prayer culture goddess love

I was just reading Paul Krugman's blog. The name of the blog is something like "Conscience of a Liberal" but I might be all wrong in that guess.  I admire the guy's thinking. He is a Pulizer Prize-winning economist, a Princeton professor and a columnist for the NY fucking Times. The NYTimes publishes some conservative columnists but not many.  Plus, consider I know jack shit about economics, never took a single course in it.

I would like to believe that studying economics makes things better for humanity. I would also like to believe science makes things better. I know materials management and engineering is behind the invention of new tools like iPads and solar energy.  I know we are going to snuff ourselves and the earth out if we don't stop depleting our resources faster than nature can replenish them. It took millions of years to create the stuff in the earth needed to make a touch-screen tablet and all the cables and equipment to make the internet. And I know I am leaving out most details. This is broadstroke speculation offered as preface to even broader declarations below.

I don't think western humankind is on the right track. And I don't think eastern humankind is on the right track.  I want to believe, i.e. I hope, that some people somewhere are thinking right.  I am sure some humans are thinking right. But the right thinkers do not have a lot of power, connection, clout, whatever it takes to be heard and attended.

I think folks are focussed 'out there', looking at the physical world they 'see' with their eyes but the answer lies 'within' us. Once, a guy I met at a conference who I thought would become one of my best, if not my best, friends said to me, soon after we met, when I had hope for friendship, that he was not sure what inner and outer meant. I had asked, I think, if he thought he was an introvert or an extrovert and he said something brilliant. I thought it was brilliant, anyway.  He said he wasn't sure if 'going within himself' to get his energy, which was how I had defined introversion (going inside one's self to get energized) involved actually 'going into the within contained in his body, i.e. his private thoughts, feelings, reflections' or if he was actually going way out into the cosmos when he paused to contemplate 'within' himself. Within or without.  I thought "I have found a partner in my work, this guy would get my work".

Almost seven years later, I am sure he would get my work. If he would spend enough time with me to get it.  But he hasn't spent any time with me, not enough to count.  He has not become my friend. And I feel stupid as I see myself still deeply engaged, inwardly (whatever that means) with the sense I have that getting to know him and being known by him is a portal I need to cross.

Fuck this.

Shake this.

I think humanity is far, far off course. As far as I can tell, and I freely admit I don't know jack shit, that just about everyone is spinning off course. Lots, even most, do good work. But the work is not out there.  Choose any work in the world that you think is good and, I am sorry to suggest, that work is undertaken in a dysfunctional system.

What if aliens did land here and offer to take every human on earth willing to go with them to a better planet where things were just?  Would you go?  Would you trust aliens offering you a trip to another planet?  How would you decide? The capacity to make such a choice, I believe, is where we huma s should be focussed. Yes, yes, in the mean time, we need roads, water, power, food, so until salvation comes or the second coming of Christ or the first, depending on your religious dogma, or depending on religions I don't know about. We need bus drivers, car mechanics, farmers, caregivers, and tools and power so all that stuff has to keep going. It's like a juggling circus act, where the juggller juggles two completely different sets of things in each hand and then, to really dazzle her audience, after she has the two juggling acts in each separate hand, she gets a third one going using one of her feet kicked up behind her. This planet is millions of simultaneous juggling of energy acts, most essential to survival, many helpful for happiness.  All slightly off kilter, slightly misaligned.

I'd settle for feeling aligned with just one person.

cloud atlas

It would be hard to do justice to this amazing novel in a movie. A friend commented on Facebook that there is too much violence.  Sadly, I think violence has played an overly large role in humanity.

I want to reread Cloud Atlas but I don't have a copy.  Darn.

After the movie, my friend and I decided to walk to Smokey Joe's Bar B Que.  I was going to share some ribs -- just the ribs, no potatoes. Maybe slaw -- this guy's cole slaw is only shredded cabbage, so I can eat that. The ribs are fatty, so loaded with cholesterol. I remember a line from a Jerry Seinfeld episode when a shiksa girlfriend offers him a pork chop and he says 'heart attack on a plate' and I had never known someone who refused pork because of a health reason, not at that time.  I know plenty now, including me.

But geez, I eat to well now. I literally eat no fat or cholesterol. Once in a blue moon won't hurt me.

But Smokey J's (which I think is the correct name) protects me. Twice now I have walked all the way to his shop, about 1.2 miles each way only to find it closed even though it is normally open at the time I go. Today I found a sign, near 8 p.m. indicating he would be closed to next week.  I like it that the guy closes when other stuff in his life matters more than the day's profits. And I am glad the few times this has happened cause I don't need the high fat ribs.

I have rationalized these ri b forays by walking there and back, at least 2.5 miles, but it is a weak rationale.

So then I thought I get some braised chicken at Berkeley Bowl but it was closed. Then I just walked home, kissed my friend good night at my door and had a protein shake.

And now I am going to try to go to bed early -- this is very early for me, cause I am doing a day trip to Sausalito tomorrow, with picnic.  We're taking the ferry from SF. I haven't ridden the ferry from SF to Sausalito since a trip to SF with my then-nine-year-old, now-30-year-old daughter. It was thrilling to pass close to Alcatraz.

I've been to Sausalito a few times, but not on the water in the SF Bay since then.  Cold and wet, I'll still have a happy day.

I can forget I live where I do because I never go anywhere. This weekend, it's tourist trips all over.

abortion

I am as pro-choice as a human being is ever going to be.  Nobody can prove when life begins. No one.  Any human's right to control what goes on inside their own bodies -- what does a right to privacy possibly mean if we don't have a right to determine what happens inside our own bodies?!! No rights, that what it means if society can make women carry cells to childbirth in their bodies if they don't want to.

I also happen to think it is very possible to avoid almost all unwanted pregnancies, except in rape.  Having said that, I acknowledge a gal I used to swim with when I lived in Mountain View, CA. She solemnly told me that while she was on birth control pills, she got pregnant twice and the second time, she and her husband decided to abort. They already had four kids by then.  I believed her story, because she sure spoke convincingly. Now I am wondering if her ob/gyn might have prescribed a different birth control pill? there are different ones. I won't deny that woman the right to end an unwanted pregnancy.

Ideally, there should be no abortions  I was sexually active for ten years without using the pill and without getting pregnant.  It is possible.  It is possible for women to get to know their bodies, to consciously pay attention.  I got so I literally felt it when my body ovulated. I counted my cycles carefully. I knew when I was fertile and I didn't have sex, or I used a condom and spermicide -- mostly I just waited until my fertile flow days had passed. Yes, this blocked out a week to ten days a month when I could not fuck like a rabbit but, hey, I'm not a rabbit. and I dont fuck.   I make love.

I do not have sex these days, age 59 to procreate.  I have sex to express deep love and intimacy.

So.  Educate young people about sex, hand out condoms liberally , make birth control easy and affordable, and support young people to (1) not have sex without committed love and (2) if they are going to have sex without committed love, use contraception.  My plan won't prevent all unwanted pregnancies  See the above 'pregnant on birth control pills' story.

I sincerely believe thats of educatio about sex and preventing babies can prevent most unwanted pregnancies,

Now to the crazy drive to deny women abortions when raped, Bullshit, I say, No one has a right to make that call but the woman carrying an egg in her uterus that was fertilized by a rapist.  This is a black and white issue,

Now I want to tell you about a labor and delivery nurse I knew 30+ years ago. Denise. I did not know Denise very well.   Her husband had gone to prep school with my husband and we socialized in the same crowd of guys that had grown up together, gone to the same prep school and were all young marrieds having babies.  Denise had several babies by the time I met her and she worked full time so she did not have a lot of time to socialize with me.  I liked her. A lot. But we never really bonded,

Dennis did this thing that she never talked about.  She and her husband had bought an old, fixer-upper house that they seemed to pour endless money into and it still seemed like a dump. But she loved her house. And man, she loved kids. And, gosh, she loved being a labor and delivery nurse

I took my lamaze classes with her and wished she could have been my delivery nurse but I had my baby at another hospital, probably cause of health insurance.

 Anyway, Denise had a crowded house in perpetual renovation mode, three kids, a spacey husband and a very busy life. Still, most of the time, a young pregnant woman would live with her, have the baby, give it up for adoption and go back to her life in someo other town  Denise talked about these young women, all of whom had been raped and found out they were pregnant.  Denise never once suggested she opened her home to those women so they wouldn't have abortions. If Denise was anti-choice, and I believe she pretty much was, she never said so,

And our whole crowd was very Catholic. The prep school all our guys had attended was Jesuit I was raised Catholic, going to Catholic school K-12 but I was and forever shall be rabidly pro-choice.    I liked /denise back then but I love her more now.  She quietly took in women whohad been raped to suport their choice to give those babies life.  If someone is going to be anti-choice, be ati-choice like denise was. She loved those women, let them live with her for free, fed them if they needed food -- although she would take money if they could contribute to her household financing, which was alwys tight, I think, / Denise was often having those parties where the ostresss venefits if people buy stuff and all us gals would go to the parties with strict instructions from our husvands to spend,

I wish when the raging repugnuts like Paul Ryan talk about not allowing abortion even in the event of rape would talk aout what they might offer women who conceive in a rape. Would these popliticians open their homes to the pregnant women, giving them rooom and voard to save the baby? Would they provide for the baby after its born Help the forceed-into-motherhood mother back into the workforce, or back to her life? Do this anti-choice lunatics offer any help to women impregnated by rape?

