Three Must-See Documentaries: One in Theaters Now
May.10.11

Stating the obvious, I love documentaries and true stories, and over the past year, I have seen several that I think everyone should put on their list of must-see films. These include Waiting for Superman, an extremely eye-opening film about our U.S. school system and crisis, and Inside Job, the Academy-award winning film about the financial meltdown of our country in the past few years. Contrary to popular belief, this film is bi-partisan and really gives the layman who didn’t completely understand how it all worked (like me) an idea of what and how it happened.

Last weekend I saw a documentary that I also REALLY encourage people to see:

It is Tom Shadyac’s I Am.

Tom is a big-time Hollywood director whose credits include films like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Nutty Professor, Liar Liar, Patch Adams, and Bruce Almighty. He had an epiphany (yes, working on getting his interview) after having an accident that made him evaluate his life and change it drastically. He then goes on a quest with a camera crew asking world-renowned thinkers and leaders primarily in science but also religion, spirituality and philosophy (people like our very own Desmond Tutu) about what is wrong with our world and what we can do about it. He seems to have come up with a very different, much more dynamic outcome than he expected – which I’ve found tends to happen when people embark on these kinds of quests, yours truly’s quest included.

Shadyac calls the film “I Am” because back in the day, when the prolific English writer G.K. Chesterton was invited by The Times along with several eminent authors to write essays on the theme “What’s Wrong with the World?” Mr. Chesterton wrote:

Dear Sirs,
I am.
Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton

If you see this film you will understand this quote and title even more.

Things that were scientifically proven to be true throughout the journey of this must-see documentary were:

1.) The entire human race is connected.
2.) We are all hard-wired to cooperate and live in community, not competition.
3.) When species in nature take more than they need from the earth, they end up being destroyed. ie: when cells start taking more than they need in our bodies, it is known as cancer. In other words, humans better look at what they’re doing by taking more than they need from the planet. (Also see Story of Stuff or read Annie Leonard’s interview in my book.)

I also saw Oprah talk about this (I’m one of those people DVRing the last 25 shows), and she said the film also proved, “If you don’t do what your heart wants you to do, it can destroy you.” I agree with this, but I didn’t feel like this was as obvious a conclusion to his research as the others, though there is lots of incredibly interesting research about the heart included that I’d never heard before. But as she talked about on her show, this film opens a conversation that needs to be had.

The film is dense with information, it’s interesting, humorous at times and it definitely makes you think much later after you’ve left the theatre about the societal structures we’ve designed and our part in them and how they might be improved, changed – maybe even overhauled – so that we are living more harmoniously with nature and one another. Maybe it will only slightly change your perspective and way of looking at our structures and the ways we’re living our lives, but if enough people have that happen, it could make a difference. Maybe it does nothing for you but entertain you. Maybe you will hate it, I doubt it, but everyone is different. But for only two hours out of your life and a few bucks, you can see for yourself and join the conversation.

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Epiphany: Saved By My Mother
May.6.11

The following account was shared on EpiphanyChannel.com.

Back in the early 80’s, before I got married, moved to Brooklyn and became a mom, I lived with my single mother and twin sister, Heidi, in an area known as Hell’s Kitchen. It was a rough New York neighborhood filled with drug dealers, prostitutes, and gangs so I didn’t blame Mother for pulling us out of grade school and attempting to teach us at home. But as I became a pre-teen, I hated home-schooling, watching Pat Robertson on the 700 Club TV show predict the end of the world, and resented being isolated from the world.

While other kids were in school, I watched the gypsy kids play in front of their parents’ tarot card storefront. One afternoon, a dark haired girl waved and yelled up for me to join them. I turned toward Mother and told her about the girl. Mother looked up from her Bible study and warned that they believed in the occult.

For weeks, I begged Mother to let us play with the gypsies. Finally she agreed on one condition: that we were to be examples for Christ and witness to them. I cringed. Heidi and I were twins, already freaks of nature. Plus, I didn’t want them to think we were like our neighbor, an elderly lady shut-in who yelled Bible verses while she trapped pigeons on her fire escape, put them in a tin can, and froze the birds in her freezer.

