Tag Archives: Beloved

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Walk away

I used to carry my phone around
hoping you would call me now
I walk away

my house is three stories and
I can’t hear the phone and still
I walk away

I long to hear your voice I send
a hopeful query to you then
I walk away

I leave the phone plugged in the wall
and go up the stairs and down the hall
I walk away

I listen in the quiet to hope sighing
in my heart and maybe dying as
I walk away

I took the photo at the National Junior Synchronized Swimming Competition in 2009.

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Where oh where is love?

How could we have love without grief?

The US culture seems to suppress grief, take grief away, heal grief, get over grief, but think about love without grief.

Could we love someone if we didn’t grieve when they died?

No. We couldn’t. That wouldn’t be love. Or that would be the pale shadow of love, love without loss, love that turned from the grave and forgot.

We cannot love without grief, so we need to make room for grief. We need to stand by each other during grief. We need to help each other, be present, be there, say the wrong thing, say the right thing, say nothing and just give love.

Love builds the Taj Mahal. Love writes Rumi’s poems. Love is the memories of the person we loved, we tell our children about them, we hold them in our hearts.

Love loves without logic, without sense. Love in spite of alcohol, addiction, lies, how can a person love an abuser? They love the person, not the abuse. They love the person, not the actions, not when the alcohol takes over, when the meth takes over, when the oxycontin takes over. Love loves the whole person and grieves the damage.

Love and grief are intertwined, a rosebush with thorns, there is no one without the other. No joy without despair, no light without dark, no you without me, no joining without separation.

I enter grief as I enter love, whole heartedly, oh, I may be afraid of the dark but I go there anyhow, I know as the waves close over my head and I sink into the depths:

There is no love without grief.

 

The picture is my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway, in high school. She died of cancer in 2000 and I still miss her terribly.

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Adverse Childhood Experiences 7 : Revisiting Erikson

Welcome back, to Adverse Childhood Experiences, and I have been thinking about Erikson’s Eight Stages of Psychosocial Development.

These were mentioned in medical school and in residency. I was in medical school from 1989 to 1993 and in Family Practice Residency from 1993 to 1996. Family Practice is at least half psychiatry, if you have time. We are losing the time with patients in order to achieve “production”. I complained about the 20 minutes I was allotted per patient and was told that I should spend 8 minutes with the patient and 12 minutes doing paperwork and labs and calling specialists. This is why I now have my own practice. A new patient under 65 gets 45 minutes and over 65 gets an hour and my “short” visits are 25 minutes. I am a happy doctor. And on the Boards last year I scored highest in psychiatry….

So, back to Erikson. The first stage, at birth to one year is Basic Trust vs Mistrust. “From warm, responsive care infants gain trust or confidence that the world is good.”

I was taught that people would have to “redo” the stage if they “failed”. Let’s look at that a little more closely.

Take an infant in a meth house. No, really, there are babies and small toddlers that have addict parents, alcohol, opiates, methamphetamines. We do not like to think about this.

A social worker told me that the toddlers from a meth house were really difficult to deal with. They do not trust adults. The first thing they do in foster care is hide food.

Hide food? Well, adults on meth are not hungry, sometimes for 24 hours or more, and they are high. So they may not feed the child.

Now, should this child trust the adult? No. No, no, no. This child is adaptable and would like to survive. So even under three they will learn to hide food. In more than one place. This is upsetting to foster care parents, but perfectly understandable from the perspective of the child.

So has the child “failed” the first stage? Well, I would say absolutely not. The child looked at the situation, decided not to starve and learned not to trust adults and hid food. Very sensible. Adaptive.

Is the child “damaged”? That is a very interesting question. After 25 years of family practice medicine I would say that no, the child is not damaged. However, the child has started out with a “crisis” brain. The brain is plastic, all our life, and so this child did what was needed to survive.

Is the child “sick”? Again, I would argue no, though our society often treats the child as sick. We think everyone should be “nice” and “warm” and “why isn’t he/she friendly?” Well, if you started in an addiction household or a crazy household or a war zone, it would not be a good adaptation to be warm and fuzzy to everyone.

