GRASS DIRT CORN

Hollie Butler | Seattle

This is my personal and family blog, where I talk about food (our household contains 3 gluten-free eaters, one low-fat plant-based foodie, three omnivores, and a 9-year-old boy who we believe subsists entirely on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches), family, photos, books, quotes, snippets of entertaining conversation, WoW, and occasionally politics and spirituality (liberal on both).

You can also find me at work.

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AN UNCOMFORTABLE ARRANGEMENT This is the next chapter in the saga of Ollie adjusting to the addition of Bodhi, the Lab puppy. Recent days have seen less nipping from Ollie, we believe based only in the fact that Bodhi is now both heavier and taller. He still growls a lot, though. Bodhi remains sweetly optimistic that eventually he will be Ollie’s BFF.  Ollie loves the couch because he can assert himself. “Hey dope, you might be taller when I’m on the ground, but the humans let me up here, and that makes me bigger than you in so many ways, and one of these is that I am AWESOME. Chew on that, infant.” We’ve let him have this for awhile. Until today.  This afternoon I was sitting next to Ollie, absent-mindedly petting his side while I worked on some email messages on my laptop, and Bodhi came over and put two paws up on the couch, and then looked up at me, like, I know there is more to this, can you help me out? Ignoring Ollie’s glares, I hoisted him the rest of the way. He took a couple looks around, taking in the new and expansive view, oblivious to the effect this was having on his future BFF. Then he collapsed in that heavy Lab way, with an audible FOOMP.  I continued to ignore Ollie’s pointed stares for the next few minutes. Maybe I’m attributing more sophistication to Ollie than is due, but I’m pretty sure he knew I was ignoring him. I’ll likely hear about this later. 

AN UNCOMFORTABLE ARRANGEMENT

This is the next chapter in the saga of Ollie adjusting to the addition of Bodhi, the Lab puppy. Recent days have seen less nipping from Ollie, we believe based only in the fact that Bodhi is now both heavier and taller. He still growls a lot, though. Bodhi remains sweetly optimistic that eventually he will be Ollie’s BFF. 

Ollie loves the couch because he can assert himself. “Hey dope, you might be taller when I’m on the ground, but the humans let me up here, and that makes me bigger than you in so many ways, and one of these is that I am AWESOME. Chew on that, infant.”

We’ve let him have this for awhile. Until today. 

This afternoon I was sitting next to Ollie, absent-mindedly petting his side while I worked on some email messages on my laptop, and Bodhi came over and put two paws up on the couch, and then looked up at me, like, I know there is more to this, can you help me out? Ignoring Ollie’s glares, I hoisted him the rest of the way. He took a couple looks around, taking in the new and expansive view, oblivious to the effect this was having on his future BFF. Then he collapsed in that heavy Lab way, with an audible FOOMP. 

I continued to ignore Ollie’s pointed stares for the next few minutes. Maybe I’m attributing more sophistication to Ollie than is due, but I’m pretty sure he knew I was ignoring him. I’ll likely hear about this later. 

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Taken with instagram

Taken with instagram

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What’s a girl to wear to Comic Con??

What’s a girl to wear to Comic Con??

