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What I learned by 70 years of age.

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What it took me until I was 70 years old to learn:
#1 If you put it back where you keep it you will save 2 years of searching over a lifetime.
#2 If you stay in the now and not be in the future planning, or in the past rummaging through garbage you won’t slice into you hand or trip downstairs.
#3 When you have an appointment don’t just write Julia on the calendar. When the day comes you will have no fucking idea who Julia is.
#4 If you save all of your errands for one day, it will save you money. Suddenly shopping and running around will just exhaust you and you will go home with only what is necessary for immediate survival.
#5 The best gift for another person is something he or she has been denying themselves.
#6 Flowers in your house are a survival necessity. They release feel good hormones and fantasy stories.
#7. You will never have the carefully made list you wrote down to go shopping actually on your person, so give up on that one. Just grab strange things you have been desiring and go home.
# 8 Having a clean car is only important if you are picking up a celebrity at the airport.
#9 Getting into or out of any new environment needs as much focus as getting out of a space shuttle. Drop down into the body, pay attention, scan for danger and obstacles. It is the transitions where the broken bones, lost cell phones and left behind coats happen.
#10 The best thing to say in every single circumstance is nothing. God gave you a face, eyes and nice teeth. Smile sweetly.
#11 Always prepare for the apocalypse. There is never too much stored toilet paper, dried beans, cash in an envelope, water in the attic, printer cartridges and paper for the next 3 months, incense for clearing energy when the world ends, (or to prevent the end).
#12. If you can afford plastic surgery get a skin pocket done so you always know where your cell phone is.
# 13 If you don’t answer your cell phone or pick up your messages you will avoid those pesky appointments you did not want to make anyway. (Who the hell is Julia and why does North Dakota call me 5 times a day?)
# 14 Don’t care. Undertake the practice of NOT giving a flip. Until something comes at my house like a bulldozer, I pay no attention to it.
#15. Exceptions are: do sign petitions that push for social justice, do speak out for the weak, young, poor and unprotected constantly. It does make a difference if you are annoying the crap out of politicians.
#16. Speak the truth to beauty. Saying, “I love your scarf to a random woman in a grocery store,” allows her to stop and tell you she bought it on her trip to Italy. Her face lights up. She has happy chemicals releasing in her body. I call it giving a “bump up.”
It is social cocaine.
#17 The only thing that matters in health care is sleep. If you did not sleep deeply with Rem every night you are running on empty. You are like someone getting off of a 20 hour plane trip. Everything you think is just stupid. Get sleep and the whole world is better.
#18 Don’t put the fuzzy red towel in with the rest of the laundry. And if it shed the first time, don’t do it ten more times just to make sure.
#19 If it didn’t fit when you bought it, it will torture you and suck the joy our of your life. Be comfortable.
#20 If it didn’t make YOU look gorgeous, don’t buy it. Nothing is worse than having your clothing upstage you.
#21 Meet the challenge when it first appears. Run toward it like a Viking storming a village. Waiting only allows it to get bigger, more horrifying and weakens us.
#22 You cannot know who you are. That is absolute bullshit. Who you are is like a strobe light image. Now you are this, now that, now something else. Allow yourself to follow your joy and grow the hell up, why don’t you.I am 80 in August and while I sat in the kindergarden desk with my knees not fitting under it for so long, I finally am learning some things.
Love yourself constantly. Coming to earth was the craziest decision we ever made. We are Navy Seals, Red Berets, our own brain surgeons and tough as nails. We are as tough as nails, baby. Don’t you ever forget that.

Serious People

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My druthers

I hear this word around me. Perhaps it was floating in the air of the ancestry story. Perhaps it was transmitted in my DNA.

 

It seems folksy and from the type of hard scrabble, unbreakable stubborn people who would choose to grow crops on rocky hill sides. The smashing or lifting or rolling of obstacles out of the way was the way. Not once, did these obdurate people say, “Oh let us move to level, greener, more civilized fields to plant a life.” There was joy in effort.

 

And so, I hear the word “druthers” inside my head as I think about my choices. I would rather paint my deck than paint my nails. I would rather mow my grass than build up points with video games or cards. In my past, I would rather go to the stacks in the library and learn about the Victorians than sit for hours in a coffee shop at University. I prefer pruning my plants in my garden to following the neighbourhood drama and fear of the homeless walking our back-alley way. Some here have put up cameras as sentries to protect their territory. I choose to walk barefoot on my piece of land and watch for new buds, or the green tiny globe of a hot pepper’s promise on the corner of my deck transitioning to a delightful scarlet red.

