Pip Cornall is the author of Sustainable Masculinity and delivers a highly successful male violence prevention program. For the last three years, he has also worked closely with Grace Gawler and her cancer patients. Together, they write books and present workshops.

This article speaks to his experience and observations as a support professional in cancer work. He writes because he is terribly upset witnessing good people with cancer making bad decisions that have cost some their lives. His experience with Grace shows that clients who work closely with her have a much better chances of success.

Once upon a time I held very different views. In 1971 I owned a health food eatery in a small Australian surfing town. New to ‘health foods’ I proselytised everybody about the benefits of eating vegetarian. An avid Rodale junkie; in a few short years I became a ‘born again natural food fundamentalist.’ I soon sold my shop and bought a little plot of land in the mountains behind Byron Bay, to go ‘organic.’ I fervently believed in the power of nature to heal our bodies and I mistrusted western medicine. As much as I wanted to believe totally in the nature path, gradually evidence that came my way worked against it.

So I changed? Time is an amazing teacher—it mellows one like fine wine. With time I’ve seen that elements of the nature-health movement was about as fundamentalist as the western medicine I’d mistrusted. As an ‘older’ person you’ve been around a while—you’ve watched things against the backdrop of time—you see what works and what doesn’t. There is no substitute for time!

Three years ago my world changed requiring further adjustments to my ideology. I entered the cancer healing world. Assisting Grace Gawler with her cancer patients, I became privy to a fast growing trend. Many patients had put their faith in extreme diets widely promoted via books and the internet. I saw how they became lulled by nature-cure ideology while simultaneously their bodies were silently ravaged as the cancer spread. These diets included Gerson, vegan, raw and various combinations. They had become nature fundamentalists like me, ignoring contrary evidence and exceptions to the rule.

Because of my belief in nature I’d desperately wanted to see people curing themselves by following the natural path—but I haven’t—and it rocked my foundations like a force 7 earthquake. That was also Grace’s experience in decades of cancer work. In the mid seventies, at the tender age of 21, she’d become full time care giver for her boyfriend, later husband, Ian Gawler, after he lost his leg to bone cancer.

Against all odds she persisted! When family, friends and the medical profession gave him up for dead she always maintained they’d find a cure. Demonstrating her optimism—they married when he had just 2 weeks to live. Imagine if you can; the calibre of this woman—she married a one legged man with cancer when he had two weeks to live. It wasn’t even a good relationship but she refused to desert him. They tried everything and won—he was in remission by 1978. Their story made history in Australia and birthed the famous Gawler Foundation for people with cancer. Her healing skills established, Grace has since assisted 13,000 cancer patients in a career spanning 35 years.

Nobody wanted the nature cures to work more than Grace—she’d been a vegetarian from the age of five, rare at the time in Australia. But, despite her strong beliefs in natural diets, Grace admits she had never personally seen the Gerson or other extreme diets work successfully with cancer patients. I’ve questioned her thoroughly on this topic. Over the years she’d observed some of her wealthier patients go to Gerson style clinics in Mexico and other countries where diet based treatments were legal. Sadly she’s seen many die following such regimes and did not witness any successes. Today she advocates a middle of the road good diet such as healthy Mediterranean but in not at the expense of other treatment.

Indeed even her husband’s recovery has been widely misreported. It’s a well known cancer recovery story and has impacted millions but it is inaccurate! It has been attributed to a vegan diet, meditation and loving support. But Grace states Ian was never on a vegan diet in the 22 years she was his full time cook and care giver—he ate calf liver, fish, other seafood, eggs, and milk products. She said Ian had little luck with meditation while ill; such was the extent of his pain. In fact they pulled out of the Dr Ainslie Meares meditation classes after 6 weeks since Ian was getting sicker and, by his own admission, only developed his meditation skills long after he recovered.

