Yes, I have been thinking about the body as a temporary vehicle recently, and unfortunately it is not without its inconveniences and downright suckiness. So, what is your view? Do we come multiple times to this earth to learn lessons and use mutliple bodies? Or is this a one-shot deal? One body in which to experience life and learn what we can? In either case, at times when I am experiencing less optimism, I experience the thought that we are prisoners of our bodies, watching ourselves decompose and losing those around us.
We all have our struggles, some more urgent than others. Carol has been struggling harder than is right, or just. How can this be happening to such a kind and gracious person? As Maureen forced me to remember on Wednesday, life is not always fair. But doesn't that just suck?
Miracles do happen, remember to send Carol some of your energy these days...
"The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind."
-Maya Angelou
I have reflected upon some of the stuff I have read, the whole thing of being removed or whatever. Here I was complaining about being so wrapped up in the mundane for so long and then I worried about being too removed. Life is a compromise, guess the best we can do is try to be aware of the choices we are making along the way and make sure we do not forget to be alive while we are here living, which is actually incredibly easy to forget as I go about my life, apparently.
Lot's of talk of what "love" really is these days.
Tonight several of us girls are going to meet and and try to figure it out. In the meantime, click on the lamb picture for valentine story (it does take a long time to load so prepare yourself to be patient...).
Learning how to use the computer better and how to do web pages has been fun, and challenging. Sometimes the confusion, when it clears, lends to the absurd...Click Here for Joke...
One of my co-workers was off and had a referral for an emergency nursing home placement from home for an elderly (mid 80s) woman who was dying of cancer. My supervisor asked me if I could call them and tell them the worker was off but could get to them as early as Monday (this was a Thursday), and I told her to never mind, that I would call them and take care of everything. I called and then went out to her condo the next morning, scheduling it all with her adult son.
As I met with the client and her son and daughter-in-law, I told them that the referring hospital social worker had not gotten me her medical information yet and asked them to explain to me all of her medical problems, and so the son and daughter-in-law mostly filled me in, the client adding a few things now and then. Later in the interview I wanted to clarify the client's current condition, because the family had really just danced around the issue, so I looked at the client and called her by her first name, she glanced up quickly, unaccustomed to being addressed by her real name. I asked her what the doctor had told her about her prognosis and as I did I could see her son sitting to my left out of the corner of my eye, his eyes getting red around the edges and looking anxiously at his mom. The client looked calmly, easily at me and said that they had told her that she had less than 6 months to live, that she was getting worse just in the last couple of days and that she herself wasn't sure exactly how long she actually had, and at the end of that excrutiating exercise the son looked relieved, the question had not hurt his mom, the question showed him that his mom understood her prognosis and was not falling apart with the knowledge, and it showed him that the subject was no longer unbroachable, that reality could be acknowledged and not destroy the world in the process.
When I left the client thanked me for coming, I reached over and rubbed her shoulder, saying "you take care, sweetie" (corny but she smiled) and that was that. I left, I will have no more contact with them, I just have to assume that what I felt had happened did happen and that I did ok.
Maybe not that much of a story...
In love there are two things, bodies and words."- Joyce Carol Oates
"May I suggest a third word? ACTIONS. Love is what love does."- Will Clegg, Pastor, Wesley Park UMC, Grand Rapids, Michigan
I went to a play Thursday night with Barbara, "Texts for Nothing" by Samuel Beckett. It was very interesting, abstract, existential- thus everyone has a little different idea of what it was about, and some have no idea of what it was about.
A very lengthy article or paper on this play is at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/eng/conf/anotherbeckett/sheehan/. On the first page the author describes the work as "Barely more than a circuit of reflective misgiving". He should have just left it at that. The play is a collection of thoughts, ideas, the mind at work sorting out what it is to be alive and the search for meaning between birth and death. To spend time analyzing the work with more words than the work itself contains seems somewhat self-inflated to me; the work speaks for itself, and it speaks to everyone differently- thus the puzzle of sorting out what this life is all about.
Click on his picture for link to general site about him with multiple links.
"Let's Go."
"Yes, let's go."
Stage Direction: They do not move.
Last Lines of Waiting for Godot
By Samuuel Beckett
Men vs Women, yes we are very different beings, and yet we are so much alike. "Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em...", an old but apt statement. As with many aspects of living this human life, the differences can divide us or they can enrich us and keep us connected, connected to each other and the pulse of life.
