Tag Archives: love

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My mom loved me

My mom loved me

It’s herself she didn’t love
She didn’t love her anger
She didn’t love her fear
She didn’t love her sorrow
She didn’t love her shadows

She packed all her troubles in her saddlebags
and rode forth singing.

When I was angry
she felt her anger
When I was scared
she felt her fear
When I was sad
she felt her sorrow
When I felt my shadows
she felt hers
I hid my shadows

I hid my shadows for many years
and then my saddlebags were full
They called me

I dove in the sea
I rescued my anger
I rescued my fear
I rescued my sorrow
I rescued my shadows

At first I couldn’t love them
My mom didn’t; how could I?

But I loved my mom
I loved all of her
Her anger
Her fear
Her sorrow
Her shadows
Her singing and courage

I thought if I could love her shadows
I could love my own

It was hard
It took months
I looked in the mirror at my own face
And slowly I was able to have
Compassion for myself

I am sad that my mom is not
where I can touch her warmth
and tell her I love all of her
I tell her anyway

I’m finding many things as I surface from my dive
Sometimes I feel the presence of angels
I was looking for something else
I found a valentine
that she made me
No date
Many hearts cut out and glued
to red paper

I am so surprised

My mom loves me
shadows and all
now and  forever.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child Sweet Honey in the Rock

I took the photo of my mother working at the etching press while I was in college.
This was previously posted on everything2.com in 7/2014 and written before that.

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Weekly Angel/Devil Fight: Love everyone

This is my weekly (biweekly, snarls my devil) blog about the arguments between the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other.

Do I really see an angel and a devil? Well, no. But we all use archetypes and we all have all of the archetypes within us. So when I have a dilemma or something comes up, I call the angel and the devil to the internal conference table of my mind and ask for their advice. They are going to give it to me whether I ask or not, so it’s more effective to be polite!

Ok, sometimes it isn’t a conference table. Sometimes it’s a hell scenario with bubbling lava or the fire forest from A Princess Bride… or it could be a field with daisies and a blue sky….

Today I am thinking about what we are supposed to do: Love everyone.

How good are we at that? Not very! Or are we?

My angel: You can love everyone. (The angel is kind and completely confident.)

My devil: Yeah, til they knife you in the back. Right. Go ahead, love them and they’ll treat you like dirt!

My angel: You can love them anyway.

My devil: Paula Pell said, “Be nice to all assholes because it disables them!”

My angel: Yes. You should be nice to those people too. (She doesn’t approve of swearing.)

Devil: sulking.

In my job, I get to love everyone. That is, as a doctor I want to be able to treat everyone and anyone who walks in my office. They can be talking about aliens or refuse to do what I suggest or they can say, “I hate doctors especially YOU.” and I am still supposed and do try to help them. Sometimes it doesn’t work very well. Sometimes we don’t connect or they are going to do the opposite of whatever I say or they return to using heroin. But I still get to try.

In my personal life, I would like to be the same. I am not there yet.

Devil: yeah, and don’t want to be….

Angel: keep trying….

But I can bring something from my job to my personal life. I don’t have to love what people DO and they can be MEAN and I don’t have to LIKE IT. But that is separate from the person themselves: I can still love the person even if they seem to be acting like an idiot and my devil wants to strangle them…..

Devil: oooo, strangle, I like it

Angel: separate the person from the action. Love them anyway.

Keep on trying…..

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The Path to Wonderland

I thought I’d learned that lesson
But no
The Beloved
Knew I had not
Hadn’t really faced it
Some small piece
Still wanted to depend
On someone else

Still fused.
Still thinking that you
Who know me so well
Would hear when I say please
I really need you to call
You say I will
I wait by the phone
You don’t call

I feel hurt
Anyone would
But my heart doesn’t stay broken
I survive
It happens again
And again
Until it occurs to me
That I’ve been reading Rumi
That we are each entirely part
Of the Beloved
Connected
And yet I’ve been fused to needing you
I don’t need you

I love you
I’m not used to not needing you
But I will be soon
10/22/06

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Hard 

It's hard to let go of you
and stay present

I don't know why
The Beloved set me this task
I argue and struggle
a fly in Her web
But I hold still when She bites me
Paralyzed by love

You connect me to Beloved
that's what I want
Like a spring
Like a stream
Like a geyser
Like a tsunami
Like an ocean
I am lost in the depths

It's ok really
I am used to pain
I am used to the air hurting like knives
When I draw breath

Oh Beloved
The sky is crying hard with hail
while I write this

It's hard to let go of you
and stay present

Luckily I have so much to cry about
That you can't tell which tears
are about you
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without reason

without reason

my cat worries
as I pack the bug out bags
to hide in the woods
if food stops arriving on trucks

she hates it when I pack
and the other pound kitten of nine years ago
was killed by a car two months ago
so she is lonely

I stop packing
I hold my cat
I say, “We will not go without you.”
I hold her
She relaxes
Believes me

I get the travel cage from the garage
wash it and get my pink silk scarf
it’s been in a bag and she has been hiding there
just her face in shadow when I walk by

I put the scarf in the travel cage
leave the door open
and feed her there intermittently
I will take her in the travel cage in the car
so that she is prepared

I’ll take the fish too
somehow

I plan to put plants outside
some may survive

some say animals and plants
have unstinting happiness
but not my cat

she worries that I will leave without her

and is reassured
when I say I won’t

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Teamwork

The photo is of a synchronized swim trio.

