Love and Service

In this episode, Kurt Wilkinson talks with his friend and fellow host of the show, Adam Griebel, and his wife, Laura Griebel. Laura shares her story, "Floaters," about proving her abilities in the swimming pool at a summer camp. Adam and Laura both share their story, "Lonely No More," and talk about finding each other and how their relationship has evolved over the decades. And finally Adam shares his stories, "Krishna" and "Lotus Blossom", opening up about his spirituality post head-injury. 

Click here to listen with the full transcript

For more details about our programs go to Art Spark Texas, True Tales Podcast Page.

Transcript

Kristen Gooch 0:09

Welcome to True Tales by Disability Advocates Podcast. Authentic voices of people thriving with disabilities, where individuals use the art of storytelling to change the world.

John Beer 0:22

The True Tales by Disability Advocates Podcast is produced by ArtSpark Texas, Speaking Advocates Program. The free virtual training is open to people of all disabilities, no matter where you live.

Kamand Alaghehband 0:35

Keep listening to hear how life's challenges can spark a desire to speak out and advocate for yourself and others.

Kurt Wilkinson 0:50

Hello, you're listening to the True Tales by Disability Advocates Podcast. Changing the world one story at a time. This is the show where advocates harness the power of storytelling to build community with their peers and develop empathy in others. Hello, everyone. I'm Kurt Wilkinson.

Jennifer McKinney 1:13

I'm Jennifer McKinney.

Adam Griebel 1:14

I'm Adam Griebel.

John Beer 1:16

I'm John Beer.

Kurt Wilkinson 1:17

And we are your hosts for season three. We love to welcome Adam and Laura Griebel to the podcast.

Laura Griebel 1:33

Thank you.

Kurt Wilkinson 1:34

Thank you very much. You have heard Adam on this podcast many times before, but we are very glad to hear Adam's True Tales today, and Laura's True Tales today as well. But you both wrote these stories quite a few years ago. You all wrote these for actual lives back at around 2000, right?

Laura Griebel 1:58

Yes, exactly. So 25 years old.

Kurt Wilkinson 2:02

25 years ago. So these these are 25-year-old stories that in some aspects, I'm sure your lives are different, but there's a lot of ways that it stays the same. This these stories are still very relevant to your lives today, and very relevant to hopefully a lot of the people listening to this podcast. And since these stories were written, you both now have a daughter. So how's that journey for you all?

Adam Griebel 2:31

Wow. It's unbelievable, Kurt.

Laura Griebel 2:35

It's really fun. So our daughter is off at college. So just this is her first year away. She's in another state, many miles away. And

Adam Griebel 2:44

Many.

Laura Griebel 2:45

The room that we're sitting in right now is kind of our third bedroom that we had turned into an office. And she and I, we we have two desks, and we used to work in here and do stuff together. And after she left, I kind of cleaned out the office. As I was doing so, I came across our actual lives file, and it has some writing in it that I had actually never seen before of Adams. And one of which is this really, really beautiful uh story that Adam wrote about being a dad.

Adam Griebel 3:16

Being a toddler dad, though.

Laura Griebel 3:18

Being a toddler, yeah. So this would have been so the date on this story is October 31, 2010. So 15 years ago, which means Madeline would have been about four. And it's just a beautiful piece that I had never seen before. And I was reading it and I was just blown away. Madeline will be coming home for Thanksgiving this month, and I can't wait to show it to her. I think it's going to be incredibly powerful for her to read this story that Adam wrote 15 years ago about what it was like to be her dad.

Adam Griebel 3:54

She'd wish for that.

Kurt Wilkinson 3:57

Yeah, it's awesome that you two live lives to where every day is kind of its own story and how things can update and lots of things change, yet lots of things stay the same. The story is interesting. I'd I'd love maybe on a future episode of the podcast, Adam could bring out some of these stories.

Laura Griebel 4:18

Yeah.

Kurt Wilkinson 4:19

But now you've been you've been raising this daughter for uh about 20 years now, and she's going off to college. That's gotta be stressful in some ways for you all, but I'm sure you're proud parents.

