2018 was a year of adventures in health!…and some more traditional, see-new-things adventures as well. We made it to the end of 2018 looking little worse for wear, and hopeful about our future. Below is a gallery of 2018 images; click on any image for more info and a slideshow.
2018 has been my getting-healthy-again year! Here on my bike escaping cabin fever after a few months of recovery from rotator cuff surgery (see the padded shoulder?).
The biggest getting-healthy-again item for me is multiple myeloma, diagnosed in late 2017: here's a backside of Joy with me at an IMF conference (they're a wonderful research org well worth our support). More on MM later.
In the midst of these changes, our land in Canyonville abides and offers us rejuvenation. I've looked up at the oxymoronic Canyon Mountain since a baby. (Yes, we all still live in Portland!)
A dogwood planted on our land in memory of family friend and community/tribal leader Sue Shaffer is now happily growing.
Joy has been planting things too!...and learning from the experience. We now know that tulips are a deer's favorite...
...while daffodils stand a greater chance of success.
Joy and Elise are investing in our land in other ways too. Here they are at Tree School, learning about everything from log cabin construction to mushroom propagation.
Alder Creek Community Forest continues to train area teachers on our land...
...and offer educational events for schools and families. Here's a map and compass exercise at the nearby community college.
We had to harvest a number of trees this year due to drought-induced mortality. How old was this big incense cedar?
Canyonville is also about the people we've known there for years. Here are Bongie and Joy with our dear friends Phil and Bub Rich.
The area we call Fern Draw on the back side of our land, taken in late (cold) 2018...kinda magical, no?
Moving to Lewis & Clark College: last spring our ENVS Program sponsored a series of field trips offering students the opportunity to engage across difference over natural resource issues in Oregon. This one, in the Tillamook State Forest, explored forest management controversies...
...while this one brought students together with ranchers from central Oregon. Many thanks to our collaborating orgs, Healthy Democracy and Oregon Humanities, who routinely practice conversation-based engagement.
Our Environmental Studies Program graduating class of 2018 endured a whole year of me coaxing them through their senior capstones...
...which some were invited to present at our national Association for Environmental Studies & Sciences conference in Washington DC!
A few extended family pix: here's sister Mary, who treated me to the Eugene Ballet (Peer Gynt) before moving to Tacoma to live closer to her young granddaughter.
Mary and son Peter with Joy and Elise at Elise's restaurant (Lucca, in NE Portland).
Here's Vivian the sparkplug with her mom Naomi and grandma Mary.
My friend Krista and I had several adventures this year, in Portland (here at the Rose Garden) and beyond.
One inspiring adventure with Krista was to the MLK Jr. Memorial in DC...my first time.
Now on to the Big Trip of 2018 to Killarney Ireland, where I joined others for the international GLOBE Learning Expedition, exploring possible connections for our ENVS Program and ACCF. First, though, a bike tour down the west coast of Ireland!
I'm looking happy in this photo, but actually my butt was pretty sore...hadn't built up the proper calluses for the adventure.
The GLOBE Learning Expedition brought students together from throughout the world, and though the emphasis was on field-based environmental science, evenings were filled with cultural exchange.
I was assigned to a field site near the 15th century Ross Castle. (Just what ACCF needs on our land in southern Oregon!)
GLE participants doing field-based transects and related vegetation, soil, and microclimate measurements. GLOBE uses these common protocol with students, well, across the globe...a wonderful opportunity to think geographically, and to consider a world of pattern and difference.
Now back in PDX, celebrating our baby Elise's 31st birthday...wow. This is now an annual Big Event organized by sister Joy, event designer extraordinaire. Recently Joy has been spending as much time in France and Morocco and gosh knows where as Portland. She's been super successful, but it's tiring work and I think she wants to be more of a homebody...see our plan for that at end of slideshow.
One joint research/education initiative I launched a few years ago that now reaches undergraduate students across the country is called EcoTypes (jimproctor.us/ecotypes), exploring environmental ideas. Students in my intro course did three-way debates based on EcoTypes application topics this fall.
