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s t a n l e y • F a i r f i e l d • S h o sh o n e • P i c a b o
Boxcar Bend Cleanup Gains National Attention
An Orchid for the Sheep: Trailing of the Sheep Awarded for Cultural Preservation
the weekly
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Sun Valley Youth Council Stages Dance for June 1 Page 7 read about it on PaGe 5
The Weekly Sun Garners Awards from The Idaho Press Club Page 12
M a y 2 2 , 2 0 1 3 • V o l . 6 • N o . 2 1 • w w w .T h e W e e k l y S u n . c o m
Eben Alexander: Proof of
Benefactor Ali Long is backing longtime friend Jolyon Sawrey’s design for a gazebo at the Sawtooth Botanical Garden.
Breaking Ground for Unique Gazebo STORY & PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
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n time, the proposed gazebo at the Sawtooth Botanical Garden will shield dozens of people from sun and rain. But on Friday umbrellas were handed out along with hard hats as the Sawtooth Botanical Garden celebrated the groundbreaking for its new gazebo. Sun Valley resident Ali Long was among those who turned out. She has contributed a $60,000 matching grant for the project in memory of her mother—the late Ellen Corning Long, a Cleveland, Ohio, philanthropist, botanist and biologist who “loved making things grow.� “I like the fact that this will be a revenue generator for the garden as they use it for weddings and other parties,� Long said. Jolyon Sawrey, who worked with Dale Bates of Living Architecture for 10 years, based his design on tents used during the Medieval Renaissance. The metal roof will require less maintenance than the curving fabric of the tents, he said. “It’s organic and open. You can see nature all around you. And it’s classy—like my mother was classy,� said Long. It’ll be up to Joe Marx and Tim Carter of Idaho Mountain Builders to duplicate the fabric look in metal—a challenging feat, Marx noted. “It’ll be beautiful—pitched and pillowy. Certainly different.� To mark the groundbreaking, Sawrey rang Tibetan prayer bells to clear and purify the air. He followed that up by waving a smudge stick made of sagebrush around each of those attending the ceremony. “The Native Americans used sage burning to dispel negative ions. Many cultures use smoke to clean out negative experiences, germs, that kind of thing,� he noted. It’s believed that the gazebo will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $150,000. So far, the garden has raised $20,000 to match Long’s $60,000 donation. Bruce Smith, Ben Young and Liz Warrick are donating their landscaping talents to redesign the perennial beds, boulders and other features around it. John Balint, president of the garden board, said that Sawrey showed board members what the garden can become with his design. “It fleshes out the whole idea of making it a great garden to come enjoy. We were scared about how we were going to raise the money; then Ali stepped in. We just got a $10,000 donation last week. And even though we’ve been in a recession, the contractors in the community have kept stepping up to the plate. tws
BY KAREN BOSSICK
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n 2008 Dr. Eben Alexander’s brain shut down, his thinking and memory going as dark as if someone had yanked out the plug on a projector. For seven days he lay hooked up to a ventilator in a deep coma, his cerebral cortex having been attacked by a rare form of bacterial meningitis. Ninety percent of those who fall prey to this particular meningitis don’t survive. But Alexander not only survived—he says he got a peek at a life beyond the veil, a dimension his publishers have since called “Proof of Heaven.� “I learned that my views before my coma about how the brain creates consciousness and that birth to death is all we have were absolutely false,� said Alexander, now 59. “Such views are way too simple. They’re kindergarten-level thinking. And I would say that the conventional science view is going to go the way of ‘the earth is flat’ and ‘the sun goes around the earth’ kind of thinking. “Within a decade or two, that very simplistic, materialistic science that says it’s all quirks, electrons, protons and photons is going to fall away as woefully primitive and inadequate. And that’s because that particular science has nothing whatsoever to offer us to explain the mechanism of consciousness.� Alexander will discuss the events that led to his best-selling book, “Proof of Heaven,� and what he’s discovered since it was published in 2012, as keynote speaker at this weekend’s Sun Valley Wellness Festival. He will speak at 6 p.m. Friday in the Limelight Room of the Sun Valley Inn. A neurosurgeon who once taught and practiced surgery at Harvard, Alexander says he used to have a difficult time reconciling neuroscience with any belief in God, heaven or soul. “I grew up in a religious family—my father was a neurosurgeon with a strong faith in God and his father was a general surgeon who knew a God that was so far
beyond any potential of our science. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s—the heyday of scientific materialism—and I believed science was the pathway to truth,� he said. “I still believe that science is a pathway to truth but I also know that the conventional science I bought into so completely before my coma is false, way too weak to explain so many phenomena of consciousness.� When his brain went dark, Alexander says he was ushered into a macabre, ugly realm that may have been purgatory. It gave way to a slow, spinning pure white light embellished with a lovely musical melody that opened into a heavenly valley with earthlike features that he calls the gateway realm. “I liken it to Plato’s Theory of Forms, which he described in ‘The Cave’ as possessing a more fundamental kind of reality than the material world,� he said. In this valley, Alexander said, were dogs jumping and children playing. Alexander was guided by a beautiful girl on the wings of a butterfly to a place where a supreme light came from an orb high in the sky. It blew through like a perfect summer breeze offering an awareness of “the divine, the all-powerful, the source, the all-loving created source.� “From my point of view, it was absolutely real—more real than the material room that we find ourselves in,� he said. Alexander likened his experience to looking up at night and seeing the universe splashed across the sky. “Then the sun comes up in the morning and you can’t see the stars anymore. It’s like the brilliance of our local consciousness veils the function of the brain and does not allow us to see through and see this higher existence, this spiritual room. In fact, the grander reality is hidden by that brilliance. When the filter of the brain is removed, we see the universe clearly for the first time.� When Alexander came to, the meningitis had wiped out everything from his
COURTESY PHOTOS
Dr. Alexander says he would have preferred to call his book “An N of One,� a reference to medical trials in which there is just one single patient. “But that probably would’ve sold 15 books,� he said.
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