Laura Griebel 4:30

We are proud parents, and it has been quite the journey every day, Kurt. I'll share a little bit. And Adam wrote about this in his piece when we were at the hospital to have her, we had a scheduled C-section. So we got checked into the hospital the night before. And it was December. Her birthday's December 7th. Adam had left to go get us dinner and came back, and he couldn't quite remember where our room was and had accidentally walked into another person's room. And we asked the the

Adam Griebel 4:57

I do things like that often.

Laura Griebel 4:59

We asked the nursing staff. We're like, could you put our name on the door? And they're like, No, we can't, HIPPA. I said, Can you put a Christmas ornament or something? It's Chris, can you just do something? Well, that triggered one of our night nurses to determine that they weren't sure if we were equipped to take our daughter home. And the next thing we knew, social services is in our room to do a deep dive into how did we think we were gonna care for this baby? And you know, early on it was I was terrified. I was like, oh my God, they're they're not gonna let us take her home. I didn't know what they were thinking, you know. And we had we had made arrangements. We had Adam and I both worked at the time, we were both working at Goodwill, and uh we had arranged for a nanny to be at the house. But they were like, okay, but what about at night? And we're like, well, we're gonna care for her, we're gonna do everything we need to do. But and yeah, it it was just it was I never out of all the preparation that we did for having a baby, that never crossed my mind that that was a conversation I needed to be prepared for. And it was frightening and it was wrong and it was scary. And but I was telling someone the story the other day, and they're like, You need to go bring a picture of Madeline and show them how wonderful she's doing, and da-da-da-da-da. And that's not to say that it's you know been a joyful, easy every day, but I don't think it's been any different than any other parental experience, to be honest with you, unique to us, but

Kurt Wilkinson 6:27

yeah, well, that is an extremely powerful and unique experience that I think is specific to the disability community, and that brings me to your story floaters, Laura.

Laura Griebel 6:44

Yeah.

Kurt Wilkinson 6:44

Because I think that that is another very big example of how as people with disabilities, people often make assumptions about us and put us in situations where we have to prove them wrong in order to be treated right.

Laura Griebel 7:03

Yep.

Kurt Wilkinson 7:03

S o let's hear Laura Griebel read her story, Floaters.

Laura Griebel 7:08

One thing that surprises people about me is that I'm a pretty good swimmer. You see, I was born in Minnesota, land of 10,000 lakes, and my family had a cabin. It was necessary that I learned to swim at an early age. When it came time for my first summer attending Texas Lions Camp for crippled children, and the camp counselors needed to determine which group of swimmers I would be with, I was confident I would be in the deep end with the more able-bodied campers. The counselors had us all swim several laps while they watched. Now, mind you, by saying that I was a pretty good swimmer, I meant I was comfortable in the water. I didn't tire easily, and I really enjoyed swimming. I didn't say anything about speed, form, or that I didn't actually sometimes look like I was drowning to an observer who had never seen me swim. While I was swimming my laps, I swam into the wall, and for some reason that upset them. You can imagine my dismay when the counselors assigned me to the shallow end with the floaters. The floaters were the campers that couldn't swim, stayed in the shallowest end of the pool, and some even had to wear life jackets while in the water. I did not belong there, and the counselors soon realized the grave error they had made. I was quickly reassigned to the deep end where I belonged. I never did accomplish the life-saving skill of tying a pair of blue jeans together to make a floating device, but that didn't matter. I got to spend my time in the deep end, proving my ability to tread water for as many minutes as the swim teachers required, and they no longer cared that I never mastered the art of swimming in a straight line.

Kurt Wilkinson 8:48

You and I both have lived with disabilities, and we are both quite obviously disabled. So, as people who have lots of experience doing that, do you personally think that that gets easier over time or harder?

