I’ve been wanting to walk the secret concrete canyon for a long time. This is the home of the nine blue sheep, my very favorite piece of Kansas City street art. I mentioned it in my 816 poem. Pretty soon I’ll going to edit out some of my better poems so they look more like a music video instead of me just standing in one place where viewers get bored. You can vote me when I get a Kickstarter project put together for this. Here’s the 816 poem that mentions the secret concrete canyon and introduces my love of Kansas City street art.

How the Secret Concrete Canyon got drained to house Kansas City street art:

Melissa Estelle checks out the Turkey Creek diversion tunnel on the ACME Explore the Urban Core ride

In the 816 poem I talk about “Turkey Creek, that got tunneled underground to build the busiest freight train hub in the nation, to build a secret concrete canyon blooming beyond Kansas City street art.” The Secret Concrete Canyon is in the historic Turkey Creek riverbed. There’s a diversion tunnel on the ridge between Turkey creek and the Kansas River that my friends and I have ridden to go explore. The diversion tunnel moves the whole channel of Turkey Creek so it drains into the Kansas River. I thought at one point that the diversion tunnel had moved the Creek Bed all the way across the city.

Then one day I was at the library and saw a 1909 map of the city, with railroad lines running through that canyon through the middle of town. I thought, “Well, the diversion tunnel says 1909 on it, so was there a previous tunnel?” I finally had time one day at the library and went to the Missouri Valley room on the fifth floor of Kansas City’s gorgeous downtown library.

I don’t know how librarians do this sometimes, but I asked a vague question like, “Doyou have anything that would tell me about how Turkey Creek built the route for trains but now there are just trains there?”

The nine blue sheep, my very favorite piece of Kansas City street art.

She said, “Well, we have a Turkey Creek file on micofilm.” So I looked through these old 1909 newspaper articles and found stories about the West Bottoms flooding all the time because of Turkey Creek. They showed one picture where the stockyards down there had gone under water and the cows all floated into the river. Then cowboys rode their horses to swim into the river for a bounty for each head of cattle they got get to swim out after the horses. Must have been pretty well trained horses. The pictures showed tons and tons of people on the bridges just standing watching all this action going swimmingly.

It turned out that Turkey Creek was shifted from draining into the Blue River to now draining in the Kansas River by a process known as stream capture. This happened in geologic times before the European settlers came to the region. However, the diversion tunnel was built in 1915 to shift Turkey Creek about a mile so that it drains a little earlier into the Kansas River to prevent flooding.  The city of Kansas City kept wanting to build this but not getting it done. Finally the city of Rosedale (now Kansas City, KS), ponied up the money by asking the railroad companies to pay for part of it. Their logic was that the railroads would gain more usable land by reducing the flooding and Rosedale would get a place to drain sewage away from their city.

Brian Galley in the Secret Concrete Canyon blooming beyond with Kansas City Street Art

So mystery solved and I still wanted to walk the length of the secret concrete canyon. However, at one point I got in a fight with a train cop that help me realize I had a few issues with PTSD. I had to wait until my probation was over before I could do the adventure, and finally a day came along when Brian and I both had the time, probably the coldest day in our very mild winter this year.

He said it was about a mile and we dodged the trains until one finally came along that we didn’t hear and we couldn’t help but get spotted. Brian said, “Oh, don’t worry, we’re fine.” Eventually I realized that I was kinda flashing back to that fight with the train cop and just scared.

I told Brian, “My Gt the F— out of Here Meter went off a long time ago. But I’m trusting you on this one.”

He said, “Don’t worry. I have the same Get the F— out of Here Meter, but mine hasn’t gone off at all yet.” So we stayed and walked the whole length of the canyon and had a fine adventure that ended that afternoon at Arthur Bryants barbecue. Here’s the whole set of pictures of this incredible Kansas City street art on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/human_hand/sets/72157629067063186/

Do you like Kansas City street art? What’s your favorite piece?

What winning the Olympic Trials Taught Me about Trauma-Informed Care (part 2 of 3)

Corinna West

…..After I won the Olympic trials, I wasn’t happy. I was scared. I was horrified. My main opponent in the trials had been the only athlete in U.S. Judo history to have medaled at both the World Championships and the Olympics. I lost the first day of the trials after a questionable referee’s call. Because I had gone into the trials as the number one ranked athlete, we had a two out of three fight-off the next day. I won both of those matches by split decision, and both were very close with no scores.