Maybe Denise just let raped pregnant women live with her for free cause she was a good person. She was definitely a good person, but I suspect she was anti-abortion.  I have much respect for the quiet, humble way she did what she could to prevent abortions,  She helped humans in need, she did it humble and with no fanfare.  Somehow I don't see Paul /rayn r that Mourduck lunatic running for the senatae or thst looonie tunes Atkins opening their home to a pregnant rape victim.

love does not admit impediments

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
by William Shakespeare, of course

So, what do you think? Is this a homage to romantic love or 'love'? Waiting for the cross walk light to change as I headed to my farmers market, I experienced an embodied awareness of "loving beyond all impediments" that was thrilling. I slipped into the golden tunnel, which is the phrase I use to represent a state of love/bliss, when everything upon which my being lights is radiant with love. And I am pure love, a light being, floating. As I sailed down the sidewalk, through the market, and back home, I felt like I was floating a few inches above the ground, for I had undergone a shift into a lighter experience of being. I got it. I got that any impediments to loving other beings is entirely within me. I falter in being loving. When I falter, I look for what is wrong with the other person. There is never anything wrong with the other person.  I know, too well, that many (most?) slip into thinking there can be, there is, something wrong with the other but this is pure fallacy. Pure delusion.  Even a serial killer is a creature of love. It is not my work to find fault with a serial killer or, even, Hitler. It is my work to see the creature of love that exists in all beings. Every human is always love; sometimes humans are asking to be loved past the illusion that they are not lovable, and serial killers would fit that category. I get why people can say "I would love you even if you did despicable things". The despicable things are illusion, ego mired in physical reality.  I got that any time I do not see other beings as radiant loving energy, the failure to love is within me. The blocks to love are from within me and only within me.  When I fail to see other beings as creatures of love, I am failing to project love.

An old lesson I have learned before. An old lesson I need to keep learning. Any failure to see love is my failure and mine alone.

August always seems portentous to me

On two different August firsts, my mom had two different baby girls who each died after very short lives. I had four brothers by then. I was unhappy. I totally believed having a sister would make my life with four brothers and a wacked out mother more beareable.

Mary Ann was born when I was five. She lived two months.  I remember a poignant scene a few months after her death. I went into the living room with a bed pillow cradled in my arms, holding it as if it contained my baby sister Mary Ann. I said "Look everyone, Mary Ann did not die. She was just asleep and now I have found her."  I remember how I felt: warm, loving and happy. I knew I was pretending. I knew my baby sister was dead. But I wanted her to be alive. Those few moments pretending she was alive were wonderful. Then I saw my dad, who seemed quit far away but he was only across the living room. He was smiling but also he was crying. Even at age seven I could see that dad didn't know what to do.  He didn't want to stop me, didn't want his rebuke to hurt me. I think he saw I was acting in grief. I was also triggered, lost in grief.  But at age seven, I was sensitive to dad's sadness and I dropped my game of pretending Mary Ann was in my arms.  I remember what motivated me. I had never held my baby sister. I longed to hold her in love. Now, as an adult, I know I can hold her in love in my heart but at age 7, with poor parents unable to parent me in their grief, I was on my own.  Dad saying nothing and I ended up putting the pillow back on my bed. I still remember the pain that crossed his face though as I said "Look, Mary Ann is alive, here she is" as I pretended to cradle her in my arms and pillow.  We never spoke of my pretend baby sister again. I understood I had done something wrong. But had I?  No one, absolutely no one, had ever talked to me about my loss, as if no one, not either of my parents, had ever considered that I grieved.

Mary Ann lived two months. She actually came home for a week or two. Her tiny lungs were so underdeveloped that she had been kept in an incubator. After a couple weeks at home, when I had been afraid to ever ask to hold her so I never had, we were all afraid her fragile lungs would take her. And they did. She returned to the hospital and diet a day or two later. If we had not brought her home, might she have lived?  I heard my parents whisper such questions late at night when they thought no one listened.

Our family did not own a car when Mary Ann was born. Mom pumped breastmilk all day and once a day, after a full day of work, dad would take the milk to the hospital, see the baby and then come home and give us cheerful stories of the good color he thought he saw in her. I love the idea of my dad taking several buses, trekking across Chicago, carrying the special cargo of expressed breast milk to his baby. It seems so valiant and so loving. He did it every day she lived and was in the hospital.

The night Mary Ann died, we all knew she was dying and the whole family knelt together in prayer that time, too.

Eight or nine years later, my baby sister Katherine Ann was born. Mom had given all her girls the name Mary, or Marie (I am Therese Marie), to invoke the power of the Virgin Mary in her daughter's names. In my childish superstition and grief, I wondered if that middle name Ann had cursed Katherine. If mom had given her Mary's name, as she did all her other daughters, would Mary have saved her. Ann? Where did that come from? Katherine only lived 8 days. She never came home. I never met her alive. I only met her at the funeral home. We had a private funeral, only my parents, brothers, me and our paternal grandfather. No aunts and uncles. Was such a small group honoring that tiny baby supposed to help our grief? I would have loved to see my many cousins. I remembered that at Mary Anne's funeral, I had had fun playing hide and seek in her funeral home. We used forbidden rooms for our games. Lots of rooms in a fancy funeral home. Since we were the only funeral in progress, we cousins ran into empty wake rooms and played like normal, happy kids. Then some adult, an aunt or uncle, would come along and yell at us for our disrespect but we were not disrepsectful. We were copiong with big, painful events.

Katherine had weight 3 pounds when she was born. She was much tinier than Mary Ann had been, who had been bigger at birth and who had lived a couple months so she had grown. All babies, jsut about, lose a bit of weight at the beginning. When a 3 pound baby loses a few ounces, it shows big.  Katherine was small than most of my dolls. It was hard to believe she had been a real human baby.  Her feet were the size of my fourteen year old, not fully grown, thumbs Her head was smaller than my fit. We dressed her in a doll dress, for newborn dresses were way too big.

I was glad I got to see her and sad I got to see her. It was scary and sad to see such a tiny human. I have heard some preemies nowadays are born even smaller and live, although very few such tiny preemies lead normal lives.

It must have been hard on my parents. It was hard on me, although no one, absolutely no one in my whole life, showed a moment of concern for my loss. It felt like my loss didn't count. Maybe no one in my world had been aware hof desparately I had prayed for a sister.

Then, just one year after Katherine, mom had another baby. Mom stayed in bed her whole pregnancy, requiring me to wait on her hand and foot. This was not boys' work so I had to do it. And I did it gladly because I wanted the baby to live. Mom told no one she was pregnant that time, because, she said, she did not want to have to tell her parents about any more infant deaths.

Happily, my sister Margaret was a full term, regular weight baby. Healthy from the start.  Mom brought her home in a few days. I was given the great honor of choosing her coming home from the hospital outfit. I chose a yellow checkered jumpsuit. I had wanted to buy something pink and frilly but my mom always scorned at girly clothes so I had tried to please mom with that yellow check. I didn't really like it. I look back and wonder if I ever let myself do anything I really wanted to do.

I was mortified when my mom pointed out that the yellow jumper had been intended for a boy:  the flap where a penis opening would go for an older boy had been stiched shut. I had seen that stitching, for I had combed over all the choices in the clothing shop. I thought it signaled that the outfit was gender neutral. Mom shamed me over that crotch stitching, giggling that I had bought my baby sister a boy's outfit. I stung with that shame for a long time.

But my baby sister mad up for that shame and all others. At last, at age fourteen, I had a sister. She was a let down. I had never really considered that a newborn infant was not going to become the confident and playmate I had longed for. But a new baby is a very fine thing for a longly teenager. I could love her as much as I wanted and, love being magic, she loved me back.

I was in heaven every minute I spent with Margaret. And I always had my baby brother Dave, who I had been the primary caregiver of since he had been born when I was eleven. Those two babies were my cocoon of love.  Nothing they needed was a burden to me. Caring for them was pure joy. I was in a cocoon of bliss The sadness of losing Mary Ann and then Catherine washed away in that joy.

Every August 1st, which was both Mary Ann's birthday and baby Catherine's birthday,  reminds me of the losses but also the joy I later found with Margaret. Catherine only lived one week. August 6th if my brother's Tom's birthday. Mom was still in the hospital with her sick preemie. Dad had all the children at home praying together, on our knees. We did not pray that Catherine would live, for I guess it was known she would not. We prayed that she would live past midnight and die on the 7th, not on Tom's birthday.  Catherine's death hit me less hard than Mary Anne's. Catherine had the good grace to die on August 7th. On the night of that August 6th, with our mother still in the hospital with her baby, dad had my four brothers and me knee with him and pray for for Catherine. We prayed for horus. I might be remembering wrongly but I think we prayed that she would live until midnight so she did not die on Tom's birthday. She did live until the 7th, did not soil Tom's day.

