There is a dreamtime

There is a dreamtime

on buses

in London.

Sitting there

all those hours gathered

like metaphysical

frequent flyer miles

Buys time

in the dreamtime

leaning your head

against vibrating walls,

a tired supporting hand,

gazing out on

pearl-bound nights,

looking at the internal pictures

of your life.

Talking

(dancing)

to the ancestors who

guide your steps

shadow-bound

singing safe your life

from bus stop to

bus stop

of your life.

Daniel Skyle © 2010

Merry Christmas

Yup. Merry Christmas, all who read this (all three, and that drunk guy and his wet dog) and to the rest of the world too.

I´m back home surrounded by a meter of snow. More is promised.

Europe is 12 hours away from Christmas. In England, they got a little bit of snow, which paralyzed large amounts of the infrastructure and ways of travel. Heathrow – one of the largest airports in the world, if not the largest – was struck so hard by its inability to deal with snow and ice that incredible scenes took place in the airport. The negligence in dealing with passengers and flights seem to be continuing saga of travelling in the early part of the 21^st century.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/dec/21/snow-ice-disrupt-christmas-travel-live-updates

A happy passenger put together this phone-interview video with other stranded passengers at Heathrow, where the treatment of waiting passengers seems to have been very badly done throughout Heathrow Airport. Because the airport owners and parties aren´t paid to be prepared for stuff like this happening?..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s0PzV0KJD0

I was stuck with the ash-cloud in the Spring of 2010, but got fairly good treatment from Easyjet who was my carrier at the time, something I´m still happy about.

Further Christmas news in these darkest days of winter 2010 are that Transport for London are shutting down the entire Tube network over Christmas Day. The entire network. On Christmas Day, the day that the UK really celebrates Christmas (the 24^th, in Sweden). There are lots of snow, and all people will have to get to relatives and parties are buses, taxis and cars, objects which are often, well, a bit hampered by large amounts of snow.

The mounting tension in the Korean Peninsula looks just great right now, with the North starting to pump up their propaganda with words like getting ready for a holy war with South Korea and similar. Please don´t. Go for a coffee instead.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/23/north-korea-holy-war-warning

And I´m back home, studying for a test in Physiology and writing. And training. And doing more training. And studying Chinese medicine.

The university courses seem pleasantly far away right now, along with such things as being told that 2500 years of continous Chinese medicine research done by pretty smart people might be wrong about a particular organ connection since one Westerner published one article in a Western acupuncture magazine which said so; that qi is absolutely not to be called ”energy”, but vitality; that we aren´t really embarassed about Chinese medicine and absolutely not defending it to Western science but we kind of really are. Maybe.

It´s Christmas now. Never mind.

The core of Chinese medicine: diagnostics, Ents, and one-needle doctors

I try to think quite a lot about bigger questions in Chinese medicine. Such as the core principles, the overriding concepts, the keys to open the deeper doors of being a good Classical Chinese Medicine practitioner.

First of all, there´s intent. The intent of the practitioner is not everything, but it is a lot. Hence the classical practitioners who practice a lot of qigong and meditation, as both these gives you more energy, cleaner energy, and a cleaner mind that has the ability to affect patients with clearer, greater levels of intent. Within Daoism, there are many specific practices done in becoming aware of the intent we have, how we manifest it out into the world, how we clean it up and start growing up as human beings when we take responsibility for it, and how intent is specifically used with the patient in Chinese medicine.

Next would be diagnosis. This starts as soon as the practitioner sees the patient in front of him or her, and is the looking part of diagnosis. The more skilled and experienced the practitioner, the more instantly they can see and diagnose while looking. The other diagnostic techniques are then added to deepen the initial diagnosis or correct it.

There are many diagnostic techniques, but next of the main ones would be feeling the pulse. Chinese medicine takes the pulse along three places off the radial bone, and train in how to feel all three as a unit as well as separately, and then at different depths, followed by how they weave together and with ever more precise skills in what they show from inside the patient. Usually, about 28 different standardized pulses are listed. Each pulse is linked to different organs, functions or depths in the person. This training is seen as standard in good Chinese medicine, and with time truly exceptional diagnostics can be done through the subtle skill of feeling the pulse.