Click Here for Message About Breast Cancer and Efforts to Keep Us Alive and Connected
"They always say that time changes things,
but you actually have to change them yourself."- Andy Warhol
Yesterday, 5/11, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Margaret, my friend from Uzbeckistan, and listen to her musings, tempered with experiences in this lifetime much different from my own. She was a linguisitcs professor in her own country, and had at one time wanted to concentrate more on her philosophy interests and at another time wanted to follow her interests in theatre.
I presented her with my question from the April pages: What did she think of fatalism vs free will? She paused thoughtfully, as she always does, thinking deeply about the experiences she has to draw upon and bringing forth the practicality that living in a country that controls peoples bodies, while it tries to control their minds too, brings. She said that, indeed, there is free will, we all make choices, but the choices are not unlimitedly broad, they are narrowed by circumstances, they are choices amongst those things possible now. In The Garden of Eden, God demonstrated free will, giving Adam and Eve free will to choose whether or not eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, but they had only two choices and, if God did not want them to eat the fruit, why did he put it there? She said that we are all connected, that we are all part of this web of life called humanity, and we all have roles or burdens to fulfill that are part of why we are here. Yes, there is free will, but it does not include everything that is.
Margaret also talked about a family during WWII who had been trapped in Leningrad during the 900 day-long seige, when the city was surrounded by the German Nazi Army and how the family had no food or fuel- they burned their furniture to stay warm in the freezing Russian winters, ate the bindings of their books for the glue that held them together, and laughed uncontrollably reading the writings in the cookbooks and etiquette teachings that posed so absurdly against their own circumstances. One member of the family survived, and from them she knows this story.
Margaret's presence in my life is a gift of which I have the free will to choose to partake of or not. There is free will, and yet life also does just happen. We find things in our life that are not by or of our own making but just are. Sometimes we have a knowing that things will transpire, and we are helpless to change that progression. We do not write the story of our life in a vacuum, it is also written by all those who interact with us, just as the story of love between two people is written by the both of them, partners in determining the progression. We are all connected, whether or not we choose to think of ourselves that way. William Burroughs said: "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." Of course, the above is conjecture, not fact, not proven, just felt- what else do we have to go by?
CLICK ME, for Excellent Pictorial Tribute to Firemen...
I went to folk concert, at a bakery/restaurant in north Seattle called The Grateful Bread, featuring three women singers who each sang separately- good stuff. Each was very different looking in style and each used her voice differently and chose her words and music also differently.
My favorite was Nancy Colton, and so I bought her CD. She reached out with her personality when she spoke, and she spoke and sang from an inner place that was clear about who she was, and comfortable with being a sentient being. One of her songs, and I don't know if the lyrics of this one were by her or not, said: "if I find my way, how much will I find?".
For some very odd, and obscure, reason this lyric struck a cord with me, but I found myself adding to it in my head (what's new?) and changing it a little: when I find my way, what will I find? how much will I find? will it be enough? yes, of course it will be enough, since it was there for only me to find, but will I wrap myself around it? or will it burrow deep inside of me?, either or both ways making it a part of me and staying with me 'stretching cycles of years' (Walt Whitman), becoming part of what I call me or I, as I continue on this journey. There is no "if" in finding my way, just as there is no "if" for anyone- we are all just finding our way and, whatever we find, it is ours and we can chose to hold it tightly up against our chest, claiming this hard-won prize, or we can pretend to ourself that there is a mistake, that this is not where we were going, not what we were to find, and miss the point of the journey. As John Kenneth Galbraith said: "In the choice between changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof."
Is there is a lesson here, somewhere? Or are these simply the musings of a mind willing to put itself on display?
Nuggets of thought or simply gears in motion?
I browse through the thrift shops,
Looking for the pieces that look back at me.
I arrange them in my new place...
"You have such good taste."
I have no control,
Looking for the places,
Looking for the spaces, where each piece looks back at me.
Ok, back to the firemen...
CLICK ME, for a Tribute to Firemen...
There is a poem called "Minnie Remembers" that I ran across many years ago. It remains one of my favorites and it guides me in my interactions with my elderly clients.