Once while Catherine was still alive, dad took us all to the hospital. He begged the hospital folks tolet us in to see our sister, who was going to die but the hospital did not relent. So we settled for waving to mom, who came to her hospital room window. She held Catherine in her arms but it was too high up to see the very tiny baby. That was the saddest moment for me:  seeing that tiny baby, too far to really see her, knowing I never would know her.

August always kicks off slow and sad, which is partly why I make a fuss about my August 16th birthday.

love

Sometimes you hear a voice through the door calling you. This turning toward what you deeply love saves you. 

~Rumi♥

nice problem to have

My bras and underpants are too big for me. It is fun to see formerly tight underpants get so loose they won't stay up.

My bras were tight before I lost all this weight but now they are actually getting baggy. I have not ever lost so much weight. I am getting back down into weight territory I have not been in for twenty years.

Basically, I never wear bras. I put one on today because I was going to see my hematologist. I 'dressed up' for her. Ha.  I don't bother with a bra for my primary care gal.  I think I have some bras I couldn't wear cause they are just too small. I'll have to see if I can find them.

Boring story but fun for me. All my clothes are baggy on me and will just get baggier. I aint buying any until I lose a whole lot more of the clothes get so big I can't wear them. Not likely to happen sice I only own baggy knits to begin with. My main pants have been bicycle pants. When the bicycle pants get loose, then I'll buy new clothes.

hearing a call to be a nun

Tis true, lots of nuns are bitching awesome. . . . but the more awesome they are, the harder it is for me to accept that they continue to buy into the Catholic Church which most def does not treat them as equals of men.

My godmother was my aunt-the-nun, my Aunt Jody. She took her final vows, entered the convent, the day after my baptism. Jody was seventeen!  As a kid, when I had dreams about my parents dying, which most kids sometimes have, my nightmare was not that my parents died but that I'd have to move into ao convent to live with my godmother. My godfather had been my grandpa -- just for convenience. Grandma, Grandpa and Jody had traveled to Chicago with newborn me and my mom to go to Jody's nun ceremony and they worked my baptism in since the relatives were in Chicago, which is where I grew up with my folks.  It was just easy to have grandpa be the godfather.

In my recutting nightmare, my folks died (which did not bother me all that much, I had a sucky childhood), and I reasoned that if my folks were gone, my geezer gramps would be dead too so that meant my aunt-the-nun, my godmother would have to raise me, right?

Sometimes I fantasized that life in a convent with a bunch of nuns might be kinda cool. All the nuns at school seemed to like kids. And, in my sexist upbringing, I assumed all women loved and doted on kids . S sometimes I fantasized that I would be beloved by all the nuns, and pampered and spoiled. That dream was pleasant.

But the nightmare dream was that I got drafted into the nunnery and had to become a nun at age 7 or 8 or whenever my folks bought the farm.  I definitely did not want to be a nun. Being devoted to god all my life did not, at all, speak to me, but my biggest resistance was trivial:  I imagined all nuns had all their hair cut off under their headdresses or veils or whatever you call them.

At my Catholic grade school, the particular order of nuns wore big boxy white frames around their faces, with a black veil draped off that white box:  it was a headdress.  My aunt the nun's order had simple black veils, with a white headband framing her face, but nightmares are nightmares. In my my-parents-are-dead dread, I lived in Jody's convent but all the nuns wore those boxy headddresses and underneath, they al have shorn heads. Scalped, shaven, no hair.

I lived in dread of short hair throughout my childhood. My mom was constantly tricking me into hair cuts. My dream was to grow my hair down to my waist but mom's drive was to keep my hair short and easy to care for. She would take me to the beauty parlor and promise that it was just for a shampoo and set, no cutting, but then when she had me in the chair, she would coo and cajole and, what a slimey thing to do, mom would say "Honey, I already paid for a haircut, I didn't remember you didn't want a cut, it's too late now, you have to let this nice lady cut your hair".  I was catatonically shy as a kid and mom knew it. No way I was going to pitch a fit in a beauty parlor, no way I would embarass myself in front of the beautician. So I would submit to the haircut, seething but hiding it.

Actually, I liked lots of nuns.  I stayed after school every day from grade second through grade 8 to help Sister Mary David clean the alter -- this was her special duty -- and lay out the vestments for the priests the next day. I considered this a great privilege. I loved that work. The church would be empty, except for me and Sister Mary David, and the floor was marble so it was cool even when it was warm outside.  I loved pushing the wide dust mop up and down the whole altar, which was huge at our gigantic post WWII booming Catholic parish.

In those days, if a kid had a 'vocation', if a kid thought she had a call to be a nun -- this was also true for boys with a call to the priesthood and, of course, boys got much more positive attention for such a all -- the whole parish would actually pray at Sunday mass for my vocation.

My mom told me that her mother had given one of her kids to god so mom was going to give god one of her kids.   Me.  I used to think, whenever she said that and she said it many times "Why do you want to give me away?" And I wondered "Why me?" She's got four sons and just the one daughter, why not give away one of the extra boys?" But I did not voice such thoughts. Mom would have considered that sassing. And sacriligious.  Back then, I was unaware of misogyny.  I had no idea my mom did not really like girls, that she much preferred children with penises. Boys.  But, geez, I was blind and clueless.  I had no idea my mom hated me. I knew but I didn't know. She was always pissed off at me and then she came up with that masterstroke of giving me away to God, which put a lot of pressure on me to be good.

I felt intensely pressured to be good all the time and to be slavishly devoted to her.  I was, truly, her slave.  My first priority

the wisteria are in bloom

Spring is beautiful everywhere but, gosh, it's gobsmacking gorgeous in Berkeley. I don't remember wisteria being so lushly abundant elsewhere as it is here. I think wisteria must not do well in the hard Minnesota frost?

I don't know the names of many flowering things here. I knew the names of things in my Midwest. It is so satisfying to know names of things in nature.  Here, I am always walking alone. I have urges to turn to my walking companion to ask him 'what is the name of this?' but I have no walking companion. Not yet.

Lavender wisteria hangs in lush, plush thickness over gates and fences and trellisses. An Oakland public library in Rockridge is covered in wisteria just now.  I will walk down there tomorrow to enjoy the wisteria.

Red blooms, pink ones, blue ones. Lush, verdant.  There is lush verdant blooms almost all the time here but it is particularly burstingly lush just now.

I see wisteria and I think of Katherine Hepburn in one of her first film roles. She plays a very young woman, an aspiring actress, cast in a play. She has to say the line "The calla lilies are in bloom again." She is supposed to say the line with tragic tone and she does. The line works on many levels, revealing the young woman's angst and longing as well as the exquisite beauty of flowers being in bloom again.

The wisteria are in bloom again.

Today, I took a long walk home from my S. Berkeley medical appointment, down side streets so I could look at gardens. I kept hearing myself 'think', in Katherine Hepburn's dramatic reading of that calla lily line:  the wisteria are in bloom again. And I bloom with wistfulness. Not just for Rosie but for all the things that slip away, from me and from us all.

Remember the opening credits to a tv soap opera from long ago:  the viewer sees an hour glass with sand drifting through it and a portentous male voice intones 'just as the sands flow through an hour glass, so flow the days of our lives . . . ." or something like that.  I feel sad wistfulness for the sands of time. I want to turn this sadness around and feel joy for what the next moment will bring me, and then the next.

I have a date this evening.  I should focus on that instead of feeling wistful for wisteria.

That wisteria reminded me of Chez Bananas, a restaurant Rosie and I frequented in Minneapolis. It has closed. Restaurants do that.  It was a tiny little wrench but a wrench. I looked at the address for Chez Bananas on google maps and then I look at The Great Wall, our other favorite restaurant. Chinese.

Whenever we went there, they always asked if we wanted smoking or non-smoking. I always said non-smoking and then the Chinese hostess would echo me and say 'two no smoke', in a choppy English.  Once, when she asked me if we wanted smoking or no smoking, I held up my hand just like the hostress always did and said, just like the hostess always did, without thinking, without intending to be funny or impolite, just unconscious, I guess, I said "Two no smoke". The hostess' eyes widened in shock. I think she perceived my behavior as rude, maybe as ridicule.  I was not ridiculing. I echo the language I hear.  I pick up language and words in a musical way. When I said 'Two no smoke' I was hearing the musicality of the way that lovely Chinese woman said it. Rosie was embarrassed but then we were able to laugh about it. After that, many, many times, we got the other laughing just by saying 'two no smoke'.

I have not shared any experiences with her, on the physical plane, since 2001, since before the world trade center collapsed.

the mobius lesson

A movius strip is a looped figure, a figure eight in which the loop continues where it intersects in the middle so it loops continuously, nonstop.

I have had some repeat life lessons that can seem like a mobius strip of learning. I circule the entire loop, learn the whole lesson but then I pass through the same lesson over and over. A mobius loop. Endless.