How do we treat the adult? In a warm fuzzy nice world the child would have a foster parent who adored them, was patient with them, healed them and they would be a nice adult. I have a friend who said that foster care was so bad that he chose to live in an abandoned car his senior year rather than stay in foster care. He couldn’t play football because he had to get back to the car and under the layer of newspapers before it got too cold. I am sure that most foster parents are total wonders and angels. But some aren’t.

I have a person who says that he lived on the streets from age 8. He did get picked up and put into foster care. He kept running away. “The miliary loved me because I could go from zero to 60 in 60 seconds.” That is, he has crisis wiring. He is great in a crisis. The military is a sort of a safe place, because it has rules and a hierarchy and stands in for the failed parenting. Expect that then you get blown up by an AED in Afganistan and hello, that makes the crisis wiring worse.

How DO we treat the adult? We treat them horribly. We say why can’t this person be nice. We diagnose them we drug them we shun them we isolate them we as a society discriminate against them deny them and we are a horror.

I get so angry when I see the Facebook posts where people say “surround yourself with only nice people”. Ok, how dare you judge someone? You don’t know that person’s history. You don’t know what they grew up with. How dare they say that everyone should be NICE.

I am a Veteran’s Choice provider. I have 6 new veterans in the last 3 months. I suspect I will get more. They are not “NICE”. They come in suspicious, hurt, wary, cadgy. And I don’t care, because I am not “NICE” either. We get along just fine.

When I run into someone who isn’t “NICE”, I think, oh, what has happened to this person? What happened to them when they were little? What happened to them as an adult? How have they been hurt?

Pema Chodron writes about sending love: to your loved ones, to a friend, to an acquaintance, to a stranger, to a difficult person and to an “enemy”.

Send love. And do something about it. Help at your local school, help families on the edge, help single parents, sponsor a child to a sport if their parents can’t afford it, pay for musical instrument lessons, do Big Brother/Big Sister, become a “grandparent” to a child at risk, be a good foster parent, donate to addiction care….

The photo is from 2007, when my children and I visited their father in Colorado. A stranger in the parking lot took it at our request…..

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Thank you for this

Oh Beloved

Oh thank you from my deepest being from all of me from every cell for this touch this kiss this day this cat this daughter this son this family this work this rose this farm box these vegetables tomatoes in my yard and deer outside the fence in town crossing at the crosswalk

the motor working the sailboat flying across the water my aunt laughing my uncle hanging the hammock up in the house the farmer’s market the panda trailer friends new bunnies who barely have fur and sniff at my alien scent in my hand teen bunnies who delight in celery patients and patience and enough

books a box from Wisconsin with a vintage suit fake fur collar and cuffs that unbutton and a woman in a wheelchair laughing when I show her the collar and cuffs and getting through another week and catching up on some of the paperwork a massage to look forward to music and song and a photograph of my father at 6 and my aunt at 3 and my great grandfather and great grandmother in about 1900, he was born in 1881 showing the photos to my daughter and my niece

physical delight that morning comes the wind in the sails of the boat hugs hands touching me and me touching the taste of the tomatoes blueberries a cream puff with whipped cream and strawberries soft cashmere yarn on sail in downtown and my daughter wants just the right hat knit of this yarn just so and it must not come down to her eyebrows we all laugh

loons mink crows raccoons deer a flock of cedar waxwings by the church who stop curious when I try to do their call cat fish frog nuthatches snapping turtle small bunnies

I am afraid to feel happy happy doesn’t stay I hold it away how can I be happy what disaster will strike next but little by little Oh Beloved I let the feeling rise and feel happy

