CauseWare.org is currently in production, and has a full website planned to launch later this Summer. We wanted to take a minute and share this very special project with you. CauseWare.org is the vision of husband and wife team Michael Ehret and Karen Lindemann — and more so, it is Karen's story. Everything one needs to know about Karen Lindemann, the inspiration behind the founding of CauseWare.org, is that she was conceived in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, July 1967. Vibrant, compassionate and generous, filled with promise and blessed with an immeasurable intellect, instinctive artistry and a natural beauty both inside and out, Karen in life has been tested to the extreme by burdens both tragic and incomprehensible. A mysterious and increasingly debilitating illness, years wasted absent a critically-needed diagnosis, and ultimately a prognosis as devastating as it was terminal: Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension. Amid innumerable infections, hospitalizations and surgeries, each contributing to continued damage to organs and tissue alike, a revelation: "I am a survivor." Through faith, prayer and a renewed commitment to making only the healthiest of life choices, each contributing to a successful double-lung transplant in June of 2009, yet another revelation: "There is a reason I’ve been given this second chance." Restored to health and renewed in spirit, essentially re-purposed for a life defined by volunteerism and charitable giving, Karen thrived for seven miraculous years until the ringing of the bell at midnight finally arrived in November 2014 with the onset of irreversible organ rejection. A hauntingly familiar sentence of death dispassionately reinstated. Never herself one to have been comfortable with accepting charity, although charity is precisely what Karen now needs, CauseWare.org has been established on Karen’s behalf to generate the requisite funding for a second life-saving transplant. Her instruction, however, was to ask CauseWare.org to offer something in trade for your consideration. Thus our cause-related product lines designed with inspired conversation in mind. Karen Lindemann is, quite simply, someone this world cannot afford to forsake. Someone whose story, while at times incomprehensively tragic, continues to comfort, inspire and empower. A fighter bruised and battered by circumstance yet somehow remarkably resolute in her determination to forestall the inevitable simply because there is work yet to be done. Were you to ask, Karen would tell you to focus no longer on what divides and separates us but rather on that which connects and unifies; rely no longer on argument and insult, substituting instead both reason and respect. Tamp down the polarizing rhetoric and make the honorable choice to embrace civility in simple conversation. Think constructively, converse purposefully, and seek to transform collaboratively. Wealth and income inequality, social injustice and racial intolerance are all too common. Gender equity is somehow translated into sacrilege by small-minded profiteers protecting their own while equality for the LBGTQ community is rejected by those in possession of an uncompromising morality. As each day passes, our reckless stewardship of the environment moves us closer to calamity if not outright catastrophe. Within each of these crises lay opportunities well within our collective grasp. So set your mind to “Open” and get on with it. Before the complete website launches, like CauseWare.org on Facebook and follow CauseWare.org on Istagram.