The third main one is looking at the tounge. In Chinese medicine, diagnostics exist for how the tounge looks and what this is linked to inside the body. The changes of the tounge indicate the deeper, more long-time disturbances in body and mind.

Weaving these together, with huge amounts of information in how they interact and what they show, is the beginning of putting together a diagnosis. All these are done each time a patient turns up, as the state of the person changes from time to time – from hour to hour, really. Treatment is then adapted after the changes and improvements in the patient´s body, mind, and energy-system.

But now, let´s talk about trees. Or Ents, if you prefer.

Classical Chinese Medicine talks about leaf – branch – trunk – root. In this simple phrase lies a whole art and a science. Chinese thinking and Daoism often use simple phrases – like the classical ones, often with four characters, called four-character phrases – to both summarize and hide information in. When it comes to practical application and training, many of these phrases can take a whole lifetime to learn in depth and the amount of information inside them is huge.

Leaf means the very outskirts of the patient´s system and illness or imbalance. Western medicine treats leaf quite a lot, as it sees this part as important. Often, unfortunately, this mean medication becoming permanent in treating a leaf, instead of solving the problem itself, with added wear-and-tear on the system.

Branch is deeper in the patient and their illness, but not by much. Trunk is becoming deep in, and here many problems and illnesses can be solved so well that they actually give up and go away for a long time.

Root is the deepest aspect of the patient and problem. If a practitioner is skilled enough to solve things here, it will often also mean a significant effect on the patient´s life and view of reality too, not just their physical health.

So, most people would say, let´s solve this problem at the root and I won´t be ill, right?

Yes. Well. Life doesn´t work quite like that.

Part of skilled Chinese medicine diagnostics is judging where the treatment can start. With some patients, you have to start at the level of leaf, maybe even remain treating there for quite some time, if the illness or imbalance in their system has gone on for a very long time and gone very deep, or if they are old and the system is less stable.

Then, with each treatment, it becomes more and more clear how that patient´s particular system and mind functions, and the treatment can slowly go deeper. Treating root issues is sometimes never done at all, as it is so deep that it could trigger a lot of side-effects – the soil, as it were, can´t support working at that level, and needs to be nourished first.

The rumoured one-needle doctors are legends in this. They are said to be so skilled in diagnostics and treament from three-four decades of experience, that they diagnose well enough to only need very few needles to create an incredible effect. At best, at the very apex of skill, this is done with only one needle in the exact right place for everything else to unravel and open like dominoes falling or a forest rising in spring.

These are the things I am thinking of, a Westerner learning acupuncture in the West in the 21^st century.

 

Daniel Skyle © 2010

Stones into Schools: a review of a book and the work of many miracles of humanity

This is an incredible book, and this review not particularly impartial. Go buy it. Now. I mean, you can read the review too, if you have nothing else to do, but really, just go buy it.

The drive and intent to help the world takes all manner of strange manifestations. Some good, some bad; some brilliant, some misplaced. Some manifested out of ego; some out of genuine and selfless altruism. In 2009, it´s calculated that there were about 250 000 aid workers out there. The aid world is a multi-billion dollar industry, and sad to say, a circus that some are in for the money. The main part of them though, are incredibly brave people who try to help others, often in places and during times when things could be worse, but it´s hard to figure out exactly how.

Stones into Schools describes the work of Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute. The first part of his story can be found in the book Three Cups of Tea, but simply put, he tried to climb Mount Everest back in the 90´s, kinda failed, got lost, ended up in a small, local village where they treated him as a returning family member since that was the culture they had with guests, and then he listened to them talk about how much they wanted a school for their children.

And Greg Mortenson kinda found himself promising they would get their school. They did, eventually, but only after first having to build a bridge to get the building materials across to the village.

