Category Archives: Beloved

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Open

O for open: open water and open heart, for the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

I kept thinking O for ocean, but the photos that I want to use are not of the ocean but of a lake. My daughter and I were there in 2012. She was a synchronized swimmer for seven years and then joined swim team in eighth grade. We went to the lake and she practiced distance swimming. She is used to a 1950s 20 yard pool. She started at the lake by swimming to a little island we call Kidnap Island. I canoed while she swam, and my cousin’s daughter came along on the first trip. They left the lake soon after that. My daughter swam farther and farther every day, with me in a canoe to ensure that no power boat would run her over.

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We were on our way to the parking lot one day, when a power boat slowed. “Long way out, aren’t you? All alone?” said one of the men. I was in a small one person canoe that only weighs 18 pounds and is really tippy. I wouldn’t take it out in any sort of nasty weather.

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“No, I am with my daughter.” I pointed to the water.

“She’s swimming? Where did you start?” he said.

I pointed back to our cabin. Far enough that he couldn’t see it.

“Really? She swam that far?” He and his friend watched my daughter power along.

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“Yes. Swim team.”

“Is she swimming to the parking lot?” The cars were still really distant.

“Yes and probably back, too.”

“Wow. I thought it was a long way for a canoe!”Β  They drove on, shaking their heads.

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Open water and open heart. It takes practice to swim that far. I swim about two days a week, about a mile in the pool. My daughter shakes her head: the swim team swims three to five miles at each practice, and she swims six days a week in the season. She considers me a wuss. I consider her a calorie burning machine.

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It takes practice to keep an open heart. That is what I need in my rural family medicine clinic. An open heart allows space and expansion and time for people to open up. To say things that are bothering them or frightening them or grieving them. I am back at work now for two weeks, but by the end of the day yesterday, I was tired, tired, tired, as if I had swum across that lake. I need to rest sometimes…..

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Move

M is for Move in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge

Move

Blessings on you

Take care of my heart

I know I’ve left it with someone kind

You don’t have to do anything with it

No giri

No obligation

You can set it anywhere

In a corner where it gets dusty

And covered with sawdust

Under the couch

In the woods

The kids can play catch with it

I don’t care

I am armored up

I am ready

I am ready to move

In the direction that I have chosen

Stand aside, please

I don’t want anyone to be hurt

Power up, armour, sheilds

I pick my sword back up

Obeisance to the Beloved

I move

38314-m

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Gift

G in the Blogging from A to Z, for gift.

Dreams are a gift. Dreams may be the unconscious speaking and attempting to bring something to consciousness. We may have a collective unconscious.

I am no expert in analyzing dreams. My minister says that we should stand in relation to dreams. That we should hold them in our consciousness and think about them. Some of the information about interpreting dreams I learned from him and from his mentor, Robert Johnson PhD.

There are four people in my fly dream. This is a good thing. Four is a number of completion, of arrival, of numinous knowledge.

The people all represent aspects of myself. My daughter/cat represents an aspect of myself. I told a friend the story of “The cat who walks by himself”, because he doesn’t read fiction. Or says he doesn’t. I have a hard time imagining not reading fiction, just as I never quite believe people who say they don’t like poetry. I think they are afraid of it.

The two males I am taking as aspects of my animus. My male energy. My male energy is healthy, which is very different from a dream that I had ten years ago. In that dream one male was a crazy cardiac surgeon who was doing a heart transplant in the middle of a garden party. The other male was the patient, whose heart was broken and needed to be replaced. In the fly dream, both males are healthy and bright. The adult male still has the capacity to not be grounded and to be disconnected from the ground, but he is willing to set the house down and explore locally, once he’s done showing off his power.

The children in my dreams were initially monsters. Baby monsters. Then my dreams had a baby girl and then a girl child. A recent dream had a two year old male, healthy. This dream is my first with a healthy teen male.

I think that this is a reassuring progression.

And still, I hold the dream present, a snapshot of my interior psyche. It may have more to tell me.

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Fly dream

F in the A to Z Challenge: Fly.

I returned to work yesterday after ten months off very sick and then convalescing. In the afternoon I came home. I ate a late lunch and fell into a deep sleep. Relief that I am back at work.

I dream: I am in a metallic boxy house. It is very modern, glass and metal. It is very spare, elegant and uncluttered. My daughter and cat are there but are one being. She keeps shape shifting from cat to daughter and back. There is a man and a teen, his son. He owns the house and built it. It is up high perched on a tower. It feels very precarious and the tower moves with the wind. The views are stunning, wilderness and mountains. The house falls and the man shows me that it is a spaceship. It hovers over the earth. He and his son are aliens. I am a bit annoyed that he deliberately scared me, but I also know that he is showing off. He is showing me his strength and power and maleness. I do find it very sexy. I want him.