Even medical journals can get it wrong! Incredibly, some years later, when Ian had his remission, Meares claimed his meditation method was responsible and inaccurately wrote of the Gawler experience in the Australian Medical Journal (MJA). Perhaps Meares, like the diet fundamentalists, had his own agenda, to prove his meditation method could cure serious diseases like cancer. If you Google Ian Gawler or Ainslie Meares you’ll find it written in cyber stone—not true, but patients the world over had no reason to doubt and thus faithfully followed the regimes proposed.

Despite decades trying to address what Grace knew to be false information, reports of Ian Gawler’s recovery have spidered out across the internet, vigorously promoted by nature-cure people like I was. Multiply my story by thousands and we see how ‘memes’ are born. (Ideas that grow) Indeed as a trained yoga and meditation teacher, I vigorously promoted the benefits of meditation. ‘Hey did you hear about that guy who cured his cancer doing intense meditation? Yes, another good reason why we should all be meditating.’ I proselytised. Due to my zeal, my ‘emotional fundamentalism,’ certain contradictory information was invisible to me—for example, I’d not remembered the many famous meditation masters who had died from cancer—it would have been an inconvenient truth. Like Dr Meares, I had an agenda!

I’m concerned that such urban myths snowball into dangerous avalanches which result in unnecessary deaths. In her practice Grace attracts numerous ‘end stage’ patients aware of her reputation for getting the ‘worst cases’ through.’ Many of these are close to death having tried to emulate what they believed to be the Gawler’s path to wellness. Unfairly it falls on Grace to straighten them out. It comes as a shock to be told the accurate account—especially after having endured years doing 3 or more hours daily meditation (with resultant social isolation) and distress from extreme diets and fasting.

Grace says the Gawler story is perhaps one of the most misreported in the new age healing industry but tragically, it is not isolated. Unfortunately there are other prominent ‘celebrities’ in the cancer healing industry whose stories don’t equate with their medical histories. Desperate patients are vulnerable and will want to believe what they read if it offers hope for them—but it must not be false hope.

Fear of surgery, chemotherapy and other treatments drive many to the internet where anecdotal cancer healing miracles abound. Upon deeper scrutiny, many are flimsy at best and few are evidence based. Just because a story is repeated on numerous websites does not testify to its veracity as Grace knows in their own healing situation. Nature-health fundamentalists such as I have been, pick up and spread the stories without much thought to the consequences—cancer patients may live or die depending on the accuracy of the information. I now realise I have a responsibility to promote the truth—as we all do.

The fundamentalist approach (if you don’t think it is fundamentalist, try talking to a raw food advocate about this topic) can be one sided and makes it even harder for desperate patients to navigate the cancer maze. Beware, of your own fundamentalism—like me, you will want to believe you can cure cancer with a raw food diet, meditating 3-5 hours a day or eating apricot kernels–whether true or not.

With millions of web articles responding to a Google search for vegetarianism, vegan, raw diets, meditation cancer cures—many misquoting the Gawler story; Grace advises patients doing internet searches to insist that the claims made by self-proclaimed cancer ‘experts’ who supposedly cured their cancer by ‘natural’ means, be medically authenticated (view the medical records)

For genuine recoveries from cancer that are medically recorded, Grace recommends the IONS publication available on the internet for free – Spontaneous Remission – An Annoted Bibliography. Most of Grace’s memoirs are available for free via Google books. Grace also refers prostate cancer patients to the work of Dr ‘Snuffy’ Myers found on Youtube and the internet. Grace suggests that you be informed, choose wisely, walk the middle path, take the ebst from all modalities—you life may depend on it.

http://www.noetic.org/research/sr/main.html

http://www.prostateforum.com

A former Physical Education and Outdoor Skills teacher, Pip Cornall has worked with young people for over four decades. Pip is concerned by male violence accounting for more than 95% of all violence. From a global perspective this threatens the very existence of our world and at a local level means communities live in fear from gangs, domestic violence, murders, theft and graffiti.