From this, the idea was born to build schools all over Pakistan. Not only schools, but schools in the places that follow once you keep going from where the map says ”End of the road”. Not only schools, but schools focused on increasing girls´ and women´s literacy, letting the local community guide everything and with deals with the elders that the school must eventually have at least 50% female students. Usually they end up having much more.

Not only schools, but, over time, an honors program that takes the best and brightest and gives them grants for further studies, often to doctor, nurse or teacher, which they then head back with to help out communities on the edge of the world, people forgotten even by the nation they are in, let alone the rest of the planet.

Not only schools, but life, literacy, and future.

”At the moment, female literacy in rural Afghanistan continues to languish in the single digits. In rural Pakistan, the figures are a little higher, but not by much. The demand for schools, teachers, books, desks, notebooks, uniforms, chalkboards, paper and pencils in these two Islamic nations is immense, and the benefits of American investment in this ”intellectual infrastructure” are indisputably clear. Nothing that has happened since my unsuccessful attempt to climb K2 – including 9/11 – has changed my conviction that promoting female literacy represents the best way forward for Pakistan and for Afghanistan.

Education is one of the many basic values that Amerians of all faiths share with Muslim people everywhere.”

Stones into Schools details something even bigger than this (if that´s possible to conceive). In it, we follow Greg Mortenson in his work in Pakistan...and how it slowly starts to tip over into Afghanistan. Suddenly, he and his very small staff of brave people are helping communitites to build schools in Afghanistan...even into areas still controlled by the Taliban. Not only schools: hope.

And in the middle of this, the Kirghiz turn up. They want to have help with building a school in one of the most inaccessible places on the planet, the Wakhan Corridor (http://maps.google.se/maps?hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4HPNN_svSE310SE310&tab=wl. You want to have fun? Try zooming in really close).

”When word had reached Abdul Rashid Khan (the leader of the Kirghiz, blog writer´s addition) that the American school builder was scheduled to pay a visit to the Charpurson Valley, he had sent out a platoon of his strongest riders and his swiftest horses to find this man and ask if he would consider coming into Afghanistan to build schools for the sons and the daughers of the Kirghiz.”

Stones into Schools talks about Mortenson´s very clear hope – and there really is hope: here is someone who´s heart and fire burn like a beacon – his very clear hope to save whole generations of children and young people and give them the chance for a future for themselves and for communities torn by decades of war and sundered by earthquake, religious intolerance and bad governments.

It really is an astounding read, a brilliant read, a read with great compassion.

For myself, I think it might be the best book I have read in quite some time.

You can buy Stones into Schools here: http://www.stonesintoschools.com/purchase-stones-into-schools/

And if you wish, you can donate to their work here: https://www.ikat.org/make-a-donation/

Done thinking

for the moment. I will stay at the course, for now. There are downsides to this and upsides, but the balance right now is to stay. Part of the problem is the lack of Chinese medicine – ha ha, but not so funny. Only half the course is pure Chinese medicine, the rest being Western science and Western medicine, and Therapeutic Relationships. I need more Chinese medicine, so I will balance that out with doing other stuff around the course itself, other, smaller courses or clinic placements or something.

We´ll see.

The jury took a long, long walk for a coffee, walked around the lake, did the promenade, saw the gazebo, loitered by the second-hand bookstore, took in three cafés on the way, and even after that – and enough coffee that two jurors switched to decaf, though no-one spoke to them without sniggering on the way back to chambers – it still ended up a hung jury.

Next post is about something extraordinary, something I really recommend as the Christmas book of the year for 2010-2012 (and after too, if it turns out that the nutcases and the azteks both are wrong about that little calendar thing).

Darknesses

There are

darknesses

in the city

See the door

find the handle

follow the shape

that knows the

way already

move

within the

city

that is real.

London, 2010

So, what is this city like now, when I am here? If someone reads this in twenty year´s time, ten, five, one, what was it like, now when I am studying here? What was it like?

