Mother has relented, a little. I could feel the pinch of hunger in my belly. She seemed to be ignoring the offerings in my bowl. My sister has helped. She is able to climb up and get the gloves with the delicious animal smell. I do not know what the animal is, but it makes me more hungry than ever. She brought me a glove from high on the shelf and added it to the bowl after we had our sparse morning feeding! I was starting to feel as if my belly was pressed against my ribs! My sister is still rounded. She is smaller and doesn’t have my needs.
Yesterday I talked to mother all day and she finally relented and gave us extra food! We were out in the bird watching box for a good half hour. My sister talks about zippers but she is not able to manipulate them to let us out. We would very much like to eat one of those birds! Or four. Or more. Some, the gold ones, are very small. It is cold out and the sky wets on us, so I am more hungry than ever!
My sister would run out of the bird watching box in a moment. I would catch a bird, but then go back in. Those cars and trucks going by terrify me! Especially the recycling one and the buses. They want to devour me, I know it. Mother does not seem to fear them.
I feel better with the extra food. I hope that mother continues to give it to us. At least until we catch those birds.
Intransitive? But you know sometimes it will snow snow sometimes it will snow sleet while I’m awake or when I sleep it may be snowing sleet or snow but really I’m not sure I know if it can also sleet snow
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Intransitive
He’s intransitive, just so annoying Intensitive bastard, good old boying! Sentensitively prosing about bird wings! Insentivizingly verbing almost all things! So intransitive, just boycloying Intensitive batshard, boyhowannoying!
There is a red headed woodpecker in this picture, though it is not a very good shot. No, it’s not a red headed, they are east of the Rockies. A red breasted sapsucker? https://wildyards.com/woodpeckers-in-washington/
Oooo, I put orientation up as the Ragtag Daily Prompt today. Then I wondered if disorientation is a word and it is! A mouthful!
This is a series of poems or meditations or arguments I had with myself last week. I was thinking about love and how to handle people that I love that have stopped behaving in a loving way or have actually been cruel or cut me off. Do I stop loving them and hate them? Do I love them anyhow? What would that love open me to? Abuse? It is disorienting to think about. Here is the series.
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The Fall
I am small. The adults love me and give me away. I grieve each time. It doesn’t matter if I behave well or not: they leave me. I decide that the adults are confused. They do not know how to love. Why don’t they know? I want to understand! Babies should be loved! We are innocent!
All babies should be loved and protected. I do, with my sister. The adults continue their mysterious crazy doings. I recognize that alcohol does not help, nor other choices.
All babies should be loved and protected. All adults were babies once. Sometimes they were not loved and protected and they are damaged. I train and then I doctor them. Healing is slow.
All babies should be loved and protected. All adults were babies once. All adults hold a baby that should be loved and protected: themselves. I try for a long time.
All babies should be loved and protected. All adults were babies once. Each adult makes their own choices, to heal or not. To grow or not. To love themselves and the Beloved or not.
All babies should be loved and protected. All adults make choices. The Beloved loves them all.
I am not the Beloved. Nor an angel. I dream of falling.
I am not the Beloved. I let go. I fall.
I do not love them all.
Rise
Yesterday I fell. I let myself dislike four people that I loved.
But no, I choose not. Angels fall and rise again. I choose love. If that means distance, then I choose distance. For now I will love the cruel ones from a distance. No contact.
The Buddhas laugh at the needy ones, the angry ones, the ones who press. Some will be enlightened, some wait for the next life. The Buddhas laugh because they do not control it. It may be the quiet one who says nothing who rises, while one who wants and wants and wants may have to want for longer. Why, Beloved? Isn’t wanting you enough? Isn’t longing enough? How much must one want? How deeply must one long?
I choose love.
Prayer to Kwan Yin
Kwan Yin, I am sorry. I cannot be a Bodhisattva. I am tired. I grieve. I want to love everyone. They hate it. If I love the small child within they are reminded of the hidden hurts and they lash out. I am tired. I don’t want to be the target of that. Kwan Yin, how to do you return and return again, loving these? I am not strong enough. I give up. I throw myself on your mercy, I bow to your infinite love and strength, I abase myself. Forgive me, I am not strong enough. I give up. I do not have enough love in my heart and I am so tired.
Beloved, I am sorry. I tried.
