Category Archives: angel

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the unwashed masses

I don’t have any of THEM as patients. The unwashed masses. All of my patients are smart.

There aren’t any unwashed masses.

I have a gentleman who is overweight, obese, diabetes. He is not stupid. He is not unwashed. He is not exercising or controlling his blood sugar right now because the temperature is below freezing. He has a hole in his trailer floor and no heat. So he huddles under the electric blanket.

I have a gentlewoman, also diabetic. She too is not stupid. She is not unwashed. She lost her husband to cancer and then everything else and then was homeless for a period. She has a small house but she has no heat. She stays in bed to stay warm. Her contractor quit before he put in the furnace and he’s gone bankrupt. She is cold.

I have veterans. They are not stupid. They are not unwashed. One was homeless for a long period and pooled his resources with another to rent a section 8 house. I am so proud of them. They are having trouble living together, each would rather live alone. Only sometimes they would rather not be alone. It is hard.

I have a massage therapist. She started to train as a counselor. To be a counselor, she needs a certain number of supervised hours and was getting this through the county mental health. “I didn’t know.” she says. “It is taking twice as long as I thought because half the time they don’t show up. They don’t show up because they don’t have gas, they don’t have food, they have been evicted, their son is in jail, they are in jail. I had no idea. My massage clientele is so different, they pay. I thought poverty was in third world countries, but it is here, in my county. I didn’t know.”

I know the people who live in the woods. A schizophrenic who comes once a month for his shot. He was losing weight. “Why are you losing weight?” I demand. “I am only eating once a day.” he says. I nag him to go to the community meals. He is shy, he is afraid of people and he is hungry. He is not stupid. He is not unwashed.

I have opiate addicts. Six years ago one expressed concern. He is 6 foot 5 and big. “I am afraid of some of the other people. You shouldn’t be doing this! It’s too scary and dangerous!” My opiate addicts are not stupid. My opiate addicts are not unwashed. Sometimes they relapse. Sometimes they die, in their 50s, 40s, 30s, 20s.

One in six people in the US is below the poverty level. They are not stupid. They are not unwashed.

And when someone talks about the masses, the people, the stupid people, most people are stupid, the sheep….

….I am beyond angry….

….my heart hurts….

Poverty in the US: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-tps153.html.

More: http://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty.html.

The examples are taken from 25 years of practice, details changed for hipaa, but I can list dozens at any one time. The photograph is during the sunset after clinic, when I walked down town, the view across the sound.

 

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Resilient

We went for a walk last night down town. On the way back, the bell in the fire tower was illuminated and looks magical. The tower was built in 1890 for the town fire bell and has been preserved. Read about it at the Jefferson County Historical Society : http://www.jchsmuseum.org/Resources/Resources-HistoricPreservationBellTower.html

I hope we can come together as a country for health care as this community has for the bell tower….

This is for the Photo Prompt: resilient.

 

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Pandora’s Box

I read this: Was Pandora framed? today and thought, I know I have a Pandora poem….and here it is, from 2011. And another write up, Why the number line freaks me out, that too. When I think of infinity and Pandora’s Box…. it’s worrisome…

Pandora’s Box

Oh, you’d think
It would be empty by now

But I open the box again
I say what I want

And hear “No.”

I sit in want
Old wants
Buried wants
Pressure rising

I know by now
What is happening
I let it rise in me
I do not fight it
I clean the bathroom
Scrub tile and grout
Wants claw inside me
Burst like striking oil
A geyser from within
Black sticky want
Screaming up through the air
Falling everywhere
Filthy, flooding

It will take a while to clean up
this dark matter,
pollutant to poison
or fuel to sustain?

 

I took the photograph yesterday on North Beach. It looks like a popped child’s toy, pink. But it’s not…. it is all over the beach. A seaweed? Something hatching? Nature is a Pandora’s Box as well…. infinitely creative….