Groundfighting with Lynn Roethke at the 1996 Olympic Trials before earning my "I'm a Walking Miracle" pin

The scariest thing for me was realizing how near I had come to giving up.

I told my fiancé at the time, “I probably wouldn’t have had the guts to pull it out if it had gone to a third match.” The trials were featured on ESPN, and the commentator said that my performance might have required the most heart of all the people who made the team. However, it felt terrible to me. There was something I had wanted so much, something that meant the whole world to me, and I had almost given up. Winning the Olympic trials was a positive event, but I also had some very negative feelings.

My recovery story and how “I’m a walking miracle:”

In a way, this parallels the greater battle that came later for me. I was labeled with a mental illness five years after I stopped competing, and given a total of twelve diagnoses, a few of which might have been accurate. I was very sick for a long time, and now I am not. Now I have a great life with many close friends, joyful hobbies, housing I’m proud of, and exciting, ever expanding career possibilities.

But there was a time when I was dangerously ill that I had none of that. I had given up on my dreams and thought that none of what I wanted was ever possible again. I thought for sure that I was going to be one of the 15% of people with serious mental illness that die by suicide, and that I wasn’t going to make it to my 30th birthday. For a very tough time in my life, I was willing to do whatever it takes to make this happen. There’s a line from one of my poems that explains this feeling, “…that place where I decided there’s nothing left. I thought my life and my family and my career were over….”

Tinna Bendt shows off her "I'm a Walking Miracle" pin at the 2011 Kansas Recovery Conference

I made six suicide attempts, and this is another fight that I almost lost. I earned a button during the certified peer specialist training that says, “I’m a walking miracle,” and I truly am. I have a line in one of my poems about one of the suicide attempts that said, “I was trying to hang myself in the barn, when saved by the one 30-second chance that the neighbor walked in.” It was indeed that close.

I performed this poem for a crisis handling training this spring for our whole agency. I told them about this time in my life where only several miracles had saved me. I told the story so powerfully that I put myself back into it. I hadn’t fully realized how close things actually were. I have a poem, that partly says,

“…Scarred in the hard for the lack of regard for the best yet to come.
Learn not to succumb so that could still become
This powerful fierce human. Being…”

Here’s the video of that poem earning my I’m a Walking Miracle Pin in my certified peer specialist job:

Can you say “I’m a Walking Miracle?” Tell us how you earned personal power by overcoming adversity.

This is an essay I wrote about two years ago, about winning Olympic Trials. This was right before I became a self-employed person. It was about the day I realized that many of my mental health problems and symptoms were coming from my past trauma experiences. I’ll be posting it in several parts since it’s long.

What winning Olympic Trials Taught Me about Trauma-Informed Care

by Corinna West

 I was a member of the 1996 Olympic Judo Team. A lot of people who find this out say, “Well, I don’t want to get you mad.” This is a complete misrepresentation of who I am. I always studied Judo as a sport and never thought about the self defense applications. The operative word in the first sentence is not “Judo,” it’s “Olympic.”  There have been 8,863 U.S. Olympians Total since 1896 when the Modern Games were reinstated. 6,649 Men, 2,214 Women. We are more rare than professional athletes.

Gripping Hannalore Brown en route to winning Olympic Trials

There is a certain mentality to all Olympic athletes. We are people who are willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top of the platform. Whether it be getting up at 4:00 a.m. to work out, finding a way to pay for training in another country, finding a way to balance work, school, and four hours of training a day, finding the right coach, anything. Ann Maria deMars, America’s first world Judo champion, told me about a survey of winning Olympic trials athletes. It asked, “If you could take a pill that would guarantee that you would win an Olympic gold medal, but you would die a year later, would you take it?” In this survey, 80% of Olympic athletes said “Yes.” That’s the kind of people we are. We’ll do anything that it takes.

Ann Maria asked me one time, “What wouldn’t you give up to win an Olympic gold medal?”

I said, “Well, maybe I wouldn’t give up my Chemistry career.” At that time I was majoring in Chemistry and wanted to do some kind of disease curing research when I graduated. I also said, “Maybe I wouldn’t give up Bill.” Bill was my boyfriend at the time and later became my first husband for 9 years. Funny thing, now I now longer have a chemistry job or Bill, but I do have a career during disease and a great fiance, Rod, Midwest Rock Lobster.

