J a n H a r t ' s
HartNews & Writings
- Essays, Articles, Thoughts
- Ebook, What Do You Mean I Can't Move To Costa Rica?
Current thoughts, info, connections and painting demos. At this time I am writing about my move to Costa Rica. If you would like to read these chapters, please send me an email and I'll forward them on to you.
Welcome!
New ideas and thoughts are always coming up! Students ask questions or I find something interesting on someone else's site that gets me thinking . Needing a way to communicate, I chose my site. So - here it is - my place to pass on information, tips, thoughts, etc. - about watercolor, about my life in Costa Rica, about life, politics, ......I plan to update it as often as time permits and to respond to ideas or thoughts that I may receive from you. I love writing as well as teaching and learning and I believe adamantly that art is collaborative. We need each other to further our own creativity. I want and welcome your comments and thoughts and you can easily reach me via email, jan@janhart.com
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What is HartNews?
HartNews is my attempt to write about life and watercolor from where I see it. As a teacher, I enjoy passing on some of the things I think about or do in watercolor. As a fellow human, I wish to pass on some of the things that inspire me - or make me laugh!. I send out HartNews, generally 4 times/year where I write about the things I love - Ranchito San Pedro - my home and the cabins, the studio, my fellow artists, the animals and people that share my life - and watercolor demos that I digitally record in my studio and the workshops that are coming up! If you have something you'd like add or say, just email me! and please feel free to pass this on to your friends.... If you'd like to see the back issues - just check the Archives above - more demos, e
Essays, Articles, Thoughts
Fighting Fear from Front Row Seats
August, 2010
We live in fearful times.Parker Palmer, a Quaker educator says, “Fear is the air we breathe. We subscribe to religions that exploit our dread of death. We do business in an economy of fear driven by consumer worries about keeping up with the neighbors. And we practice a politics of fear in which candidates are elected by playing on voter’s anxieties about race and class. And we continue to ‘collaborate with these structures because they promise to protect us against one of the deepest fears at the heart of being human – the fear of ….a win-lose conflict in which we could lose something of ourselves.” We fear loss. Basically, we want things to stay the same – or at least how things used to be. Many of us still cling to images of the ‘American Dream’ which appear almost as ghostlike scenes from the 50’s or even 70’s... Things were simpler then. People could count on finding a job and buying a house. Most felt that their kids would have a better life than they had. Now we are not so sure. In America everything has changed and there is widespread fear of more changes coming - at least for all except the top 10%. Fear producing words seep into our daily lives. Many of us begin each day by listening to the news on radio or watching a TV morning program. Some still get their news from a newspaper over coffee. Internet users now find news headlines popping up as they log into Google or AOL. We hear frightening news in our cars and from friends and neighbors. Fear is also burned into our memories. Most of us remember exactly what we were doing and where we were when we heard the news of Kennedy’s assassination and the 9/11 catastrophes.Perhaps the most insidious form of fear is that advanced purposefully for political gain. Fear mongering is a political tactic used to frighten citizens and influence their opinions. We in the United States first experienced it with McCarthyism and then with the drumbeat to war after 9/11. The oft-repeated phrases, ‘War on Terror’ and ‘weapons of mass destruction’ worked to create fear and coalesce a predetermined mindset favoring war. And now even our respected news sources are becoming more politicized. The fires of anger and hatred are being fanned by fear mongering talk show hosts who focus blame and shame on the disenfranchised – poor, immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims, ‘others’.Our disenfranchised numbers are growing exponentially. Middle class American workers teeter on the brink of solvency. In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks! And for the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth than all individual Americans put together. And now more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps! And this number is projected to jump to 43 million by 2011! Does anyone even know about the back door cuts to disabled living allowances that now threaten those least able to recover? Like my son. Those of us who are struggling to keep going after losing our homes or jobs or health are left incredulous as we hear shouts to continue tax cuts for the wealthy in the same breath with efforts to cut remaining social safety nets. Sure, we might get some relief with healthcare when the bill goes into effect in 2014 – if we can hang on ‘til then. Single, older women like me are especially vulnerable. Among women over the age of 65, 11.9 percent are currently below the poverty line. Without social security benefits that percentage will rise to nearly 50%! 1 How can any rational, feeling person not see all of this as absolute insanity?! Maybe they think it can’t happen to them. There is, after all still a pervasive cultural myth in the US known as ‘The American Success Syndrome’ that suggests if you don’t have lots of money, connections, social power and success in business or the professional world, you just aren’t working hard enough. Please get real.
