As one who is always, some would say “too often”, ready to respond to the slightest nudge toward merriment, I assumed, with this obvious shove, my meant-to-be-self-mocking, over-the-top “professional stance” and harrumphed, “Yes, yes indeed it is! It is I!”

The Voice soothingly continued with a purring invitation to conjecture on “who this is” — and I knew immediately. “I thought it was you right away!” I yelled into the phone and started laughing uncontrollably. “Janice! Where the hell are you?”

I met my darling friend Janice in a health food store in the Midwest, where we were both wandering around trying to find something. I don’t remember what specifically drew us together, but we started trading cracks and smart-ass retorts right off the bat. I probably peed my pants some because we stood there for so long laughing at each other, and it kept getting worse and worse — or better and better, so to speak.

When we finally parted that day, we traded cards and vowed to call each other and conspire on SOMETHING, we didn’t know what. And the wonderful upshot of it is that we did!

I have never met anyone like Janice, who has a uniquely compassionate and observant lensing on the world — she sees and comments on things that no one else would, and, damn it, she’s always right. It’s so totally annoying, and seductive and attractive and mesmerizing and educational in that way where you’re always caught off-guard and catching your breath with her tantalizing insights into the world. Like, “Damn, why didn’t I see that?” But I never did. She could always get me, time and time again. I felt like a little kid in a candy store, mouth hanging open, a little bit of drool dripping down from the corner.

Now this sort of vulnerability wasn’t the easiest thing for me back then, when I took myself a lot more seriously than I do now, due to my insecurity about how serious I actually was. Since then I have worked out how completely insubstantial and superfluous I am to the Greater Scheme of Things, so I go into stuff much more willingly now. It’s really taken the stress off!

But I digress — back then, I couldn’t stop being led down the proverbial and very nurturant garden path by the inimitable Janice. She always effortlessly popped any pomp and circumstance bubble I attempted to inject into the proceedings, and, without comment or judgment, continued smoothly on her idiosyncratic, way-out-of-the-mainstream way.

She decided that we tell each other “far-away stories”, which I immediately knew what she meant – it was like there wasn’t an atom of distance between our wacky little minds – and we began to create a wonderful little world for ourselves in the midst of a conservative and vaguely tut-tutting city.

It was just that she had to keep opening the door for me into that world because I, as a deeply socialized slice of white bread, kept knee-jerking back into the sludge that I kept thinking was “supposed” to “work”, but never did for me. I liked Janice’s world a whole lot better. I was hooked, and she knew it, though she never misused the magnetism she held for me.

Not that she didn’t have her demons too. She was having major marital difficulty but man, that never slowed her down much that I could see, though I know it had its cost.

So we began to tell our far-away stories to each other, and began having adventures in which nothing was impossible or out of bounds, most of which I’ve forgotten except that I remember how alive and fascinating it felt to be creating them with her.

I remember one adventure we had with a man who was an ex-con living in the inner city and trying to put his family life back together again after getting out of prison. Janice had begun her homespun film career by then, though she had a somewhat dusty degree in film, and she was determined to make a documentary on him, his family and their story.

I met Ralph because Janice thought he would be the perfect intermediary to help me start a family counseling program that I wanted to start – and of course she was right. Ralph knew everyone in the community where I wanted to work, and introduced me to the very power broker who took my program under his wing. He got me into a community non-profit, which got me into schools, which got me into principals’ offices and we were off – with Ralph and his wife now having new jobs as the co-coordinators. Sweet.

Too soon, Janice had to move far away because of her husband’s job – it was like air futtering out of a balloon deep in my being. I cried, but went ahead, and was pleased to realize that I had been changed forever by Janice and her magical mystery tour.

Janice moved several more times, and then I moved far away from our original home base, and the scratched out phone numbers and email addresses took its toll. We lost touch.

Though apparently we still spin together on similar axes, because we picked right up where we left off, now with marathon phone calls instead of madcap meanderings. Poor Keith wandered around in front of me during our last call, whimpering a little for lack of attention, as I continued howling and guffawing for a few hours. He finally gave up and went to bed. Good boy.

Janice is now a full-fledged film/video person, developing and making documentaries and series for major channels and movie corporations. She just taught herself how to do it, and kept meeting the right people to help her and give her stories, far-away and otherwise, which she does constantly without breaking a sweat. She dropped the name of a writer for Medium, a show I love, and damn – there it was, right there in the opening credits. Her word is as good as gold. She gets scared about doing new things, and then does them any way. What a revolutionary.

She lives in the West now, not all that far from me. I also found out that SHE thinks that I opened the door for HER back then. Isn’t that a hoot? I love that.

It’s clear that now we are completely equal partners in crime, aged to a fine and mellow bouquet.

It’s said that two electrons who have once been in close connection can be separated by the entire universe, yet still rotate and vibrate to the same rhythm and changeups at the exact same time, in what Einstein called “spooky action”. He didn’t like it much because it shook his neatly constructed, verifiable scientific world. I like it.