I just figured, once again for the first time, that I am not now, nor will I ever be, an extrovert.  Not only am I an introvert, but I like lots of solitude.  I like people. I love people. I love to interact with people in happy ways. But I don't like, want or need large networks of people in my life.  I like knowing lots of people as acquaintances.  I tend to remember detail more than most people so I tend to remember conference acquaintances, to remember little details about them that few do.  I just do.   I don't try to remember detail.  I just do.

This remembrance of lots of detail can fill me up with people and I lose connection with myself.  No one does this to me. I do it all here within my being, by myself and to myself.

I tend to critiicize myself for preferring as much solitude as I do.  I 'should' have more friends. I 'should' socialize much more than  do.  I 'should' go to parties.  I should do all kinds of things I do not do.

I am very tender. I feel others so keenly.  I can only feel a few without losing connection with my self.

About a year and a half ago, I went to a boring workshop that had been billed as a playshop. It was free so I can't really complain, but it was most definitely billed as an opportunity to play a game with a new system of money.  I imagined a game, like an online game only played in a room full of people.  The game would be a chance to 'play' imaginatively in a system without money as we know it.  People's gifts to one another, people's exchanges of activity, would be the currency. Only, since it was a playshop, it would be pretend.

The guy behind this system was, I think, in the Bay Area to pitch his work to venture capitalists. I think he envisions launching a website that will be the gift economy equivalent of Ebay. I believe someone will, eventually, launch such a site and that site will explode quickly, like Ebay did, or Facebook. Maybe the guy who offered the free playshop will be the first one. And it's not just him. He works with a bunch of wonderful people who care very much about changing the economic realm of human culture who have technical skill.

But this guy is not a game designer and he must not have thought, at all, about how to simulate a playshop about money. All he did was get up in front of about forty people, on a beautiful Fall, Sunday afternoon, and talk at us, sharing his ideas about money. His ideas were not new to me, of course. I have been visioning an economic realm similar to Rudolf Steiner's vision for about twenty years. And I have worked with money experiments, offering my work in the world unconditionally in a pay-it-forward approach. And I supposed myself and my daughter in the middle class that way. And now I live entirely on gifts.  I am ahead of the curve on money.  I know I am.  I do not need the world's approval to know who I am.

But I would like to have a small circle of close friends who love me.  I would like to have a family. Since I don't have a 'real' family, I would like to have a small circle of friends that were my family, people who would always take my phone calls, and I would always take theirs.  People who would love me all the time no matter what, the way a family, a good one, does.  I don't need many. A couple best friends and a life partner.

Anyway. This money guy had all these cool, hip folks in a room, people who had come because they had picked up the excitement of his money ideas and the idea of a playshop. And then he got up in front of us and droned for over two hours, nonstop. He did not stop for any interaction dialogue with the group. He just talked on and on. And when he felt like people's attention was flagging, which it was, because it is very boring and old-school to just talk at people for two hours nonstop. This wasn't school. This was supposed to be play.

He made a rule. He imposed a rule. He said "If I tell you to stop looking at your computer, you will stop looking at your computer and look at me immediately." Bullshit. Not unless you ask me if I agree to your rule, or rules.

I went along for a long time but then, when he said "Stop looking at your computers", and expected everyone to look at him, I kept on typing on my laptop. I had tuned the guy out.  His ideas about money were not new to me, or, I think, anyone in the room.  Maybe venture capitalists liked his boring speech. I have seen this guy's Ted talk:  he learned how to be a better speaker. He began his Ted talk by engaging the audience in a little game. But that day, when I ignored his order to stop looking at my computer, he called me out and said "Give me your attention." And I said "If you want my attention, be interesting" and I kept on typing.

I heard a young man sitting right behind me say, in a stage whispered intended,  think, for my hearing "Geez, she doesn't have to be here. what is she complaining about."

I was actually giving that speaker valuable feedback. I learned decades ago that my experience is never unique. If I was bored, so were others. But most people, even hipsters who think they are unconventional and hip and unique, are conventional and sheep-like, herd-like.  The guy stopped talking soon and gave the room a break.

We never played. Turned out his software was not online, the software had not yet been created so people could play the game online.  False advertising. It wasn't a playshop. He was recycling his pitch to investors, I think, and he was being condescending. I am pretty sure everyone in that room was hip to gift economics, to a culture beyond money.

During the break, a Mexican guy came up to me and asked for a hug. It turned out he demanded a hug. In Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication,  a request is a demand if you are not willing to hear no. This guy would not accept my refusal of his hug. He demanded I hug him. He repeatedly tried to force a hug on me. I had tears in my eyes.  Just a second before this cute guy had demanded I hug him, so, as he put it, I would feel his unconditional love, a friend at that phony playshop had told me something that upset me a lot.  To me, it felt like the most important relationship in my life was over. I had turned from my friend, intending to run out of that non-fun playshop, to just leave but I got stuck with the cute Mexican guy insisting on giving me kindness, unconditional love and, dammit, a hug.

When I held out for my refusal, he got online and posted a comment about how he had tried to give unconditional love and he could see my pain in my eyes. He wrote about how the pain he saw in my eyes proved I needed the 'unconditional love' of his demand that I hug him. He was sure the tears he saw were because I felt unloved and that if I had accepted his hug, I would have felt the love he had tried to force on me.

I can actually see a case for his perspective.  Each of us is free to choose love in each moment. I could have accepted his love instead of feeling my pain.

But I am not an ascended master.  I am not a rapidly emerging leader of love, as this guy actually is.  He is rapidly becoming very well known as a love leader, part of the Occupy movement and a representative of unconditional love.

I think he is sincere about being loving. And, hey, if he can build a career as being loving, go for it.

How come it is men who become the public symbols of love?  Well, that's another post.

I felt pretty bad after I turned down that pushy demand that I hug a stranger.  I am often hard on myself, berating myself for not being loving enough. I should float through the world as the personification of unconditional love, right? And there is something wrong with me if I don't.

Bullshit.  I get to be me. If I feel guided to spend lots of time alone, doing my private work, that's okay. We aren't all extroverts.  Maybe some of the most loving, most evolved beings are actually like me:  okay being alone a lot.

I am very sad and sore right now.  I have been beating myself up for months.  I am stuck. Stuck stuck stuck.  I feel and think that I am nothing, worthless. I know I could simply choose, in this moment, to be loving and happy.

Like I said, a mobius strip of a lesson.

sometimes something wonderful

I spent lots of time this week struggling, really struggling, just to get some medical prescriptions renewed and get a blood test result sent to the right office.  Three prescriptions are meds I have been on longterm. The refills had lapsed.  My clinic has a schlerotic, understaffed system for what should be, for a health care clinic, a routine task:  renewing ongoing meds.

There are some stars on this clinic's staff. One is a nurse named Michael. He listens. He is impeccably courteous and attentive. And, usually, he gets things right. Last week, however, he made a dumb ass mistake.

I lost my old glucometer (the machine to test my blood sugar levels) so I needed a new one, which means I also needed all new supplies:  new test strips and new lancets to poke my finger to get blood. I think everyone knows that it is a standard paradigm in medical care in USA that a medical doctor has to initiate a new prescription. Michael, for some reason, called me, after the customer service rep had promised that my doc would write the new scripts I needed, and he insisted that the pharmacy had to initiate the new prescription.  I challenged Michael, only lightly, because he seems to have it totally together.  "I am pretty sure that this counts as a new prescription and I am positive," I said to him last week, "that a doctor has to start this, not the pharmacy." Michael was insistent.

So I went to my pharmacy, where I have worked to cultivate friendly connections with the overwhelmed staff.  I explained Michael's instructions. Megan, the pharmacy clerk I know the most, sighed and said Michael's request violated their protocol but she would fax him a prescription request. It took her a bit of time to get all the new details right -- this is the kind of thing a doctor is supposed to know, not a pharmacy clerk.  And Megan could not determine how many times a day I test, that is definitely a doctor's decision.  I saw her send the fax.

The fax never arrived at my clinic. I waited a few days, went back to the pharmacy, went to the clilnic. I was polite with everyone I talked to.  I spoke gently, and it took a bit of effort, because by now I had not tested my blood sugar for over a week. I have recently changed my diet significantly.  I need to know what my sugars are doing. If they go too low, I could pass out. If they go too high, I could pass out. Not to mention have a stroke, a heart attack, or go blind.  If my body chemistry went kerplooey bad enough, something awful could happen in seconds. But I worked to keep my anxiety out of my voice.

Megan could not give me the stuff I needed without a script and no one at the clinic was listening to me. So I went to the clinic and asked to speak to the triage nurse. They have a nurse whose job it is to deal with just this kind of thing, little glitches that someone has to become aware of before they can be dealt with.

The nurse was initially abrupt. My doc was not working that day, so she was not my doc's nurse and she didn't want to hear my long story. I politely asked her to listen to my whole story. And, with some pressing, which takes a toll on me, she listened.