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that

Whenever I think

that
is what I don’t want to be

the Beloved laughs
and orders me
to be that

as if I’ve called it
that

the angels surround me
curious

it’s my passion
anger
fear
that calls them

motes from heaven
fall on me
from their wings

and I weep

and step forward
and fall
fall
fall

becoming
that

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Heart call

I am lying in bed and missing my heart.

I prayed to the Beloved to fall in love and I do. I happen to be terribly sick because the Beloved is teaching me to take time off and not just work harder and longer to avoid grieving. This is the second lesson. Or the fifth, depending on how I count it. The previous one was two months, this will be ten.

But early on, before I realize that death is standing in my doorway, I am at a picnic. A sports picnic with parents and teens and some younger children. I see a man who has been flirting with me be nice to a tween girl. My heart falls out of my chest and attaches itself to him. It follows him home.

He is quite spectacularly wrong for me. I know it but my heart doesn’t care. And he is a liar, manipulator and a slut. Familiar ground, just like my family. I go to his place and try to catch my heart, but it is stubborn and skitters away from me. It is covered with sawdust, cat hair and motor oil. Also rabbit fur. He raises bunnies for meat and kills them. I cuddle the babies and then he does too.

My heart is brutally stubborn. I tell it it is stupid, it will get hurt, he doesn’t want it, all the usual stuff. I think the Beloved is laughing at me. By January I revise my prayers. Ok, Beloved, you win AGAIN, I am STUPID, now I want NOT ONLY to fall in love but to fall in love with someone who loves me back. I am so stupid I can’t believe it.

The Beloved ignores me, since my heart is already gone. Damn it.

The man tells me a dream. He dreams that his son is stuffed inside a giant teddy bear to keep him safe. He is fighting a war alone, being shot at and shooting a multitude of enemies. He tells me that his son is trained. If he needs to come out of the bear, he will be angry and he is trained to kill. Another dream is of zombies coming up from the shop and attacking the door. He and a teen or two are trying to hold them off.

There are no women in his dreams. At least the ones he tells me.

Uh, Beloved? Shit. I dream of angels, as many angels as there are stars. I meet with my minister to challenge his ideas. “The people in dreams are aspects of ourselves, ok, but not angels right? I can’t have that many angels. I was raised atheist, damn it.”

“The angels are aspects of yourself.”

And zombies…well, we’re well matched on a psychic level, right? I have enough angels to handle any number of zombies and more.

I connect with his small child self, because our small child selves are so alike. Abandoned at the same age and afraid and with desperate courage.

His pattern is obvious from the start. Mapped out like a constellation. I tell my heart, but it scurries up ladders, into boats, down the metal stands, under cars. It plays among the tools. I tell it to be careful of the saws and tools and it ignores me.

He lies and ignores emails and lies again and avoids me when he’s done something that will hurt me and like, obvious, duh. I get angry, but my angels map a new path to his small child each time. Boundary after boundary after boundary.

And now I am in contact only by text. Only by distant virtual message. He is showing up again, of course, because that’s the pattern. He has tried so hard to make me angry and make me abandon him in rage. I don’t really care. He fixes the leak on my boat that I asked him about over a year ago. He texts about installing the bilge pump. He offers to bag up the cushions and put them in his loft.

No, I reply. I have room in my house.

The only things left at his shop are a broken outboard, pipe clamps that I inherited from my father and my heart. I will go to get them.

I lie in bed, thinking of getting the motor and clamps. I think of asking for my heart too. But he has never noticed that he had it. I didn’t tell him. It was obvious. And he didn’t want it. So why would I tell him now?

And then I think, I can just call my heart. I don’t need to go in person.

I call my heart. Come home, I say. He never noticed you. You could stay, but we have done everything we can. He is still fighting the zombies, he doesn’t know he is fighting himself. He is fighting his own feelings. Come home.

My heart comes home.

It is in my chest. Filthy, sawdust, bruised, motor oil, banged up, with old tears that I mended with ribbon and dental floss and sewing thread and artificial cat gut.

Welcome home, my heart. Welcome home.

This is for the Music Prompt #63: Daniel Powter Bad Day. I took the photograph on the train from Chicago, in the evening in a storm. Prayers for those hit by the hurricane and other disasters.

