THE NOVA CONVENTION (A REWRITE, CIRCA 2005)

MARK LUNSFORD, MOHAMMAD ALI, VICTIM ADVOCATES EN MASS AND SILVER WRAPPED OBSIDIAN:

A REWRITE

NOVATUES
At Nova, the (National Organization of Victim Advocates) On Tues
Today I'm feeling the pinches of my new shoes. I’m recovering. The tiny evidence of functionality is flowering in the weedy field of my mind. I'm reminded of what Mohamed Ali said about his head injury. He said that he was not a different person that he thought about the same things in the same way. "I'm just slower” he said.
By all accounts I have pulled off a miracle recovery. I've gone from being a heart transplant candidate who couldn't stand up to do the dishes, to resuming more or less normal activity. Most of my tests are normal. I'm reminded this week that I could barely talk after the initial exposure to the anthrax and other toxic chemicals.
I became autistic after having Rumatic fever as a baby.
I stumble around in a daze for my first twenty years, looking for myself. I had a problem with misplacing things.
I popped awake in my twenties, like popcorn going off. I got a job in radio.
I was (and still am) hypersensitive to sound and music. I spent much of my childhood laying in the dark with the radio on or messing around with the guitar and piano. The radio was a natural bit of follow through for me. But it was more than I expected. It was a complete peak experience for me.
When I was on the air I was awake and aware for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by my own voice and my own vibrations. My more kinetics friends told me that they had never seen a more active job; I was moving so much, getting records and commercials on the air, segueing records, answering phones, talking up-beat and down, rolling around on my wheeled desk chair in multi-task, tuning things up, turning things down and pulling the microphone in to talk. It was six hours of rapture a night. All free-fall and bungee jump.
After the toxic exposure I relapsed into a poison mug slump of mind. I was living in slow motion again. I could barely get from one minute to the next without getting lost in a maze of detail. It was a return to a kind of autism I had forgotten.
Out of the fog I started to construct a radio studio in my home. I don't remember deciding to do this. I just started to build a studio. I could barely talk. I started doing a radio show. Slowly I became oriented again, oriented enough to talk and take stock of where I was and how I got there.
That was in 1998.
I tape recorded my progress. That POD Cast of sorts became "The Little Radio Station at the Back of Your Mind."
What has this got to do with NOVA in 2005?
I'm not sure. I volunteered to work the conference since I couldn’t afford to go any other way. I used to be a victim advocate. Now I was even more so, without so much as lifting and eyebrow.
It's been like building another radio station in my mind. After almost a decade of recovery I am beginning to remember who I am and how I got here. I am a survivor. I am an advocate. I am a volunteer.
Today I got myself on the road on time.
I was early for the conference.
I had gotten myself to Orlando. The confetti snowed all around my mind in celebration.
I tossed my keys on the front seat and started to unload things. I was thinking about what was coming up when the soft and ominous click of the door behind me woke me up. I set my backpack on the ground and tugged on the door.
It was locked.
After fencing with the car with a coat hanger for a half hour, I decided to call for road service. The only phone card phone in the lobby of the hotel (the wrong one) wasn't working well. It was noisy. I had to scream, literally to be heard. "THAT'S Z AS IN ZEBRA. A AS IN APPLE. ....." The road service finally got my name.
By the time I had spelled my name, everybody at the conference knew it.
Welcome back to the world.
That started day one.
Everyone knew my name at the plaza.
The Pop-A-Lock guy couldn't have been nicer.
He was into the car in less than two minutes.
It was 11 a.m. by the time I got to the conference.
People were great. I got my NOVA bag and lime green volunteer t-shirts. I got my Frisbee and mug with "RAPE" in big boldface letters on them. The black mug especially got my attention. In smaller letters was the word "prevent."
I had my coffee in it. I looked at it every time I sipped. It reminded me about the national situation concerning sexual assault issues. I used to be a member of NCASA, The National Coalition Against Sexual Assault. Not much had changed since then. I was hoping to move to a time when the words and actions got equal emphasis on my mug and my life. We were still responding to crisis in the world.
I tried to imagine drinking from this cup at my local tea shop. That is not a complaint. I'm happy to get mugged.
I'm just enormously grateful for the effort and impact of the grass roots movement in the 1960s and 1970s. I am grateful for the work of my grandmother, aunts and their friends through the 1930s and 1940s as they segued into the 1950s and 1960s. My mom and sisters are a big influence, as are my nieces and girlfriends.
Through the 80s into the new century it has been a painful and glorious learning experience. The advice from then is as crystal clear and relevant as the advice I got at the NOVA conference, a constant balancing of influences as we work with what we have. Communication has come a long way round. We've got a long way to go to.
I worked the silent auction booth with extraordinary people.
Survivors and advocates volunteered. The people who could not really afford to attend in any other way.
I enjoyed the contact with professionals. I'm beginning to remember that I use to do this for a living. It was eight years ago. I look less professional now. More like a puppy dog after a bath. I’m still getting it together. I'd like to do it again. I found out the other day that there are no male victim advocates in the State of Florida.
As a Boulder County Mental Health Center Certified Rape Crisis Counselor I remember the conflicts that some people felt having men on the team.
People arrived at the conference all morning to register.
The table was closed over lunch.
The most vivid moment of the day was when Mark Lunsford, the reborn father, survivor, advocate and activist came up to the desk. He had lost his young daughter to kidnapping and sexual assault. I recognized him right away, of course. His long hair and easy style had been all over the news.
The weight of attention in the last year must have been incredible for him. He had aged around the eyes.
I thought about what it must be like for him.
Unimaginable.
The place was filled with up-front survivors and family members who carry the weight of what has happened to them and their loved ones public manner. Mark Lunsford held the keynote and the initiative with Jessica’s Law.
I was inspired by that, and the sense of rightness that rode his back like angel wings.
Wings are heavy, I decided.
Especially the ones hung on us by other people.
"I don't know how I do what I do," he told me as he walked away.
"I just do it."
"Thank you Mr. Lunsford" I said.
It was a hand on the ground confirmation of the real people grouping here, and the real tragedies we have endured on the way to activism.
Entry for August 25, 2006