Then, bless her, she phoned in a prescription for my testing supplies even though my doc was not in the office. She just did it, did the right thing.

Over at the pharmacy, the pharmacy manager and Megan have been dealing with endless Medicare B audits. Medicare B pays for all diabetes testing supplies. Medicare B has been giving this pharmacy a hard time about test strips and lancets. The drug companies, by the way, change the designs of these babies constantly so they never become generic so they can charge top dollar, which is why people need new machines:  the old machines eventually don't have available suppplies because they go generic and the drug companies drop them for newer, patented test strips. All the supplies do the same thing but the designs change:  a lancet, that simply pokes a tiny hole in m finger to get a drop of blood is redesigned so it no longer fits in my old lancet poker.  I hate this kind of thinking. If we really cared about health care costs, wouldn't it be prudent, with so many millions with diabetes, to use generic test strips, generic lancets and standard machines. Diabetes doesn't go away. The drug companies want to gouge diabetics, insurance companies or Medicare B, forever.

My pharmacy has been audited and just yesterday, someone at Medicare told Joel, my pharmacy manager, that Medicare B would no longer accept faxed prescriptions. He was told he could only accept a handwritten prescription. Most medical prescriptions go through computers these days. Everything but Class A narcotics go to the pharmacy online. Now, at least in this area, at my pharmacy, the prescriptions for the test supplies have to be in writing. They are treating medicare supplies like Class A narcotics now. Geez. Maybe there is a blackmarket for these supplies?  Maybe folks with insurance get maxed out scripts and then sell test strips they don't need. You can go online and find places that will buy you unused testing supplies if the supplies are still 'good', if they have not expired.  I would never do that. In fact, I have a bunch of test supplies from my old machine, which I lost. I am going to walk over to the free clinic in Berkeley tomorrow and offer them my new but unusable strips. Lots of folks still have the old kind of machine like the one I just lost. I did not lose it. I left it in a hospital room when I was there overnight recently. The staff said no one found it. But I definitely left it on the nightstand and someone definitely took it. These things are worth almost nothing.  I guess some people steal without lots of thinking, a theft of opportunity, and then later try to turn their stolen property into a few bucks. My old machine was almost ten years old. You can't buy them anymore. It can't be worth much.  But it's gone.

I know how boring this stuff I am writing is.  The unboring part has been, for me, that it has been very stressful.  I have wanted to just give up.  I should have pressed this a week ago but I didn't have the emotional resources to push last week so I let it slide. This week, I had to force myself to force this issue. The system makes it so easy to let things slide.  No one wants to talk to me. And, as far as I can tell, at the clinic, almost no one does what they tell me they are going to do. What kind of people do that?

Sometimes something wonderful happens like the nurse who phoned in y prescription.  It still makes me feel sad -- I have my test supplies now -- to recall that she stepped out of her safety zone and called that script to the pharmacy to help me. But that was the day Medicare told my pharmacy guy that the script has to be in writing now.

Yesterday, first I dealt with getting a prescription for lovenox. I am going to have a surgical procedure next week. I had to stop taking my coumadin yesterday, which means I need to inject lovenox for seven days. This is  a grim thing to do. I am used to the very small, light insulin needles. The lancets to poke blood to glucose testing are a teeny, tiny prick. But these lovenox needles are fat needles and it takes it out of me to do it.  I absolutely did not feel like fighting the system to get these needles.

And I did everything right for the lovenox.

Last Thursday, I made an appointment with my coumadin gal so she could tell the doctor about my procedure and request the doctor's order for the lovenox. Later, this week, Michael told me the coumadin nurse practitioner could have ordered the lovenox but he was wrong. Gwendolyn specifically told me she could not do it. I know this because I had another procedure a couple months ago and I had to go through the same rigamarole. And my doc knows the rigamarole. The doc had to write it.

For some reason, Gwendolyn's request never got to my file and we don't know if Gwendolyn's request was ever read by my doctor. My doc is overworked and she has a gagillion details like this coming at her every day.  Michael is a good guy but he tends to disbelieve me if I report something that is not in the file. He seems to have absolute faith that all staff at this clinic always documents everything. There was nothing in the file about my meeting with Gwen, much less Gwen's promised instructions to my doc. Do you think I made up that appointment? How much you want to bet it will get billed? Of course I had that appointment. The notes never made it to Gwen. Now I do see Gwen at a different location. Maybe her records for me are kept at a separate location. I don't know.

But it wore me down to a nub to have Michael disbelieve me. He had been wrong last week when he insisted the pharmacy was supposed to initiate a new testing supplies prescription instead of my doc. And he was wrong when he insisted that my nurse practitioner could write a script for the lovenox. Criminy. If Gwen could have written the script, she would have.

Gwendolyn also fell down. She promised me, last Thursday, that se would call me no matter what. And she did not.

And then there were a couple other drugs, less critical ones, whose automatic refills had been used up.  I put in requests for them over a week ago.  I did everything right at my end. But someone somewhere did not do the refills. So I was without those drugs for several days and the clock ticking.

So yesterday, I was on the phone repeatedly, dealing with several different issues. I could tell that all the staff I interfaced with was feeling like I was being a pain in the neck but I was being impeccably polite. It's just that I had four problems going.

When I walked into the clinic, Michael initially told the receptionist to tell me he wouldn't see me, that nothing had changed since we spoke on the phone. He said this without asking why I was there. I was there because I had gone to the pharmacy, because the nice nurse who phoned in my testing script had called and said my stuff should be okay at the pharmacy but I went to the pharmacy and learned that phone orders will no longer be accepted. And I went to the pharmacy instead of calling because I had already called so many times that staff was not bothering to return my calls. And Michael's attitude, blowing me off because he wrongly assumed that I was there to complain about the same issues.

But I had a brand new issue.

And now all my issues are taken care of. But this was all I did for days this week and days last week.  I am lonely, burned out, sad and a little suicidal. I feel unloved, uncared for.  I can't believe I am saing this but I need a hug. I need to see someone smile at me like they know me and actually like me and say "I care about you Tree".  Like that is going to happen.

But there is always a wonderful human here and there.

After dealing with Michael, getting him to understand each of my separate issues, I stopped at another office that is in the same building as my clinic but is affiliated with another health organization.   I have been referred to this place to see a hematologist.  I just had a ton of blood tests -- the blood gal filled over 20 tubes with my blood. But, weirdly, no one had the blood results. I called and called and called and my clinic said " we never got it". Today Michael said the most current blood work in my file was from November -- that is scary. I get blood tests all the time and have had many since Nov. And last week I had about 20 blood tests.

So I called the blood testing company's customer service office in Sacramento (a big cororate place) and they told me that my blood test results had been faxed to my clinic and the hemtologist at 8:44 a.m. yesterday and they had received a fax'd confirmation that the fax transmission had been completed and received. But the hematologist office said there was no record and maybe I'd have to do the tests over. Which I would do if I had to but, geez, I did not imagine those tubes.   The blood technologist had joked that she had never filled so many tubes in one setting before. I like her. She is one of the something wonderfuls. She is very sweet, always cheerful. She works alone in a tiny outpost of a blood draw place, no coworkers. But she is always cheerful, polite, courteous and I feel touched by her caring. I could not do that job, drawing blood all day, having no relationships with people other than hello, can I see your paper work, now I am going to stick you, open your hand, good job.

So anyway. Just cause I was in the clinic building for the third time this week and just cause I was magically hoping I would not have to go back tomorrow, I stopped into the hematology place -- which is mainly billed as cancer treatment -- that's a little scary. But I am happy to report that the very large waiting room where people with cancer go for chem and radiation is a very, very pleasant room. This building is an old, dreary hospital.  My clinic is in old hospital patient rooms turned into exam rooms with no style, just equipment but someone spent money on a good architect and good design to create a pleasant place for cancer patients to wait. I am happy about that. Aren't ou?

And the gal at the hematologist who helped me was extremely gracious.  She picked up right away on my tension (because I said I had been calling all week and people at her place had promised me daily to call me back but, so far, no one had, so she picked up on my stress). It wasn't her job to hep me but the gal whose job it is to help me had not come into work yet so this gal dug around until she found out what I needed to know.  My lab tests had been found. My hematologist will review them tomorrow and someone will call me to schedule a meeting.

I wouldn't mind finding out I have a terminal illness with a short prognosis. I would decline treatment and let myself die. But I don't have a terminal illness.  No such luck.

I can't begin to imagine how hard this shit is for someone who is really sick. I'm not really sick and I am burned out. Stop the world and let me off.

But thank you goddess for the nice humans who were nice to me yesterday and today. Sometimes, if I remember to think this way, people whine before me as more dazzling than a Van Gogh starry night. is life worth living just to see people shine like that?  Hmmm.  It sure felt good to feel some folks eing extremely good to me.

rebellion

My daughter's first college was Simon's Rock College of Bard. I lived in Amherst, MA, getting a masters degree while she was a freshman and sophomore in college. It's a two or three hour drive to Great Barrington from Amherst.  I only saw her at the required mid-term break, when students were expected to leave the campus and, for the most part, go home. The students at Simon's Rock, now integrated fully into Bard but, back when Katie went, a separate institution, were high school sophomores and juniors. They had those required mid-term breaks so the younger college student spent time with their parental units.

