For landscape designer and writer Zachiah Murray, walking into a garden is like walking into a meditation hall. She becomes grounded. Like the conscious energy that lingers even after the practitioners have gone, the plants call her to the present.

Jamey Harris, 41, and Rod Heskett, 44, are the heart and soul of Santa Cruz Running, a six-year-old organization that brings runners together every Wednesday evening in Capitola and every Sunday morning in Nisene Marks, all levels welcome.

The last Wellness column, which was about anemia, ended with the advice to “try a multivitamin and eat more kale.” A week spent wandering the aisles of the local health stores and a phone interview with Jerry Garcia’s former physician convinced me that this easily-dispensed advice is more crucial than ever—but useless if not followed with care.

As a child, I went through an anemic phase, a very tired time punctuated by my mother chasing me around the house with a dropper of metallic drops to squirt on my tongue. I was 4. Chomping copious amounts of iron-rich beets and kale, per my mother’s orders, I began to feel a bit more energetic.

“I could catch an alligator any size—all I need is two ropes and a pole,” Frisby informs me in the southern drawl of this boyhood. He takes a sip of his café au lait. “I was catchin’ eight footers by the time I was seven.”  It was at this point that I decided to put down my pen and forget the questions I had carefully planned for Frisby about his one-man band and the birdfeeders he crafts out of found relics and just enjoy the ride, for which we were departing at full gallop. NOTE: JUNE 28 SHOW POSTPONED.

Daniel Suelo, 51, has just finished sewing himself a summertime sleeping bag out of a flannel sheet and some dental floss. It’s not the first thing he’s resourcefully scraped together for himself. Over the past 12 years of Suelo’s moneyless existence, he’s made many things.

On a farm outside Santa Barbara, Jim Denevan, 50, is making his way down a long table set between rows of lettuce and ripe fennel. With a wine glass cupped behind his back and a battered straw hat clinging to his bald dome, he greets his guests, pausing to hunker down near the occasional chair and chat.

Descending on Thimann Lecture Hall at 8am on a Thursday morning is like joining a flock of zombies: coffee cups and notebooks loosely clutched, we shuffle through the remnants of last night’s dreams towards habitual seats in the 300-seat hall. By 8:12am, though, it’s apparent that this isn’t just another morning in the risers of PSYC170, Professor David A. Hoffman’s abnormal psychology class at UC–Santa Cruz.

Less than three years ago, Jennifer Heskett Yamaguchi laid on an examination table in Tucson and watched the monitor as a urologist sent a camera into her bladder. What she saw turned her world upside down: more than 20 cancerous tumors—too many to even count—taking over the right side of her bladder.