 

I see my hands, my bent over back, my strong legs as a source of joy. It means I can strive upon the earth. Hundreds of ancestors watch me and cheer me on.

 

Time is not meant to be squandered, burned down to ashes without forming a prayer to be sent up. “What is the outcome?” my non forbearing forebearers would ask. Why would you wrap a ribbon in your hair when you could be wrapping the base of a tree to protect it from clawing animals? Be sensible always.

 

Silly choices, trivial choices, no account choices were condemned. I can feel the presence of my ancestors standing in rows behind my shoulders observing me. They ask me to consider. They ask me to take time to dissect with discrimination what I hold as a vision in my heart.

Caroline Schmidt

“Are you sure?” I hear the voice of Laetitia my far distant grandmother who raised 17 children that she alone brought into the world.

 

“Is this wise?” I hear my Quaker grandfather speaking quietly and evenly.

Francis Cook, Pilgrim

“Does this create a more substantial life?” say my Lutheran forebearers.

Sarah Black, Grandmother

“Is this merely a fancy, a decorative gesture or is it solid and serious?” say my Puritan dynasty filling the boats to struggle in a new country.

 

I am pleased as I stand viewing what my effort has created. A cleaned out space, a weeded garden, a tidied shed gives me more joy than any layered chocolate cake, celebratory party can ever deliver. Now, I know myself and I do not struggle with my choices as I did in the past.

 

I know my druthers. I know who I am. I am home.

 

How cutting toe nails was a major goal for me

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Or, perhaps, I could write about that gloriious day months after my hip replacement surgery when I was able to get on my underpants without a Cirque de Soleil contortion routine across chairs, the bed, sometimes holding on to the top of a short wall. I developed a system and it was awkward. It was prone to failure and once in a while a fall.

So often I notice that we mortals toddle along like cartoon characters dump de dump de dump. We do the same things daily. There is a rhythm of success we don’t even notice. Our minds are restless and on the look out for the disappointments, the dropped glass pitcher moments, the flat tire on the high way, the slip with the knife while cooking.

But almost generally, we can say things work. We get from our homes to our appointments. The clothes we put into the washer come out clean. The slow cooked chicken is succulent and safely done to the bone.

If an angel rang a bell for every successfully completed task during our everyday, we would be deafened.

Every single day we experience a thousand victories which we don’t even notice.

It is only when the front door warps and the key won’t turn the lock that we realize that disaster can stop us in our tracks. How do I get in, if the key doesn’t work?  And then it is time to repair, replace, restructure, reassess. Then it comes home, the realisation of the complexity of everyday rituals.

What I noticed most about not being able to sit or walk for 15 months was that my toe nails began to look like the claws of a giant ant eater. They hooked on the sheets, caught on curtains, were painful in shoes and made getting anything other than a skirt or dress on impossible.

I had to take myself for a slow walk on the sidewalk. I had to gently begin physiotherapy. When I walked, I lurched to the left because the muscles in my right hip had weakened from two years or more of not working properly.

The surgeon slid over to me in a chair, made eye contact and popped his eyes out at me to try to explain that my expectations were child like. He was direct. But I could see myself on a unicorn riding over a rainbow to cotton candy land through his gaze.

fantasy shoes

I lurched so unpredictably that I repeatedly ran off of the narrow cement walking highway. One day I said to my neighbour, “I need a tee shirt that says,’ I am not drunk or stoned. I am just relearning to walk.’ ”

And then the glorious day 6 months after surgery, I did it. I brought my feet up toward me and I clipped my predator’s nails. An entirely new future opened for me. I could wear socks, and slide my feet into all of my shoes. I could wear long pants and successfuly push my now civilized toe nails down the tube to pop out below.

What I have known on some level, is that I have never realized how many “missions” I have completed successfully in my life. The habit of self criticism is strong. But I feel like an Olympian with a gold medal now: I can walk. I can put on my own underpants. I can clip my toe nails . Damn, it feels good.

Why is “normal” actually “harmful”?

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We can be like Cinderella’s step sisters or like a middle weight boxer trying to “fit in” to the category we wish to enter. We think, “I want to be a princess so I will cram my foot into these shoes.” We think, ” I must shed weight no matter what the physical cost to be able to compete.”