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Unconditional 2

I think the hardest thing in the world is to love unconditionally. And we can’t love unconditionally unless we love ourselves in that too. Including our faults, our mistakes, our dark corners, our anger and grief, pettiness, unkindness, stupidity, jealousy, greed lust… if we only love our “good” side then we will attack others when they show the same weakness and faults that we know, deep inside, that we are capable of or have acted on. If we cannot love someone who is a sinner, we cannot love anyone, because we are all guilty. Love people anyhow and wholly and yourself too.

I went through a period after my mother died, where I felt I’d entirely failed. My marriage was disintegrating, and I was looking at myself very carefully. How had I gotten here? What mistakes had I made? I felt unlovable and stupid.

I found a letter from my mother written to herself when my father asked me to clean out her clothes. It was two or three years after she died. Here is the letter, with a few things left out for the privacy of the living:

____________________

Sept 18, Friday
1987
Seattle

I don’t want to go home. I want to stay here in Seattle. With the mountains that lift my heart. And clear air and only good memories. What is there to go home to? Struggling with X and his alcohol. I don’t want to try to do something about it. I don’t think it will work if I do. I think will only go on as it is and trying to get help will only lead to fight. I don’t think I have the strength, the courage or the wisdom to help myself or him.

What else am I going to? A house that needs a great deal of work that I only moderately like. A climate I loath. A landscape I find boring. I’m tired of living in a crowded suburb. And that house needs so much work.

People. What people do I go home to? Nearly all have problems. Y, wounded bird, so foolishly enamored of Z or thinks he is. And I have little sympathy or patience with it. And his propensity to failure which I’m tired of also.

A who I dearly love but her household is such chaos with those ill-behaved children and one crisis after another.

B who I like very much but really have so little in common with. I fear all that spiritual stuff may eventually bore me. Maybe not.

C. Another wounded bird, really. And not dependable.

D, barely around, anymore.

Mother, older and frailer. Who needs my care and patience.

E. There is one person to go home to. Thank God she’s there. Not wounded anymore. But so busy and it isn’t fair or wise to dump my troubles on her.

Who else? Why don’t I know any successful (in the best sense) sane people. People who are intellectuals, interested in ideas. F is. But not a fully successful human being and not when G is with him. Ugh. Besides he lives far away and he and X don’t like each other.

I don’t really want to have that show at H’s Church. I don’t like H very well. Oh dear.

I maybe have a job which if I get will be very hard work and if I don’t will be a great disappointment.

Winter’s coming and things cost more and we don’t have quite enough to live on. So that means digging into my inheritance.

I am sick of D.C. I am sick of being a struggling, unsuccessful artist. I am sick of worrying about X, about his moods, his acting the fool when half drunk and acting cruel and crazy when fully drunk. I’m sick of being afraid, of his depression, of his refusal to talk to me about anything of importance.

Of doing dishing. Of all the mess in our house. The mess on my desk, the mud room, the kitchen, the study, the basement. The dirty paint. The back yard. Oh God! How can I change things? Well there are a lot of bad things.

Oh, & I’m sick of being anxious, 10 lbs overweight, biting my nails, having bad teeth/gums. Life get tedjous, don’t it?

Any good stuff?

____________________________

For me, this letter was the key to finding myself lovable. My mother wrote to herself because she felt that she could not share these feelings with anyone. Terrible feelings. And I thought about it for a long time: I thought: my mother was charming, loved and an entertainer. But a child knows the parents’ hidden feelings. So I knew about my mother’s darkness and the letter confirmed it. And I thought, my mother didn’t need to hide that because I knew about it and I loved her anyhow. I love her more knowing that she was human too.

And if she is lovable whole, so am I. So are you. We all are. And we all make mistakes and are guilty of anger (sometimes appropriate but sometimes not!) jealousy, greed, lust, sloth and pride. Love people anyway and wholly and yourself too.

 

I have a view of Puget Sound if I stand in the road in front of my house. I took this with a zoom lens on solstice morning at sunrise.