Red double-decker buses are the biggest herbivores of the city. They drift through it, sometimes lazily, sometimes fast. Sometimes they flock in large numbers around a specific crossing or stop. There are smaller ones too, one level only, but longer, like aardvarks, that will take you to more local stops. Among their dance there are ponderous old elephants: the old Routemasters, the ones where you could get on and off on the open platform at the back. Most of them have been scrapped or sold, only a few move along what is called the ”Heritage Line” of buses 9 and 15 who take tourists from Liverpool Street Station, through Aldgate and the Strand, past Charing Cross Station and Trafalgar Square, and on to Picadilly Circus, Oxford Street, Regent Street, then later, Paddington or Knightsbridge and High Street Kensington.

Names, names. The city is still filled with all these magical names. Muttered invocations, mumbled curses, softer laughs of places to meet, streets to live on, neighbourhoods to avoid or live longing for.

...Angel, Mayfair, Goose Green and Notting Hill...

London has always had a reputation for noise. Today, cell phones are everywhere. Inventors have yet to invent an internal system for controlling the loudness of an individual – maybe by your time, when you read this in the future, this will exist and force the talker to keep a low tone when other people are around. Maybe there will even be controls from the outside, for people who are habitually loud and obnoxious, or some kind of system where you are legally allowed to taser them on sight – like you are today, when someone plays music out loud on the bus or on the train (oh I wish this was so).

There are five loose paving stones just in front of the bus shelter facing the theater on Cambridge Circus. They are rectangular, and pale.

London 2010 is a bustling city in constant change and movement. Yesterday, I went back home on a bus. Suddenly we were re-routed: the bridge was closed. It was a Sunday, and a lot of engineering works is done on Sundays to minimize problems. The bus was still full to the brim on a Sunday at 1800. They are constantly upgrading the Tube; there is a Sisyphosian labour of restoring the plumbing all over London, upgrading the Victorian pipes to something resembling present day technology. Not that they weren´t great, it seems they really were extraordinarily well done, but...it´s been a while since the 1800´s.

It´s difficult to get a flat in London. Prices are going up, and then going up more. A mortgage for buying a small flat would probably start at 300 000 pounds today (about 3 million SEK, current rate). And that would be a very, very small flat.

Boris Johnson is mayor. Boris of the bicycle, the floppy hair, and the great idea to restore a version of the old Routemasters which I really like.

Lady Gaga is very popular; Stephen Fry just came out with his second part of his autobiography. The Robin Hood Tax movement still fights the fight to get the banks taxed; Portobello Market still fills every week, just a bit away from Notting Hill Gate where a beacon stood in Roman times, 2000 years ago. Instead of grim-faced Roman soldiers now here walks Japanese tourists with high-tech digital cameras, young students in gazelle-like flocks, and the owners with the special faces of the ”antique” dealers resembling the rats that you´re never supposed to be more than 1.5 meters away from in most places in London.

London is gearing up for 2012 and the Olympics. There are a few zillion security cameras in the capital now – I think you´re covered by 3 cameras for most meters that you walk – and the new cars with roving cameras that weave through traffic have started a new movement, where bikers or motorcyclists wearing masks drive next to them with a big sign and an arrow that says, ”Smile – you´re being filmed!”.

Maybe you will be reading this in a hundred years´ time. Who knows. Then London might be a built-in metropolis covering the entire south of England, with bridges to France like the bridges that cross the Thames today, and both the London and Paris-sides of the water can say that it´s in fact the other city that is a suburb to theirs.

...Lambeth, Southwark, Aldgate and St Giles...

Now Old King Winter is moving in. He is dressed in his huge old cape, with his long white beard and a crown of crystal ice, one hand holds a lantern made in of old black iron, the other, a scepter covered in frost. He moves into London, covering the bridges with snow, the tall buildings with icicles; he walks gently, on soles hidden in snow, killing homeless people and the old. Snow over London. Maybe in a hundred years´ time the whole city will be covered by cupolas, geodesics, thermal walkways, airfilter systems that will clean out any terrorist attacks that tries to use germs or bacterial warfare. The security people for the Olympics here 2012 must be spending their entire days worrying, and not sleeping much. Talk about a good place for terrorists to succeed and be seen, during the London Olympics. And I will be here, then. Great. Time to stock up on extra first aid kits for my backpack. And, uh, some high quality instant coffee. You never know if you can get that when disaster hits.

