Nov 19, 2019
Kathleen Lowndes is proof that attitude is
everything.
Kathleen's first experience with desert was on a
family move from Upstate NY to Inglewood California via the
infamous Route 66 – Kathleen was eight years old.
She recently found a black and white
photo from 1955 of her family under a Joshua tree in Kingman
AZ.
After
Kathleen's mother died in 1998, Kathleen grieved for a year -
sitting in bed, knitting and crocheting. After grieving, her roommate had a stroke and
decided to take their recovery in their homeland of Sweden to take
advantage of the lifetime healthcare.
Having
been invited to stay with friends in Banning, California, Kathleen
gave up the apartment in Laguna Beach, put her things in storage
until she decided how she wanted to move forward with her
life.
With a
plan to take day trips, try to get her old job back, get her things
out of storage and move on – Kathleen says her car had other plans,
bringing her regularly to the hi-desert. Kathleen entered the park,
where she explored places she'd previously visited in the park and
after two or three weeks of this routine, Kathleen decided to get
all her things out of storage and found a house to rent in Joshua
Tree.
In
this episode Kathleen talks about the medical condition – that she
later discovered ran in her family – that began to present itself
in various ways, until finally taking her down in
July of 2003, which lead to a
diagnosis putting her on a journey to
her
enormous medical miracle: a surgery that could potentially rob her
of her abilities to think, walk and talk.
Kathleen says she went for the miracle because
she couldn’t stomach the thought of becoming permanently disabled
and says, “I trained for this surgery like an Olympic athlete
trains for a gold medal".
After
successful surgery and months of physical therapy, rehab and a
short stint in assisted living, Kathleen found her self at home in
the desert silence, where she says she experienced an onslaught of
ideas. Kathleen says she is pretty convinced it was the silence and
the solitude that really helped her recover and that she was
somehow positioned in this desert for all of this to play out as it
did.
Since
having the surgery, Kathleen is thriving, doing all those things
and more including writing a book about her experience. The only
thing left to do is get back behind the wheel of a
car.
Kathleen's book, 'Facing the Ultimate Fear: A
New Future', is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and
locally in the desert at Joshua Tree's Space Cowboy Books and in
Yucca Valley at Cactus Wren Book Exchange and Rainbow
Stew.