I trained for all my young adult life to be an Olympic gold medalist. I have a poem called “Because I Can,” about the Olympics, and I’ll excerpt from that,

….I train a solid year for the Olympic trials. A grant pays for morning Judo workouts
On top of the evening Judo workouts, before or after the sprints, along with the video watching
besides the mental training, and using the bicycling as transportation.
The Olympic trials are close, referee’s decisions against a stylistically difficult opponent.
It’s my innovative, aggressive, pit bull tactics against her duck, dodge, and run away.
It’s my dominating, snowboard, impose my strength and will tactics,
versus a former world and Olympic medalist.
And I won, because I believed in the work ethic.
I believed anything was possible with enough persistence.
Anything that got in the way, I just overcame the resistance.
I chose mere subsistence, and I went the distance….”

Here’s the video telling the Olympic story and about the Olympic Trials:

Feelings after winning Olympic Trials:

But after winning Olympic Trials, I wasn’t happy.

I was scared. I was horrified. My main opponent in the trials had been the only athlete in U.S. Judo history to have medaled at both the World Championships and the Olympics. I lost the first day of the trials after a questionable referee’s call. Because I had gone into the trials as the number one ranked athlete, we had a two out of three fight-off the next day. I won both of those matches by split decision, and both were very close with no scores.

The scariest thing for me was realizing how near I had come to giving up.

I told my fiancé at the time, “I probably wouldn’t have had the guts to pull it out if it had gone to a third match.” The trials were featured on ESPN, and the commentator said that my performance might have required the most heart of all the people who made the team. However, it felt terrible to me. There was something I had wanted so much, something that meant the whole world to me, and I had almost given up. Winning the Olympic trials was a positive event, but I also had some very negative feelings.

Stay tuned for the next sections of this essay about winning Olympic trials to be posted…..

Have you ever found negative feelings after something highly positive like winning Olympic Trials?

How 350.org created a social change movement that makes mental health prevention completely possible:

Here are some quotes from this speech about using art for social change movements:

“Money warps our political life, it obscures our vision, but just like with physics and chemistry, there’s no use whining. We know what we need to do. The first thing we need to do is build a movement. We will never has as much money as the oil companies, so we need a different currency to work in. We need bodies, we need creativity, we need spirit…We cannot stop their money, but we can strip them of their credibility….”

“I know that simply persuasion will not do. We need to fight non-violently and with civil disobedience….But one thing that you need to make sure, the one thing that you need to get across, is that you are not the radicals in this fight. The radicals are the people that are fundamentally altering the composition of our atmosphere. That is the most radical thing that people have ever done. We need to fight with art and with music, too. Not just the side of our brain that like bar graphs and pie charts, but with all of our brains and all of our souls. We need to fight with unity. We need to have a coherent voice. We need to speak with one loud voice. We fighting for your future….”

Sybil Noble receives Arts KC's Volunteer of the Year Award for a lifetime in the mental health social change movement

“We fight alongside our brothers and sisters around the world….Most of the people that we work with around the world are poor, and black, and brown, and Asian and young, because that’s what most of the world is made up of, and they care about the future as much as anyone else….”

“The only thing that a morally awake person can do when the worst thing is happening that can happen, is to try to change those odds. There is no guarantee that we will win, but we will fight side by long as long as we’ve got.”

How can we work differently to build our social change movement?

I found this video and thought I would go ahead and make this claim publicly. Yes, I’m a Christian poet. No, I don’t believe your spiritual tradition is wrong.  This statement has the potential to irk both my Christian friends and my non-Christian friends, but I’ll claim it. I don’t think spiritual paths are exclusive. I think a omnipotent God (or gods) could have made a revelation many different ways for many different cultures. So I feel like I can claim, “Yes, I’m a Christian poet” without invalidating anyone else.

Video from the Passion for Christ poetry team: Does anyone even know that I’m a Christian poet?

I’m a Christian poet that believes in tolerance:

I used to think my mom was a pagan for participating in the Sacred Fired Community. This is a spiritual community working to preserve the pre-Christian religions that have been in continuous practice since their beginning. These are native practices, and she mostly works with the Huichol Indians in Mexico in the mountains between Puerto Vallerta and Guadlajara. She follows Grandfather Fire, who also says, the same thing, that all religions are right. That’s a tough one for a lot of folks to agree to but the point of the Coexistance bumper stickers I’ve seen some places. Even their community has a hard time not bashing Christians some times, but I decided they could be OK if they we OK with me saying, “I’m a Christian poet.”