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Playing around with photo editing is a pleasant way to spend my break. This is the view outside our building. Today’s oncology massage morning dealt mainly with risk factors for various complications, and how we might avoid them. At one point yesterday, a classmate brought up the issue of cancer caused by lifestyle choices, and I was in awe of how deftly Tracy handled this, making it clear that yes, there can certainly be lifestyle choices that may contribute to a cancer risk, but there are a great, great many reasons one might have cancer and we as therapists are absolutely not here to either judge our clients or to play around with idle and uninformed conjecture on the source of theirs. Cancer happens for so many reasons, and in most cases we can’t know or speculate why someone has it. I agree with her, and was livid that this was even brought up, and yet all morning while sitting there in my seat hearing her lecture on complications, I found myself making this mental list of all the things I would do from now on to reduce cancer risk. I will eat healthier, I will exercise more, I will buy organic food, I will buy cleansers found soaps without carcinogens, I will…. I finally had to get up to use the restroom (eighteen refills of the water bottle will do that), and while walking out to the lobby, this giant light-filled space, I became aware of how hunched over I was, how tense were my shoulders, how my feet slapped the floor because I was hardly bending my joints. I was afraid. Pardon my expletive, but this shit is scary. Cancer is scary. Working with cancer patients is not only a constant reminder of compassion, of life, of grace, but also too a reminder that something like one third of us (or more?) will walk this walk at some point in our lives. Cancer touches a great many people, for a great many reasons, and we don’t know when or if or how we might be one of those. The fear that I think so many people around this topic and this population is simply a reflection of something inside us, that niggling voice that tells us we might not be superhuman, we might not, as my Dad loves to say, “get out of this thing alive”. Even the people who leave cancer behind them, a chapter in their lives that closes while the rest of their life goes on, will eventually die. All the organic vegetables in the world will not keep you from getting old, getting sick, and passing on. It’s deeper than this, of course. It always is. Cancer is also scary because the most frightening thing we can imagine outside of our own suffering is the suffering of someone we love, and for many of us the latter is worse. Listening to Tracy tell some of these stories is very difficult, and even while she has such composure, I know her heart is a deep, deep well. This fact is everywhere in her writing and her descriptions of how she does her work. And therein lies my own niggling fear; I can cope, I hope, with the feelings of fear that might rise up and pass through me in doing this work, but the attachment I will feel to my clients, the love I will feel….my hope is that I can funnel this into compassionate touch, and not into worry. That I can do my job safely and well. That I can be there.

Playing around with photo editing is a pleasant way to spend my break. This is the view outside our building. Today’s oncology massage morning dealt mainly with risk factors for various complications, and how we might avoid them.

At one point yesterday, a classmate brought up the issue of cancer caused by lifestyle choices, and I was in awe of how deftly Tracy handled this, making it clear that yes, there can certainly be lifestyle choices that may contribute to a cancer risk, but there are a great, great many reasons one might have cancer and we as therapists are absolutely not here to either judge our clients or to play around with idle and uninformed conjecture on the source of theirs. Cancer happens for so many reasons, and in most cases we can’t know or speculate why someone has it.

I agree with her, and was livid that this was even brought up, and yet all morning while sitting there in my seat hearing her lecture on complications, I found myself making this mental list of all the things I would do from now on to reduce cancer risk. I will eat healthier, I will exercise more, I will buy organic food, I will buy cleansers found soaps without carcinogens, I will….

I finally had to get up to use the restroom (eighteen refills of the water bottle will do that), and while walking out to the lobby, this giant light-filled space, I became aware of how hunched over I was, how tense were my shoulders, how my feet slapped the floor because I was hardly bending my joints.

I was afraid.

Pardon my expletive, but this shit is scary. Cancer is scary. Working with cancer patients is not only a constant reminder of compassion, of life, of grace, but also too a reminder that something like one third of us (or more?) will walk this walk at some point in our lives. Cancer touches a great many people, for a great many reasons, and we don’t know when or if or how we might be one of those.

The fear that I think so many people around this topic and this population is simply a reflection of something inside us, that niggling voice that tells us we might not be superhuman, we might not, as my Dad loves to say, “get out of this thing alive”. Even the people who leave cancer behind them, a chapter in their lives that closes while the rest of their life goes on, will eventually die. All the organic vegetables in the world will not keep you from getting old, getting sick, and passing on.

It’s deeper than this, of course. It always is. Cancer is also scary because the most frightening thing we can imagine outside of our own suffering is the suffering of someone we love, and for many of us the latter is worse. Listening to Tracy tell some of these stories is very difficult, and even while she has such composure, I know her heart is a deep, deep well. This fact is everywhere in her writing and her descriptions of how she does her work.