In fall the ENVS Program also welcomed Daryl Davis to campus for a packed Symposium keynote on his risky work engaging with members of the KKK—one of many inspirations for the Environment Across Boundaries theme infusing Symposium, our ENVS curriculum, and other opportunities for ENVS students at Lewis & Clark College.
My highlight of fall was West Coast Kojosho camp in PDX, where we welcomed Chief Instructor Fred Absher and other senior black belts to work alongside undergrad students John Knight and I teach weekly via a Lewis & Clark PE course.
After camp we took a light-suffused walk through the Japanese Garden in Portland.
John teaching our Beginning Kojosho PE course, here doing animal postures. Kojosho blends hard and soft elements of karate, with a lifetime of learning opportunities—you may know I've been hooked for nearly 35 years.
This is my longstanding Kojosho workout spot in Washington Park overlooking PDX. Beagle Bailey and I used to run up the hill and work out every morning!...now it's just me.
Back to my medical condition...and please don't worry! I have had a lot of time to see beautiful things from airplanes this year, while building a world-class medical team from the most cutting-edge myeloma research institutions in the U.S.
The main one this fall has been the University of Alabama at Birmingham, chief sponsors of a clinical trial exploring aggressive treatment and monitoring for multiple myeloma. Ten years ago, MM was pretty much a death sentence; now it could be called a long-term chronic disease, and clinical trials like this one are even venturing the possibility of a cure.
Since mid-November I have been getting weekly infusions at UAB's Kirklin Clinic. So far, very few worrisome side effects and no limitations on my day to day...I am so grateful for this opportunity to be on the cutting edge of myeloma research and treatment.
Here's a rather woozy me during my first treatment. Now that they know I'm okay with the drugs they speed it up considerably, and I can do it all via one night away from home. And, in January, we are hopeful that the clinical trial will finally land at OHSU (Portland)...much simpler. It's been a bit unreal, as I have no overt symptoms, in part as it was caught very early and I'm super healthy, thank goodness.
One of many benefits of my sojourn in Birmingham has been getting to know Gerda Carmichael, an 88 year old artist, fellow Unitarian (that's how we connected), and veritable force of nature. Living with Gerda means living in a house literally filled with art!...and wonderful conversation.
Birmingham is known for its deep, sad, inspiring racial history. As I walk Birmingham and hear of its continued struggles (the recent Hoover police shooting happened just a few miles away), I realize that we Portlanders deploy the word justice far too easily.
The famous 16th Street Baptist Church, a main gathering point for the civil rights movement in Birmingham—and, sadly, the site of the bombing death of four girls in 1963.
Did I hear that Alabama has a certain football team?? I did get the opportunity to watch pub fans watch the Crimson Tide come from behind to beat Georgia....little wonder "Roll Tide" is known to be uttered at the end of prayers around here.
My sweet students sent me a card!...somehow they managed this fall amidst my various treatments and trips. I guess we are both super resilient.
2019 will hopefully witness the selling of my historic condo in PDX. All the twists and turns Joy, Elise, and I have been through have led us to discuss establishing a Proctor compound in Portland, with Joy and Bongani living in the main house, Elise using the basement as a possible art/living/Airbnb studio, and me building a small accessory dwelling unit for myself. As this listing suggests, we tried in 2018, but alas!...no luck.
So I moved back into my place mid-2018, and decided that the realtors' baby blue just wasn't my color—thankfully Mary, Naomi, and Joy helped transform the living room into something a bit more manly.
One reason my place didn't sell was that our 111 year old condo was in desperate need of a makeover. Here is the entrance to my place, now stripped to the bone for the first time in ages...
...and, after months and months of disruption, here is the old-new Irving Classic Condominiums! (Mine's on the top at right.) This, and recent completion of some nice condos next door, bodes well for a successful sale in 2019...here's hoping for a Proctor family compound sometime soon.
Finally: with all my comings and goings this fall, the guitar calluses on my fingers are pretty much gone. Here's also to a 2019 with more music in my life, a way to sing about—sometimes to escape—the world we all face today. I'm wishing each of you happiness, peace, and productive engagement with our world in 2019...it's not the world we may want, but it's up to us to make it the world we want.