Social Signalling is out of our control. Our neurons are set up to synk with the behavior of people we observe around us. It is a left over survival pattern. Back in time, we observed others and if Kruk did not follow the ways of those around him and just decided the red berries looked delicious, he would end up curled on the ground poisoned dead. It was a matter of the discontinuance of Kruk and of his DNA.

In the world entranced by the manichaen doctrine the soul of a wicked one was like someone carrying the plague. Wiki tells us Manichaeism taught that life in this world is unbearably painful and radically evil. In Manichaeism inner illumination reveals that the soul, which shares in the nature of God, has fallen into the evil world of matter and must be saved by the means of spirit or intelligence. Consequently, in a society where survival depended on being connected to a village, shunning and exile were used as a passive death sentence.

No food would be given, no shelter, no warmth either physical or emotional. If a member of a social group broke the law of the normal, they were possessed by the devil and were left to die.

Even more contemporarily, various groups use exclusion as a way of controlling desired behavior.

The result is that we have in our DNA the memory of complying with what is considered normal. It is one of the reasons that social signalling controls our choices.

And so we, when trapped in a crowded theatre and fire breaks out, follow the crowd even if it leads to death. And so when we have evidence that certain behaviors shorten our lives and sabotage our health, it is worth it for us. At least we are not alone.

The only way we can pull ourselves out of this hypnotic state of automatically following the mores and choices of members of our social group is to become “the watcher.” We can teach ourselves to sit back as if we are in a drawing class and really concentrate on what we are seeing. We see the lines, the shapes, the patterns, the presentation of behaviors. We take time to consider each action.

The questions to ask ourselves are: “Does this serve the greater good? Does this action, this decision make me healthier, stronger, a better version of myself?”

It is like the mindfulness walk of a Buddhist sanga. Step, step, stop. And as one foot touches another the mind connects to the ground. The mind focuses in on the now. The mind can ask, “Where are you going?” “Are you in balance?”

who could you be?

We are in a time when “normal” no longer is of service to our own lives; to the culture surrounding us; to the earth.

It is time to see who you were meant to be. It is time to grow into a deeply connected self. But not connected to others mindlessly following. We start to wonder who we could be…. if only…..

Hallucinating Reality

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I wake up with my new Russian Blue cat pushed against my legs. Day after day of dense ponderous rain has been falling. All of us welcomed it. The numerous fires breaking out every summer have begun early. They began in April and seered right through to May. Just a week ago we were choked by the brown-gray sky and warned against the evil of outside.

The rain appeared like a blessing that comes from a genii. It was instant. It was within the parameters of what the seeker of a miracle had asked for. But, as always with hope and fate and dread there was that twist, the sting of literally getting what was wished for.

My new thrift store shoes priced in the world of heavy-edged commerce at over $100 were red and sparkling on my feet soaked to the gunnels by the pooling rainwater. As I determinedly made my way to “accomplish” the purchase of items on my list, I was stopped twice by other women who were also wearing Italian-brand shoes.  We stood facing one another showing off our shoes and delighting in our “tribe” of niche consumers.

As my hair became rivulets to channel the heavy rain, I thought about how much my life had been about a rhythm of collapse in the face of opposition and then arising to heroically push forward.

as above, so below
as within, so without

The failed hip, the fear of death lurking outside my door, constant pain. The angels of hope kept showing up to grab me under each armpit and stand me on my feet.

Just before the smoke appeared to threaten our lungs, Tod, my companion cat became anxious and twitchy. He could feel it coming. He was restless and unsettled. Jumping from one viewing place to another, he had all senses alert.

And once the rain came, both he and I relaxed into a deep, long sleep.

“When will my life begin for real,” my ego asks me. “When will I achieve my goals and stand strong and triumphant?”

And then I remind myself that after 78 years of life, I should know by now, it is not a single track run for a prize life.

The struggle is always in the physicality of existence. I torture myself with phrases like “When will you be what you want to be?” I lash myself with the whips of familial and societal expectations.

Nobody tells a five-year-old that simply rising to a challenge; simply loving and caring for the body; simply having a consistently compassionate reaction to others is achieving something. Nobody hangs a gold medal on the chest of an individual who resists the mass hallucination spun out spell-casting of reality.

It is like pushing through bars of a prison, this life.

And as I wake up with Tod, the cat laying on my left leg with his legs wrapped around my calf, I hear him purr.

And as I wake up still alive and held by my body with no pain, I know that pushing myself into satisfying some installed craving by my ancestors, my society has once again been avoided. I am focused on living peacefully. That is a life beyond the insanity of hallucinated chaos.