I did not go to campus except to pick her up and drop her off for such breaks but to hear her tell it, I hounded her with visits. I would call her about once a month, which is not very much for a parent who lived with the kid for sixteen years, but, gripes, she angrily recoiled at my calls. She angrily denounced me for sending her U.S. mail, too, even though I typically sent her mail accompanied by money.  She was ready to individuate, I guess.  The way she angrily attacked me for staying in touch with her, one overhearing her might easily conclude I was a monster. Is showing up for parent weekend being an intrusive monster?  I didn't go to parent weekend the second year but, uh, yeah, I went the first time. Keep in mind that the summer before Katie left home for Simon's Rock, she had spent the entire summer in full-time treatment for an eating disorder. First she had been in residential treatment and then in outpatient day treatment.  Her health was fragile and I was her only parent.  I don't think it was being pushy to show I cared.

In the spring of her freshman year, as it happens, she got kicked off campus when her weight dropped dangerously low.  I had been very worried about her starving herself but I had held my tongue. A friend turned her in.  Not me. Thank goddess.  I had seen her during that mid-term required break.  I saw had dangerously thin she was.  I worried. I grieved, imagining my daughter keeling over from a heart attack because she weighed 98 pounds, but I said nothing. A very anorexic child can take on a strangely incandescent glow. The anorexic female's thinness is praised by most.  When Katie was at her thinnest, men, esp. older and older ones, would openly drool over her thinness.  These people did not see, I think, that she was not thin, she was starving.

I remember a story she told me when we were spending time in NYC, staying at my sister's Central Park South apartment (which my sister no longer has, sis now living in Illinois, married to someone else).  Some guy had followed her on the sidewalk along Broadway, speaking to her about how hot she was. He followed her long enough, scrutinized her closely enough, that he noticed her panty line. Then, apparently, he closely scrutinized her panty line  (this was before everyone skinny wore string panties, around 1999) to note that her panties were a little baggy. Her panties were 'baggy' bikini briefs because she was literally deathly thin. She knew the guy had been following her, scoping her out, openly commenting on her, on how much he would like to do her, yet when he got up close and whispered in her ear that she needed to buy smaller panties, only then she did feel invaded. Or, at least, this was the story she told me.  I don't really know what kind of relationships my daughter had, or encouraged, with men who openly talk about women's bodies on the street.  I suspect that there were times when she encouraged such behavior, seeing their interest as flattering. I remember once, when she was still in high school, around age 15, telling me about a guy asking for her number. She told me she didn't give it to him. She had her first cell phone at that time. Then she was hospitalized, for the eating disorder, and her phone was with me. It rang and I asked the caller if he was the guy who had just tried to pick her up at the So-and-So (whatever sidewalk cafe Katie had described:  it was something at the corner of Lake and Hennepin, a coffeeshop). He said 'Yeah', and I said "Do you know my daughter is fifteen?"  He hung up and never called back.  I know he didn't call back because she was hospitalized for several more weeks and she did not have the phone with her.

I sold my house to finance Simon's Rock, then used some of those proceeds to finance her education at  Cornell.  I gave her private schools for all but two years of her life.  I gave up stuff for her, as most parents do.

So. In the fall of 1998, as I drove her back to her college campus after her first college-mandated mid-term break with parental units, I asked her to sew a button onto an article of clothing of mine. I have never learned how to properly sew on a button but in Waldorf schools, all the children have handwork classes. All the children in Waldorf schools learn how to sew on buttons. There is a trick or two to how you knot the thread between the button and the garment. I had never learned that trick. When I sewed buttons onto coats, they fell off. When Katie sewed them on, they stayed on.

So I had planned that button repair for the trip. She had refused to do it the whole week she had spent 'home' with me in Amherst. She didn't have much to do that week but she resisted doing it. I had naively imagined that, trapped in the car with me for a few hours, and aware that I was putting wear and tear on my psyche by driving 2.5 hours to her campus and then 2.5 hours back -- she had never driven and she was probably unaware that five hours of driving is work, not a joy ride -- I had totally expected, and assumed, that she would do it. She had been living apart from me for a couple months. She had not done anything for me since college started. She had not lifted a finger during the week she had spent at home with me.

I still don't think it was much to ask, to ask her to sew on that button.

When I asked her to do it, in the car, she initially said she would do it. But later.  When we pulled off the turnpike, for the final half hour or so stretch through side- and back-roads to Simon's Rock, I said "Now, Katie, this is your last chance."

She angrily informed me that she was not my servant and she would not sew on that button.

I pulled to the shoulder and said that we were about thirty miles from her dorm and maybe I would refuse to take her further, just let her and her luggage off right there.  I pointed out that I was doing something for her, not to mention that I was paying for everything in her life. The meals on campus were not free. The single dorm room that cost extra was not free. The  clothes on her back were not free.

She was furious with me.  I don't think I was furious. I think I was hurt.

When I saw that there was no fucking way she was going to sew on that cursed button, I pulled back on the road, drove to campus in relative silence and did not get out of the car when she unloaded.

I guess that was the day she left me, although I did see her a few times after that.

me and Tricky Dick

After Richard Nixon left the presidency, maybe five years later, I happened to read that he had developed blood clots and had been hospitalized. The article explained the phenomenon of blood clots. As I read it, my inner voice told me I was going too have the same condition someday. This was, maybe, around 1980, 1981. Maybe a little later.

Then, in 2006, I did develop deep vein thrombosis, then pulmonary emboli.  I had been awakened in the middle of the night with pain in my left calf. It hurt like a fatherfucker, let me tell ya. Then I went back to sleep.  I ignore physical pain. I always have aches and pains. Doesn't everyone?

Then, several times, for no reason, I was unable to breath. Just for a few seconds. It didn't last long, just long enough for me to notice 'hey, I can't breath' and then my breath would resume and I forgot about it.

At the time, I had monthly visits with my doctor.  When I saw her the next time, her nurse skipped a question in her standard protocol. Every time I had seen that doc for every month for a year or so, the nurse had asked me "have there been any changes in your health in the past month". So I saw the doc, she checked whatever I was there to have checked and as Martha, the doc began to leave, my visit with her over, I said "Hey, the nurse did not ask me if anything is different since my last visit and something is different."  I was mostly kinda kidding.  When I had been unable to breath, I had flashed to my upcoming doctor visit, imagined the nurse asking her standard questions, so I had noticed she had not asked.

Martha closed the door, sat back down at the desk, ordered me to sit back down and questioned me closely. I had chuckled but she was very interested. I guess doctors care about patients not being able to breath. She pulled out her stethoscope, listened to me breath again, asking me to take those deep breaths they ask you to do. Mid-big-breath, I stopped breathing. She asked "Like that?  You stop breathing like that?"

She ordered a blood test. The next day, I was out all day. My doctor personally called me, not a nurse. She left several messages, each one more anxious-sounding. I finally got home around 4:30. The receptionist passed my call through to Martha, calling her out of a patient exam to talk to me, as Martha had instructed.

My blood test indicated I most likely had some clotting going on. Martha told me to take a cab to the a testing place that would check for clots. I said "It's Friday, by the time I get to the place,  they'll be closed. I'll go on Monday." She said "What kind of doctor would I be to let you go walking around with a potentially fatal condition over the weekend?" I said "I promise, if the breath thing happens again, I will go straight to the nearest ER. I'll tell them what you have said, and make sure they check for clotting."  She said "And what do you think I would look like if you walked into an ER and told them that your doctor had let you go around all weekend like this? Promise me you will take a cab."

I lied to her and promised to take a cab.  I took public transit. I had to transfer twice. And the final walk from the closest bus stop was a steep incline. The Seattle area is about as hilly at San Francisco but folks from other places don't really seem to register that Seattle is very hilly. With each step, I fought for air. When I got to the place that would do the test, which was across a parking lot from a hospital, the receptionist and the lab tech person were upset, waiting for me. My doc had called them and asked them to wait for me, told them I was coming in a cab. The bus ride delayed my arrival and my doc and the lab folks were sitting around imagining me dead somewhere.

I did have a gigantic cluster of clotting in my left thigh. And, as discovered that evening, clots (emboli) all over my lungs. Lots of blood in my lungs. It was actually amazing that I had been able to walk at all.

The next day, still in intensive care, a nurse told me that radiologist (or whatever title the person had who had read my chest screens to diagnose the pulmonary emboli) had actually called ICU to see if I had lived through the night. He had not met me -- he had looked at my scans on his home computer. And, by the way, I guess sometimes doctors in India practice medicine with US hospitals by computer, from India.  The nurse said it was unusual for the radiologist (or whatever) to call, but he had been amazed to learn that I had walked into the hospital, that I had been breathing at all.

