That’s neither here nor there. What is here is that my kindred kid-namer friend has Lyme Disease. She’s been struggling with it for a few years and has recently been crumbling. She’s been in treatment for months and is now looking at bee sting therapy. I had never heard of it and had to look it up. It’s a thing — their venom contains a peptide with anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties, leaving Lyme patients hopeful. Imagine suffering so much that bee stings give you hope.

A rush of what should have been memories overcame me when I heard her news. I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease when I was 19 years old. Bedridden for months and disabled for years, I followed a lot of traditional and untraditional roads to treatment.

The best story was the Shaman I met in Mexico who prescribed sleeping with dead scorpions on the top of my head and the bottoms of my feet. I spoke no Spanish and he spoke no English, but I think I got the gist — something about the toxin from one poisonous creature pulling out the toxin of another. Sounds not too dissimilar from the bee stings. It didn’t work. After almost a decade of chasing relief, the only thing that worked was antibiotics.

There is a caveat to the antibiotic cure. It got me better than anything else did, but it didn’t cure it. It took me a couple of years to realize that I had permanent damage. The only way to see myself as not sick was acceptance. We are so conditioned to think that modern medicine can cure all if it cures at all. But the more I age, the more I think the mind is the true miracle worker. Not in the sense of abracadabra, but in perspective.

How could I not have been changed by Lyme Disease? We like to think that we are different from other systems. But if a fire burns through a landscape, it’s scarred. The landscape might recover, and things may grow that wouldn’t have grown otherwise, but it is forever changed.

Ironically, this mom and I also lost our homes to fire. It’s always been part of living in the Santa Monica Mountains and increasingly more so throughout the world. It’s just the luck of the draw as to whose home gets saved and when.

I grew up in these mountains, and when my house burned down when I was young, I learned that fire is part of this ecosystem. And if I’m going to live in it, chances are I’m going to be impacted by fire.

I’ve heard the fear from friends and neighbors who are transplants to Malibu about living in a fire zone. They have anxiety about fires burning their house down and contemplate moving regularly.

We will see fire again in our neighborhoods. We don’t know when. We just need to be prepared when it shows up.

I can understand why we don’t always see illness as part of a bigger system. But if you’re living in an ecosystem shaped by fire, why would you think you’d be immune to it?

I posted in Notes this week about the camping trip that I was on in the western Sierras. At the campground, on two different nights, two different neighbors saw a bear and called 911.

After the first sighting, our neighbor’s teenage daughter came over to tell me. She said they called 911 and 911 didn’t do anything. They had put marshmallows in a squirrel box and the bear got to them. Her dad searched the Internet, which told them that the bear would come back. They were warning us.

The following night, my friend who I was camping with was awakened by someone honking their horn. When she went to the bathroom the next morning, she met the honker who was trying to scare off a bear. The honker called 911. Apparently the 911 operator said that it was a nice bear.

Hearing all of this made me miss Gary Larson and the comic relief of The Far Side cartoons. Are we really so detached we don’t understand that when we’re camping in bear habitat we might see a bear? Even if we don’t know a thing about the natural habitat we’re in, is it an emergency if we see a wild animal in nature? And then there’s the food part. Really, a bear finds sugar and comes back for more? PEOPLE.

The bear wasn’t doing anything particularly surprising. It found food. It came back for food. It was being a bear.

Like fires in the Santa Monica Mountains, bears are in the Sierras. The difference is that bear fuel is much more selective than fire fuel.

We live in a fire ecosystem and are surprised when it burns. We camp in bear country and are surprised when we see a bear. We get sick and are surprised that our bodies don’t simply return to the way they were before.

In contrast to that cognitive dissonance, sleeping with scorpions and getting stung by bees makes a lot more sense. We have always looked to nature for medicine. Maybe the strange thing isn’t that my friend is looking to bees. Rather, it’s that we spend so much of our lives thinking that our bodies, our homes, our communities, and our lives exist outside of nature’s systems.