Heidi and I ran downstairs, introduced ourselves, and they did the same. They were small for their age, even skinnier than Heidi and I, and seemed to exist solely on bags of potato chips and candy. Muppets, Smurfs, and He-Man figurines rested curbside and a dog peed on the sidewalk tree barely missing My Little Pony.

Hours later, over dinner, we told Mother about the games we played.

“The indoctrination has begun. Those toys are disguised as fairyland, but they are tools for magic and Lucifer,” mother said. Then she plopped open a Sears catalogue and pointed to a model wearing a peace sign on a T-shirt.

“That’s the upside down cross. It signifies Satan’s victory over Jesus.”

Mother told us how Disneyland’s wizards, crystals, rainbows, and unicorns were symbols of the Third Eye and of the Antichrist. She said the song, “It’s a Small World” taught one-worldism.

Every day we listened to Mother rant about how Christ was going to pass judgment on the world’s sins and how the End Times were approaching.

Months later, Mother asked us if we had led the gypsies to Christ. We shook our heads no. She didn’t understand that I didn’t want them to change and become Christians, I just loved being their friend.

The gypsies eventually moved away and Mother railroaded us into Bob Jones University, a Protestant fundamentalist school in the South where we had to sit six inches away from boys, wear skirts below our knee, and weren’t allowed to leave the gated campus without a chaperone.

When I quit a year later, I wanted distance from my family and fellow Christians and decided to move back to New York. I was tired of hearing from Mother and classmates that I’d end up in hell if I didn’t settle down and marry a missionary.

“Where are you going to live?” Mother asked.

“YMCA has cheap rooms,” I said.

“They teach yoga, meditation, and Tai Chi. Tools for Devil worship. They should re-name it YWOA for Young Women’s Occult Association.”

I ignored her, moved in, bought books by Buddhists, and became a waitress. I stopped visiting her as often and decided to shut her out of my life. But she sent hand page written letters. At first, I tossed them onto my desk and watched them pile up. Then out of Protestant guilt, I read them. She detailed how her father was strict, disciplined her by hitting her, how she ran away on freight trains for Kentucky, was put into a boarding school for bad girls, and how she entered a mental institution in her twenties. All those years of hiding us in a tenement and smothering us with sermons was meant to keep us safe from what had hurt her.

I called her and cried.

“Pray to God for strength,” Mother said.

Last time I visited Mother, we went to Sunday service. Inside the unadorned church, we watched a women be baptized in a pool of water. For the first time, I understood my mother, her search for renewal and for the past to be washed away. She was just trying to shield us, protect us from what she thought were the evils of the world. Kneeling for the prayer, I reached over and took my mother’s hand.

I might have lost my religion, but I finally understood my mother.

– Heather Kristin, New York, NY

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A Mother’s Epiphany about Love. (With a New and Happy Epilogue!)
May.5.11

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As Mothers’ Day has been approaching, I have been examining epiphanies about mothers, from mothers, and thinking about all epiphanies related to motherhood in general. And then I received this email from my friend, John Scott:

We had a boy and a girl!! Everyone is great.
Ovid Alexander Scott (Ovid) was born first around 8:45am,
6lbs 11oz, 20 inches
Hattie Hardage Scott (Hattie) was 6lbs 13oz, 20 inches
Good times!
John Skipper Scott

This is fantastic news for anyone to read – a proud father announcing the birth of his twins. But this particular announcement is extraordinarily wonderful. John is the husband of Laurian Scott, whose epiphany in my book is about many things, as are all of the stories I have heard – but Laurian’s story is, at its core, about a mother’s love, and John’s email is its epilogue.