I tell him that he can set the ship down in a safe place. I am suitably impressed and admiring. He does not need a spaceship or to scare me or to fly to be loved. He intimates that we can fly to explore other planets. I say “I am happy to explore this one for a while. It is ok to be grounded.” He sets the house spaceship down in the mountains.

I wake up.

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Love in Ten Sentences

Janebasilblog nominated me for this challenge and I finally have done it. Now to tag ten MORE people…..

Details of the challenge: Write a 10 line poem with four words to each line, and each line must contain the word β€˜love’. Nominate 10 people to carry on the challenge.

love complicates my life
love and don’t like
behavior not deserving love
love pours forth anyhow
love feels deep hurt
love withdraws lick wounds
love heals ventures forth
less contact mean loves
behavior change brings love
complicated joy : love anyhow

I still need to nominate ten people to carry on and write the NEXT love in ten sentences. I will add that…

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Egg

E for egg and Easter egg. I was up very early this morning, excited about returning to work tomorrow, and am dying eggs. When my mother was in hospice in 2000, she said, “This will be the first time in 42 years that I have not dyed eggs.” My sister and I looked at each other and went to buy dye and eggs. My mother was staying in bed most of the time, but she got up and came to the dining room, to dye one egg. We hid the eggs and baskets on Easter and she watched out the window while her three grandchildren searched for the eggs. My daughter was two, niece was one and 1/2 and my son was seven. My mother died in May. I remember her every time I dye eggs.

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Daughters and dinosaurs

D for daughter and dinosaur. Here is a poem I wrote quite a while ago, though it is about my son rather than my daughter.

Dinosaur Dreams

The problem
With Intelligent Design
Is those old bones
Those dinosaurs

Also that of 10,000 dreams of creation
One would be right
And the followers of all the others
Consigned to hell
If so, I go gladly, clutching
Dinosaur bones to my chest
And will enjoy the diversity
Not the narrow heaven with a narrow
Small-minded deity

But is evolution right?

Well, I think it’s on the right track

But wholly done and all correct?

After all, think how often
Medicine has been wrong
Think of tobacco and vioxx
Think of Galen, over 2000 years ago
Thinking that evil humors built up in the uterus
Causing hysteria
External pelvic massage was the cure
For over 2000 years
For old maids, widows and nuns
Who had no male to cleave unto
Massage was a treatment into the early 1900s
And now we wonder about prozac too

Evolution is an evolving science

I think of when my son was four
And he watched “Jurassic Park”
Against my wishes
Because I thought it was too violent
He studied it carefully many times

One day he asked me, anxiously,
“Mom, is DNA real?”
To check that it wasn’t another of those Santa stories
I was able to reassure him
Yes, I think DNA is real
He was pleased

A few days later he announced
That when he grows up
He wants to be a plant and animal scientist
Extract DNA from amber
And grow those dinosaurs

A laudable ambition
For any four year old

If God left the dinosaur bones
Around to fool us
And they never lived
She has a nasty sense of humor
And my son and I will not forgive

I believe in evolution
And dream of dinosaurs

first published on everything2.com in 2005

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Cousin

A to Z and I am a little behind…..

The photo is me and two of my cousins, at Lake Matinenda in Ontario, Canada in the 1960s. I am the one on the left. We were in cabins or tents, drank the lake water, used propane or camping stoves, and had aladdin lamps for light, as well as flashlights. The mysterious padded garment that I am wearing is a life jacket. My sister and I had five cousins on one side and seven on the other, all within reasonable age range that we played together and still stay in contact.

I just went to stay with my mother’s cousin, my Great Uncle. He also went to the lake in his teens and told me stories about my mother, my uncles and my grandparents. It was delightful to see him and hear another set of stories.

Hooray for cousins and hooray for family.

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Beloved

B for Beloved. Rumi and Hafiz, the Sufi poets, write about the Beloved.

The Beloved is God and God is the Beloved.

I like thinking of God as the Beloved. That makes sense to me. God should be Beloved, most Beloved of all.

But sometimes I feel abandoned and lost and stressed and grumpy and it feels as if I am longing hopelessly for a connection with the Beloved. Rumi says in his poems that it is the longing itself that is the connection to the Beloved. Then my inner devil gets annoyed and sarcastic and says, “That’s stupid. That’s a Catch-22. So why is the Beloved Beloved if suffering longing is the way to reach Her or Him?” My inner angel gets involved and is all serene and untroubled and says, “Of course longing is a doorway to the Beloved.” Then they both get out flaming swords and proceed to fight. They can’t kill each other though they try. And I sigh and say to the Beloved, “They don’t behave.” Then the angel and the devil both turn on me and say that I should love each one of them best. “No.” I say. “I love the Beloved best, but you are both part of the Beloved so if everything is loved, then you are both loved best.” Then the angel and devil point to each other and say how the other one is just horribly wrong….. they just go on.