She lived in a log cabin that she and her ex-husband had built. It was about two miles up a dirt road, perched above her stables. She had horses and dogs and a guest suite for company and heated tile bathroom floors and a huge green kitchen. Her house was lived in and filled with the things of her life — her art, her Kreiss sofa, photos that her dear friend Richard Gere took.

To know Andrea was to know her as a Hollywood agent despite her retirement. Her stories of friendships and love affairs and trials of mingling with the most famous were the background to conversations about politics and animal welfare and food — the things she was most interested in and, of course, men. I spent one of her birthdays sitting between Dyan Cannon and Cindy Crawford at an intimate table at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she and her dog were part of the family.

Eventually, the ranch house became too much for her to take care of, so she sold it and moved to Bozeman. She was always dating — always wanting a witness to her life. And while she was remodeling the place in Bozeman, she met someone.

I went to their wedding in the Hudson Valley. Gabriel Byrne spoke. He told a story about him and Robert Redford vying for Andrea’s attention. In the end, the man she married, who was 14 years her junior, was not the caring, kind person he presented to be. He eventually left her. Or maybe she kicked him out. Either way, he abandoned her.

There’s this whole contract we make in choosing to hold each other’s hearts. We assume that’s the contract in marriage — that we take care of one another. Ideally kindly. Andrea committed to that. But in the end, he proved not worthy of her heart, and broke it. Right after she had heart surgery.

Andrea says that having heart surgery saved her life, but it’s the worst thing that ever happened to her. Her health hasn’t been the same since. Last year, she moved to a retirement home in Santa Barbara. I helped her find it. When we were talking about the finances, she said she had enough money for ten years but didn’t want to live another ten.

Last week she sent me a text that said her health has declined so much that she has chosen assisted suicide.

I went to see her yesterday. While I was there, she was fielding calls about her biography and a Broadway play she’s been an integral part of while sending texts along the way. Two of her friends from Big Sky were visiting. So was the home health person, and her dog. And me, of course. Hard to believe she’s dying.

As we were leaving her place to go for a walk, she pointed to a picture of her and Robert Redford and said, “Isn’t that a nice picture?” Naturally, I said yes. Then she asked me if I wanted it.

You reach a certain age in life and it’s inevitable that someone close to you has died — or, in this case, is going to die. I’ve lost two life partners — one a gay best friend, the other my fiancé. In one case, he’s certainly better off. In the other, nobody saw it coming. Regardless, having these two people gone has given me faith that there is something beyond this life. At the very least, the rules of entropy apply.

There is something so elegant, and so Andrea, about choosing to go out this way. She’s ending her life the same way she lived it — on her terms. It served her well while she was here, and I have a hard time believing it won’t serve her well at the end of her stay. She gets to wrap her life up knowing there’s an endpoint. She gets to say goodbye to people. She gets to make sure she’s leaving her things as she wants them left. She gets to choose not to suffer. Instead of fighting the inevitable, she gets to commune with the riches of the life she created until she goes.

Watching family and friends age and decline teaches you things — what to do, and not to do when the time comes, if you can help it. My fiancé did not die well. Whether he had the capacity to is another story. What most people agree on: dying from ailments is not for the faint of heart. Neither is aging with ailments. We are all faced with this at some point — our parents, other loved ones, or us. I have a friend who wrote a book about this, called The Beginner’s Guide to the End. We all need help. Particularly in dying.

Our society has a hard time accepting that dying is part of life — nature in its most extreme and inevitable cycle.

When I asked Andrea what I could do to help, she mentioned something about her end-of-life celebration. I guess that’s the bookend to the baby shower. Except this time, she won’t be around for it.

Andrea, I celebrate you. I commend you. I love you. I’m with you.

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I was thrilled when I finally found some hangers that were bioplastic, until I saw they were 50% wheat straw and the other 50% polypropylene. Besides, they were only available in toddler sizes. After that, there was 50% post-consumer recycled content—made in a facility that was saving water and treating its people well.

I continued down the Google rabbit hole that, as it does, landed me on Amazon. I had many options, but none were truly eco-groovy. To make an educated decision based on my values, I’d need to do more research.

