http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php The blog of Dr. Susan Rangitsch en linda@digitalmagicmontana.com Copyright 2011 2011-12-08T07:14:12+00:00 http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/come_into_the_center/ http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/come_into_the_center/#When:07:14:12Z 2011-12-08T07:14:12+00:00 http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/remember/ http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/remember/#When:19:27:15Z May we live at the edge of our imagination... 2011-01-01T19:27:15+00:00 http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/especially_for_you/ http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/especially_for_you/#When:05:50:34Z A visual poem especailly for you 2010-07-31T05:50:34+00:00 http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/wilderness_of_being/ http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/wilderness_of_being/#When:17:17:56Z Be called into the wilderness of your being and a place like no other...Announcing the Summer wilderness programs at Blacktail Ranch 2010-05-14T17:17:56+00:00 http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/creativity_and_madness_conference_presentation/ http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/creativity_and_madness_conference_presentation/#When:01:07:40Z A promotional video for Dr. Susan Rangitsch's presentation of "Mandalas of Madness or Transcendence?" at the Creativity and Madness Conference on March 13, 2010 at 10:45am in Santa Fe, NM. 2010-02-03T01:07:40+00:00 http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/for_the_children/ http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/for_the_children/#When:18:01:47Z This New Year, tragedy laid over our community. Watch the video. You can view this in full screen by clicking the box with the arrow in the lower right corner. 2010-01-06T18:01:47+00:00 http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/2010_new_year/ http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/2010_new_year/#When:17:55:43Z Towards the New Year and a New Decade... Watch the video. 2010-01-02T17:55:43+00:00 http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/writings_sample_entry/ http://www.susanrangitsch.com/index.php/main/blog_article/writings_sample_entry/#When:09:03:40Z One week ago, at 6:10 in the morning, tectonic plates shifted 6 miles deep in the earth and 10 miles north of Wells, Nevada. The 6-point magnitude earthquake rolled forcefully under this small rural community of about 1300 people. The earthquake was one of the lesser major events of the morning and it attracted national news crews. Pictures and footage flashed across the wires in time for the morning new broadcasts. One week ago, at 6:10 in the morning, tectonic plates shifted 6 miles deep in the earth and 10 miles north of Wells, Nevada. The 6-point magnitude earthquake rolled forcefully under this small rural community of about 1300 people. The earthquake was one of the lesser major events of the morning and it attracted national news crews. Pictures and footage flashed across the wires in time for the morning new broadcasts. I don’t usually start my day by scanning the news, so I didn’t know anything about the quake until 4:00 in the afternoon. I received an e-mail from the disaster service organization I volunteer with, notifying me of the event and asking about my immediate availability for deployment to Wells, Nevada, 185 miles west of Salt Lake City. The operation was “Nevada Earthquake.”This was close to home, and the event caught my attention. I was definitely interested in going and I e-mailed back, “I am available.” I’d passed through Wells dozens of times over the years on my way to California or Arizona. It’s a truck stop town at the junction of Hwy 93, North/ South, and I-80, East /West. It sprung up 150 years ago when steel rails began to connect the West. Then, too, it was a rest stop for people on their way to some other place.Wells is 50 miles or more from anything in every direction. It is a no man’s land, wide-open space, a high plateau rimmed by several mountain ranges, and the wind blows constantly. In the heat, huge tumbleweeds rip across the highway and slam against barbed wire fences. In the winter cold, roads close because of blowing snow. That’s when someone stops in Wells.  Only when they have to! I didn’t drive those roads in winter storms and I always gauged my gas by larger towns where the bigger casinos had better odds. I never stopped in Wells, Nevada.Two hours later I was officially deployed to provide mental health care to the volunteer staff and the victims of the Nevada earthquake. OK, switch gears, fast. The memo said, “Pack you bags. You are needed. ASAP” which means the next available flight. Suddenly, I was calling in my personal support for dogs and home, and canceling 10 days of work. I sent an email out to friends and clients letting them know where I was going. A man from the Catskills forwarded back to me a news clip with the pictures he had seen in the morning.There it was! Wells, Nevada, February 21, 2008, a.m. Scenes from small town, rural America, hit with a major disaster. They showed a picture of a man with a wounded face, a band-aid (bandage?) covering most of his forehead. He was obviously in shock. The other clip was an aerial view of Main Street and the surrounding area. Old brick buildings were collapsed and sidewalks were buried in debris. I saw an Obama campaign sign buried in broken glass and sheets of ice that had fallen from a roof. The film panned out beyond Main Street to show several blocks of old homes that were destroyed. No one was