Male challenge is one of Pip’s greatest passions and provides resources to help boys become good men, to help men promote healthy masculine norms, to help parents and single mums raise boys to become good men, and helps sport and sporting communities endorse sensible forms of masculinity.

The camps participants and output will be introduced to economic and political leaders during a post-camp summit. Applications are still being accepted until 8/30. Palomar5s main sponsor is Deutsche Telekom AG. For more info and application: http://palomar5.org

Bestselling author Dave Eggers believes helping young people learn to express themselves can make all the difference in the world.

Marco Visscher | June/July 2009 issue

Dave Eggers

Photo: McSweeney’s

Halfway through our interview, Dave Eggers jumps up from the sofa, flips open his laptop, which is buried under a pile of magazines and newspapers, and retrieves an email from Valentino Achak Deng, the Sudanese refugee whose harrowing experiences during his country’s civil war and bizarre entry into the U.S. were chronicled by Eggers in What Is the What. The proceeds from that book, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006, go to Deng’s foundation , which is helping reconstruct Sudan. The email contains photos showing what has been done so far with the money: pictures of a recently opened school building in Marial Bai, Deng’s native village. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Eggers says.

Call it “trickle-down eggersnomics”—ever since his immensely successful 2000 debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers has used his royalties to help others. He devoted some of that money to 826 Valencia, which helps children in poor neighborhoods of San Francisco with their writing skills and homework. Meanwhile, he runs McSweeney’s, a publishing house that offers a platform for unknown writers and brings out a series of books in which those on the margins of society—such as prisoners and undocumented immigrants—get the chance to tell their stories. Eggers is using his Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Prize—a $100,000 award given by the TED arts and ideas conference that grants the recipient “one wish to change the world”—to inspire people to put time and energy into helping inner city kids in public schools. “You do what you can,” Eggers says.

~ Andrew Cohen from Living Enlightenment

How to Build a Village by Claude Lewenz is not simply a contemporary masterpiece. It is a very practical one that we can only hope guides the decision making process of all future architects, developers, city planners and residents considering building visionary and viable communities of the future. Lewenz invites us to consider the possibility of living a more soul satisfying and richly diverse life in an inclusive, integral, eco-arts-based community that reflects our deepest values and longings. And he does this by turning real estate development upside down by inviting future residents to become a potent block of buying power, empowering them to use tools he provides to design their homes and communities to be what they love and need and only then, involving architects, developers and city planning.

His vision is part of a seismic social shift that is moving us closer to what truly matters in life and leaving behind the superficial media driven outer directed lives many of us have led for so long. We are turning away from the material drive for more and moving towards a simple high quality of life among neighbors we know, sharing lives in a place that reflects our deepest values and make sense because economics finds its rightful place in the service of people and the planet. I have been saying for years that when launching any project, the first question one must ask is, “Will this project have a positive impact on people?” Then, “Will this project have a positive impact on the planet?” And finally, “Does this project make economic sense for all concerned?” If one cannot answer the first two questions affirmatively, the project is shelved. That’s new paradigm decision making at its best.

It is clear that The Village described in Claude Lewenz new book fits those criteria and will serve as a useful model of how we can live in harmony with each other and the earth while having a wonderful time doing it. While writing the book, Claude struggled with what to call these communities and settled on the Village. More recently, on the VillageForum.com web site, he and his colleagues call it a VillageTown – a Town made up of Villages. A face-to-face community of 500 people (200 homes), he calls a village.

Claude envisions the people who will live there “clustering by something they hold in common… an Italian village next to a Chinatown… a village of people connected to film-making, next to a village of trendy, creative singles… a youth zone and a blokes village near the industrial park. The VillageTown is 10,000 people, 20 such villages, where an evening stroll becomes a journey from one culture to another… all within a 10-minute walk”.

Like a glass of fine wine, I enjoyed every sip of Claude’s soulful, meticulously researched and beautifully written and illustrated book that offers what I, and many of my friends and associates have been searching for most of our lives. How to Build a Village is filled with 400 wonderful photographs that help illuminate Claude’s brilliant ideas.

