Monthly Archives: August 2017

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solitary tree and thought

Sunrise in Wisconsin last week.

My solitary thought this morning is about ethics. It does not matter what the other person has done, we still must be true to our ethical values. This means that a contractor can’t refuse to pay a worker. I am thinking of my own behavior but I am also thinking of the White House. I want an ethical president, a president who takes responsibility, a president who does not blame others, a president who stands up for what is right. A president who put ethical values first. Not money. Not predation. Not fake news. Not lies. Not corporations over citizens. Citizens are people. A corporation is not a person.

I want an ethical president who will not lie.

 

 

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on fire

This is an early morning photograph, downtown, not this year.

It was frightening to fly back from Wisconsin last week and have the plane descend into smoke in Seattle. The smoke from fires in British Columbia and Washington blanketed the city. I am used to descending into cloud, but smoke looks brown and was neither opaque nor transparent. Haze.

I missed the worst air, but the smoke still bothers me. One afternoon my receptionist and I both were having trouble with eye irritation from the bad air. My clinic is in a 1950s building and closing all the windows and doors is hot! No air conditioning.

I am hoping that we make changes to slow and mitigate climate change and global warming: I don’t want the world on fire!

How many summers will it take? My guess is three consecutive summers….

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Forgiveness 2

I wrote this poem in 2009 when I was struggling with forgiveness and wanting to forgive. How do we forgive when someone does not apologize? When they do not explain nor listen to your hurt and grief? Yet forgiveness is internal in each of us. The external is reconciliation and that requires listening from both sides.

Forgiveness

I want to forgive something
Someone
In fact a group
Something that hurt a lot
I’ve tried logic
I tell myself
“It was an expression of concern”

My heart doesn’t agree
It is sullen
Immobile and grumpy
It whispers
“They have not apologized”
It whispers
“When people say you’re crazy
It could be a joke
An expression of concern
It wasn’t
It was a palm held out
At arm’s length
To distance me.”

My head argues
“That’s what it felt like to you.
You don’t know their intentions.”

I want to write
A poem of forgiveness
Hoping my heart will follow

My conscious doesn’t write my poems
My conscious wrestles with an idea
The poem comes out of this struggle
I look at the poem I’ve written
I think,
“That is what I would like
my conscious heart to feel.”
My poem is often more generous
than my conscious feels

My poems are not mine
They are a gift
From the unconscious
It is much larger
Than the small conscious me
I dream of feeling envy
I climb into a bathtub
And transform myself
To battle a trickster
We are transported
To the bottom of the ocean

In the ocean
The trickster and I are one
It is unlimited
It is not my unconscious
There is no separation
It is all unconscious

I did not think
A poem would give forgiveness
But pain drove me
Into the sea
I am connected
You gave me these pearls
Thank you

 

I am submitting this to the Daily Prompt: jiffy. I wish this could happen in a jiffy…. but it is slow….