...St. James´s, Pimlico and Bloomsbury, Hackney, Westminster and Camden Town...

Clinic. And the final days of Semester 1

Had clinic all day Monday. First part was Video Clinic. Here the students sit most of the time in one room, while the tutor treats a patient in another room that is fitted with camera (the patient has consented to being filmed). The case is discussed, before and after, treatment is planned and discussed (followed-up, if it´s a returning patient) and the tutor will then come back and explain what he or she did, and why. A lot of case notes are taken, and students are taught how to look at the diagnosis through Chinese medical eyes, but also with some differential diagnosis from Western medicine and Western pharmacology.

The second part of the day was Observation Clinic. Here we walk around and observe the Third year students as they take their first, stumbling steps in treating people with needles. The first two years of the course is all observation, with rarely any needling done. Diagnostics are done though, and the main process of looking, pulse-taking and tongue-diagnosis (see the earlier post on this for more detail. We will go in more in depth on them later on) are repeated and checked, and a slow internal database of references and concrete experience of how patients look, feel or talk is put into place. A third year student will be in charge of the patient, do the main diagnosis, then walk out and talk it through with the tutor or the clinic supervisor. Advice will be given, both on diagnosis, treatment-plan done to get clearer intent, and the selection of points, then the student goes back to implement it. This is done in the University clinic but also in the Gateway clinic, which is integrated into a London NHS hospital. All through this, extensive case-notes and patient files are kept, checked, and logged.

It´s now barely more than a week before the first semester is over. So...only five more to go before the Bachelor is done. Hooray. Add another two semesters for the full Masters.

We´re going out for drinks tomorrow, students from all three years of the course. That feels like a very good idea right now.

Next week, three tests are due. Two essays and the final test in Anatomy. There is also a presentation as part of one of the other modules.

Drinks. Yeah. Drinks.

Whispering

I whisper to

myself

on buses, trains

while

stumbling on sidewalks,

while choosing

groceries

whispering in

winter.

Snow and thinking

Runes of snow written on the tarmac at Kastrup airport. Planes and cars write them with clumsy fists, while the air traffic controllers weave the spells that throw us through the air (this incredible blasphemy against the gods), and safely to our destination.

I´ve been grounded since Wednesday. Sunday now. Five days, flightless. Several lessons missed, as the snows swept in over England and grounded flights while the cold and snow freaked out the Southern English in a way that is sort of cute if you´re Scandinavian. Usually barely an inch of snow in the south of England will have people on the verge of hysterics, talking of ”problems” and ”situations”. The day I left, there was talk of five centimeters of snow coming over the weekend, and ”the city authorities wanted people to know that they were prepared for this”.

But there came much more than that. Enough to ground flights, enough to make England as cold as Iceland, enough to kill.

Heading back now for the final two weeks of the first semester, I am debating the pros and cons of the course with myself. Is it worth the large amount of money it costs me, worth the hassle from some of the teachers, worth living as poor as I do in England, worth being away from home this much?..

The jury´s still out on that one too.

On the tarmac, dancing convoys of snowploughs snake their away along the concourses, looking like something out of a Disney movie in the dark. SAS planes, KLM, far-away tall lights of other parts of the airport. Nearby, a snowed-over car stands empty and cold, and small crew-buses zoom by heading towards planes that hopefully will leave as planned.

In here, the travellers move through the Airport Deli, buying very expensive food after having been let through security and filtered through the vacuum-cleaner of the tax-free aisles.

Learning Chinese medicine. Hmmm. Great stuff, but the pressure on and around the course is... But I´m going for quality, investing in it, which is a value I like. There is no training in Scandinavia even approaching this one in the amount of training-time. There is no course in Scandinavia with the same amount of Western medicine in it, which is helpful for dealing with the NHS and with Western diagnosises that patients walk in with. There is no university course like this in Scandinavia, period.

Hmmm. The jury is still out. Probably going for coffee.

Snow out there, on the tarmac, in the skies.