I have a poem about this in my earlier book, “F— yeah, I’m a Christian poet.” But now I’m trying to retire this poem since I wanted to get rid of expletives so my poems were PG rated for greater public consumption. You can email me for a copy or order the book on my web store.

I was already a Christian poet when Paul Hensley, the husband of my spiritual mentor, Margaret, took this picture of me waiting to fight in the Olympic Trials.

For about six months I lived with a very angry and bitter roommate who was a trauma survivor and like to fight with me. She used to say, “You’re not really a Christian poet.” Then she’d get on the phone and tell her friends how everyone in her life just a total jerk, just tearing people up over the phone.  I thought the boss who fired her might have been nine feet tall and ate babies for breakfast the way she talked. My finance had heard about a book at his church called, When Bad Christians Happen to Good People, about how Christians can do damage to the cause of Christ. He used this book to give that roommate the nickname, “my bad Christian roommate.” But later on she came back to me and apologized for all the hard times we had together and said that our time together had been very helpful to her and a good learning experience.  Just to show that you never know when you are making an impact.

I decided to become a believer in college after looking at some of the evidence of creationism and talking to other beleivers and particularly working with a mentor named Margaret Hensley. She worked with a nonprofit founded by Billy Graham called Navigators. Their theory was that tons of groups converted people to Christianity but few supported their growth and development and continued commitment. She’s sent me tons of books through the days and I’ve even read most of them.*

An Environmentalist who loves chemicals

As far as Creationism, I think evolution makes a ton of sense except for one thing: Where did a single celled organism come from? Because I can really believe that people came from monkeys and horses came from Eohippus, that kinda makes sense. But a single cell involves mitochondria to move energy, huge amounts of DNA in intricate spirals, cell walls, and nucleus with another wall, riboplasm, etc. all kinds of parts that you might vaguely remember from biology that are all required. There is no life before a single cell, not intermediate. It’s all or nothing.

Saying that something this hugely complex thing could randomly occur from say, lighting strikes to a primordial goo, is about as implausible as any claim made by any religion. So a Christian poet and scientist like me would of course, write a poem about this, which is featured on one of my first digital poem collages.

I got sprinkly baptized as a Catholic at 12 when I went to a Catholic school, then again when I was 22 at a Bible church in Colorado Springs. That’s another story, how I went all the way to Argentina to meet a guy who lived in the same city in Colorado as me and get me to start going to church.

 Here’s Cloudscapes, my spoken word performance that most admits that I’m a Christian poet:

It’s about Brenda Day, who was my best friend and training partner going into the 1996 Olympics. She also helped me get started as a wrestler and took me on police officer ride alongs three different times. She took me practical handgunning, where she shot target popping up out of the woods and had to not shoot at civilian targets. She got me started on a soccer team with the funny moment where the coach, Ginger, said, “She’s such an incredible athlete, just learning soccer so quickly.” She said it so much and was so astonished that finally I had to correct her and tell her that I’d played five seasons of youth soccer as a kid. I miss my friend Brenda. If mental health services were “lifetime,” and it wasn’t so stigmatizing to get help, maybe she’d still be here.

* Shh… don’t tell Margaret I haven’t read quite all the books she mailed me yet. Or that I might admit other traditions are right.**

** Shh…don’t tell my mom  the same thing. Like competitors or something for my soul.

Are you a Christian poet, too? What works for you in your spiritual journey?

“I am young, involved and in control of my destiny.
I am free, powerful, hopeful, and people like me…. there are many.
Sixty pushups, a six mile run, or sixty miles to Lees Summit.
I can get there with no gas – I’ll watch OPEC plummet.
Setbacks I take ‘em, with pancakes and bacon
Whipped cream on my coffee, and let life just come through me.
This world I do give a damn, thought I’m not the man
I do have a plan, and power, and a way….”

This is an excerpt from one my earlier poems called “I Pay No Gas Taxes.”  My plan, power, and way is to unite the mental health advocacy community with the bicycle pedestrian advocacy communities. I use interactive performances combining spoken word poetry, audience engagement, and statistical information about the importance of exercise for mental wellness. I’ve ridden my bicycle the 200 – 300 miles each way from Kansas City to Wichita, KS, Lake of the Ozarks, MO, and Omaha, NE for mental health conferences.