Laura Griebel 9:02

I think it gets easier because the older I get, the more I just don't care what other people think, in all honesty. You know, and and my other stories, obviously, you know, when you're young and trying to have friends and boyfriends and girlfriends and things, you care a lot more. But as a woman in my mid-50s, I I don't really care much about that at all. You know, that story from Texas Lions Camp is pretty interesting because keep in mind, Texas Lions Camp is a camp for kids with physical disabilities. So theoretically, these camp counselors were were supposed to be a little bit better trained and things like that. So it was no, I never took it as a you're horrible that you made these assumptions about me. I to this day believe it was because they wanted me safe and all that kind of stuff. And I just remember when we were writing these stories back in the summer of 2000, the workshop was so wonderful in how they kind of got us to just start thinking about our experiences and our stories. And for some reason that one popped out. And I was like, How dare you think I need to be in such a shallow end? You know, I grew up, like I said, in Minnesota. I also, and then when we moved to Texas, I grew up next door. My very best friend had a pool in her backyard and I was over there all the time swimming. I love to swim. So when it came on to go to camp, I was just like, What do you mean? I want to say that Texas Lions Camp was one of the best experiences that I've ever had. I spent six summers there, and it was the first and frankly only time, maybe with the exception of actual lives, that I was not in the minority. Every single camper there had a physical disability, and it was the most empowering experience for me, and even more so for a lot of other kids whose parents maybe didn't expect them to thrive and didn't expect them to have independence and didn't expect. I tell people all the time, parents would come out, and it was a two-week camp. It wasn't just a weekend, it was a two-week camp. 14 nights away. When these parents would show up, they were blown away because we all had to have chores. We all cleaned the toilets, swept the floors, made the beds. It didn't matter what your disability was, you had a chore. And these parents would come back and just be blown away with what their sons and daughters could do. And it was just that empowering we're all here. So it was a great place.

Adam Griebel 11:32

Do they still have those?

Laura Griebel 11:33

Texas Lions camp? Yeah, it's still very much operating.

Kurt Wilkinson 11:36

Yeah, there are multiple camps in Texas that are for people with disabilities. It can be quite surprising that you can see that kind of prejudice uh and assumptions about uh what people can and can't do even in disability spaces.

Laura Griebel 11:54

Yeah.

Kurt Wilkinson 11:55

But I think a lot of that is inherent to kind of the human experience and similar things to lead that lead to prejudices outside of those spaces. I've experienced similar things at the pool at Camp Camp. You know, all these places they have their systems to try their very best to make things accessible. But in reality, disability is a very personal experience. And what somebody can and can't do is really up to them.

Laura Griebel 12:20

Yeah.

Kurt Wilkinson 12:20

And it can be extremely tempting, especially for organizations that deal with a lot of people, to put people into boxes or have a very simple test to put people into boxes so that way things can be done easier and faster. But a lot of ways, just asking someone personally, what can you do, what can't you do, what do you think you can do and can't do is so so helpful.

Laura Griebel 12:45

Yeah, it's so powerful. You know, I tell people all the time, there's a lot I can do, there's some things I can't do. I just just ask.

Adam Griebel 12:52

That's what I'm here for.

Laura Griebel 12:53

That's what he's here for. Well, we help each other. You know, we do we tell people a lot that we we make such a perfect pair because where I need for help and some physical things, and Adam from a more would you say cognitive or

Adam Griebel 13:07

Psychobabble.

Laura Griebel 13:09

Psychobabble, yeah. So we make we make a pretty beautiful pair in that way.

Kurt Wilkinson 13:15

Yeah. In living with a disability, it is a lot of having to explain to people what your needs are, and it's a lot of having to say the same thing over and over again. And so it's extremely nice to have a relationship where you two understand each other's needs on a more internal level, and so you all can help each other out without having to explain, and it works out, and that is part of the beauty of it.

Laura Griebel 13:42

Yeah.

Kurt Wilkinson 13:42

Let's all experience some of that beauty by hearing Adam and Laura Griebel read together Lonely No More.

Laura Griebel 13:52

I spent so many years of my adult life alone. I don't mean without friends and family, I mean single, mateless. Many dateless Friday and Saturday nights. Many.