Oh Beloved thank you for this and all

My photograph of common mergansers on Lake Matinenda, Ontario, Canada, 8/2015

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the kind of people

my cousin’s husband said
I wouldn’t want to be around the kind of people who play paintball
which silenced me as I suppose he meant to as I stared at him thinking that since I was telling him that I had taken my son to play paintball as a celebration of my son getting a 4.0 in sixth grade and we were framing it as a celebration rather than a reward so that low grades would not generate in turn a punishment and I was trying to tell my cousin’s husband about the third round of paintball and I was the only woman there and definitely the only mother there and by then the sharpshooters in camouflage had asked why I was there and I had explained upon which one said “you are a good mom” and so in the third round when my son said that he wanted to be on the opposite team as his mother the guys giggled and we were on opposite teams and I am good at hiding in the woods but was having a bit of trouble with trajectory so everyone on his team was shot but him and everyone on my team was shot but me and I was trying to shoot my son with a paintball in a desultory sort of way since he was peppering the tree I was crouched behind when he ran out of ammo and we walked back to the safe area me with the gun held over my head saying “moms rule” and the sharpshooters in camo said we are going to shoot you next time and they certainly did
and I didn’t say any of that to my cousin’s husband
because I am one of the kind of people who play paintball and so is my son and I realized abruptly when my cousin’s husband said that that I really want to love everyone and so I still send love to my cousin’s husband but honestly I have trouble being around people who divide the world into us and them and didn’t Jesus and buddha and Muhammed all say essentially that god is love and Rumi says that the universe is the Beloved and so everyone is Beloved and we are all part of the one and there is no division and if god is love then there can be no hell
and I don’t really visit that cousin any more
and I still wonder why people want us and them and why people talk about that kind of people and I try to work with every kind of people that comes into my clinic that’s why I became a doctor really because I wanted to understand people and understand love and forgive things that happened when I was very little and thought that really, the big people were insane and loving but not trustworthy and obviously this is a fail in the end because I truly don’t understand how anyone could ever make assumptions about anyone else and ever say that they wouldn’t want to be around
the kind of people

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On the nature of love

love is not one love is longing for one love is two
love is the other longing for the other longing for union longing for one longing for the Beloved seen in the face of the other
do not forget nor lose nor submerse yourself in the other remember there are two not one you are longing to be one that is the longing for the Beloved you must be two and remember both while longing for union while longing to be one
you can love and yet not accept abuse yet not accept ill treatment yet not accept being walked on in the name of love
you can love even one who is behaving badly and treats you ill yet you should not accept ill treatment you are to remember that there are two and you are longing for the Beloved seen in the face of the other longing for union but that does not require that the other long for the Beloved nor see the Beloved in your face
you can love even one who does not want union with you yet they long for union with the Beloved
you can love even one who is behaving badly and treats you ill you should not accept ill treatment and there may be a time when you still love and walk away still loving and longing

for there are two
not one

I took this picture of my sister and our neighbor and friend in the late 1970s, probably playing pong…

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Not yet adequately adored

I am wandering in the forests of emotion I am comfortable now mostly I don’t talk about it much though occasionally I am irritable I am thinking about love I have had my children going commando could also be going postmenopausal because there is no longer bleeding or if there is I would have to get checked for uterine cancer but it is hot and why wear underwear of course apparently things can still get wet which is a bit of a surprise since so many women complain of less libido once the hormones drop I as usual do everything ass backwards and want sex more than ever but not when I am working hard and tired and cursing the new server laptop printer program and the keyboard is spaced differently and more sensitive all this fucking equipment when what we really want is to be loved as we are I have only seriously dated two people in the last seven years and one said that what I want is to be adored he said he couldn’t and I thought why not and Rumi says the depth of the longing is our depth of longing for the Beloved and really it’s not a forest for me it’s the ocean it’s the deepest part of the ocean those rifts and I dive all the way and don’t care if I run out of air Beloved I am not yet adequately adored

I will go for coffee instead.

the photo is from 2006, one swimmer carrying the younger swimmer

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Harden

harden my broken heart, please, Beloved
not against you I am openopenopen evermore
I have no enemies nor none to hate
openopenopen transparent like glass they step
on my heart glass it shatters again ow shards
pierce through me all over it takes time for each
clear piece to work its way to the surface I need a
harder heart then glass how do the bodhisattvas do it I
don’t know, oh, Beloved, yet I want to remain
openopenopen even if glass is the only heart I have
I pull the shard from my bleeding chest and back and
this is not a job for sewing or ribbon or lace my
friend gave me tape with a spine printed on it I tape
my heart with boneshards it doesn’t matter anyhow no matter
how I wail and tear my clothes it is all longing

for you, Beloved

my photo from the 2012 US Synchronized Swimming Nationals

remember, the lifts are entirely swimming: no one touches bottom

submitting to Ronavon’s beWOW