It was serious.  They put me in ICU partly because I could have stopped breathing with each breath. They didn't even want me to stand up to pee. An ICU nurse cried when I objected to peeing in a bed pan. She said, in Filipino accented English, "You could die when you stand up. Do you think how I feel?"  I did not feel empathy for her tears.  At the time, I barely registered them. It was only later that I noticed that she had been more concerned about my wellbeing than I had been. I told her that I had been walking around for at least two weeks with pulmonary emboli, that I was unlikely to die if I stood up to pee in the adult-sized potty chair and I was not going to pee in a bed pan. Have you ever tried to do that?  I did once when pregnant:  it is very uncomfortable. You get pee all over yourself. Well, just a little over, but you feel that wetness, know it's pee. Yuck.

They put me on oxygen. When I got to the ER, my breath did not show enough oxygen. And they administer some kind of intense drug. The way the doctor explained it was that the drug would thin out all the blood in my body, make the blood so thin that my body was at great risk from the drug. I had to be very closely monitored. She said it was a bit like a very intense chemotherapy. It was chemical therapy, if you ask me, just not cancer-chemo. She explained that they hoped this chemical would make my blood so thin that the clots would begin to 'melt'. That's how she put it, melt.

And, just 24 hours later, they scanned my lungs again and saw much improvement.  I was going to live. I stayed in ICU a couple more days, very sick.

ICU is a bit like a spa experience. Everyone is very intensely focused on the patient's wellbeing. If I moved, someone came to my side.  I didn't move much. I didn't talk much. The drug didn't just thin out all my blood. It thinned out my consciousness.  It was somewhat pleasant, in a weirdly indirect way of being pleasant. I was so debilitated that I didn't have to do anything. I didn't try to do anything. I zonked out for two and a half days in that ICU.  No TV, no conversation. A friend came to visit. A few days later, when I was in a regular room, many friends called. As soon as I was not completely out of it, they removed me from the ICU.

My answer to Oven Bird's question

In the last line of Robert Frost's poem, Oven Bird, he, or the bird perhaps standing in for Frost, asks "what to make of a diminished thing".

Here is Oven Bird:

The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past,

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Robert Frost

If you have never done so and if you imagine yourself a lover of literary art, pick a favorite poem by a highly renown poet. Google the poem for literary analysis. And dive in.  If you have ever thought that language amounts to mutual agreement, that words have objective meaning, only an hour reading literary analysis of one poem will demonstrate that language has as much mutually agree-upon and/or objective meaning as Marc Rothko's paintings. Marc Rothko's work or any great abstract expressionist.

It is an illusion, perhaps a delusion, to think words are mutual agreements.  Words are what we have to try to connect.  One of the things we have to try to connect.

I set out, in this post, to answer Frost's question, 'what to make of a diminished thing'. Here is my answer, a poem by Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson spent virtually her entire life, with only two or three trips away, in Amherst, MA. And, as most people know, she stopped leaving her home almost entirely after she reached adulthood. (She did frequent the house next door where her brother, a beloved sister-in-law and a beloved nephew lived. The path is still there, between the houses. A visit to her home, open for tours, is worth it, especially to people who love her writing.  I swear I felt her standing at the window of her second story bedroom, as she dropped a basket down to children playing on the lawn. Several times in the tour, I had a sense of someone ducking out of sight. I felt a rush of air, the sound of skirts moving. It was her. She used to stand at the top of the stairs so she could listen to the many visitors in the parlor. Sometimes she sent down word, requesting a particular song when someone was playing the piano. She was present in the parlor but upstairs. Her sister Lavinia sometimes joined her at the top of the stairs and sometimes mingled with the guests.  As time passed, Emily stayed out of sight from all but Lavinia and her other family.

Robert Frost also spent many years in Amherst, also writing poems.

Here is my answer to the question, what becomes of a diminished thing.

  The Black Berry—wears a Thorn in his side—
But no Man heard Him cry—
He offers His Berry, just the same
To Partridge—and to Boy—

He sometimes holds upon the Fence—
Or struggles to a Tree—
Or clasps a Rock, with both His Hands—
But not for Sympathy—

We—tell a Hurt—to cool it—
This Mourner—to the Sky
A little further reaches—instead—
Brave Black Berry—


Here is my analysis of the poem.  I do not know, nor do I wish to, the language of poetry criticism. There are labels for various poetry patterns. A sonnet has fourteen lines, so many consider Oven Bird a sonnet. Iambic pentameter is about syllables but as soon as poets agreed upon what iambic pentameter meant, they seemed to have felt free to play around with it, as Frost does in Oven Bird. Shakespeare, I believe, wrote all his poetry in iambic pentameter. I remember being so amazed by that fact when I first learned about Shake's iambic pentameter in high school. It seemed impossible for someone to create so much rhyming, in rhythm,  to discipline one's self to hard numbers of syllables per line.

Then I had a kid.  I wanted to stretch her thinking as best I could so I played around with language a lot. Sometimes, I would try to speak in rhyme all day long, partly to have silly fun, partly to get her to pay closer attention to me, partly to sharpen her own thinking, sharpen her verbal skill.  As a mother, I was not always on, but I was on a lot. I saw learning opportunities in everything we did and, as best as I could, I turned everything into learning games. If she wanted an apple at the store, I asked her to notice the different colors and choose one. When she knew her colors, I would buy as many apples as she could count, incentivizing her to learn how to count.  I don't know if my homemade lessons added up to anything but she did get an academic scholarship to an Ivy.  I digress, again and again, eh?!

Emily is not writing about blackberries in the above poem. She is offloading a bruise in her being, telling us she has a hurt that needs cooling. She hides this vulnerability as one might hide a bruise on one's forearm by putting on a long sleeved blouse. Being a gifted word artist, she hides her hurt inside a beautiful paean to the blackberry, using the blackberry's thorns to protect her hurt as she describes for her readers how the blackberry is protected from deer and other hungry animals by surrounding itself with thorns. Those thorns, protection, guardedness, both protect and allow the blackberry bramble itself to grow. Protecting one's self from the slings and arrows of life is necessary in order to thrive.  Humans need guardedness, comparable to the blackberry's thorns. And then, since the thorns are already there, why not use them to allow us to grow.

Now, if you are interested in a language game, google Emily's poem for literary criticism and read the amazing array of what others see in the poem. I have never read any literary criticism of this poem.  I am protecting my own analysis, my refusal to read others insights into the poem are my thorns, protecting my own tender self confidence.  I am pretty sure Emily would have understood what I am getting at, even if no one else does.

I have told no one, speaking out loud, of the hurt I am feeling. I only write about it here on this blog that no one reads. No one I know. Occasionally, an internet traveler stops by. 47 people follow this blog. I wonder if any of them are someone I actually know. I think not. I do not know.

I understand a person needs to be guarded, to be a little thorny so one can 'be', and being implies growing, yes? When does pure self responsibility become mutual interdependence? When is a relationship codependent and when is it mutual support, a positive interdependence?

Ouch.

It might matter, esp. to Frost fans, that many poetry experts think the Oven Bird in the poem represents Frost himself, and that his Oven  Bird poem is about poetry.  People read all kinds of stuff into it.

I am still holding onto damage from my undergraduate experience.  I would have been an English major but the head of the department, at my small liberal arts school, was a bully. He seemed to believe that all literary work had just one meaning. He blasted my papers for him because he said I always interpreted whatever literary work I was writing about wrongly. What the fuck? There is no such thing as a wrong interpretation of art.  He seemed to think there was one right one. But, come to think of it, I wonder if I projected this onto him? Maybe I thought he thought everything I wrote was wrong because I thought everything I wrote was wrong.

Sometimes, life feels like what Lewis Carroll was trying to convey, at least I think he was, when he wrote the Mad Hatter scene. Gobbledegook and nonsense passing for people talking.

breaking up is hard to do

We have all heard the song with the lyrics 'they say that breaking up is hard to do'. That song is about the end of a romantic breakup.  You rarely hear songs about friendship breakups, or longing for friendship.  It can seem like only romantic/primary/partner relationships matter.

I am struggling over the end of a friendship. This male friend and I were not lovers but we love one another. We still love one another. But we are no longer friends.  I am heartbroken. And pretty much alone in this loss.Friends don't matter, right? Not as much as a lover, or, it sometimes seems to me, a beloved pet. This guy mattered to me. It's like losing a family member, only he's not dead, just dead to me. There is a hole in my heart, my being.

In my mind, in my heart, I still turn to this friend, still want to talk to him about my life. Nevermind that we have broken up because turning to him had stopped being a positive, happy stream.  We have broken up because we just couldn't find the right stream of energy to hold our friendship. We wanted different kinds of connection. The dissonance between what each of us wanted was unsettling, a growing strain for me and, I am pretty sure, for him.  It's a good thing we have stopped interacting.

I am grieving.  Bereft.

soup

I have become, if I do say so myself, a soup master.

the way to San Jose

Tomorrow, I'm headed to San Jose. I used to go to San Jose more regularly when I lived in MV. I could hop on Caltrain and be in downtown SJ in about fifteen minutes.

