Category Archives: 7 sins and friends

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bravery

There is more than one list of seven virtues. Courage, or bravery, goes back to Aristotle and Plato as one of the four cardinal virtues.

What is bravery to you? An extreme sport? A warrior?

My sister endured cancer treatment for 7 years, over 30 rounds of chemotherapy. She said, “People say I am brave, but they don’t understand. I don’t have a choice. It’s do the therapy or die.” It’s still brave, though, isn’t it.

The person who comes to my mind for bravery is a woman, a long time ago. She spoke Spanish and we had a translator. Her son had had rheumatic fever and they had gone to the pediatric cardiologist for the yearly visit. Her son had a damaged heart valve that was getting worse. He was somewhere between 9 and 12.

“The heart doctor says he needs surgery. He needs the valve replaced. But the heart doctor said he could die in surgery.” she said.

I read the notes and the heart ultrasound. “The heart valve is leaking more and more. If he doesn’t have the surgery it will damage his heart. He will be able to do less and less and then he will die. If he has the surgery, there is a small chance that he will die. But if he doesn’t, he will be able to grow and to run and to be active.”

She said, “I am so afraid.” But she returned to the pediatric cardiologist. And he got through the valve replacement surgery and did fine.

That is courage to me. The parents who take chances for their children: get into boats to escape war. Search for treatments. Fight for their home, their children, their loved ones. It is both men and women, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, and people who have no blood relation to a child that they reach out to help. Adoption, volunteering in schools, supporting a student, supporting an organization that helps children grow and thrive.

For the A to Z challenge….and last year.

 

 

 

 

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ardor

“the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra, la!”

I walk uptown today in the sun and the birds and I are out in the sun. It is warm and just amazing. There are flowers everywhere. Arriving home I change to bike gear and then it’s cloudy again. I change out and here is the sun. I will do the A to Z after all, because I am posting daily anyhow and the alphabet trickles round my thoughts. A, a day, a day late, arduous or ardor?

The birds and I are
slain by the sun: welcome
ardor spring flowers

My topic is Virtues and Views….there are Seven Virtues just as there are Seven Sins. Last year I wrote about a different feeling each day. Are the virtues feelings? And there is more than one list of virtues….

 

 

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new growth

I’ve been thinking about the A to Z challenge again. I did it last year, with 7 sins and friends. I wrote about an emotion each day…. and I planned to do it this year starting with the 7 virtues. Bet you can’t name as many virtues as sins…. though I don’t think any of the emotions are sins. They are part of us. They are part of the way we respond to the world and survive. We have to learn to pay attention to them and not label any of them as negative or bad. We cannot excise grief or fear or anger from our psyche and remain human. Instead we need to learn to be curious about each emotion….

…..and there has been a shift in my life, three parts all shifting at once, this week. It is very odd to have all three go at once. I may leave the virtues until next year, because this sudden freedom is strange, peculiar, unfamiliar…. I need to expand in it and explore it….

New growth….

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Wall

This is for photrablogger’s Mundane Monday #94.

And bravo for this blog: https://safarfiertze.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/all-that-we-share/

and the Danes: https://youtu.be/jD8tjhVO1TcΒ  .

My paternal grandfather arrived as an immigrant from England. My father’s mother’s father was an immigrant from Scotland. My maternal uncle traces our family back to the Mayflower: immigrants.

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Who is driving the car?

I am at my parent’s house.

My mother and I and the baby, a toddler, go out to the car which is a huge newish SUV. I open the back door and see a drawing lying on the seat, beside the car seat. It is a drawing of my son, from a photograph. My mother has written on it, her ideas about how she wants to do the painting. I took the photograph and know it: my son has an exuberant joyous toddler expression. I climb in to the SUV. My mother gets in the front and turns the car on. She pulls forward and I start screaming, “STOP! STOP DON’T DRIVE! THE BABY IS NOT IN THE CAR!” My mother is pulling forward and backing, in confusion. She stops.

I leap out and search. Under the car by the back wheel, but not under it, is a kitten. A black kitten, lying on its side. I reach and very gently pick it up, supporting its spine. I am crying. The kitten cries as I pick it up, with pain. I say, “She’s hurt! I am going to die!”

I wake up.

I think about the dream. Even though there is a picture of my son in the car, I am a teen in the dream. The toddler is not my son. The toddler is not my daughter. The toddler is my sister. My parents had old cars, never a new SUV. The house in the dream was my parent’s house in Alexandria, Virginia. We moved there when I started ninth grade and my sister started sixth. My parents sold the house and moved in 1996.

Who is driving the SUV? Is there a responsible adult? Are they taking care of the children? Or are they driving recklessly and leaving the children to try to care for each other? Some adults are not responsible and should not be driving.

 

My son took the photograph of my daughter in 2011 for a school project, recreating a movie poster: True Grit.

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Coming soon: The Unaffordable Health Care Act!

Coming soon in the United States!

Aren’t you sick of the Affordable Care Act? aka Obamacare? Time for a new administration and time to get rid of Affordable Care. We don’t want that! Competition, Corporations and Profit First!

Call Mr. Future President Trump, call you congress persons, call your senator, call your representative, call your state ones. Stand up and be heard, US Citizens! Tell them you are all for the Unaffordable Health Care Act! We can kill more small businesses faster! We can make doctors and nurses quit by age 50! We can have more people turn to addictive drugs for numbing and comfort!

Come on, US Citizens! You voted! Now call! The Unaffordable Health Care Act! brought to you by an all conservative all corporate all discriminatory group of unbelievably rich congresspeople and your stinking rich and suing everyone future president.

Or you could say you want Medicare For All! Hey, one system, one set of rules, all US citizens have care, we could start small businesses, business might return to the US since they don’t have to pay more and MORE and MORE for health insurance, wages would go up instead of yearly decreases in health care coverage….nah, US Citizens, you wouldn’t want that, would you?

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relegated

you’ve relegated me to one small box

a place in your life, Sunday morning
not every Sunday, but some Sundays
to work together on the tree house
and talk a little

well, you talk. I am supposed to listen
and give another perspective. I don’t get to
pick the topic.

You don’t answer emails: not the poems,
not the essays. I am not your Facebook friend,
we don’t have dinner like civilized friends
you would not mention my birthday
nor will you take me out on your boat.
Holidays are on ignore. You even agreed
to watch my cat and left her, after one day.

you’ve relegated me to one small box

I climb out and wander the streets, howling

I am unedited, unwashed, unpredictable, unrelegated

howling about you and your treatment of me