kidney the cancer was a terribly contained it left kidney and they said not to worry i wasn't going to get cancer back and then five years later we found out that i had a lot of full of metastas s and i was on chemotherapy for thirteen months and i had it open just surgery for a few spots that were not cleared out by the cable and then about every three years since then i've had one spot show up the one where the time and there's been about four spots since then and i just had scans two weeks ago and currently i don't have any evidence of anything  t and i became more withdrawn i became more isolated and i started gaining weight i just was kind of in a downward spiral losing interest in things just most of the classical depression symptoms you know sleep disturbance mild eating disorder it was getting to the point where my daughter and friends were saying you know you need to do something because you're just kind of becoming a criminal just getting too isolated to be withdrawn i think the topic of my depression came up with my daughter with friends off and on for two or three years before i saw the ad for the john hopkins research study and in the meantime i had gone and did individual counseling once or twice for you know ten to twelve sessions each time and i had tried two different you know depressive education during have three years that before i went to john hopkins so i was what i would call a chronic low level depression i was clearly having trouble sleeping i was up a couple times a night  i was had i was pretty sad most of the time low self esteem i was not being very sociable except with my very closest friends not dating it was pretty much me of the dog it wasn't much of the life i mean i was well aware that i was depressed and it was so i was kind of educated i mean i had all my excuses and explanations of course but if you stood just ten feet back from it you could see it was depression i've had marijuana back in the seventy's about three times and once it was  very pleasant experience and then the second two times it was it it wasn't pleasant i got a little paranoid i kind of was at a party drugs other than those three times with the marijuana because i was very familiar with a lot of bad consequences of taking my heart on occasion i would be doing night duty in the emergency room and people would come in on a bad trip or they've overdosed on something you know these people were terrified that what didn't look like a real fun nor productive experience for it john hopkins you then you have three days of working with the two researchers one of which was a ph d therapist psychologist and you'd be you get to know that really well over three days because it's the better part of three days or so they learned all of your history you get a real sense of comfort with a real sense of trust under the influence of the drug the with you the whole day and it turned out that that was really valuable because had they not been there in the initial phases of the thing i was so right that high would have bolted and that would've been the end of the whole thing well when you first take the high dose it takes about ten to fifteen minutes for it to start circling effects after about fifteen minutes here so your sense of reality just starts fred and at that point i realized that there was no turning back what i would do the meditation seemed almost make it worse and so what i really wanted to do was open my eyes and get up and move around but the two people who were in the room were pretty good they kept the relatively calm and it took about an hour and a half for me really to calm down and kind of become credible there's just no longer any construct in a sense of ego at all so there's really no fri because there's nothing sort of left to lose if you will i kind of describe it i've described it before as kind of like falling off a sailboat and you fall off the sill bodi come back up to the surface you look around in the boat's gone and then shortly after that the water is gone and then shortly after that you're gone but you're still conscious it was very valuable that that the that the whole process was so closely supervised because i would have gotten up and tried to leave the room and get outside if i hadn't had the people there with me and i had confidence in them that i was going to come out on the other side of it in one piece the second all just in particular just sat next to me kind of was in physical contact with me and of course i had no sense of time it could have been ten minutes or six hours i had no idea and he said afterwards that he just kind of sat there and had his arm around my shoulder for about an hour and he was just being quiet he wasn't saying anything in particular i couldn't make out voices anyway but i did have a sense of him being physically present that something that you're just kind of in this call for sure is space and when i was in that space i had at one point i had some sense of being in a cathedral at one time and i thought well i'll ask god you know i said you know if there's ever a time you want to talk to me this it i didn't say that out loud i was just thinking and and nothing happened i didn't begin the thing happened so i just dropped that at the other point when i was right in the middle of it i had a sense of living on the surface of a bubble and through the thickness of the bubble a very large bubble and that was my living space and other people had other living spaces nearby that it was there's no sense of being drugged or anything it's just crystal clear lucid curiosity just you know but but no clues nations no colors no no anything just avoided i could pull up out of memory past memory and current memory of any relationship i've ever had and i could objective really kind of do a review of what i could like restricts it but without there being any church ego involved with it was just  there was a lot of sadness and too you know failed relationship time feelings and stuff like that it wasn't tiredly clear to me that i was going to make it back to their everyday reality or that if i went back into everyday reality it would make sense because it seemed it seemed less significant or less real something i was thinking kind of as a psychologist of the moment i'm wondering if this is what happens with schizophrenia a story you know where every day reality doesn't mean the same thing to them anymore and that's a lot of why they're acting the way they are but five or six times i would intentionally move from the everyday reality back to the void i could do that because i was kind of halfway in between and i could kind of control a little bit it was like i was trying to sleep these breadcrumbs you know the fall of the track back you know and  it turned out that was really helpful because now when i do meditation i could get back to a somewhat so that experience and just you know five or ten minutes but as a function of the simple side when i came away with a kind of a spontaneous trust and intuition and it was sort of like i made this discovery that there was this whole body of of information and knowledge that i could trust that i wasn't producing in my head  and that was quite a shock it was quite a surprise spiritually i had mitered contemporary