Every Being (Sonnet 9)
Keep the cruel ones at a distance far. Hold your enemies close in love’s embrace. None to hate, yet cruelty glints like stars. I hide quiet with cats in this home space. My heart opens like the universe. Projections batter me from head to toe. Why tear at me with their deep hurts? They project their pain: inside they know. They know, don’t know, choose not to learn. Dark rooms and texts and staring at the screen. My skin scalded, heart black with new burns. I think they’d like me too to turn out mean. I will hide here with Beloved’s dove. Each tear I cry sends every being love.
In spite of want
Sol set in my heart and rises again. I can love whoever I want. There are no boundaries to love. But I will not be abused or used, I will love quietly and silently and without letting my love know. And I will love who I want. No, I will love in spite of want, though I do not want to, though it is not deserved. But I honor my stubborn heart that does not let go of love.
Today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt is prompt, because we need a seventh person. Sounds pretty easy, right? To pick a word once a week and post it and then watch the replies.
It is easy and it isn’t! That day sneaks up on me. Now I try to post the Tuesday prompt 5-7 days early and set it to post on Tuesday morning.
If another prompt is missing, I can check the Ragtag site. Sometimes a prompter is gone or has something happening in their life or has put 9 pm instead of 9 am! I can intervene and fix the last problem. We fill in for each other, too.
This is an international group and a prompt for peace! Peace us and join us! I love seeing photographs from all over the world. I am itching to go to Australia to see all the birds and to India and back to Alamosa, Colorado and in fact, I would go to any of the areas that people post from. With all of the stress from the pandemic and the ongoing war, this is a daily place that makes me hopeful that people can get along and that we will reach the point where the color of our skin matters no more than the color of our eyes. It is Martin Luther King Day in the US and I am celebrating peace and hope.
I heard a wonderful sermon yesterday from a man who works in our school system, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfmPjcEIbBA. I went to a music jam which had wonderful diversity of music. I went to hear Chicago Bob play and I have to say that I did not expect him to play Teddy Bear’s Picnic. A friend came to dinner too.
I do NOT have a coherent novel at the end. I have pieces and sections and chapters and questions. I have to look up a bunch of microbiology and also how the goblets cells in the stomach work, because I don’t remember and anyhow, I am sure it has changed since I was in medical school.
BUT I DO have 50,000 words.
I got stuck twice at the beginning and had two days where I didn’t write anything except this blog. And then another two. I kept dreaming about an ogre who wanted to be in the novel. Well, ok. I finally decided that the goal was to write the 50, 000 words, not stick to an outline. I added the ogre and have not missed a day since. To finish 50,000 words in 30 days, it breaks down to 1667 per day. If you miss four days it is more. I had two days where I wrote over 5100 words. That helped a lot.
Now I think I will rest for a day or two and then start looking it over. Write a list of questions, work on some needed research, think about it. That ogre is interesting. Unexpected.
I think it was fun! At least, some of it was. I got stuck writing about something based on when I was ill, so that was difficult. It brought up the fear and the deep loneliness of that time. I learned to skip to something else when I get overwhelmed.
But I did write another verse for the song SAVED. It might not be the one that comes up on the You tube search. I learn it as a teen from side B of Moondog Matinee by The Band.
I sang it to my father. He said, “Where did you learn THAT?” I didn’t know and did an internet search. I forgot what album I leaned it from. It was his album, that I recorded on tape before I went to college.
Here is my new verse:
I used to Tweet, I used to Twerk, I used to Tweet, Twerk, I was such a Jerk
I used to tweet and twerk, tweet and twerk and I was such a jerk
But now I’m standing on the corner, it was too much work
That’s cause I’m saved, that’s cause I’m saved
People let me tell you about Kingdom Come
I’m saved, I’m saved, I’m going to preach until you’re deaf and dumb
I’m in the Salvation Army, beating on the big bass drum!
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Who else sang it? Laverne Baker! She is the earliest I’ve found. Recorded in 1960, though the videos are later.
Rainshadow Chorale is going to sing like Shakespeare birds on November 5th and 6th. I think this will be another delightful and really fun concert. I tried out for a solo wearing a cowgirl hat. My hat got a solo. I got a small group part. I’m too jealous of my hat, of my hat.
Why a cowgirl hat for Shakespeare? You’ll have to come to the concert to find out! We have composers ranging from Purcell to modern, all using Shakespeare’s words.
