Archive for March, 2008

Sendler's List

I’d never heard of her. Irena Sendlerowa. Have you?

An article in the April 2008 Guideposts magazine educated me. Written by Megan Felt, from Farlington, Kansas, she tells the story of entering National History Day, a competition of more than half a million students who vie to create a compelling presentation of an historical topic. She and her friends wanted to research something about the Holocaust because it was so different from their small farming town.

A teacher of theirs, Norm Conard, helped them find Irena, an actual person to research. They wrote a one-act play.

Irena Sendlerowa was a Polish social worker who rescued more than 2,500 Jewish children to safety from the Warsaw Ghetto. To preserve their names, she wrote them on sheets of paper and buried them in jars in her garden. 2,500 was a thousand more than Oskar Schindler had saved.

Irena was unknown for a reason. The girls could find almost nothing about her. They searched through books, newspapers, the Internet and even went to a Holocaust education center in the Midwest. Finally, one of their Internet inquiries responded with the suggestion that the young people contact Irena in Poland directly. She was 90.

They wrote her a letter, enclosed their play and sent her three dollars for return postage. Weeks went by. The girls needed her to write back. Finally, a letter arrived—in Polish! Their teacher arranged for a translator.

“To my dear and beloved girls, very close to my heart,” it began. She told them the whole story. How she’d talked her way into the ghetto and smuggled babies out. She told them of her fear. How she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. How they’d fractured her legs and feet during an interrogation. Someone bribed the guards to let her go. How she retrieved the names from her garden, and tried to reunite the children with their parents after the war. Irena insisted she was no hero. “I did what anyone would have done.” (She donated the three dollars.)

The girls did their play, made it to the finals, and didn’t win, but they did get some coverage in a local Kansas newspaper. Soon they were invited to perform their play in all sorts of surprising places. After one such performance, a Jewish businessman called, “Would you like to go to Warsaw to meet Irena? I’ll pay your way if you come back and talk to my businessman’s association about what you find.”

Can you say Miracle?

They went. Three farm girls from Kansas and one mom went to Warsaw in 2001. The Polish press mobbed them. They met their hero. Their Unsung Hero. It changed their lives.

Before she died, my mother worked tirelessly for the cause of AIDS. She won a DIFFA Unsung Hero Award. The program she and her team developed has been used as a prototype for county response to AIDS for many years.

Maybe heroes aren’t extraordinary people at all? Maybe heroes are those who “do what anyone would do?” My mom did. And according to Irena, so did she.

P. S. If you want to see a DVD of the play about Irena, Life In A Jar, go to http://www.irenasendler.org/ to order it.

Prognosis

Seeds X, 13

Seed: Prognosis

So, once we understand diagnosis, of course, the next word to think about is prognosis. It too derives from Greek roots meaning to know beforehand. What I want to ask is: do we really know beforehand?

Medicine, as practiced in North America, at this point in human history, has become what those who practice it call “evidence-based.” Evidence-based? It means, literally, by what they see (see the beginnings of our word, video, in there?). Actually, I think it’s a code word because how it plays out these days is medicine by the numbers.

Statistics, percentages, studies. If X number of women get breast cancer, then X number will this and Y number will that. You are part of group Z, and so we can deduce that . . . you take my point, I’m sure.

Here is what my friend came to know, and what we all can know in the faces of scary diagnoses: the prognosis is up to us. Doctors don’t really know beforehand for any given individual. What they know are the trends of the past. Our own spirits, our bodily individualities, our souls participate in the prognosis, and that, for me, is a huge relief.

Be content,

Susan Corso

Dr. Susan Corso

Seeds are remarkable gifts. Sown in consciousness, they bring you to the most important part of your being—your Divine Spark.

When you have friends you would like added to the Seeds e-mail list, send their addresses to me at SeedsDrCorso@comcast.net and please visit my blog Ode Magazine.

Zero Bits

When was the last time your email inbox was empty? Totally, completely clear. Mine is right now. In fact, I try to get it to empty every single day. Some days I succeed better than others.

Author Mark Hurst writes about this as bit literacy. See his book of the same name at Amazon. He recommends that we achieve emptiness every day for email. I agree with him.

When the snail mail comes to the house, I don’t put pieces of it aside to deal with later. I open all of it that interests me and recycle the rest. Why not the same with email? Since when have we agreed to email overwhelm? Can we change those agreements?
My sweetie and I signed up for GreenDimes.com a couple of years ago so we could get off all those catalogue mailing lists. Our recycling is three-quarters less than it used to be. In my email program, under Tools, I found an option called Block Sender. It moves emails I’m not interested in immediately to the Deleted folder.

Mr. Durst suggests we empty our inboxes daily so that we have a chance for an empty mind as well. Zero bits. No input. Monkey mind put to bed. Silence. Quiet. The peace of our own thoughts without information overload from others.

Try this: empty your inbox today, and see how long you can keep it empty. I think you’ll find that your mind quiets quite naturally when you deliberately decrease the input you allow.