Too me, it’s just another far-away story to play with as I will.

I think Janice and I were successful at our creations from so long ago – now what do we do?

Primum non nocere has migrated into other professions such that you may hear it used in mental health, universities, nonprofit businesses, clean energy, animal research and even some for-profit corporations. It has nestled so deeply into our collective unconscious that we don’t question its goodness and universal utility; for those whom it stops from wreaking havoc on others, it has been a good and trusted servant. But is that enough, in our current situation?

Is “doing no harm” a strong enough societal vessel to get us where we choose to go now, or do we need something more affirming, directional and robust? Don’t we need to be assertively “doing lots of good” to counter the massive problems we have created in the past several centuries?

In this era of massive governmental and business corruption frequently justified by someone’s delusion of “the greater good” (e.g., invading Iraq, or police brutality), or by a common projection of “everyone’s doing it, and it doesn’t hurt anyone” (e.g., huge corporate bonuses, some given to the very perpetrators of our current economic debacle, or the serfdom of women caught in the sex trade, where there are supposedly no victims), real pain and suffering abound for innocent people caught in the crossfire.

Too many are hungry, ill, and homeless with no job prospects or medical care on the horizon for the negatively-framed “do no harm” to be nearly potent enough for our screwed-up world. Too many are confused and emotionally adrift in a society where media continually trumpet, “Be sure to get yours – then get out!”

We must change our consciousness into an active and positive “do good as much as you possibly can”, in order to bring our world out of the literal and figurative smog. Merely not hurting anyone never really was good enough – now we can see the truth of this everywhere we look across our depleted landscape, where whole species are going extinct by default and where water is being bought and sold to the highest bidder as part of the traditional capitalist system. “Do no harm” won’t stop these freight trains.

Our greatest resource for changing this mindset and creatively and truly nourishing our world resides within ourselves. This is meant in a literal and powerfully creative sense.

We know from the work of University of Oregon emeritus physics professor Amit Goswami (www.amitgoswami.org) that there is a universal level within each of us that is creative in unlimited proportions, that allows us to see and work in the world with new eyes and possibilities. It’s a level that unites us all in the strength of caring about our world.

That level obviously is not the level of our everyday world, in which we’re rushing, worrying, picking up kids, and looking for work. Rather, the universal level of creative possibilities is the one where we’re quiet, breathing deeply, and reflecting inward to our hearts, into the space between thoughts.

The Institute of Heartmath [www.heartmath.org] provides research that showcases the primacy of the heart in this journey of healing the world and doing good, and that doing good is actually good and pleasurable for you. Heartmath says, “Sincere caring can have a profound and immediate impact on an individual’s physical state.” This impact encompasses “greater energy, better immune system function and improved cognitive ability, including more clarity and effective decision-making,” as well as slower aging, to name a few of its components. Doing good is really good for you.

We have some deep work to do to change our passive societal stance toward corruption, violence, discrimination, poverty and all the other ills, into an active searching for and embracing of solutions that build community and make us all strong. When we use the “doing good” muscles together, we become stronger and wiser together. And as we grow together, doing harm drops more and more from even being considered as a viable action.

Love may not quite be all we need, but we certainly, actively, need it now. Loving our neighbor, more than just “doing no harm”, is great medicine.

This has ramifications for two court cases concerning police aggression in the community. Go figure.

The real kicker of this is that it was thrown out after a private investigator from Portland – also police – found that more witnesses to the comment said the chief DID say it, or something like it, than said he didn’t say it.

Many in the Eugene community have many questions about this highly questionable behavior on the part of city officials.

Ruiz, the city manager, seems like a very entitled kind of guy – kind of swaggering, kind of sure of knowing that you know that he’s good-looking, kind of macho like he knows it all. You know the type. Who hired this character? And why? I know it was the City Council, but honestly, who was his champion? How did he make it to the final three? Especially with his record, which was not so great, as I recall. There was a cloud over him at his former job.

Eugene has had mucho problems with police violence in recent years, as has the entire country. How do we end it when this kind of manipulation occurs, probably on common basis?

My 21 year-old nephew was Tasered in Cincinnati one night by an OFF-DUTY officer. Andy was walking away from a university bar with his girlfriend and a cardboard cutout of a beer icon that had been standing in front of the bar. A friend of his has tried to get away with it earlier and I guess Andy thought it would be funny to try again.

Yes, it was a dumb thing to do. Did I say he was all of 21? And did he deserve to be Tasered for this prank, so hard that he fell, hit his head against concrete and was knocked unconscious with a concussion that threatened to limit his brain function?

Fortunately he received treatment quickly and he was back at college soon with no lasting damage. Others haven’t been so fortunate. They’ve died from being Tasered.

What is this penchant we have for adopting a military outfit and then finding it convenient and acceptable to “kick butt”, torture, waterboard, Taser and otherwise inflict pain and possibly death on a person who should be safely in the confines of a supposedly well thought out legal system that presumes innocence? WHERE IS THE LEGAL SYSTEM?