Anyhow, mark your calendars. My father was one of the initial eight choral members in 1997 and I joined in 2000. Sing on!
In Practicing conflict, I wrote about practicing conflict by arguing different sides of a topic inside my head. I wrote that I don’t fear conflict and have learned to enjoy arguing with myself. I am a physician and physicians argue all the time.
What? No they don’t. Well, the doctor persona does not argue with the patient much. Some doctors give orders to patients, others try to negotiate, some try to convince. But behind the scenes, doctors are more like the Whacky Racer Car with the Cave Guys, running with their feet and hitting each other with clubs.
In residency in Family Practice at OHSU in Portland, Oregon, I start on General Surgery during internship. This is in the early 1990s and there was not much in the way of “disruptive physician” rules. I have to cover Trauma and Plastic Surgery and General Surgery at night on call. The resident is present but I get paged first for patients on the floor. I learn that I should go to all Trauma pages in the emergency room. If I know what is happening with the new Trauma patient, it’s a lot easier to handle the phone calls for more drugs and so forth. Also, the resident is less mean to me.
We attend the Trauma “Grand Rounds”. These are unreassuring to a new intern. A resident presents a trauma patient, giving the history in the accepted formal order. The Faculty Trauma Surgeons interrupt, disagree with management of the patient and yell. They yell at the resident and at each other. The upper level residents yell too, being well trained. The Trauma Surgeons do not agree with each other. They are inflammatory and rude. I am shocked initially: medicine is not a cookbook, is not simple and it appears that it is a controversial mess. It turns out that medicine IS a controversial mess.
There is not as much yelling on the next rotation. At that time Trauma Surgeons yelled more than any other set of doctors that I ran across. They yelled in the ER, at each other, at the staff, at the nurses, at the residents. The culture has changed, I suspect, but that’s how it was then.
I take Advanced Trauma Life Support as a third year resident. The Trauma Surgeons at OHSU helped write the course. They don’t agree with it. On some questions the teaching Surgeon says, “The answer to this question is (c), “ followed by muttering loudly, “though I totally don’t agree with that and I would do (b).” Another Trauma resident or surgeon then might start arguing with him, but they moved on pretty quickly, to teach the current agreed best practices in the book. Which change every few years. Great.
Years later (2009) I join the Mad as Hell Doctors, to go across the US talking about single payer. They are a group from Oregon. Physicians for a National Healthcare Program are a bit cautious with us the first year: we might be whackos. We have an RV with our logo and we have a small fleet of cars and what do you think we do in the cars? We argue. Or discuss. Or whatever you want to call it. We spend the driving dissecting issues and how to present things best and tearing apart the last presentation and rebuilding our ideas. The group does 36 presentations in 24 days. Each presentation takes an hour to set up, two hours to do and another hour to break down and debrief. We get more and more exhausted and cranky and um, well, argumentative, as the trip proceeds. Even though I think of the Whacky Racer Cave Guys running with their feet and bonking each other with clubs, this is the most wonderful group of doctors I have ever been with. A common goal that we all want to get to, discussing and disagreeing on strategy all the way! I feel closer to those physicians in a week then I feel to any of the physicians that I’ve worked with for the last 9 years in my small town. Conflict with a common goal.
Doctors are TRAINED to argue, even with themselves, to document every decision in the chart with reasons why they have reached that decision. And that they have thought about all of the reasons for say, a low potassium, thought of every possible cause and worked their way through testing. The testing always has two strands. One strand is rule out the things that could kill the person NOW, even if rare. The other strand is what is common? You have to think about both at the same time, always. And argue with yourself about which tests should be done, in what order, what is most important, how do you treat the person while awaiting results, and have I missed anything? And if we aren’t sure, we call another doctor, run it by them, wait for them to shoot holes in our logic or to say, no, I can’t think of anything else.
We can deal with conflict. We must deal with conflict. The world is too small not to deal with conflict, with disagreements, with different viewpoints and positions and ideas. If doctors can do it every single day at work, then everyone else can too. Trying to see all the positions and possible diagnoses saves lives in medicine. We need to extrapolate that to everything else. Try to see other positions, try to understand them, to respect them. We can and we must.
The photograph is from my clinic once we had stopped seeing patients and were selling everything. Mordechai was our clinic skeleton, made of plastic, from China. This was in January 2021.
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - Flüchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflüchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
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