Queens and Brooklyn will vote again and they’ll tell us whether they want him to continue to represent them. Until then I think whenever he appears in public, people should greet him with a rousing Schmuck, just to remind him to own his behavior and move ahead.

Scientists at Georgia Tech recently reported this fascinating example of altruistic behavior in the animal kingdom as a survival mechanism (Proceedings of the National Academies, April 25, 2011). They reported that the dreaded Amazonian fire ant when swept up by the seasonal floodwaters came together by the thousands to save each other. Alone they soon drowned but when they clung to each other locking arms, legs and jaws to form a raft, it was impenetrable to water, and the living raft could survive for months.

They come together without a single ant being in charge of the process and become what entomologists call a super- organism. Bound together in this way the raft can survive for months sailing off to new lands. Fire ants have succeeded in landing in the southern United States.

Binding together in community is an amazing social behavior; it ensures the fire ants survival. There is a lesson here for us… as a species we too are wired to hold onto someone other than ourselves. Connecting in an intimate way.is what helps us survive in the hard times.

This is the theme of Tom Shadyak’s new movie I AM (which I encourage you to see). Shadyak, the successful director of Hollywood comedies like Ace Ventura, The Nutty Professor, also Patch Adams. This is a new genre for Shadyak, a personal memoir about his recovering from a serious accident and what he learns about how we survive as people and as a planet. He interviews scientists and mystics to show how the whole basis of survival in nature is based on connection and cooperation. We are hardwired to be our brother’s keepers.

Here’s a practical application of what the ants are telling us? We are in a serious time of economic upheaval. The globalization of the economy has left many nations drowning in debt. How about responding to these desperate times by legislators coming together and building a structure based on mutuality of interest. Let Democrats and Republicans shelve party politics and find a way to keep us afloat until we reach the other side.

Officials at the Presbyterian Church in Vienna, Virginia (VPC) decided to acknowledge the churches failures in handling reports of sexual abuse by its Youth Ministry Director. The church’s governing board expected their statement would upset the congregation, but it didn’t expect their insurance company’s response. The company’s lawyers warned the Board “not to make any statements, orally, in writing or in any other manner, to acknowledge, admit to or apologize for anything that might be interpreted as VPC causing or contributing to any damages arising from the intentional acts/abuse/misconduct by the Youth Director. The lawyers then added this proviso, that failure to comply with these conditions would jeopardize their coverage.

The church wrote back saying their advice may be correct from a legal perspective, but from the Church’s perspective they would do the right thing… “Doing what is right is informed by our understanding of what God would have us do, so there’s a very clear standard articulated in Scripture”. The church added they believed that coverage was deserved and even if the insurers refused, they would do it anyway.

The risks of such a course were substantial. If the church lost its argument and insurers were not responsible for paying future claims they might have to close the doors. In spite of the consequences on Sunday, March 27, 2011 Pastor James addressed the congregation and said (USA Today, 5/10/11): “we won’t hide behind lawyers… Jesus said the truth will set us free”. Looking at survivors he said “we as church leaders were part of the harm in failing to extend the compassion and mercy that you needed. Some of you felt uncared for, neglected and even blamed in this church. I am truly sorry… I regret the harm this neglect has caused you”.

The argument between the church and its insurer about potential liabilities remains in limbo , and if no lawsuits are filed it may never be resolved. I applaud the Church’ stand; when what’s right comes down to a lawyer’s truth or the Church’s, you know whose truth will set you free.