Adam Griebel 14:03

I have trouble organizing my time. I can't keep a job. I work for three months, 40 hours a week. I work four ten-hour days so I could take three-day weekends. I just wanted to have fun.

Laura Griebel 14:16

I remember a time when I would cry uncontrollably with an overwhelming feeling that I would be alone forever.

Adam Griebel 14:24

I watered plants out in the hot central Texas sun. I was fired because I failed to keep the plants alive.

Laura Griebel 14:37

Then there became a period of time when I worked through these feelings by doing a lot of getting to know myself. I learned that it could be fun to stay home and read a book on a Friday night.

Adam Griebel 14:51

Me. The plants. We all have our mortal lives to live.

Laura Griebel 14:54

I remember my friends, my friends who were together with someone saying that love would come when I least expected it. Well, as a 27, 28, or 30-year-old single woman, when would I not be expecting love?

Adam Griebel 15:08

I always wanted a beautiful, buxom babe. They really got my attention. I wanted sex. And every now and then, I even got it.

Laura Griebel 15:20

You see, mine is an affectionate soul. I love to be touched, hugged, and held. I really love to be held.

Adam Griebel 15:29

And then I learned that the pigeons, the monkeys, they can have sex like three times in the hour. Pigs, and they can have offspring twice in a year, and each time up to a dozen piglets. We can hardly compete. There had to be more than just sex.

Laura Griebel 15:51

And then came Adam.

Adam Griebel 15:55

And then came Laura.

Kurt Wilkinson 15:58

In a lot of the stories that you all have written, like in Lonely No More and the Together version with you and Adam, there's a lot of struggles about finding romance and community and your own self-confidence due to disability, which I think is a theme that is very present in a lot of people with disabilities. Post your relationship and you two finding each other, have you found that you both now gravitate more towards community?

Adam Griebel 16:30

Other people with disabilities?

Kurt Wilkinson 16:31

Yeah, the disability community.

Adam Griebel 16:33

More, more so, yeah.

Kurt Wilkinson 16:35

Yeah. Because a lot of like Lonely No More was talking about like Laura in her late 20s and early 30s. You really like to be alone. So do you think that's kind of changed now, decades later?

Laura Griebel 16:46

Um, no, I still like to be alone. Truly, what I think has happened is that our community of friends with disabilities became very important to us after actual lives, through actual lives and following actual lives. Both of us have actually always worked within disability services. And so our work has also brought us into these communities, but it was such an incredibly powerful experience. The five years that we were part of actual lives, especially that first year. The writing workshop, I mean,

Adam Griebel 17:24

 Yeah, Chris.

Laura Griebel 17:25

I gotta say, well, we had a girl who had fibromyalgia. I didn't, I'd never heard of fibromyalgia before in the year 2000. I didn't have a clue what that meant. This is someone who presented as completely able-bodied, and I had no idea what it meant for her. We had all these different people, older, younger. It was such a learning experience. For me, having a congenital disability, having lived with a disability all my life. Yeah, it was it was just so incredible. And and for me, it was so beautiful and we loved it so much. I mean, we would meet every Sunday at the age building. I would look forward to that. I was so excited. We'd meet, I think, from like one to four every Sunday or something. And I just I loved it. We we got to know those folks so well. And then we had Madeline, and we got to be on the Gene and Dave show once with Madeline. They came to the house and interviewed us, and it was a beautiful way for Madeline to have people with disabilities in her life because they're friends of ours, not because, you know, we're doing something special around disability. We just happen to have these friends who happen to have disabilities. And to this day, she'll like run into some friends of ours or whatever and be like, hey, I saw Nancy and Renee. It'd be great. So I think that again, even though we both have disabilities and worked within disability services, that artistic environment and that very real and and frankly raw writing of disability as adults, talking about sex and all the other things that we would talk about was so unique. And and honestly, I've never seen it anywhere else. I really haven't.

Adam Griebel 19:11

I haven't heard I thought they had other chapters.

Laura Griebel 19:14

Well, there were there was certainly a continuation after we after we had Madeline, we had to kind of stop. We just didn't have the capacity to continue on. And there were more versions of it.