John and Laurian lost their daughter, Thisbe (age 3), and then their son, Noah (18 months), within a year of each other to Brown-Vialetto-Van Laere (BVVL) syndrome, a toddler form of ALS (Lou’s Gehrig’s disease). BVVL like ALS, has no cure and the pain and suffering involved are excruciating. Needless to say, the devastation of their loss and witnessing what their children had to endure was beyond traumatic. In her interview, Laurian says,

“For me, hope died with Thisbe and Noah. So did my faith. I even felt I’d lost the ability to love. I couldn’t feel anything outside the pain, the ache to be with my children again…I haven’t told anybody this, but I spent that year longing to “accidentally” leave this world, and sort of trying to.”

When John and her family intervened, realizing she was suicidal, Laurian knew they were right and that she needed help. She wanted to go to a monastery that she knew about in California rather than a hospital facility though, which puzzled her family. (Laurian nor her family knew anything about the monastery, even what kind of monastery it was, and when it ended up being Catholic, none of them were Catholic or knew anything about Catholicism and still don’t.) But it was where she felt she needed to go so they sent her. It was there that she had her epiphany through a conversation with a compassionate priest that got her back on her road to healing. I won’t tell the whole story here, but this is what happened after she had her epiphany:

“It was like a sigh-a long, long sigh. I thought, ‘Okay, so I’m going to be okay. I don’t really have to play by any rules. Maybe I can’t take my own life, but I don’t have to just believe in Jesus, or just do this or that, or go to this church to get to heaven. Really, all I have to do is just live according to love and I’m going to be okay.’

I learned that the only thing I’d never lost is the eternal flame of love I have for my children. That sits right here in my core.

In my search for God, the only thing I can say I really believe in right now is love. That is the one thing that I can palpably, tangibly say that I absolutely know. The only part of the Bible I believe in right now is that God is love, and I believe in love. Right now, it’s love that guides me. Love is all that matters. Love is all that we’re here for. And when we lose sight of love, everything goes dark and bleak.

My husband and I have this urge to give the world the piece of Thisbe and Noah that was here, which was beauty, love, and everything good. As long as we can give that back to the world, then they’re still living somehow through us, and we can honor them and their lives. To do this, we’ve established a foundation called the Olive Branch Fund: A Thisbe and Noah Scott Legacy. We actually started it when Noah was sick, a few months before he died. In our very last-ditch effort to save him, a doctor told us that no one could really help us until the gene is found that causes BVVL. We had no idea how to go about helping science to do that, so we sat down to figure it out. We are still finding our way—and only with the incredible support and help of our friends and family would any of this be possible. We started the Olive Branch Fund to be able to pay a researcher to find the gene. Noah died before we could find the gene and a cure, but just last month we did identify the gene that causes BVVL. We will keep going until we find a cure, and our organization has evolved and is still evolving into an international advocacy organization for all pediatric motor neuron diseases. It’s our goal in our lifetime to be able to say if Thisbe and Noah had been born now, they wouldn’t have had to die.

The courage and spirit my children displayed inspires us. It’s impossible for us to go through life not trying to do what we wish people had done and would do for us. So actually, maybe I do believe in another thing in the Bible – The Golden Rule.”

Almost a year to the day after I interviewed Laurian and they identified the gene that causes BVVL, the Scotts have welcomed their healthy new son and daughter – positive that they are BVVL-free. Because of John and Laurian’s love for their children, they are advocating for children around the world with motor neuron diseases and perhaps no child will ever have to suffer from BVVL again.

This is only one story of a mother’s and father’s love for their children changing the world, but it is one that I happen to be a steward for and am thrilled to be able to share their news and the happy epilogue to the story! I also love the serendipitous timing of it coming to my inbox right before we officially celebrate mothers.

Wishing you and yours a very Happy Mothers Day.

To read more about Laurian and the non-profit work they are doing, advocating for children with neurological diseases everywhere, go HERE.