For hangers.

This is the purchasing dilemma of our times. And speaking of time, how much time should a busy single mother dedicate to figuring out what the best values-aligned hanger is?

Another dilemma of our time.

At least hangers are basic.

A little more than 10 years ago, I had a sustainable lifestyle store in Big Sky, Montana—Big Sky Life. It was a luxury brand providing second homeowners in Big Sky with goods that made them feel at home in the mountains. I sourced everything we had in that store.

I insisted that the hangers we used were eco-groovy and found a brand called Ditto that was post-consumer cardboard. They were clunky, but still slim and surprisingly sturdy. The good thing was you could recycle them when you were done. The bad thing was they gave you paper cuts.

A small price to pay for guilt-free hangers.

I opened the store in 2012. It was a time when very little clothing and few goods in the market were “sustainable.” We didn’t have a huge selection, but what we had mattered. We had furniture made locally with recycled metals and found wood. We had Coyuchi, the first organic bedding company in the U.S. Organic skincare and clothing, and the list went on.

I found that it was easy to sell the products because the companies and people who made them cared about the products and their small footprints—I could get behind them.

Fourteen years later, Ditto hangers don’t exist, and neither does my lifestyle store.

So much of our shopping is online. We seldom walk into a store that is curated based on our values—or even one value. Now we’re left with the exhaustion of having to comb through an outsized selection of whatever product we’re looking for. And then, once we find the right color and size, we have to read the fine print to understand to what extent it fits us.

We have to filter those products through our own individual lens to determine which one fits our needs, let alone our values. But the language for those values is insufficient. Sustainable. Recycled. Recyclable. Organic. Natural. Eco-friendly. Regenerative. Carbon neutral.

Being human means there’s no such thing as a footprint-free choice. Even recycling has its environmental footprint—another layer in the mental load behind purchasing a single product.

And then there’s the reality that we’ve become conditioned to convenience. Getting things immediately has colored how we view buying things and who we buy them from. And sadly, our individual answers to environmental problems have turned to consumerism. Yet, because of the challenges inside capitalism, we’ve somehow lost the plot.

We can’t buy our way out of our environmental impact.

It’s a way bigger problem than hangers. But I still long for Ditto hangers.

It always feels dirty driving that Franklin corridor. It’s urban — a catchall to those foothills that house so many people. To look over and see a hawk in the mess of human construct just sitting on that fence, on that corner of Los Angeles, felt profound and like a complete disconnect. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

Aside from its presence alone, what really struck me was that the hawk was at eye level. I’m always seeing hawks — Red Tails in particular, hanging out on lampposts or trees, or electrical poles. But to see a hawk at eye level really stayed with me. It’s unusual. Was the hawk sick? Was it hunting? Why did it decide to descend to eye level?

Raptors live in open spaces and need open spaces to hunt. Are they hunting from city skies too? From fences and gates in the Franklin corridor? Wildlife is adaptable to an extent. Some, like coyotes, are more adaptable than others. We know that because we’ve learned to almost co-exist with them. From my family reports, coyotes are more prevalent in Brentwood and Los Feliz than they used to be.

Just over the hill from where I live, they are putting on the finishing touches on the Annenberg Wildlife Crossing. It is the first of its kind in California and the largest in the world — a massive bridge built for wildlife to cross. The main impetus was to connect two populations of mountain lions so that their species can survive.

The average size of monitored vertebrate populations globally has crashed by 73% in the last 50 years. We know that species decline is a direct result of human impact. And yesterday, the Trump administration moved to remove protections for wildlife already at risk. Animals provide ecosystem services that benefit everyone. The story of the wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone taught us this if nothing else. And yet, when things are down, people watch wildlife. In a study conducted by the University of Vermont, wildlife watching went up 64% during covid.