It is clear Lewenz has spent a lifetime thinking about community development issues and he delivers them like a wise professor, mentor, philosopher, social healer, husband and father.

This completely practical community design document represents Claude’s legacy to his family, his adopted country, and the larger world beyond as well as to ours, and future generations.

In the book’s first forty or so pages, Claude speaks directly to potential members of the community from Baby Boomers to single mothers to artists and “The Creative Class” speaking in their language and inviting them to join him in imagining and building the first model of what communities must look like if they are to deliver on their promise of nurturing every member in their daily work, play, and interactions with others while insuring that future residents are able to afford to own a home there.

In his invitation to join him in creating the first community, Claude is creating a market force that will initiate and inform developers and local elected officials that they want to live, work and play in their town and have it be a model for the world of what really works. In this way, Claude is doing the world a great service to say nothing of the community’s first residents. He estimates that the average Village Town home will cost 60% of the local market rate with 20-33% in line with local pricing. Are there 10,000 people in the world ready to move to such a community? I’d say easily and, many more – I being one of them.

Claude suggests that readers of his book add the following addition to their job description: “enabling people and communities to provide for their social, economic, cultural and environmental well being”.         His communities are designed to “uplift the human spirit, the quality of life, and provide a higher level of personal and community security.”

A few quotes from the book speak more eloquently about Claude’s passion and vision than I possibly could.

“The underlying idea is that while the world may have many problems right now, solving them are huge challenges. However, most of us live locally – and the more we can create a healthy, thriving wonderful local place that addresses those challenges for the people of that common locality and its surrounding local region, the more we can be part of the solution,
not the problem.”

“If we look at history, we find that major changes came about not because of some monolithic system, but often because of a few inspired individuals with a will to bring about change. As mentioned elsewhere in this book, I grew up in Baltimore and witnessed a handful of men and women change the face of their city, and then inspired other cities to do the same. When they began, they were not famous, had no training in what they were about to do, and they were not raving radicals. They felt improvements could be made and set about pursuing them. They painted a vision and enrolled others. They put a stake in the ground. They spoke out. They put their heart in it and most importantly – they got started.

What you need to succeed are:

People who want to live in the community and are prepared to call it into being.
A strong economic plan to assure it can be paid for and thrive for many decades.
Available and appropriate land.

Alternatively, if you prefer sound-bites: People, Prosperity and Place.”

“It’s about Land
To motivate people, have them stand on the land that will become the Village. Carry poles and stake them where the Village gate is to be, plant flags to set out the main plazas. Land makes the vision feel real. It gives meaning. If it is possible, secure the land early in the process.”

It’s about Action
Yes, you can build a Village. No, you don’t need to be a developer, an investor or a professional in the industry – those people will show up when they are needed. If you are one, great, but if not, don’t let that stop you. If you need it, this book empowers you to build a Village. Everything required to build a Village has already been done before. It’s not like going to the moon. The steps set out in this book should make it easier. Every journey begins with a first step and looking far enough ahead to chart a direction. Each of us is on an evolutionary path. Each of us is given a multitude of directions we can take – a choice of probable futures. When we walk our life, we must choose one of those futures, and if we listen to our heart, we know which suits us best.

If you decide to build your Village, then you will find others join you on the path. It is important then that you remember who you are, not yielding responsibility to the others that join you – they have their part to play, not yours. Building a Village for many generations to come is a tremendous thing to do with ones life. If this inspires you, then get on with it… the time is now.

Imagine a place where all experience freedom from want, freedom from fear, safety for all, pursuit of good health, an enriched social and cultural life, a place of creativity, a place balancing privacy and public life, a place where one walks with a light environmental footprint to leave a better world for future generations, a place with a wonderful spirit.

Finally, imagine what happens when a dozen or so such Villages are built in a country. Imagine how they may contribute to the character of the nation.”

