Page 11 - the NOISE January 2015

SYMPHONY VIOLIST marianna hEarTsOng:
part 2 in a SerieS SMART METER ProFIles
cindy cOlE
analOg
ties. I have other friends who are sensitive and they could feel it before I did.”
When Ms. Heartsong figured out it was the smart meters installed around her home affect-
mETEr
ing her, she decided to take action. “I called APS. The person I talked to said ‘we know there are people like you.’ They were aware these things were hurting people.” She asked if APS could just remove the meters. The company representative told her that only the person whose name is on the household’s electric bill could ask for the smart meters to be removed. Funny, nobody had asked her to put one in.
back in!
nEw lEasE
On lifE!
“I went from neighbor to neighbor, and one by one they caved in. But this has alienated me from my neighbors; one neighbor said to me that if I didn’t get well, I better not come after him with a lawsuit. Then for 3 months I wasn’t getting any weird eggs,” she recalls. “At the end of summer, it started again. There was a smart meter on an empty house nearby but the electric- ity wasn’t turned on. Then somebody moved in and the strange eggs were back. I don’t have nearly as many bees as I used to. I’m really concerned they won’t make it through the winter.”
Ms. Heartsong’s life has not been the same since April. “I have no defense against this. My life has changed dramatically. I had been teaching and taking classes at the Osher Lifelong Living Institute at Yavapai College for a number of years. I can’t go into the building anymore.” Ms. Heartsong’s eyes begin to well as she fights back tears. “That wipes out a whole piece of my life. There are a whole bunch of places I can’t go.”
Ms. Heartsong describes a trip to a local restaurant to have dinner with a friend that turned into take out. “I asked them if they had a smart meter when I had to ask them to pack up our food. I just couldn’t stay ... I walked up from the airport vortex along the path to the top of Airport Mesa and as I walked underneath all the cell towers, I got nauseous and dizzy ... There is a class that will be taking place there at the Masonic Lodge that I really want to attend but I don’t think I will be able to.”
“I can’t go Uptown because it’s too dense there with this stuff — smart meters, WiFi, cell phones. My friend moved to Uptown and a week later he was dead. He did have some health problems already, so people are quick to dismiss the possibility it had anything to do with smart meters. But in less than five minutes of walking around his apartment I got so sick it took me more than four hours to recover. I know if I had to sleep there, I would also be dead.”
“I don’t know when I’m going to have a wave that goes through my head and it just erases my brain. It’s very scary. In the beginning I joked that it was instant Alzheimer’s. And then I realized this is no joke. I have days when I get up and for the life of me I can’t focus. That’s not right. I don’t have anything remotely like Alzheimer’s. This is criminal.”
“I saw my doctor in April and will see him again in January. He told me ‘I’m sorry and good luck’when I was leaving his office, which made me realize he didn’t have a clue what was wrong with me or how to help me. He has sent me some research since so I know he is on it now.”
For Ms. Heartsong, her illness has been debilitating. “I just applied for food stamps. This has brought me to my knees.” Again, her eyes well with tears. “I’m so embarrassed but I have spent everything I can on books, protective shielding material and on supplements to try and figure out how I can function and stay well when I am being bombarded all the time ... It’s going to cost everyone if others become disabled.”
As she has been learning to cope with the eMF effects, she is beginning to get back on her feet. “I’m resurrecting my practice ... My house is relatively clean. I don’t have a smart meter. I don’t use wireless anything or have a cell phone. But the moment they start charging fees, my neighbors won’t be willing to stand up. I use my power extremely well. Anything above my normal bill is ridiculous. I will refuse to pay an opt-out fee. So what they’re going to do with me, I don’t know.”
“I don’t want to move. I love this house. I designed it myself. Look – go touch this wall!” She urges me to get up and put my hand on the wall in the living room that is framed at the base by built-in planters with beautiful greenery growing directly from the floor. “Do you feel that?” The wall feels warm to the touch. Ms. Heartsong beams with pride and joy at my reaction.
“The bathroom does the same thing. It’s passive solar!”
“... But with this level of intrusion on one’s life, you’d think that somebody would take some
action. I know there are others going through this. I don’t know if they could legally get rid of smart meters in sedona but opting out doesn’t work. I’m opted out and I’m still surrounded. And it’s football fields of space that you need to be away from them, and they go through buildings and everything. We know there are dirty politics going on. We know this is tearing neighborhoods apart. But I don’t want to be forced to move.”
I ask Ms. Heartsong what an ideal solution would look like to her. “If we could declare Se- dona a smart Meter Free Zone. People aren’t going to get rid of their cell phones but if we could at least bring it back to pre-April levels, it would be really good.”
| Cindy Cole is a Sedona writer, forester, & girl scout leader.
cindycole@live.com
sTory & PHoTo by
marianna Heartsong is no stranger to personal tragedy. On November 21, 2009, while she played a concert in Cottonwood, her house in Sedona was burning to the ground. By the time she arrived back home, the fire had completely destroyed everything she owned. Her only belonging saved was the viola she had taken with her for the performance.
Ms. Heartsong has lived in the Verde Valley since 1995 and moved to Sedona in 2006. She has a PhD in Clinical Psychology and is a contract member of the Flagstaff symphony. She helped found the Verde Valley sinfonietta and the slow Water Team, an organization focused on improving Sedona’s storm drainage methods and protecting water resources. She’s on the steering committee for Greening Harmony, a neighborhood organization geared toward en- couraging gardening and sustainable environmental practices. After her house burned down in 2009, she designed the house she now lives in, using passive solar architecture and creating a permaculture garden on her land.
She is intelligent, personable, kind and active in her community. That is, she was until so-called smart meters — and the electromagnetic Frequencies (EMFs) they emit — came to town.
On April 9, 2014, Arizona Public service installed smart meters in Ms. Heartsong’s neighbor- hood. “Within 6 1⁄2 hours of smart meters being put in all around me, my left retina tore and detached,” Ms. Heartsong tells me. She had to be rushed to Phoenix for surgery. “I’ve had 3 operations since April.”
She noticed other changes around her property, too. “My bees attacked me the day after the smart meters were put in. They didn’t recognize me because it [EMFs] interferes with them. Five days after the meters went in, I got my first weird egg from my chickens. Eight days after the meters went in my beehive had a big die off and I my first broccoli bud was malformed. I had been eating my broccoli and all of a sudden something just wasn’t right! That’s how quickly it happened.”
At first, Ms. Heartsong wasn’t sure what was happening to her. “About six weeks after the smart meterscamein,IranawayforacoupleofweeksbecauseIwasgoingsocrazy,”shesays. “Ifound that all my symptoms disappeared. Within 24 hours of returning, I was symptomatic again.”
“I’vehadWiFiandcordlessphonesinthepast. Ican’tdothatanymore.I’mwired,”Ms.Heart- song continues. She pauses for a moment, seeming to lose her train of thought. “Oh, now where was I going with that? You see, the brain disconnects; I can’t always track my thoughts which drives me insane! I had a rehearsal until 9PM last night. There’s some electrical stuff I have to deal with there, and it takes some time for me to recover.”
She said she never experienced issues with memory or thought patterns before smart me- ters arrived in her neighborhood. “I was completely unaware of having any of these sensitivi-
PROFIle
thenoise.us • the NOISE arts & news • january 2015 • 11