My daughter talks about Jackie and Shadow, and this year’s babies, Luna and Sandy — bald eagles that nest above Big Bear Lake with a nest cam. Her TK class followed Jackie and Shadow through Luna and Sandy’s hatching. When my father was in the hospital two weeks ago, I spent the day in the ER with him, and I could see the TV behind the administrative station — they, too, were watching the eagles. These stories — bridges built for mountain lions, nest cams followed by kindergartners and ER staff alike — give me hope. People connect to wildlife even when policy doesn’t

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While I was reading it, I couldn’t help but think that countless animals navigate via magnetoreception - detection of the earth’s geomagnetic field. I understand that veering left is far from migration and navigation, but it is about individual movement. And speaking of directional travel, doesn’t toilet water circle in the opposite direction in the other hemisphere? I just looked it up and dusted off the cobwebs of my 8th grade science brain - what I’m thinking of is called the Coriolis effect. The earth’s rotation impacts the movement of large-scale systems like hurricanes, not toilets. So the toilet thing is a myth, but a good one.

If animals move across the planet by the earth’s magnetic field, why would we be immune? Perhaps I should write to the Times and ask if the researchers looked to see if we have proteins in our eyes like birds do, or chains of biogenic magnetite in our cells like sea turtles.

I have to believe that these scientists have considered something along these lines. Otherwise it just reads as a great SNL skit on how we’re globally directionally challenged.

Instead, they decided that the impulse to walk left is biomechanic rather than something that is connected to external forces. But biomechanics leads to medicine. And even with all the expertise out there, I’ve spent enough time in the medical system to believe that calling medicine a practice is correct nomenclature. No diss to doctors, I know and love many, but there is still so much they don’t see or at least can’t predict.

My father had his 6th spine surgery two weeks ago- just before his 84th birthday. After two days in the hospital, they sent him to rehab. After two weeks he declined so severely that they sent him to the ER to scan his entire spine and do a blood work buffet to understand what was happening. The information they gathered led them nowhere. His spine looked as it should and his bloodwork was normal with the understandable exception of inflammation markers.

My best mom friend’s favorite kids’ movie is Strange World. In it, a family of explorers discover that the world they live on is a turtle. When they go below the surface, what looks like a sci-fi planet turns out to be the turtle’s internal system. In discovering that their planet is a turtle, they realize the animals they were defending themselves from were the turtle’s immune system. I’m beginning to see a theme in children’s programming: “We are living on a planet that is an interdependent system and when a piece of that system gets disrupted, things go wrong.”

I have no formal training in systems theory, only ecology, but I’m a systems evangelist. And in terms of systems, I think the more we reflect nature in how we think about other things, the better off we are. All life forms are systems unto themselves. We don’t know exactly what happened with my father’s decline, but this morning he walked without incident. He hadn’t in almost a week. I’m sure there’s a medical explanation. But I can’t help but think that it could be as simple as his body had a serious disruption. It hadn’t had a chance to regroup before he started rehab, so it revolted. Now we’ll just have to see when he walks left.

Our collective response to this is the $6.8 trillion dollar wellness industry where we tout the benefits of meditation, products that force us to slow down, reconnect and nurture ourselves. Many of these products are nature based. So while connecting to ourselves, we’re connecting to nature. But what if we just connected to nature? We know from people like the late great Dr. J Nichols, and Richard Louv, that spending time in water or the woods improves our mental and physical health. Sure, so much of the wellness industry is about how we look. But, don’t we just look better when we’re happy? And if you’re happy doesn’t your wrinkled, sagging skin matter less?

My daughter was watching a movie the other day- Hoppers. It’s a kids movie that has a heavy handed and ecologically incorrect way of addressing the conflict between nature and modern society. I mean a great white shark that lives in a river? The flying I can accept. I draw the line at river dwelling. At the beginning of the movie, the lead character’s grandmother takes her to a pond and declares: It’s hard to be mad when you feel like you’re part of something big.

What if we didn’t have to constantly remind ourselves that we’re a part of something big? What if that was the rose colored lens we put on? What if we lived like we were part of a system greater than us and the decisions we made were based on that, rather than the systems we create? I’m not saying that this is entirely possible, but it’s a damn good lens.

Nature is constantly perceived as a destination rather than a place to live from. This is my exploration of that. We are nature. Basically.

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