The remainder of the book fills in the details of how to elegantly and deeply conceive and develop an economically sound, ecologically wise and ethically based integral community that is located in a beautiful natural setting like mountains, the sea, or countryside with local farms supplying its food as well as community member’s home gardens, socially enriched by the diversity of its population by profession, culture and age, enjoying a variety of culturally diverse plazas featuring charming slow food cafes and shops, car free allows smaller more human scaled streets and everything located within a safe ten minute walk. By having guild-halls with nearby artists, musicians and crafts people’s homes sold only to guild members, the artists become permanent stakeholders, never to be gentrified out because of rising home market prices. Other chapters cover the Slow Food Movement, Local Transport Areas, and much more. These are only a few of the hundreds of exciting and doable features of the communities Lewenz envisions.

“Sound good to me. When can I move in?” I can hear you thinking. You can move in after you have enrolled in helping to create your community. It all begins with a simple action, letting Claude and the emerging team of Village Stewards know you are interested on the VillageForum website page devoted to expressions of interest. However, that can only properly happen after you have read the book and fully understand the well thought through details of Claude’s vision. This is one time when reading a book may offer far more than a distraction from our normal Matrix like work a day world. It can, in fact, change our lives. For many, that’s exactly what they are desperately seeking. A way out of a world in chaos into a values based community they can call their own and contribute to its planning and manifestation.

How to Build a Village touches on the most soulful elements of what makes life worth living which is felt community. It is clear that Claude’s vision echoes what is in many peoples minds and hearts – the desire to live in a compassionate, inclusive and sustainable community based in love, caring for each other and the earth not in some far off future but as a daily living reality as soon as possible.

Each page contributed to my sense of well being and sparked my imagination to see, feel, smell and taste what it would be like to live in a community dedicated to the wellbeing of every person. I saw the wonderful kinds of people who will be attracted to be part of the first vibrant and happy community they will bring to life. And in the end, this book is an invitation, a clarion call to those very people to read the book, contribute in their own unique ways to co-creating the first and subsequent communities and to one day in the near future, spending the rest of their lives living, working and playing there.

The community development process, normally left to an architectural firm and a developer will, in this case, be co-created by the very people who will be living there as part of the planning process and each home will reflect the values and aesthetics of the owners rather than soulless cookie cutter developments built for profit at the expense of people and the environment. Claude has adapted an approach developed in A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander that enables people who know nothing about planning or design, and don’t believe they are capable to discover that they can do a brilliant job in shaping their future home and community.

How refreshing… as is every page of this remarkable and thought provoking book. Whether you or anyone you know might like to live in a future Village Town or just dream about doing so, this soul satisfying treasure belongs on your library bookshelf and makes an ideal gift for anyone searching for values based communities.

As John Lennon said, “You may think I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will be as one.”

To learn more about Claude’s vision, to order his book or become an active supporter of your own community, visit www.villageforum.com.

Jeff Hutner, Editor
New Paradigm Digest

From World of Good: Good News of the Day:

In her room at Texas Children’s Cancer Center in Houston, eight-year-old Simran Jatar lay hooked up to a chemo drip to fight her bone cancer. Over her bald head, she wore a pink hat that matched her pajamas. But the third grader’s cheery outfit didn’t mask her pain and weary eyes. Then a visitor showed up. “Do you want to write a song?” asked Anita Kruse, 49, rolling a cart equipped with an electronic keyboard, a microphone, and speakers. Simran stared. “Have you ever written a poem?” Kruse continued. Well, yes, Simran said. Within minutes, she was reading her poem into the microphone. “Some bird soaring through the sky,” she said softly. “Imagination in its head…” Kruse added piano chords, a few warbling birds, and finally her own voice. Thirty minutes later, she presented Simran with a CD of her first recorded song. That was the beginning of Purple Songs Can Fly, a project that has helped more than 125 young patients write and record songs.  [ more ]
Be The Change:
Listen to some “Purple Songs Can Fly” recordings here. [ more ]