dead, only 3 minor injuries.I went on line to check on updates, but by evening, the story was replaced by more pressing news, events in the Middle East, politics and the gossip preceding the Academy Awards. The story had dropped off the screen quickly. I guess it just wasn’t big enough, but I was going, so something big must have happened. This was a major call out for disaster volunteers. Local resources, 1st on the scene, had requested a lot of help, which was immediately approved in the regional offices. They must have had good reason.When I arrived in Wells the next morning, I checked into the hotel and then went looking for the relief operation. The hotel clerk didn’t know and the location was still TBA according to the latest phone info. The exit off the highway is the only road into town. It loops through the city center and bends back out to another I-interchange. The total distance is about 2 miles. Downtown is about 10 blocks deep, extending from the old historic district next to the RR tracks back to the sparse new development close to the noise of the interstate.Neither the disaster nor the headquarters was hard to find. I followed the signs marking school crossings and found the grade school, a likely place, and indeed they were there in full force. The parking lot was crammed with emergency response vehicles and activity. I wasn’t ready to sign-in. I slowed down and drove through a few more blocks then headed back to the main drag. Every home and a few vehicles had already been marked with ribbons, up to 3 different colors, orange, green and candy striped. These indicated preliminary assessments of damage or not. The ribbons hung from doors, mailboxes, bushes, gates and fences. Chimneys were crumbled over roofs and some porches and canopies were definitely pitched and broken.Closer to Main Street and in the old section of town I didn’t have to look for damage. It was everywhere. When I turned left onto Main, I saw the Obama sign up against the mounds of snow and glass, just as I’d seen it on the news clip! The structure behind it was destroyed, though the walls were still standing. Across the street, an abandoned building hadn’t faired any better and it, too, had been pictured on national news. Up ahead an arrow pointed to the historic district and I turned in. According to the news, this was the area most severely hit. I don’t know what makes me think I can do what ever I want, so with some audacity, I drove through the space between one orange cone and another that had been moved back and I proceeded to drive through the restricted area. A couple of blocks down at the only intersection, a police car was manned to keep people out. The officer honked his horn and motioned me over. He asked what I was doing and I told him I was looking for the relief headquarters. He pointed in the direction of the school and told me to get out. I foolishly thanked him and told him I would move the cone back so no one else would come through.I went back to headquarters and signed myself over.A storm came through that night and brought with it wind, snow and ice. In the morning it was still snowing, heavy and wet, with 4-6 inches already on the ground. I was awake early and when I left the room, I took my camera hoping to get some interesting shots in the storm, one disaster on top of another. I ended up on a road out of town heading towards the airport, which was nothing more than an ice bound strip and an open empty hanger. Around the corner, the road followed tall power poles on up the hill. Several poles down I could make out a large bird perched on a crossbar.I slowed and drove closer. It was a golden eagle. Of course there were golden eagles in this wide-open country. The bird let me get closer and I stopped, put the zoom on my camera and rolled down the window. I took a dozen shots before I risked stretching out the window even more. The eagle lifted off and flew low over the fields before landing on another pole much further down. I wondered if this winged one knew about earthquakes, as though it mattered to its life.I drove back into town and took a picture of the Wells welcome sign. “There is more to see!” it says. I snapped a few of ribbons blowing in the snow; a gate wrapped in candy stripes with no sign of footsteps coming or going through the deep snow, another of a mailbox with bright orange fluttering from the raised flag.I drove into town hoping to get some pictures of the collapsed old brick buildings from the backside that could be seen from a few parking lots that weren’t off limits. I drove through and stopped a few times, but nothing seemed right through the viewfinder. After a few more stops with the same ambivalence, I tucked the camera inside my backpack and drove back to headquarters. I thought I’d come back at a better time, when it wasn’t snowing and the sun was shining, when the sting of this small town disaster wasn’t so fresh and I wouldn’t be so obviously another tourist coming through to gawk and take pictures.Several nights later, after a long and exhausting day, an elderly and very distraught woman came in and I was asked to talk with her. I sat beside her and she told me her story. She and her husband had retired a number of years ago and they moved to Wells because they liked the community. They had been hard working low middle class Americans and they invested their entire life savings in the old and dilapidated buildings next to the railroad tracks. Over the years, they worked themselves into the heart of the community and their vision of restoring the Historic District, to bring Wells back from thepoint of near extinction, slowly and steadily brought the community back to life. She told me they had invested everything, year after year, and they finally had reached a point of possible return. She was so proud that Wells was finally on the Governor’s Historic Sites Map.“All gone.” She kept saying, “All gone, just piles of broken bricks.” Watching her graceful grief, I knew she didn’t have insurance. No one in Wells had earthquake insurance. No one could afford it. No one has anything extra in Wells, Nevada.Finally she looked at me and said, “It could have been so much worse. Nobody was killed or seriously hurt, only a few broken bones and scratches.” I knew she meant everyone, not just herself and a few others, but everyone.In Buddhism we understand the concept of interdependence. If one person suffers, we all suffer. If one person is affected by a disaster, we are all affected. One is not apart from what happens down the street or across town. No one is apart from what happens on the other side of the planet. We can pride ourselves on our autonomy, our nuclear and separate families, but it is an illusion. We are part of the whole. We are one breathing, living community. The smoke and ash from a forest fire in California spreads across the waters and borders that separate countries, and we all breathe the result. When a child screams in Iraq, the vibration spreads out like the ash, and we all hear the terror.The people in Wells lived this principle long before the disaster. They were interwoven with each other, generations deep and across the daily concerns of life. Like the water and gas lines that tied every home to each other, they were connected, solidly connected. They cared and they knew about each other. The 30 some homes and business condemned or destroyed were the properties of someone they loved and cared about. Everyone was affected, and in the aftermath, no one was left behind. No one was unaccounted for; not one elderly or shut-in, not a single child, not even a cat, dog, or goat.Over the six days that I served on the mental health team, I took calls, one after another, all day long. They called not for themselves, but for others.“I’m concerned about Lucy. She lives down the street and hasn’t been out of her home all day. She always comes to bingo.”“Can you please check on Toma? He didn’t come to work today. He and his wife live in a trailer about 5 miles north of here.”“Someone’s freaking out in the lobby. Can you please come talk to her?”“Will you come and speak to our employees? Their level of anxiety is so high and families have been totally displaced.”I would say, “We encourage you to invite family members as well. We do better when we’re together.”Everyone understood that and people gathered to talk, ask questions, and share their experience; at the grocery deli and the Senior Center, on street corners and in backyards while removing rubble. It was all part of their healing. Over those few days, I think my team talked to every person who lived in Wells, Nevada. In the end, we had knocked on every single door.When I was preparing to come home, the community was already in recovery. The 4+ aftershocks that continued to roll through had become part of their healing, and even FEMA’s denial of disaster assistance was OK, not good news, but expected.Wells had been bypassed for 50 years. It wasn’t going to be different now or because of this. FEMA did not announce their decision to the community personally. I thought it would have been nice if someone had been sent back to express their concern and offer alternatives. Instead, their decision appeared on national broadcasts the crawl under the televised program. The community held a town meeting that night. They weren’t angry and they weren’t shouting resentments and frustrations at the mayor. Instead, they gave her a standing ovation and then they got down to the task of digging deeper to find other solutions, not for themselves personally, but for the community - that one entity holding everyone.The room was packed. The disaster was theirs, broken water and gas lines that couldn’t be assessed until the ground thawed, foundations that would crack and give more as the ground beneath continued to shift. The high school with 138 students was condemned, sink-holes were taking over streets, and the local economy was shattered.I take my hat off to these people, but I do have to wonder about the political sign in town and a country that thinks it has the right to manage the world when it doesn’t seem to care about some of her own citizens.I never did take a photograph of the still standing walls in the historic district nor the piles of rubble that had been someone’s home. The Navaho say if you take a picture of someone without their permission, you steal their spirit. What happens when you take a picture of someone’s disaster? I think you steal their privacy. I understand why I put my camera away, and I’m glad I didn’t steal from this community of proud and good people.It is always hard for me to integrate back when I come home from a disaster. I work with the emotional aftermath on site. I listen to stories and I witness intense emotion. When I leave, my sensitivities are heightened and I am extremely vulnerable, even to loud or sudden noises, bright lightsand conversations around me.I drove back to Salt Lake with another volunteer. He was a refugee from Katrina now living in San Jose. He had a lot to talk about, and he was Cajun. They love to talk loud! Even though I wasn’t up for a lot of conversation, I fell under his influence and our drive back was delightful, absolutely delightful.Airport security was another matter altogether! When the TSA person motioned me to come forward, I was not aware that I was walking into a sealed chamber that would “sniff” me for explosives. As I walked in, the door slammed shut behind me and I banged into the clear plexiglass panel in front of me. I was suddenly trapped.I had no forewarning and I felt myself becoming very frightened. I looked at the TSA person out there counting seconds with his finger and motioning for me to stay put. But I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I was walking through the usual scanner.Finally, with a loud and quick swoosh, the panel opened in front and I could get out. How long was I in there? As long as an earthquake, 38 seconds.I looked at the TSA guy and thought to myself, “Man, you don’t know where I’ve been!”Instead, I said, “Someone could have a panic attack in there.” He laughed. “Ya, sometimes people scream.”I was momentarily horrified, but then preceded through the next check, the one I was familiar with. Another TSA guy looked at my ticket and asked where I’d been. “Wells, Nevada.”He sarcasctly replied, “That’s a place I can do without!”I did not know why he would say that. I thought he might have been born and raised there and he hated the place. Then I wondered if he even knew about the earthquake or did he even care that people actually lived there and had gone through that. I turned and walked down the concourse. What a world we live in!Missoula never looked so beautiful that night. The city lights lit the white mountains and silhouetted them against a dark sky. I was so glad to be home. I was so grateful to have gone on this deployment.I did not come home to good news. In the week I was gone, two people in this community committed suicide. One I knew and the other I knew about. He was the father of one of my daughter’s best friends through junior high. He was 44 years old. She was beautiful, talented and a star athlete in basketball and volleyball. She was 17 years old, a senior in high school. I’m affected by these deaths. How can I not be?In fact, I’ve been haunted by them. I cannot begin to imagine being inside these personal tragedies, but I do try to imagine it. How does something like this happen? In my community? In any community? What does it take to penetrate a silent desperation that leads someone to kill themself? Maybe it’slike an earthquake. It’s going to happen and no one can stop it, no one knows it’s coming.I can only fold this into the experience of my week, and perhaps answer why I was so drawn to go Nevada. I learned something about community, the community right outside my doorstep. The ones who live across from me and beside me, and the ones on down the street. I don’t know the name of the families that live one house away from me and I don’t even know if they have children. I am ashamed to admit this. It shames me when I think they could be dead in their home and I wouldn’t know it, or that I wouldn’t know the name of the child screaming in the street just one door down. I am compelled to do something about this and then perhaps this haunting will subside.It is the condition of our communities, not the buildings and the codes and the gardens and sidewalks, but the personal well being of our communities that I am calling into question. Person to person stuff! Like the people in Wells, we are connected. The pipelines connect my home to everyone’s home in this community. What if our personal connections were as solid and as encompassing? Our national treasure, Bill Cosby, published a book last year called, “Come on, People.” He was not speaking to just the black community. He was speaking to all of us. Reach out and get interested in each other. We need to really care about what’s going on.Come on people!!I don’t have disaster pictures, but I do have three photos from Wells, Nevada, the welcome sign (“More to See…Discover Us”, not much to see but what a rich discovery!), and a gate with ribbons. Tragedies strike equally across all of us. It is the whole of life we are subject to, a shattering whether a dream, divorce, death, a diagnosis or a disaster. Chief Seattle wrote, “What happens in the world, happens to us.” This is the principal of inter-relatedness.When these events hit within our community, go out to your neighbor’s gate and make sure fresh footprints are in the snow. And even if there is, open the gate!The 3rd photo is of the eagle craning its neck around the pole and looking directly down on me. I don’t go looking for these majestic birds, but I see them all the time. They are always close to me. They are sacred birds, and their flight takes them closest to Father Sky, and that is why they are so revered. It is believed they have pity on us and carry our prayers to the Great Spirit.I think this bird had a question from the One Above, “Hey you, what are you doing down there?”“Just taking pictures.”What are we doing down here?Just taking pictures?May this great bird look down upon us all and carry our prayers to the God of our calling. May we look at the question and find our solutions in meaningful connections with each other and in our capacities to be concerned and to care about one another.The EndWritten by Dr. Susan Rangitsch, March 1, 2008I dedicate this story to Karen. Your home was your safe place, your refuge. You’ve been protected all your life and suddenly you were thrown against a wall with all your things smashing around you. You couldn’t get out. You were one of the three injuries and you were traumatized. Life is unpredictable like this. Sometimes, awful things happen – to you. The earthquake matured you a bit and this is good. Now you know you are larger than your fears and it sets you free. I will always want to see you when I come through Wells, Nevada.And to Scott’s children, Nicki and Michael, and Tiffany’s family. 2009-05-23T09:03:40+00:00