People at the conferences say, “I didn’t know you could ride a bicycle that far,” or “Thanks for showing me a new possibility.” Physical wellness and exercise are extremely important topics in the mental health community. People who have been diagnosed with a “serious mental illness” have a 25 year lower life expectancy than people without that diagnosis, mainly due to preventable cardiovascular risk factors. Transportation is often the biggest hurdle for people with disabilities, and active transportation is a crucial solution to both problems. Mixing advocacy approaches is essential to solving our community problems.

How I’ve been mixing advocacy approaches in mental health advocacy and bicycle pedestrian advocacy work

Brian Galmeyer, a veteran of mixing advocacy approaches and changing broken spokes

One of  the first presentations I put together was called “Building America: Changing Lives and Communities with Active Transportation.” It included statistics, spoken word or performance poems, and an indoor scavenger hunt or wellness discussion activity based on the alley kat races held by bike messengers and urban cyclists. I went around and performed this workshop at 4 of the 7 community mental health centers in metro Kansas City. People wrote on their evaluations concrete action plans, like, “I will promise myself something and go after it,” or “Go back to an activity I was happy with,” or “I plan to contact the government and president about mental health.”

In 2008 at the national mental health consumer conference in Buffalo, NY, 650 people at the conference had the opportunity to learn more about the power of active transportation. The program was called, “informative and inspirational” and “the most interactive workshop I attended at the whole conference.” One person said, “I really like the ideas about how improving life for a group improves the whole society.” The Building America presentation contains a powerful and mobilizing assertion that bicycle pedestrian advocacy improves the life of even inactive motorists, just as civil rights improves the lives of white people, women’s liberation frees men as well, and mental health advocacy improves the lives of people without any disabilities. This is an idea first developed by Saul Alinsky, one of the first “radicals” and community organizers.

How art can bring people together when mixing advocacy approaches

By using spoken word poetry in my presentations, I can communicate complex ideas and emotion in a much more dense form. One of the very first presentations I did was about  competing in the Olympics in Judo. I put together a 60 minute talk with 32 slides. Then later I wrote a spoken word poem about the experience. My 7 1/2 poem had more images, stories, and a lot more emotion than the 60 minute talk. This is what I mean by density.

I have a poem called “I Am Urban,” about experiences relating to the world during her everyday bike commute. “….I slide through the glide as ride. I greet who I meet with a bell and a wave. All the teachers at Crestview say hi when I ride by. I ring for the suits at the Max stop at city market…”  In 2008  this poem was incorporated into a kickoff party to launch a program called KC Fit Net. This was a walking challenge sponsored in collaboration with Corinna’s former employer, Mental Health America of the Heartland, and the seven Kansas City community mental health centers.

Brian and I rode through a tornado on our first trip to Wichita and saw this hail

Twenty five mental health service recipients from each of the eight agencies were given a pedometer and helped to track steps to increase their walking for a three month period. We helped people to log their steps into the website and to encourage people to keep walking. The leading walker from her agency gave a speech at the awards ceremony at the end describing all the things she discovered when she started walking.

“I walked through Loose Park everyday,” she said. “I saw a hawk that lives in this park in the middle of he city. I got to say hi to the same people with their strollers each day. I saw the leaves change, and I got to enjoy the crisp air. I got my nephew walking, and we worked on our recovery together.” Some of the other 200 people who participated in the program talked about losing weight, sleeping better, improving their diabetes, needing less medications, and finding a new sense of peace and accomplishment with the simple act of walking more.

Mixing advocacy approaches was crucial to my recovery from 12 mental health diagnoses.

I am still passionate about active transportation because it was one of the things that helped me recover from 12 mental health diagnoses.  Sometimes I can sum up the story by saying, “I was really ill for a long time, and now I am not,” I tell people. “Now I have a great life with an exciting full time job, lots of friends, engaging hobbies, and place I am proud to live.” I attribute cycling with much of this change. In the mental health field there is a concept called personal medicine, developed by Pat Deegan. Personal medicine is both the reasons we find for wanting to stay well and the things we do in order to stay well. Pill medicine is what we take, but personal medicine is what we do.

I love helping people find what works for them to stay well. This is what we talk about now in our Poetry for Pesonal Power events that I’m doing across Missouri.  We have students talk about what helps them get through tough times in their lives. Some of the students come up with really amazing experiences. Mixing advocacay approaches helps me to constantly know of fresh ways to see problems.

How have you found success by mixing advocacy approaches?  Tell us a funny story: