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Many gatherings, conferences, festivals, and so on have been canceled or rescheduled in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I expect many more to do so in the coming months. It is the best and most responsible choice in this crisis. I am involved in a wide range of events as an attendee, a presenter, or an organizer. As such I have a fairly comprehensive sense of how these events work and the amount labor, resources, and money that go into these community gatherings. Having recently been involved in the process of canceling or rescheduling events, I have answered a prodigious number of questions that have reminded me of the need to share more of the nuts and bolts and nitty-gritty. Not all of what I share will apply to every event or cover every situation but will be generally true for many.

It was Monday, January 5th, 2015. I was working on a blog about daily practices when my brother sent me a message on Facebook. It simply and succinctly said "If you want to see dad, you better come now". If you've ever gotten that call or email, you know that life completely slows down and goes really fast all at the same time. I've tried to describe the feeling to folks that haven't had this experience and the closest thing I can compare it to is suddenly finding yourself underwater trying to have a conversation with a world full of people that are still on dry land.

The next twenty-four hours were a blur of phone calls and airports and moments of snatched sleep and worry and sitting awkwardly between two strangers and hurtling through the air at several hundred miles an hour. When I finally breathed fresh air again, I was seven thousand miles from home, in New Zealand, and just like that winter had turned to summer and the east was in the west and the moon was upside down.

Dear Friends,

Effective immediately, please stop telling me to delegate.

Thanks so much.

I'd like to talk about some troubling attitudes toward holistic health and healing. Beth Lynch wrote her own entry about this topic and received a troubling comment that pretty much embodies everything that Camille and Beth were talking about in their respective posts. I'm not going to rehash everything that I said in my comments to the person there, but I would like to discuss what really worries me when people start going on woo alone.

Is there a mind-body connection? Yes, absolutely. However, the people I know who are /actual/ healers working with the mind/body connection [in my personal experiences with hypnotherapy, reiki, etc.] have never discouraged me from using western medicine. You know why?