Adam Griebel 19:24

Well, it maybe, maybe, and is it just as impactful for them? That's

Laura Griebel 19:28

I would imagine it was. Yeah.

Kurt Wilkinson 19:30

Yeah. I'm glad that y'all continue like over the decades to do great work in these disability communities. And I'm glad that this work helps you all get into community in the ways that you want to, because of course, spending time alone is perfectly fine as long as you're happy while you're alone. I appreciate you two in doing that work to help other people find community as well. Like your work on this podcast, Adam. We very much appreciate it.

Adam Griebel 20:00

Thank you Kurt for letting me serve.

Kurt Wilkinson 20:03

Now let's hear Adam's stories: Krishna and Lotus Blossom.

Adam Griebel 20:09

When I was 28, I lived on South Lamar. I had a girlfriend whenever I could. I smoked a bunch of pot and drank bath beer. I was a little pudgy. I had long dark hair that I love chicks to run their fingers through. I spent a lot of time naked in Barton Creek by myself. I hope for better pot, more girls, with big boobs. I listened to a lot of reggae. Bob Marley. I was just about to discover religion. I was 28, living in South Austin in some cheap housing, owned by a company whose CEO was a friend of mine and my father's. I enjoyed it a lot. Consuming mind-altering substances, mainly pot and some alcohol. Cheeba is what I like the most, you know. Smoke, ganja, boo, doobic, Mary Jane, MJ, marijuana, and any one of a number of other names. I was hanging out with my main man Simon. We were passing the chalice, talking about spirituality, and he said to me in a raspy voice, Hey man, Krishna's cool. Don't you like Hare Krishna? That was it. I went to Half Price Books on the Drag, bought a copy of the science of self-realization by his divine grace, AC, Bhaktivedanta, Swami Prabhupada. That was it. It was all over. I sought out a spiritual master who lived on 31st in Medical Parkway. I went to his holy Dahrma and offered respectful obeisance as per instruction by the book I had bought. Guree Pudni, the spiritual master's wife, said I should cut my hair short to look nice and neat like gentlemen. So I cut my hair. I no longer resembled Fabio. When I cut it, I looked like Mike Meyers. Krishna. Bhagavan. Madhava. Giridhara. These are a few of the millions of days of God. In the morning on the 11th day of November 1989, my buddies and I were all partying without a single thought of the frailty of these mortal lives we were all participating in. At approximately 3:30 a.m., We entered the intersection of 6th and Lamar through a flashing yellow light, only to be broadsided by a speeding car with no consideration of a flashing red, west bound on 6th. Things started to make sense again about the 30th of January 1990. Now I'm going on 35 years post head-injury. I realize that our mortal lives are tottering like dew drops on the petals of a lotus blossom.

Kurt Wilkinson 23:02

So in a lot of your stories, Adam, you have discussed how finding and practicing your religion for now many decades, uh, it's given you a certain perspective on pleasure seeking and responsibility that seems to have made you grow as a person. Is there anything more specifically you want to talk about with that?

Adam Griebel 23:27

It it leads me to understand that we put too much emphasis on that. Pleasure that we have on this in this material world is not real.

Kurt Wilkinson 23:40

Yeah, a lot of people go through their lives trying to figure out like what do they like and what's like happiness. And so when we talk about pleasure versus like something more long-term, like happiness, there is kind of like there's there's the separation there. And for some people, that line is blurred. And so for those who are maybe looking at this not necessarily from a religious perspective, what do you think is the main difference there between like a carnal short pleasure versus like long-term fulfillment and happiness?

Adam Griebel 24:19

A carnal it's like it's like a sneeze. I mean, and then it's over.

Kurt Wilkinson 24:26

Yeah, it might feel good for a short amount of time, but then you gotta mess.

Adam Griebel 24:31

Exactly. For lack of a better word, yes.

Kurt Wilkinson 24:36

So if pleasure is like a sneeze, then what do you think we should be doing maybe a little bit less sneezing? And then what do you think we should be doing more of?