And therein lies my own niggling fear; I can cope, I hope, with the feelings of fear that might rise up and pass through me in doing this work, but the attachment I will feel to my clients, the love I will feel….my hope is that I can funnel this into compassionate touch, and not into worry. That I can do my job safely and well. That I can be there.

Yogurt and granola. I’m tired.

This work is not about healing others.  
We can’t heal another human being.  
We can only heal ourselves
until our presence is healing.
–Irene Smith,
Founder,  Service through Touch

Today was the first day of the oncology massage workshop I’ve been looking forward to for the last six months. Tracy Walton is one of the best presenters I’ve ever taken a class from, and I’m so grateful to be doing this. At the same time, it’s also stressful learning about cancer all day (please save your sympathy for the dear folks who live with actual cancer all day), and I felt a bit drained this evening. 

Greg and I went to Ballard Market to get some more Luna Protein bars. I love those things. While I was there, my exhaustion forced me (forced! I tell you!) to get some soy yogurt and some of this crazy granola. 

It’s way too good, which means it’s bad. Probably full of sugar or fat or both. It’s peanut butter granola with chocolate chunks, which is basically a pathetic way of trying to eat a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and pretend you’re doing something good for you. I put it in the yogurt, an important part of this charade (Yogurt Is Healthy). 

We gave one of my classmates a ride home tonight. Bodhi was in my lap in the front seat, this mammoth puppy, and every so often he would attempt to eat my hand, and I would shriek in pain and threaten to throw him out the window. My classmate said that her friend is a dog trainer, and he suggests that when a puppy bites you, you shove your hand into their mouths even more, the You-Want-It-You-Got-It discipline method (I’ll use this later when Miles asks for a car; “as long as you spend the next two and a half years driving your sister around”).

So I’m sitting there trying to eat my yogurt, picking out the granola and leaving all the chocolate chunks at the bottom, with this dorky happy anticipation of when I would eat them at the end, and Greg was making me laugh, and like every five minutes I’d lean down to pet our dopey Labrador who would chew painfully on my fingers, at which point I’d shove my hand in his mouth and he’d make this GACK face, and then let my hand go with this utterly stupefied expression, like GEEZ LADY, WHAT WAS THAT?, and something about the whole scene just melted all the tension away. 

I got to the end of the bowl, and ate my chocolate chunks. 

Did you ever eat Lucky Charms as a kid, eating all the alphabet letters and then saving the marshmallow charms for the end? One big disgusting mouthful of sugar and artificial flavors? Remember how sweet that was? Yeah this yogurt and granola thing is way better than that. You should totally try it. 

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Going through some old photos today, found this one from August of 2002, me feeding Miles in the NICU after his harrowing birth (and seizures, and organ failure….). I remember how he used to staaaaaaare at me, this little thing, like he was in awe of me. And! How he would turn his head whenever Greg said anything, that familiar deep voice that he somehow recognized even from outside the womb and with (what we would soon find) a significant hearing loss. I loved how he’d do that.  Once, when Miles was little, I told him about how kangaroo mothers love their babies so much they keep them in their pockets. And he asked, “Did you keep me in your pocket?” “I kept you in my heart.” Still do.

Going through some old photos today, found this one from August of 2002, me feeding Miles in the NICU after his harrowing birth (and seizures, and organ failure….). I remember how he used to staaaaaaare at me, this little thing, like he was in awe of me. And! How he would turn his head whenever Greg said anything, that familiar deep voice that he somehow recognized even from outside the womb and with (what we would soon find) a significant hearing loss. I loved how he’d do that. 

Once, when Miles was little, I told him about how kangaroo mothers love their babies so much they keep them in their pockets. And he asked, “Did you keep me in your pocket?”

“I kept you in my heart.”

Still do.

“The most effective way to do it, is to do it.”

Amelia Earhart

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Cheeky monkeys (Taken with instagram)

Cheeky monkeys (Taken with instagram)

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Beth’s first Sounders game! (Taken with instagram)

Beth’s first Sounders game! (Taken with instagram)

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