But I’d wanted to graduate from University from a very young age, even though I’m not a linear, organized, determined kind of person, and I knew it would take me the long way ’round before I received my diploma.

Which has been, in the long run, very good for me. I’ve got a thirty+ year perspective on the California System of Higher Education, and the same on how Nursing’s perceived itself and its purpose. I’m half-way through a Certificate in Conflict Resolution. I’ve added computer literacy and web-based research skills to my already excellent writing and library skills. I’ve made hundreds of connections inside and out of academia. And I’ve learned to trust patience and perseverance as much as I value quick decisive action.

I’ve used the time between the last post and this one to pull together my goals for this website.

First: to develop a Nuclear Awareness curriculum for Nurses, including despair-work, nuclear guardianship, and nuclear-disarmament activism, within the role of the RN as Community Health Nurse.

Second: a central site for my thoughts on the intersection of Nursing, Public Health, and Anti-Nuclear Activism.

Third: the story of my growing personal activism as it is informed and shaped by my experience as an RN.

Nurses, Nursing- there’s a lot on our plates. No country can really afford its health care; no country really uses its nurses to its advantage. Nursing’s subject the opportunities and constraints that affect all labor: I posit that teaching Non-Violent Communication in nursing school or in Continuing Education courses would develop ways for nurses to negotiate decent contracts in an increasingly fiscally uncertain time, and to find ways to be more active in, more available to, the health of their communities whether through direct service or political service.

I like to think of nursing as a force for change; I’m determined to do my part to wake us to our larger value. I’ll be working on this over the winter as I continue to rehabilitate a shoulder injury, and follow nuclear disarmament/nuclear guardianship activity around the world.

To date, I’ve recruited 21 new members, donated $20, and raised nothing. At first glance that would seem discouraging- well, and it is, a little bit- but from another point of view it’s encouraging.

In his 2003 talk “Descent Into Limbo” at MIT for the May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, Maurice Sendak refers briefly- lightly- but clearly- to the fact that since 1945 children’s literature has been written under the shadow of nuclear weapons.

That’s nearly 65 years that, somehow, story has had to take into account, and account for, this Monster that is so big, so inhumane, that it can eat worlds. 65 years. 1,690 two-week periods.

In two weeks I’ve recruited 21 new members out of the 170 or so people on Facebook that I’ve invited (more than once, and, yes, I’m going to invite you again). I’ve been in touch with people at IPPNW, talked about ICAN with neighbors and friends, retweeted updates from the Non-Proliferation Conference at the UN. I found Mr. Sendak’s speech, which has buoyed me immeasurably, reassured me that Story has its place in peace-making, and that my telling this Story here is worth while.

I’ve seen, joined, and promoted other Causes. One is Keep the Arts in Public Schools which is working with Americans for the Arts to raise $50,000 for arts education. It’s ironic, that we as nations can borrow so much money from our futures to protect or defend against nuclear weapons, but to bring arts education to our present peoples, we turn to the modern equivalent of the village well, the back fence, the neighborhood park.

Am I sad that my Facebook fund-raising didn’t raise any funds for my Cause this time? Yes. Am I feeling a bit more confident, that my efforts made 21 more people aware that there IS such a Cause as the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons? Without doubt.

Living is an art, and art is uncertain. What is certain is that without art, living is not lively.

Probably best known for Meriadoc Brandybuck in Peter Jackson’s films of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Charlie Pace on J. J. Abrams’ Lost, Dominic Monaghan is also a photographer, budding film-maker, and human-scale philanthropist.

He’s admitted to a period of doubt and darkness after Rings finished, before Lost came along, and said more than once how much it meant- means- to him to have friends who wouldn’t let him hide out, who recognized his unhappiness but wouldn’t buy unnecessary suffering.

Avoiding the question of “What do we do with nuclear weapons?” is rather like running through a burning house grabbing collector’s edition DVDs and leaving our own diaries behind. I had a pretty good collection of DVDs until this spring, when I sold almost all of them to help finance a trip to Europe to see friends. My friends help me hold up a mirror to myself; they help me recognize that I know what’s important, and what can be replaced.

It’s not painless, turning around, facing the monster. But it’s life-saving. What to save, and what to leave behind, becomes clear, and that is such a relief- the lifting of such a weight- that letting go of denial becomes the most simple thing in the world.

I was lucky enough as a young girl to hear Pete in person, more than once. He sang us to sleep with “Abiyoyo”, and charged our courage with “We Shall Not Be Moved.” And with the album “The Rainbow Quest” he told me the story that would shape my life.

Over the next several posts, I’ll tell that story, and I hope I can do with it what The Rainbow Quest did for me: move you, open your heart, give you the courage to look your fear of the nuclear monster in the face and sing it to sleep, so you can step up, wave your magic wand zup zup and make the paralyzing weight of that fear disappear.