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What are your Epiphanies about Mothers and Motherhood? Book Giveaway in Honor of Mothers Day!
Apr.29.11

Mothers Day is just over a week away and I am going to start periodically posting the epiphanies that people are writing in under Epiphany Stories – even if they are one line – starting today. In honor of celebrating mothers everywhere, we’ll be doing a signed Epiphany book giveaway the day after Mothers Day by drawing from the names of everyone who sends in an epiphany over the next 10 days about anything related to motherhood – about your mothers, grandmothers, mothers-in-law, wanting to be/becoming a mother, being or what it means to be a mother. In other words, any epiphanies concerning mothering, we want to hear! They can be as long or as short as you want them to be. You can write in paragraphs or one or two sentences. You can submit them on the website or on our Facebook Fan Page, or you can tweet them with the hash tag #epiphanymoms.

Look forward to hearing yours!

If you’d like some guidelines about how to summarize epiphanies, you can check out some questions I always ask on our Share Your Epiphany page.

And here is the first submitted Epiphany Story I posted…and on the Royal Wedding Day of Kate and William, no less – a day that surprised me in just how full of hope, love and celebration it was…sort of like an epiphany…I think that’s a good sign.

 

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Epiphany about Mothers, a Father, Loss and Compassion
Apr.29.11

simplereminders.com-elise-book-2The first submitted epiphany I ever received on the relaunched website, came from my beautiful and talented friend, Maureen Muldoon. She and I were in a theater company in Los Angeles together about 9 years ago, but had completely lost touch over the years when I moved to Austin.

When I moved back to Los Angeles a couple of years ago, I couldn’t bear the thought of the waste of throwing out all the perfectly good boxes I had, so I put an ad on Craigslist in the “Free Stuff” category for people to come get the boxes if they wanted them. I had a huge response – there was no way I could even open all of the emails I got. One that I randomly picked to open was signed “Maureen Muldoon.” I responded to the email saying, “Surely this isn’t Maureen Muldoon of the Black Box Theatre company from days of yore.”

And this is why I am in love with the magical Craigslist and had to interview its founder, Craig Newmark–it’s like some kind of weird portal for serendipity to happen.

The email was indeed from the Maureen Muldoon I had known back in my theatre days of yore. Out of all the hundreds of people who wrote me randomly on Craigslist about boxes for a move and of the few I opened, she happened to be the one of them. The Craigslist posting resulted not only in the recycling of a ton of boxes, but in the unexpected reunion of old friends!

So Maureen was one of the first friends I reconnected with in Los Angeles (but alas, she used my boxes to move to the Chicago area soon thereafter) ; she was the first person to write in an epiphany when this site launched; and she is the first person to have her website-submitted epiphany posted in Epiphany Stories.

Serendipity also comes into play in that this posting was scheduled around Mothers Day, and her poignant epiphany account happens to be about mothers … and a father.

 

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“Approach life with tenderness and compassion toward yourself and others.  No matter how big, or old, or wise people may appear to be, there is a part of us that is still a child, trying to do our best.”

Growing up I imagined that my parents’ life started with my birth. I never thought about my parents as children or as having a childhood or a previous life.

When my mother died, I was thirteen.

My father sat beside me at her deathbed and told me a story about how he had lost his mother when he was around my age. This was how he told me that my mother was dying.

Now, I had heard the news (that my mother was dying) from my aunts and my teacher and our priest, but I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. It was like trying to believe that I could live without air. But when my father sat beside me and told me about his mother, there was a strange and powerful shift. I guess you could call it an epiphany. I looked at him in a whole new way.

Suddenly he was a kid, with a mother. Suddenly he was a kid who had survived what I was wrestling with. Suddenly there was a glimmer of hope for me. Even in my pain, even in my darkest hour, I saw that he had traveled through this hideous part of hell and he had indeed survived. So now I knew that I would survive too. Although it appeared that this nightmare would swallow me whole, there was a new possibility that maybe it wouldn’t. That maybe I could learn to live without air. After all, my father had.

After he shared his story with me, he laid his head in his hands and started to weep like a baby. That is when I had my real epiphany. That was when I realized that no matter how big, or old, or wise people may appear to be, we are all mostly just little kids, trying to do our best. It has led me to approach life with greater tenderness and compassion.

– Maureen Muldoon, La Grange, IL

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