Adam Griebel 24:45

Serving.

Kurt Wilkinson 24:46

Serving. Interesting. Yeah.

Adam Griebel 24:49

Help those that can't.

Kurt Wilkinson 24:50

Serving to help those that can't. That's very good. Because I think if you're thinking about this from a non-religious perspective, I think a lot of people think that like you have to look at at a higher power. And that higher power may not necessarily have to be some sort of God, but I think it can also be the other people around us. And that higher power, I think, I think it can be God. And I think it's wonderful that going through Krishna and finding that growth in you, I think that's very good. And that's something that a lot of people struggle. A lot of us are isolating and kind of focusing on those pleasures. So maybe a little bit less sneezing and a little bit more serving for either those above us or those alongside us on the same axes. You think that we'd be a better world?

Adam Griebel 25:46

Sounds great.

Kurt Wilkinson 25:48

Sounds great. That's awesome.

Laura Griebel 25:50

To continue a little bit of Adam's spiritual and religious journey, when Madeline was in second grade, Adam elected to become Catholic.

Adam Griebel 25:59

Oh, sure.

Laura Griebel 26:02

And I think exactly what Adam just said is our daughter went to a Catholic school and we attended Mass in the parish where I grew up. And what you would tell me, Adam, is what you loved about it wasn't so much the religion or

Adam Griebel 26:20

The dogma.

Laura Griebel 26:22

Yeah, you didn't like the dogma, you didn't like that, but you liked the community that it offered. The community where Madeline went to school and we went to worship and the people we got to know and how evident it became that this was a community of people that served one another. And that really that really spoke to you. And you you wanted to be a part of it. And just like with the Hare Krishna movement, you were drawn to the rituals. The same in the Catholic Church. The rituals are beautiful. I I love how it doesn't have to be God, it can be community. It's the stories that we tell and the rituals that we repeat, you know, whether it's holiday rituals, family rituals, friendship rituals, whatever that is, service that every year we go feed people who are homeless at Thanksgiving or whatever that service looks like. That that's what's drawn you to spirituality is that baseline of service, regardless of the the religion. Would that be an accurate?

Adam Griebel 27:29

I can I can I can I can agree with that.

Kurt Wilkinson 27:32

Yeah, so I am I am curious about your personal spiritual journey, Adam. So when you were writing this, Hare Krishna was relatively new to you, and since then you've had some experiences with Catholicism. Since then, have there been spiritual developments? How do you see yourself spiritually in this current moment?

Adam Griebel 27:53

Once you once you learn spirituality, once you God is absolute, and and then like I said before, he's got four million eight hundred thousand forms, and that's just in this universe. Not to mention across the entire cosmos. Which is infathomable, fathomable, you know what I mean.

Kurt Wilkinson 28:17

Unfathomable.

Adam Griebel 28:18

 Yeah that's right. Where was I going with that?

Kurt Wilkinson 28:24

It seems like you can't fathom it.

Adam Griebel 28:27

Many forms, many names. Four million eight hundred thousand different names.

Kurt Wilkinson 28:32

So God has many, many forms and is all across the universe and is quite unfathomable.

Adam Griebel 28:38

That's I see your great.

Kurt Wilkinson 28:40

So Hare Krishna is an aspect of your spirituality, and you would say that you take your aspects of spirituality from many places.

Adam Griebel 28:48

Indeed.

Kurt Wilkinson 28:49

That's great. What a wonderful perspective. I love that. Thank you for listening to the third season of the True Tales by Disability Advocates Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, oh please share it with your friends and talk about us on social media. If you'd like to let us know what you think of the podcast, consider leaving us a review on social media or on your favorite podcast platform. Don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Goodbye, everybody, and have a wonderful day.

Kamand Alaghehband 29:27

All episodes of the True Tales by Disability Advocates are free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere you get your podcasts.

John Beer 29:36

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Kristen Gooch 29:46

To learn more about the Speaking Advocates program, sign up for our newsletter at artsparktx.org. That's A R T S P A R K T X dot O R G.