Here on YouTube ~ Pete Seeger ~ Live at Wolftrap (1993) ~ Abiyoyo

Barack Obama is a centrist. His skill is in bringing two opposing views to a middle ground. If he is to succeed in finding a middle ground in this economic crisis that benefits the citizenry as much or more than it benefits the banks, then we, the people, must speak, must act.

Do you know how much the various items in the National Budget cost your community? Not how much is in the budget for your community: we all know, first hand, how long it takes for Federal money to show up on our doorsteps. How much are, say, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq costing your community? Using The National Priorities Project’s calculator for the two wars’ cost to my county, Sonoma,  California, I find that the 1.7 Billion spent by my county since 2001 could have provided 715,801 People with health care for one year. 24,568 music and arts teachers for one year. We’re in those wars to protect oil; we’re in those wars to prevent people we don’t agree with from acquiring nuclear weapons, either of their own, or “left over” from the Soviet Union. We’re in those wars because we’re in them: because now  Americans are (and British and other “coalition country” troops have been) on the ground, trying to finish projects or embroiled in fighting, and we can’t.just.leave.them.there.

As the National Priorities Project puts it:

American taxpayers expect the federal government to provide national security. Achieving that security is a constant and complicated challenge that cannot be met by military might alone. A sound national security policy involves three broad strategies:

• preventive measures such as securing nuclear materials abroad and participating in multi-lateral diplomatic and peacekeeping operations;
• homeland security such as providing port security and coordinating emergency first responders; and
• the military

According to their figures, in fiscal 2009 US federal spending on national security broke down like this: 89% to the military, 7% to homeland security, 4% toward preventative measures.

We can see how well this is working.

Mr. Obama has said over and over, “I need to hear from you.” Let him use his experience as a community organizer, someone who spends his time listening to what the community says it needs, then organizing the community to achieve what it must. As President, his community is not the banks, not the corporations, not the Senate or the Congress. His community is US.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Learn the law of the land. Your Senators and Congresspeople are paid to represent their communities, not their contributors. Let’s remind them of that, and help them help Mr. Obama find the middle ground that’s as close to home as possible.

“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.” – Thomas Jefferson @ Trust: Representative Democracy in America

For a free pocket copy of The Constitution, leave me a comment and I will snail-mail you one. To order your own or for a group, go to the National Center for Constitutional Studies.

SCW Tools for Change

05/11 People’s History:
1995–Nuclear weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty is extended. While Treaty limits nuclear weapons development in most countries, it also allows five nuclear powers with advanced technology to continue their work.

“Their work,” of course, is manufacturing, storing, not-using, and trying-to-figure-out-how-to-dispose-of nuclear weapons. Buying time is complex: there are negotiations made, positions lost and won. Buying time is simple: Each one, each individual person in each country, takes their stand and says “No” to nuclear weapons.

Available at SYC:
by Bonnie Acker/SCW ©2004
Organic cotton, sweatshop free.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead

All images (c) SWC and their artists. Please support them through buying from them or donate to their $10 campaign. Thank you.

Blessings on your heads.

International Nurses Day is celebrated on Florence Nightingale’s birthday, May 12. This year’s theme is Delivering Quality, Serving Communities: Nurses Leading Care Innovations. There’s a care innovation I’d like to see: I’d like to see nurses learn about, teach about The Last Epidemic: the public health consequences of nuclear weapons. And then I’d like to see us- see nurses, see nursing- perform real primary prevention and remove this contaminant, this unnecessary evil, from our world-wide community.

I want that learning and that work to be creative, to have joy in it- acknowledging, finally, the weight of nuclear weapons on our individual and collective consciousness is heavy work, what Joanna Rogers Macy calls “Despair-work”. She also calls it “The work that reconnects”.  It has brought me to create this journal, to reconnect with nursing, with creativity.

In her blog Creativity in Healthcare Marti Hand celebrates International Nurses Day. Marti is a registered nurse and an artist. She knows first-hand how despair wears on nurses, on the communities we serve, and how creative acts restore us.

In honor of International Nurse Day, out  of my own despair-work, and in the pure joy of creativity, I hereby launch this, my contribution to creating the nuclear weapons-free world I dream of.

For me, the essence of nursing is threefold: an ethic of care, a practice of meticulous data collection, and an application of grace. Nurses buy time. That’s what I aim to do- to buy time in which to remove nuclear weapons, their risk, cost, and impact, from this world I love so dearly, so the work of community can be done.

I welcome your company while I do in this work. Join my Cause on Facebook, contribute your own stories of peace-activism, of nursing, of creativity, of buying time; donate to ICAN, The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Together, WE can.

Blessings on your head.