theology and always my approach to religion had always been highly intellectual and my sense of self esteem quite a bit i took it in water see it myself as the sort of linguistic construct that i used to see myself as you know the descriptive self the doctor or the you know two hundred forty pound as a result of that i i don't manage my life very much i mean i have preferences and values but i don't have much in the way of goals in work because one of the things that became very clear to me after this was i was getting stuck on my goals i would create a goal and pursue it for years and in the meantime i would be living you know i would i would have this idea in my head about how my life ought to be running in the meantime my life  running over here and i wasn't paying attention to it you know my organic dynamic self was over here and my idea of who i was was over here and who i needed to be and where i needed to be and two years from now that i was getting stuck in there for two three and four years of the time and i wasn't having much of it also became very clear to me that dog relationships into their relationships don't need to be managed if you just show up with kind of a national a doozy if you have some capacity for being a good to manage how things went when i finished the high dose and i got my exit interview with roland the director he said at that time that i needed to give myself the space to life that just occurred spontaneously that seemed to be a product of a different way of my approaching the movement the move from the intellectual to the intuitive well i talked to the john hopkins people about doing here again you know doing a subsequent study right after i did it i wasn't clear about why that i want to do it again because it was among other things for a role to actually said well a lot of people once they've had the experience don't ever really need to do it again because it is all so fresh in your mind mentally ill people physically disabled people and of course as i learned recently families tire families just on the street you know who is going to take care of them how some somebody people just can't help their situation it's just getting worse it's estimated in the state of washington in two thousand nine hundred thousand families in the vigils faced homelessness in king county on a particular given night twenty three thousand people are homeless in twenty five hundred of those are on the streets individuals and families with nowhere to stay in january of two thousand the my community came together individual would need to work seventy five hours a week in a retail job to afford the typical one or two bedroom apartment here on the east side if you were going to work a forty hour week you need to have a wage of twenty two dollars and forty seven july twenty third two thousand and four i was getting ready to make a left hand turn it's a beautiful sunny day and i was trying to pass moves like i didn't exist for some reason they stopped paying my benefits and it should have happened they misinterpreted a doctor's letter it's not just drugs and alcohol that make people it's like a life change also besides the hard work that families put into finding shelters the calling every day several times a day even with all that work that they do a lot of times it is the lack of the drive it's the make up of the family i had one family two parents two children no substance abuse problems no domestic violence and the mom said nancy we're just a normal family we can't find any shelter lately the waits have been two months to get into a shelter in the face of a homeless family is any face and it's almost a full time job to be homeless and while that family is waiting for shelter or some someplace to call home or to sleep imagine just for a moment if you were in that situation you had no money no money coming in no place to go home to no place to go to to close the door on the world even for a minute you're not even sure where you're going to go the bathroom next where do you store your clothes for tomorrow what happens to your special trinkets we all have whether it be a piece of jewelry your child's drawing that they made for you years ago a gift from one of your parents as a child what happens to those item mentally when do you regroup physically when do you get to rest and emotionally when do you heal homelessness is something we can all do do something about we can be part of the  this is about the kensington mine project its near lower slate lake and alaska the dispute is that is about what is happening there breaks the e p a one nine hundred seventy five clean water act guess what it's allowed by the supreme court's findings of this year the one nine hundred seventy five clean water act prohibits discharge of toxins into water in order to restore our rivers and lakes to useful and use usable capacity it has been the intent it has the intent of making our water drink a ball again a generation of people have been working on cleaning up our environment from the radiation that love can now to our streams that were filled with bacteria and heavy metals that would make people ill and kill plants and animals our progress in cleaning up our environment was positive during the bush administration pollution was redefined as filler material this gave the army army corps of engineers the opportunity to use lower slate lake in alaska as a waste dump for the kensington mines lead mercury and other caustic chemicals tom al attorney for or to justice fought the case with the supreme court of our united states the supreme court voted six to three to allow this dumping to happen is this a slippery slope for the rest of our country yes is the answer from conservation agencies and others such as scientist whose who have been involved in this two hundred thousand gallons a day of toxic discharge will go into flight lake after ten years which is the life span of most mines  there will be four and a half tons of solids left in the lake all life is estimated to have died out at the beginning of the use of the lake as a toxic waste dump the bed of the lake will be raised by the four and a half tons of toxins and will spread out to three times that size it will be larger and shallower according to some scientists findings it will fill up with the mine tailings the supply specific effect is expected to be that it will be highly toxic the minus required to put four inches of natural soil four inches over the waist at the end of the ten years it is not likely according to scientists that the lake will recover if it does it is estimated to take many decades president o rescind this mine permit it is important if you want this to happen to let our president know your wishes whatever you decide i hope you make your voice heard and tell your legislators ok now what about that slippery slope according to the national wildlife federation this alters the clean water act framework up to sixty percent of the nation's stream miles have lost or at risk for losing vital protection more than twenty million acres of wetlands have effectively lost federal water pollution safeguards  generation of progress in cleaning u s waters maybe last congress presently has a clean water restoration act before it let your f