Doctor in Support of Health Care Reform

Here is our Dr. Chris Gaynor, joining with local physicians in support of health care reform:

One Sky Wellness Winter Closures

Due to the very snowy and icy weather, One Sky Wellness Associates will be closed on Monday, December 22.

We are also closed for the Christmas holiday, Thursday, December 25 and Friday, December 26 as well as Thursday January 1.

Established patients who must talk with their physician on an urgent basis when the clinic is not open should listen to our voice message at 206 363 5555 to get their doctor's emergency on-call number.

Warm wishes for the holiday season and a Happy New Year!

Suspended on the Brink of the Solstice

The word Solstice means "Sun stand still." On the Winter Solstice, the spinning top of the Earth has come to the farthest stretch of its tilt away from the sun, and the farther north you go, the more it can feel like the world is holding its breath in anticipation of descent into a deep, long, darkness and the next pivot step into the gradually growing light.

Chinese medicine sees Winter as the season of Water. Some correlations include these:
Water is Black and deep Blue. The Water organs and tissues are Kidney, Bladder, bones, ears. The energy of Water and Winter encompasses death and the end of the cycle; reflection, stillness, depth, silence. Fear and terror. Wisdom and the will to live.

Water is the reservoir of our lineage (genetic and spiritual), our generative potency, our seeds. In the dark and cold and silence of Winter are seeds and buds full of the intensely concentrated essence of future. One of the archetypes of Winter is the Sage.

Water is adaptable, enduring, and patient, flows according to where the way is open, goes around obstacles, stores power. The source of our capacity for awe.

In his teachings on the Elements, our friend Paul Karsten of the Seattle Institute of Oriental Medicine adds this: Water is community. Gathering. Things coming together. Sense of holding on, with feeling. Water practices: holding every moment as precious; deep listening.
Just like the water in the world, the water moving in us can be frozen stiff, can rush and flood, can drip and penetrate, can soak and nourish...how does the water within you flow these days?
Winter: ice and fear and stillness, suspended over the brink. Photo credit of a charter bus that narrowly avoided complete disaster yesterday, Ken Lambert of the Seattle Times

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from all of the staff and practitioners at One Sky Wellness Associates!

We will be closed for the holiday on Monday 12/31 and Tuesday 1/1. We have been having some voice mail difficulty lately but if you phone us (206 363.5555) during the holiday, you will be able to obtain the number for the on-call doc. If you want to leave a message and don't get that option, you can email us at and we'll get back to you on Wednesday 1/2. Remember that pharmacy refills need to be phoned into your pharmacist and they will contact us if necessary.

May 2008 be a year of increased joy and health for all.

Morning Poem

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging ---

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted ---

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(Dream Work)
(from the poetry archive at Panhala.net)

Tomato-Buttermilk Skin cleanser

Our friend, herbalist-wizard Rowan Hamilton, with the first in a series of videos about superb skin care using ingredients from the market and the garden:

bee people

This is from One Sky Wellness psychotherapist, Karen Stocker:

Dear Human Cousins,

You worry we may be disappearing.

You wonder if we've died, become lost or run away.

We give thanks you wonder! We like it when you Human People wonder.

Please wonder!...about our lives, our days, our ways of flying out and all the way home on any available breeze; our yellow pollen fuzz leggings and blur of glascene wings; our ancient intimacy with blossoms; the precise hexagonal wax of our edible hives; the amazing, thick, sweet medicinal translucence of honey; our dance vibrations languages and questioning antennas, our irresistably magnetizing queen, and faithful tender attentions to each of our precious jewel-like sleeping unborn; our reason for being bees.

Please wonder!...what is flight like in a tangle of satellite signals, cell phone fequencies, exhaust and high voltage wires? What does Life feel like without Her, without Them? What meaning can be made from the taste of sugar water and 'pollen substitute'? Can we be shipped by the thousands, thousands of miles in the chaos and din of metal eighteen wheelers? How many times can we land on the open petals of ancestrally welcoming flowers to find the heart we enter sprayed or engineered hostile?

Wonder Human Cousins, could you live like this? Released, would you come back?

with Respect and Love to our Human Cousins,

Bee People

Bumblebee on bramble, originally uploaded by SouthbankSteve.
Crossposted from Life Cultivating Life.

Step It Up 2007: National Day of Climate Action

April 14, 2007, is "National Day of Climate Action." Serving as the organizing hub is Step It Up 2007, a grassroots group which has used email, word of mouth, and online networking (plus a write-up in Business Week, and an endorsement by Al Gore) to inspire and invite gatherings, actions and rallies of all kinds, in order to send the message to Congress to "Step it up -- cut carbon emissions 80% by 2050."

The Step It Up 2007 team writes,
"As a truly global crisis, global warming will impact everyone. However, the impact will be felt greatest among the most vulnerable of the world’s population. While global warming presents us with our most pressing challenge, it also presents our most inspiring opportunity. We have an opportunity and a responsibility to ensure that our solutions to this crisis take these populations into account."

So far there are over 1300 rallies and actions being planned by local volunteers, with at least one in every state, and people adding new ones to the list every day. There are going to be over a dozen in Seattle alone, including "The Marching Forest of Shoreline" ("Calling all aspiring trees, squirrels, mushrooms, suns, streams, hills, bunnies, bushes, butterflies, birds, bees, fish, flowers and bad English Ivy! We invite you, even if you don't live in Shoreline, to join our carbon-offsetting forest to help raise awareness about the global warming crisis"), a Solutions Fair, a couple of actions to mark how far the waters will rise if the polar ice caps melt into the sea, and a march between Occidental Park in Pioneer Square through downtown to a rally at Myrtle Edwards Park (across the street from Seattle icon the Pike Place Market).

Please join us! (even if you don't dress up like a squirrel, or bad English ivy!)

(cross-posted at life cultivating life)