Only one swimmer is really visible. She is being lifted by the other two. They are not allowed to touch to bottom at all. It is all done lifting their own or each other’s bodies out of the water by swimming.

Sychronized swimming is a shrinking sport in the United States, because it is such hard work. My daughter started at age seven and had to swim three laps. She made it one length and then had to hold on to the lane divider to rest during the rest of the laps. She went under three separate times during that first practice. I nearly jumped the divider all three times, but she came up each time.

“How was it?” I asked when she got out.

“I nearly drowned three times.” she said, stomping past me in a rage.

She says that she hated it for the first year and that I made her keep going. If I did, I would feel guilty, except that she loved it so much after that. Seven years of synchronized swimming, until our very small town team folded, and then swim team. She is now a junior. What she wants most in college is to continue to swim on a team.

Back to the photo. To be lifted straight out of the water that far, you must be in the right position, you must have very good core strength, and your two partners must be in the right position underwater and lift correctly. You must practice and practice and practice and practice.

And you do this in time to music.

We need to work as a team in the world to deal with infection, to deal with ebola, to work together. My daughter loved synchronized swimming because it is so challenging and because it is above all, teamwork.

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Taking care of Ebola is hard

“We may never know exactly how [transmission] happened, but the bottom line is that the guidelines didn’t work for that hospital,” said Frieden. “Dallas shows that taking care of Ebola is hard.”

From the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/20/ebola-hospitals-us_n_6018372.html

And for me, a lowly rural Family Practice physician, from the American Academy of Family Practice: “The first steps in preparing your office for a possible Ebola case are to make sure you have all referral contact information ready to go and that you educate each staff member on his or her role should a case present.”

There is only me and a receptionist. We don’t have hazmat suits. Actually I’ve been off sick, lung and vocal cord problems, for all of October.

We have masks, gloves, I do have a white coat that I almost never wear.

Also from the AAFP:”Appointment clerks and front-desk personnel taking calls for appointments should inquire about African travel history in patients calling for appointments for fever, headache, weakness, diarrhea, vomiting, muscle aches or bleeding,” said Mahoney. “Anyone with a positive travel history should be contacted by a provider to gather additional history and determine if public health authorities need to be involved before a patient even presents to the physician office.”

http://www.aafp.org/news/health-of-the-public/20141017eboladisprep.html

We are both going to get our influenza shots this week. Please get your influenza shot. There is a lot more influenza around than risk of ebola in the United States, and influenza kills many many people every year. And even if you “never get colds” and “have a strong immune system”, you might get a mild case of influenza and pass it on to someone who then dies of it. If you tell me “I got flu the last time I got the shot”, excuse me, but that is hooey. First of all, it takes two weeks for your immune system to respond to the shot, so if you got symptoms the next day it could be influenza but not from the shot. Maybe from being exposed to someone with influenza at the grocery store or your doctor’s office. Secondly, people say “flu” and often they mean stomach flu. Stomach flu is not influenza. Third, influenza changes all the time, so about 80% of the vaccinated people are protected most years. That’s right: two weeks after my influenza shot, I am about 80% protected. Not 100%.

Why are we getting vaccinated? For one thing, we are health care workers and we get exposed. And for another, the initial symptoms of influenza are the same as the initial symptoms of ebola. Actually the United States is really rather lucky that the ebola case happened before influenza really hit, because they look too much the same initially. Suppose that three of the quarentined people had come down with influenza….. confusion and panic initially.

So please get your influenza vaccine, because you not only help to protect yourself, but protect others and prevent panic.

Blessings!

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Evolution

I like this poem: http://seshatwuji.wordpress.com/2014/10/07/birth-of-the-global-brain/

I am posting a poem that I first posted on everything2 on June 6, 2014.

Evolution

The boys keep building machines
They get more and more complicated

The girls use the machines, some

The boys plug in
wire up
log on

The girls tweet
Sometimes they twerk

Some boys twerk too
And some girls log on

The boys write more languages
more programs
they translate from one to another
it all moves faster
They play games where they kill bosses
Online in groups
By the tens of thousands

It all looks a little insane

Don’t worry
Don’t fear

The boys keep building

In hopes that they will come

Some girls build
They hope they will come too

The girls are the Borg Queen
Some boys are too

“We will assimilate you,”
they say

The boys and girls say,

Yes

Please

Yes

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The Introverted Thinker whines

One morning, the Introverted Thinker was whining. She was about 8, she was tired, the alarm had not gone off.

“I.T., you are whining.”

She continued to droop and delay and whine.

I thought, “I hate whining.” I thought of my parents. My mother would say, “Go away and come back when you can talk to me without whining.” I’ve read parenting books that tell us to say, “I can’t understand you when you whine. Say it without whining.”

But I was in a vulnerable place myself. I thought, when we whine, we are feeling very vulnerable. And to be sent away until we stop expressing that vulnerability, well, is that the message that I want to send? I thought, what do I want to be told when I wish I could whine or when I DO whine? Certainly not to go away alone with my whiny self. I thought: I want to be loved anyhow, even when I’m behaving badly.

I hugged her right away and said, “I love all of you, even the parts that whine.”

She stopped. Instantly. She just stood there in the hug for a moment and then got dressed, ate breakfast and went off to school. She didn’t seem insulted or hurt. It was just as if I’d heard her and reassured her: I am present when you are vulnerable and I love you. The whole you.

Also published on an obscure writing website in August 2010.