CLICK ME, to Read the Poem
Yes, I am rude, I call elderly people by their first name, and do not ask their permission to do so. I touch their shoulder, let my hand linger and hold theirs if they do not immediately let it go when I offer it on greeting, on leaving, and in the course of visiting.
I have never had a client complain when I have called them by their real name, but I have a couple of times had families question that- I tell them it is up to their mom/dad, that I just really want to talk to Minnie, not to mom/dad, grandma/pa. They look at me blankly, and watch their mom/dad talk to me, watch her/his face get more animated, watch them smile, watch me hold their mom/dad's hand, and, later, thank me for coming. Sometimes as I leave they put their arm around their mom/dad, and their parent keeps smiling.
Back in January I wrote of a client I had seen who was turning 98. She was used to being vibrantly alive and active, but her body now had other ideas, and she spoke of her readiness for God to take her, ready to see her loved ones already waiting on the other side. When I got to the facility the staff informed me that this woman was "crotchety", had thrown out the last social worker who visited her and told me to come back down for their help if I had trouble getting in. I went up to her room, called her by her first name, held her hand a little after we shook, sat and listened to her story that no one else had time to listen to, and had to pry myself away from her- it was getting late. As I prepared to leave she thanked me for coming and I explained to her that we try to see our clients every six months. She looked at me and said simply "I hope it is you that comes next time". She didn't seem to mind me calling her by her first name.
A bit of interesting trivia courtesy of Reverend Will: "Dalmations were first used when fire engines were pulled by horses. In those days packs of dogs would attack the horses. Dalmations, because they are fast and good fighters would keep the packs of dogs away from the horses. We used to have a dalmation when I was a kid. Any dog that came on our property was run down and beat up by Mike (the dog). They never came back."
He is just kidding about "when I was a kid", he still is a kid at heart.
CLICK ME, for link to Dalmation site...
Happy Memorial Day...
Memorial Day, the holiday set aside to remember those we have lost from this world and this life, and to remember those who have given their lives for the continuance of our country and way of living.
We don't love qualities.
We love a person;
sometimes by reason of their defects
as well as their qualities.
-Jacques Maritain
This day, and every day, remember those you love, and those you like. Connection to other human beings, as well as a deep connection to your self, is the main joy of being alive. Stopping to remember this as we go about the tasks of living is something we often forget to do. Put it on your calendar, or whatever you do to remind yourself: "don't forget to be alive today".
And so, as we remember to connect, also remember that everyone else is just like you- flawed and imperfect. Reach out and connect to the imperfect beings here with you, they will almost always return what you give tenfold...
A Reminder to Connect at Right, "Perfect" Women, Waiting for the "Perfect" Man...
"What we do together is not as important as that we are together."
- John-Roger and Peter McWilliams
My new man, the one who was coming to my sliding door and begging to come in, has disappeared, I let him in and now he had moved on...
But, I have replaced him, replaced him with a more permanent man, one who will stay around and who loves to watch me walk by, excitedly greeting me and wriggling all over with joy at the mere sight of me...
Meet Shorty, he lives in a lovely glass home near my couch. He is beautiful, with flowing blue and red tresses. And he has a beautiful name, one he was born to have...
MSNBC NEWS SERVICES:
NEW YORK, May 30: With the tolling of a firehouse bell, an empty stretcher carrying an American flag and the mournful skirl of bagpipes, New Yorkers on Thursday marked the end of the World Trade Center recovery effort and a new beginning for the site where thousands died Sept. 11.
Today, 5/30/02, the World Trade Center cleanup ended. Last September started my web page making odyssey. Looking back, two entries:
"9/11/01: It is a scarey day."
"9/12/01: ... Rudyard Kipling and his words from a century ago... The Drums Of the Fore and Aft, where Kipling talks of [terrorists] "who have not European nerves... wholly mad with religious fanaticism... because a man who means to die, who desires to die, who will gain heaven by dying, must, in nine cases out of ten, kill a man who has lingering prejudice in favour of life", such a weakness we have, the wish to live, and for others to live.
And so, how many times will life demonstrate that it is itself tenuous, as if we need to learn that over and over? Safety is an illusion that we must create in order to go about the mundane [tasks of life]."
SEE YOU IN JUNE... CLICK TO GO TO JUNE PAGE...
Music: Click on Lips Page Created May 2002 |