I've been putting off this trek for weeks. It is going to take more than two hours each way. A bit onerous, but it will be worth it.  I'm headed to the San Jose Museum of Art,  a nice little art museum that focuses on contemporary California artists.

I wish I could blink and be there. I am so dreading the train and bus rides.

sidewalk sleeping San Francisco

Yesterday, on a bus at a bus stop in San Francisco, I noticed a homeless-appearing man sound sleep on the sidewalk. He was curled up in a fetal position, leaning against a garbage bag that seemed to be his belongings. His face was weathered, as if he spent lots of time outdoors. And this guy was sound asleep.  It was my sense that he was sleeping from exhaustion, not that he had passed out from drinking or drugs but who knows? This human being looked as thoroughly tired as a person can. And he was sleeping so soundly, as if he was in a private, cosy bed.

It looked as if he had sat down, leaning against the wall of a restaurant, and fallen asleep, then fallen to the sidewalk.

It is against the law to sit on the sidewalk in San Francisco, and it is also against the law to sleep on the sidewalk. This law has been strongly debated. The homeless challenge San Francisco in many ways.  I think most decent humans have empathy for homeless people. I certainly do. But it can be intimidating to be approached for money by drunk or high people. And if they are unclean, maybe smelly because they have no way to bath regularly or launder their clothing, well, you get smelly, messy, vaguely intimidating and unpleasant humans, which is bad for the tourism that is important to the San Francisco economy.

It's a complex issue. I am mindful that anything I might say can sound condescending.  I have empathy for homeless people. And I know there is a wide range of homeless. People who lose their jobs and then their homes because they can't pay rent or mortgage payments are a different category of homeless than the chronically homeless with addiction and/or mental health issues.

The sleeping homeless guy that I saw yesterday looked like chronic homeless, homeless by choice. But I don't know.

The bus was stopped longer than usual because a wheelchair passenger was getting on. As I observed the guy sleeping on the sidewalk, I became aware of the SF police officer as he pulled out his citation book, then took out a pen and started filling out his form. He was going to cite the sleeping guy.

I guess the cop was going to do whatever paperwork he could do before awakening the guy.  And I thought it unusual for the cop to be alone. Nowadays, it seems cops always show up in pairs. Maybe the reason the cop had not yet approached the sleeper was because he was waiting for another cop.

I don't know what the SF official response to sidewalk sleepers is.  I think I have read, in the news, that cops issue warnings first.

It was a calm, quiet moment. I imagine as the incident proceeded in time, the cop would have awakened the sidewalk sleeper. If the guy was unconscious, I suppose the guy would be hauled off in what used to be called a paddy wagon.

Modern life.

Someone swaddled that sidewalk sleeper when he was a baby, changing his disapeers, encouraging him to learn how to walk and talk. At least I hope so. And he went to school, probably learned how to read and write, probably had jobs at some point.  There lots of unhappiness in this world.

a snake sheds its skin

An old friend and former biz partner owned a gigantic snake named Elsa.  I don't know what kind of snake Elsa is (was? how long do gigantic snakes live?).  I think Elsa might have been six feet long and, at her widest the approximate size of a large apple.  I can't 'think' in terms of circumference.   How many inches all the way around a very large apple?

If Elsa ate a mouse, which Lynn, my former biz partner, sometimes fed her, the lump of the mouse would bulge out as the mouse's body moved through Elsa being digested, gradually melting away until Elsa resumed her regular roundness. I guess the snake swallowed a mouse whole. Also, Elsa was not the same diameter all the way. She was thicker in the middle, with each end tapering. One end tapered to the end of her. The other end tapered to her face.

When I stayed with Lynn, who lived in Baltimore when we were partners -- I lived in Minneapolis then -- she put Elsa in her large glass 'cage'. Elsa's box was a very large aquarium.  When Lynn was home alone with Elsa, Elsa had the roam of the house.

During a visit, Elsa was shedding her skin. I had always known snakes shed their skin. Humans shed their skin, too, but it is not as clear-cut. Human skin sheds in microscopic flakes, something that happens steadily all over the body.  I guess all living organisms change steadily, growing and dying simultaneously.  I have not had a science class since my high school biology class. I never even took chemistry, which I regret. Chemistry was not required for most colleges or for my graduation.

I never felt any draw to study science, although I find myself increasingly interested in understanding some science.  We have all, I bet, heard one kid or another complain that many of the things they are asked to learn in school are useless in life.  This is not true, of course. As I age, I find myself often wishing I knew more about science. Nothing prevents me from learning and I think I will undertake some study of science.  This post is not about my academic regrets, which might be a topic for another day.

Watching Elsa literally slink and slide out of her old skin, seeing her new skin emerge, penetrated me. I watched her for hours at a time. Her movement out of her old skin, emerging into her new one, was glacial.  Her skin was made up of an endless number of tiny flakes. The dead cells were dried flakes. The new skin wet, alive, moving. Some flecks of the old skin became light flakes that might be moved with air movement, but the bulk of her old skin retained the form of the snake.

Anyone who is into reptiles has seen snakes shed their skin, I guess.  My observation of Elsa's shedding was not special or unique. But it is special to me, unique in my experience.

Humans don't just shed skin. I bet all of my body sheds old cells and steadily grow new ones.  My heart does not retain any of the actual, physical cells that I was born with.  The tiny pancreas baby Tree had on August 16, 1953 is the same pancreas in my body today, but all the cells in today's pancreas are new.

Life is so amazing, isn't it?

Just as physical matter changes constantly, my being constantly changes.  I change how I go about being me.

I have shed lots of people as I have moved through life. And people have shed me.  I know this is life, growing and changing is life.  I know it is right.

I wish it did not hurt so much to be shed by someone I love.

Wislawa Szymborka died today

True Love

True love. Is it normal
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way - in reward for what?
For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.
Couldn't they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends' sake?
Listen to them laughing - its an insult.
The language they use - deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines -
it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!

It's hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who'd want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.


Wislawa Szymborska

movement qigong eurythmy swimming

Just musing here, rambling through my mind. . . .

I have been severely depressed. I tend to think that present unhappiness feels worse than past unhappiness, analogous to the way I tend to believe present physical pain is worse than past physical pain.  I forget what physical pain felt like. For example, I can mentally recall that I experienced serious pain when I was in childbirth but, reflecting backwards, that pain doesn't seem to have been all that bad. When my pelvic area was wracked with the body cracking crunch of my baby coming out, the pain seemed bigger than my body, my being, my mind.  Anyway, my fuzzy, poorly-written point is that even though I sincerely believe I have been in the deepest depression of my life, maybe it's not true. But I am pretty sure this is the most depressed I have ever been, although maybe in the past I just wasn't able to surrender to depression the way I am now. In the past, I had things going on that drew me into the world. I could not stay in bed, only getting out to use the toilet and grab food and water from the kitchen, when I was raising a kid. She had to get gotten off to school, or picked up after dance. She needed stuff all the time and it was my job to go into the world and arrange for it.

In the past, I had jobs and commitments and all kinds of relationships that involved active interaction. Friends would call to talk. Gosh, I used to talk on the phone for hours and hours.

Recently, throughout January I think, I have only left my apartment a handful of times and only because I absolutely had to go out.  I had to deliver my rent checks in January and February to the management office in the lobby.  I had to go out and buy food. I had a dental appointment, a colonoscopy.

The most onerous task in my life right now is going to the drug store.  I am steadily shocked to see how hard it is for me to pull myself together, which includes having to get dressed, check to see that I have keys and wallet, and then walk one block to the pharmacy, stand in the always-too-long line, and get my meds.  This is so stupid but I can't get the pharmacy system to work to me. I have tried to request refills from home, so when I get to the pharmacy, my stuff will be ready but, for some reason, this never happens. Getting my scripts refilled always involves two trips, one to prod the pharmacy staff to refill a prescription and then a return trip to pick it up. Once in awhile, the staff offers to fill it immediately, which tends to mean at least a thirty minute wait. I will wait but these waits can seem interminable to me because I am so depressed.  I hate being out in the world, humans humming around me. I wonder if the word hum has any connection to the word human?  Hmmm.

I am crying now, thinking about how hard it can be for me to wait at the pharmacy. Such an outing leaves me feeling totally wiped out but it was nothing.

I have done trials in courtrooms, as a lawyer.  I have designed and lead awesome trainings and group experiences for years.  I have cleaned my homes, done laundry, gardened, sung in choirs, lobbied state legislatures, ridden bikes, driven cars, traveled abroad, laughed and loved but right now, lately, I don't want to do anything.

On Tuesday, I tried as hard as I could to sleep all day. I am amazed to have discovered that I can actually sleep for 20 hours in a 24 hour cycle. It's not restful sleep but I can zone out. Am I catonic when I am sprawled in bed for 20 hours in a 24 hour day?

The last time I saw my mom, in 2007, I was amazed by how much time she spent in bed, and, for the most part, sleeping. Now I understand that behavior. If there is nothing in the world that interests you, it is possible to draw into myself, block out the world, mostly avoid all thoughts, numb myself from feeling, and lay in bed doing something like sleep for 20 hours.