A personal story of getting real I am one of the lucky ones. Fear and loss and realness came upon me early and forced me to start thinking about some new approaches. I was single and 54 year old.I woke up in May, 1996 in pain. My skin even hurt! I got up and showered but knew that something was fearfully wrong. Living alone in my beloved Ranchito San Pedro I called a friend to take me to the local clinic. Unable to afford health insurance then I depended upon a local sliding scale clinic for my medical needs. By the end of the day I had been sent on to the local hospital emergency room and then rushed to a Santa Fe hospital where I underwent emergency surgery to try to identify the cause of an overwhelming bacterial infection centered in my spine and threatening my life. An antibiotic resistant strain of Staph! (I had unknowingly contracted this staph infection during a previous back surgery 18 years before and my body had kept it isolated.) 6 1/2 weeks and 3 surgeries later I emerged with a tortoise shell brace, a walker and a quarter of a million dollar medical debt. Having no health insurance or follow up care I depended on friends and the generosity of other artists who helped raise some money to cover my rent and living expenses while I healed. Paying off my medical debt was out of the question and I was forced into bankruptcy. (A study reported in the American Journal of Medicine found that illness and medical bills contribute to a large and increasing share of US bankruptcies 2) A big wake up call of change and fear for a basically optimistic person who had always enjoyed good health and worked hard for a fairly stable lifestyle!
I began to fear the future....
First I had to get past denial. If I don’t listen to the news or talk to others I can believe that everything is just fine! This was one of the coping mechanisms taught to me by my mother. In their later years my parents nearly wore out their video copies of ‘Mary Poppins’ and ‘Sound of Music’ so that they could stay happy!. Personally, I think that Denial and its next door neighbor, Distraction are perfectly fine short term strategies. But in the long run they don’t help you move forward. Eventually the rational mind will try to find appropriate actions to take. I once bought the book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway just to have it in my bookshelf. I never read it. I pretty much knew what it said inside and I just appreciated the reminder!
The next 12 years brought more changes as I struggled to fight my way back to success and the Middle Class. I taught watercolor, hosted workshops, got a loan to buy my New Mexico home and published a book. But my pre-existing condition made me unable to qualify for health insurance. When additional surgeries were needed I again fell into medical debt. I refinanced my mortgage to pay. The last refinancing was in response to one of the almost daily unrequested phone calls that I received from mortgage lenders just 2 months after my last surgery. Later I found out they were called ‘Predatory lenders’ and that they obviously had access to my private financial information. Suddenly I was living in a financial ‘house of cards’. At the base of the balancing act was a mortgage swollen by medical debt - a shaky foundation. The entire structure was contingent upon continued good health, optimum rentals for the casitas and plenty of students for workshops and classes. At 65 I had a small social security income but the $670/month would be impossible to live on. I had Medicare – but my last surgery for degenerative disk diseases still left me $3000 in debt. My savings were minimal – just for emergencies. So, in the pre dawn moments of early 2008, as my sleepy mind sifted through my ‘what if’ list, I felt an initial jolt of warning – like the first tremor of an earthquake. All it would take is one slip on the ice covered porch outside my front door for the entire, magical house of cards to come tumbling down. While watching television a few nights later I saw the too familiar economic line graph showing a rise followed by the precipitous downward turn and it occurred to me that I could superimpose that graph over my accumulated ‘wealth’ of things! Instead of ‘supersizing’ my life, I would ‘downsize it’! I would make the pre-emptive strike for a manageable life before I was forced to live in the rubble! I found online and signed up for a tour, Live in Costa Rica on Your Social Security and a few months later walked into the little Tico house in southern Costa Rica, with the only horizontal surface other than the floor being the toilet seat – and I knew it was perfect. Here was my blank canvas for the creation of a new downsized lifestyle. Here I might be able to live just on social security. As soon as I embraced the idea it became kind of fun. Like – how could I make enough money to move myself, two dogs and four parrots to Costa Rica? 5 huge garage sales showed me how to let go of stuff I thought I’d never part with. When my sons decided they didn’t want the old, unsorted photographs – they got thrown out. I gave away paintings and clothes and furniture I couldn’t sell. Each time I would feel a twinge as I let go and then turned my attention to the next thing. I decided to walk away from my house that wouldn’t sell. My goal was to get enough money to take as little as possible to Costa Rica and start over - simply. At the same time my house moved into foreclosure I took my first solo steps into my new life in a new country. It was Christmas Eve, 2008 and I had just turned 66.
In 2010 I feel safer and more secure - but not yet fearless.
Continued. If you would like to read the second part, please email me here.