New picture

We recently spent a few days on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Such beauty is there - is everywhere in the natural world.
A new picture with every gaze.

“Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses,
and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls.”
—Thoreau

Known as

Again, from Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality, by David G. Benner:

"Nouwen notes that “becoming like the heavenly Father is not just one important aspect of Jesus’ teaching, it is the very heart of his message...” What God wants is daughters and sons who show a family resemblance.
He wants us to be known as great lovers because love is his way…"

Who we are

I have enjoyed absorbing more about love as I’ve read a book by David G. Benner called Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality.
The author makes the statement

“Because God is love, and because human beings are made in God’s image, love is who we are. Love is not, first and foremost, something that we do. More basically, it is who we are.”

This quote of James Olthuis’ expands the idea --

“To live is to let love well up and stream through us as the beat, pulse, and rhythm of our lives, connecting us to ourselves, our neighbors, the whole family of earth’s creatures, and God, the alpha and omega of love. To love (which is to live) is to be seeking, fostering, and sustaining connections with that which is different and other – without domination, absorption, or fusion, in delight, in care, in compassion….
It is in loving (or not loving) that we are (or are not) human. It is in heeding the call of love – in making life-affirming connections – that we become human… Loving is not merely one thing among others that we are called to do – an extraordinary achievement, a heroic gesture that completes ordinary acts and raises them to a higher level. Love is not an additive, a spiritual supplement reserved for saints… loving is of the essence of being human, the connective tissue of reality, the oxygen of life.” - James Olthuis (P 97)

Screening

In the news lately has been some talk about sunscreens. I am blessed with a good amount of melanin in my skin, and thus have had a rather cavalier attitude toward sun exposure and sunscreens. But with aging skin I am finally actually using screens, and paying attention when I hear that my generic cheap sunscreen cream may not be doing much screening.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG; a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research organization) gave a failing grade to 85% of the nearly 1,000 sunscreens they reviewed, finding that the products gave inadequate sun protection, had ingredients thought to be health hazards, or had not been tested for safety.

So, what’s a sun lover to do?
* Look for sunscreens using physical blockers, such as titanium dioxide or zinc oxide. Preferred by EWG scientists, they protect us over a broad range of ultraviolet A (UVA rays cause aging and likely skin cancer) and UVB (causes sunburn and skin cancer)." Physical blocker ingredients work by reflecting rays away from the skin and don't tend to break down as easily as other sunscreen ingredients such as chemical-blockers (oxybenzone) that work by absorbing rays and preventing them from penetrating.
- EWG's list of recommended brands at www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/special/sunscreens2008. Or ask your doctor to suggest a brand.
* Apply sunscreen about 30 minutes to an hour before you go out the door, and then reapply every two hours, or more often if swimming or sweating much. Be aware that SPF applies only to UVB rays.
* Use a cream rather than spray: most experts say creams offer better coverage and are more likely to be used properly. Additionally, using a cream avoids inhalation of small sunscreen spray particles that can potentially damage your lungs. If do use a spray, use an adequate quantity, spread over the surface of the skin and rub it in.

Some old standby wisdom:
Wear a hat, stay in the shade, avoid the sun as much as possible from 10 to 4, and wear sunglasses to protect your eyes.

For more (including sources), go to: http://www.webmd.com/skin-beauty/news/20080708/8-burning-questions-about-sunscreens

Bad food bugs

Salmonella!
Picture from www.neighborhoodmarket.org and www.fda.org

I’ve often wondered how long it is between intake of bad food and getting sick: maybe partly because it is not at all uncommon to find questionable food in my frig. Recently though, I had a particularly good reason to do some web searching on food poisoning – ask me for more if you think you want to hear the story – and found a helpful U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) site.
There’s a page labeled “Bad Bug Book” found at http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~mow/app2.html that names particular pathogens, along with onset, duration, and symptoms of foodborne illness and natural toxins. You can go to the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition home page http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/list.html where we can learn anything we’ve ever wanted to know about food safety.

This world

This World
I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it

nothing fancy.
But it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open
and becomes a star.
The ants bore into the peony bud and there is the dark
pinprick well of sweetness.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.
So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds
were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
As comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too
hurried to hear it.
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too, and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,
So happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.
- Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early: New Poems

Wonder

"May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder."
- John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes

Antioxidants

According to my limited understanding, here’s a few words on antioxidants and free radicals:

“In a stable molecule, the core is surrounded by pairs of negative charges, called electrons. Remove one electron of a pair (a process called oxidation) and the molecule becomes unstable and, possibly destructive…Obsessed to recapture balance, the free radical awaits another collision to recapture the lost electron” (-Laura Pawlak, A Perfect 10).
Oxidation reactions (that happen from such things as exposure to environmental toxins or excess sun, eating food with added chemicals or excessive amounts, or even as a part of normal metabolism) can produce these free radicals, which start chain reactions that damage cells, and is thought to contribute to the development of a wide range of diseases.
Antioxidants reinstate the free radical back to electron balance, by binding together with and inactivating it.

From my reading, the best sources of antioxidants are whole grains, fruits, and vegetables (especially those that are highly colored), with high levels of beta-carotene, selenium, zinc, Vitamin A, C, and E.
["One vitamin E molecule can disarm up to 1000 free radicals.” Somer, E, The Essential Guide to Vitamins and Minerals, Harper Collins, NY, 1995].

A friendly reminder: Supplements are supplemental: pills and powders are not substitutes for eating good food, but rather a second-line of defense (that work best, even then, when swallowed with plant food).

A list

A University of California-Los Angeles study recently ranked 10 beverages by their levels of disease-fighting antioxidants; here’s the ranked list:
1) pomegranate juice (at least 20% greater than any of the other beverages tested),
2) red wine,
3) Concord grape juice,
4) blueberry juice,
5) black cherry juice,
6) Acai juice,
7) cranberry juice,
8) orange juice,
9) tea, and
10) apple juice.
(J Agric Food Chem. 2008 Feb 27;56(4):1415-22. Epub 2008 Jan 26)

Recently I bought a liquid supplement – ‘cause I hate swallowing those huge multivitamins – called “Miracle Fruits of the World: All-in-One Super Antioxidant Dietary supplement.” I just checked: it has most of the juices in the list (excepting cranberry and orange) plus some other exotic fruits. A not-so-yummy-but-still-palatable ounce downed quickly will be one of my regular antioxidant boosts.

Maybe try it, you might like it… OR
better yet, just eat more fruits and vegetables, like your mother said.

Do I hear you say, “tell me more about antioxidants”?
Coming soon - in the next entry – will be some riveting explanations of antioxidants and free radicals.
Hard to wait, I know.

Light is...

Light is the shadow of God.

- Plato

Light rays in Peru
Photographer: Seth

It's possible

“Fighting data asphyxiation is difficult but possible...”
- William Van Winkle

I’m beginning to work on a web site in hopes of both
1) notifying folks of my availability to do spiritual direction, and
2) offering a service of wellness education. My intent is to include such resources as -- a recommended book list for spiritual growth, a list of Twin Cities retreat locations, links to other spiritual formation web sites, and links to reliable sites for health and wellness information. That kind of stuff.

It’s ridiculously difficult to know where to go for reliable data on the world wide web, and it can be especially confusing to find information on health-related topics. There are so many conflicting words and sources that it can be easy to give up on understanding.

"Health educators may well face a significantly desensitized population, segments of which are immobilized by fear, indecision, and confusion."

- Angelo A. Alonzo, professor of medical sociology at Ohio State University, told to USA Today Magazine (October 1994), and cited in an online article written by free-lance writer William VanWinkle. The article includes some good to-dos for handling information overload; see http://www.gdrc.org/icts/i-overload/infoload.html. One of his statements that is easy to say, hard to do, but worth striving towards is “Overall, the maxim to live by is, ‘decrease quantity, increase quality.’”

Maybe you’ll be interested in a few of my favorite, mostly reliable sites for medical information (and I am extremely interested in any sites you’ve found helpful!):

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus - U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) health information site (general rule to keep in mind: .gov and .edu sites have mostly credible info) with decent search capabilities on various health topics, drug/supplements info, medical encyclopedia and dictionary; and more.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov - PubMed Central (PMC) is the NIH free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.

http://Familydoctor.org – “Health Information for the whole family” from the American Academy of Family Physicians, this site includes some preventative health info (Smart Patient Guide, Healthy Living tidbits), and a “Search by symptom” feature with nifty flow charts; and, of course, more.

http://www.mayoclinic.com – “Tools for healthier lives” hosted by MayoClinic, has some fun health tools (calculators, self-assessments, quizzes); and yes, still more.

http://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu - “Integrating the best of complementary and conventional care for optimal health and healing” this University of Minnesota Center for Spirituality and Healing site has info on complementary therapies, and a colorful “My Health Planner” online tool; and you guessed it, very much more.
http://nccam.nih.gov/camonpubmed - CAM (Complementary & Alternative Medicine) on PubMed is a subset of NLM’s PubMed, created through the partnering of NCCAM and the National Library of Medicine (NLM); access to citations from the MEDLINE database specific to CAM.

About my web presence – I’m aiming for some sort of site to be up and running within a month (and when it is, I'll likely mention it on this blog).

Oh yah, it’s possible…