NOVAThurs
I had a great time at the silent auction. It was really good to be busy. I miss work. I miss hobnobbing with the great people we have in this field.
I got home around midnight after a quiet drive down the interstate. Thursday was my day. I had a late start. It was like a kid’s board game. I took every wrong turn possible. It was insane. I kept my sense of humor and made it to the conference and parked. As I was walking in, Mark Lunsford was walking out.
He looked completely refreshed, gentle and smiling. It was nice to see him again. I had missed his key-note.
As it turned out I got to my anti-terrorism session late, but I got the big bang out of it that creates and settles universes. It was good to be in the up-scale and active world of survivors of terrorist attacks.
There are a lot of us.
I made it to the session on doing groups for sexually abused girls. It was a good model. It was the same one that we used in Waianae at the Sex Abuse Clinic there before I got hurt. I had the chill of memory go up my spine.
At break I picked up a piece of jewelry I had silver-wrapped at the marketplace.
The jeweler’s name is Valerie Kay Frayed from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
The pieces she had on display were silver wrapped chandelier crystals from the 1930s and 1940s. She had leaded glass from the last three centuries in her collection.
I used to look for similar pieces in antique stores in Honolulu when I lived there.
They have a quieting quality to them.
There is something about the lead in the crystal that makes them very similar to volcanic glass. They have a really nice resonance, but what had really caught my eye was the tremendous silver work that she did.
I was really happy to see her kiosk and bright smile.
She uses more than one gauge of wire on any given piece. The pieces are tremendously wrapped in silver or gold wire. They were very beautiful. I had a piece wrapped in silver ($18) and picked it up. It was a piece of rainbow obsidian I had with me. I like the way obsidian resonates with the throat and heart. When I have taccacardia. It really calms my heart-beat.
I had it wrapped it in red magnetic wire, because that is what I had at the time.
As I put on the newly wrapped piece around my neck and walked away, I felt a tremendous surge in my central nervous system, everything balanced and went calm. I am fairly sensitive to my neurology because I've had to be. The wrapping she did created a great bio-circuit around the stone.
It was so accurate to the map of my central nervous system that I had to go back and ask her about it.
It turns out that she is a Rieki master as well as a jeweler. Her designs are biophysical as well as beautiful. They are nice pieces for working balance and stress. They are also great for opening blocked parts of the body, parts of the body that lack circulation or feeling.
She has my highest recommendations. You can contact her at Frayer Designs, http://www.frayerdesigns.com/ or 225-755-8892.
The necklace is a nice reminder of the conference, a conference about opening channels and strengthening the right things.
My own situation has gotten more complicated as a result of attending the conference. The cyber-stalking situation I live with is more intense. The hacking on my computer is more malicious. But I feel stronger and more supported this week despite the increase of harassment that extended into the conference itself. There were many law enforcement people there. I felt validated by their observations.
I also feel more aggressive. It’s amazing how anger and compassion can go together sometimes. How power can come from facing fear. How strength can come out of weakness.
Thank you all, and the national NOVA office, who gave a boost to this blog and others and for allowing me to find these things in myself again. Thank you for the conference and the ability to attend. Thank you for the support and company.

WensNOVA
I was awed today by the efforts of so many survivors to communicate their experiences and inspired by how well they succeeded.
It was as clear as a rubbed Tibetan bell, the hum.
I was thinking as I listened to Coco O'Conner and her husband talk about what happened to them and how good it felt to hear things that I could closely identify with. It was not that the details of the stories were similar, their situation is horrific and unique, but in the impact, after effects and the coping involved in dealing with their tragedies are the key similarities of struggle and pain.
It was not chowder talk.
It was not common.
It was intimate and appreciated.
It’s not that I don’t think about these things on a daily basis, but to hear it outside of my head was church bells at a funeral of sorts. I can move through, never on, but through.
Today is my day to focus.
It’s time to twist the lens in and snap away.
It was a day not to miss any detail.
It was a day on motor-drive.
It was nonstop until it ended.
I worked during the closing address. Hearing the applause and occasional tears as the conference came to a close. I couldn’t hear the closing remarks, only the reactions.
And so it is in the therapy world I’m trying to return to.
You never hear the quiet cracking of the egg shells, only the reflection of the pressure that causes them to crack.
Driving home on the dark interstate, I didn’t get lost. I got home.