I watch my thoughts and my actions and I see how skilled I am becoming at dismissing the siren’s call asking me to run my life based on fear and phobia.

Yesterday, I thought, “You have been so closed down, you have forgotten to look at a flower.”

Today, I intend to spend time appreciating the miracle of a flower continuing to burst forth in beauty in the midst of cold, killer smoke and heavy beating rain. How heroic is the lilac, the daisy, the iris. We are like that. We are blossoming. We must congratulate ourselves.

 

Spring is an expectation

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Outside my window rain, rain, rain day after day the gray clouds are wrung out by wind and pushed high over the surrounding mountain ridges. A daffodil or two has survived the tourist deer touring through our neighbourhood. They used to feed on Knox Mountain but now with climate disruption, they come in family groups to treat our carefully planted gardens like a salad bar in a buffet. I cannot be angry with the eight in my yard today. Their ribs are prominent and signal malnutrition. Their world no longer supports them.

I have sprayed deterrent. I placed silver pin wheels to spin confusion and trigger the hesitancy of fear in their faces as they bend their heads to nibble down the burgeoning bulbs to the ground with one delicate bite after another.

The days play with us. The flirtation can come on in a moment with the clouds parting to allow sun to leak out and sometimes even allow escaping warmth. Just as quickly the clouds are blown back to cover the sky. The only variation is how high they hang. At times, they are layered across the tops of the surrounding mountains. At others they are low enough to form a backdrop to the black drama of branches in neighbour’s trees.

Next to the door are coats for protection against the shifting climates. The light weight one has been worn a few times but stays on the hook attesting to the optimism with which I face the two steps down into the outside world. My triple-layered, hooded blizzard coat hangs next to the lighter choice. Too many times I have opened the door to weak sunshine and had the whip of stinging wind slap me.

At least…. I keep thinking. Back East the maps have eliptical circles showing where the weather is to be feared either now or in the near future. ‘Guerilla hail’ is falling to create an attack likened to warfare on those who move along the sidewalk or rush to the car for shelter.

At least our houses are not being ripped up by the angry Gods of Valhalla to punish humankind.

And there are the occasional surviving bright yellow golden daffodills standing tall but with the petals closed around the heart. Volunteering in my garden bed out back, I found early snow glories. I pinched the tiny blue flowers off between my fingernails and placed them in a miniature clay pot I held with two tight fingers.

They sit now in front of the Buddha in the window reminding me that sometimes the subtle signs are a cause for optimism. At least…. I keep thinking.

 

What is happening when nothing is happening?

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As the sun translates itself into golden leaves and the sky shifts to a watercolor mix of grey and blue, the sense of waiting for clarity, the prescience is heavy all around. The world is holding its breath.

There is no “thing” to cling to today for me. For over a year, I have been floating on a raft sometimes carried by the current and other times just caught in the protruding tangle of tree roots. At these times, I become an immobile witness to the flow of time and events in the outside world.

Never before in 78 years of life have I been so detached from what is considered the 3 D normal world so completely. Sometimes I feel as if I have been attacked, bound, and thrown in a white van to be taken to a rehab temple high up in the mountains.

When my hip first failed, I had some difficulty walking but as the year went by the grinding of bone on bone in my hip joint ramped up the attack of pain, and the impossibility of trying to live what was my “normal” life stopped me in my tracks. I had been forced into complete submission.

My work addiction has been stripped from my mind violently. There is no joy in pushing myself to achieve a task. It sends me into three or four days of recovery and reclining on my pillows like some aged Cleopatra carried on a barge unmanned by hope.

I visualize deep black space and I as an astronaut float tethered to a source of oxygen. I have no references left, no gravity, no routine, no date on the horizon for when my spiritual plastic surgery will end and the actual hip surgery will begin.

No one could tell me what would happen next. The phone calls I made went to an answering machine that had a series of polite words that translated into “FUCK OFF.”

“We will call you if we have information.”

And so the patterns of the last few decades came to a halt. I dare not risk social contact because someone somewhere might be rubbing the lamp of my deepest wishes and a surgery date would magically appear. I had to be COVID free, totally well.

Since 2020 I isolated from COVID. Then on September 20, 2021, I isolated more vigilantly. When my ship-hip came in, I would be allowed to board and be carried to a magic land without constant pain, loneliness and the companion of exhaustion from nothing at all.

I felt much better when I researched the effect on the brain of chronic pain. I laughed out loud when I read the medical definition of “chronic ” as being three months. I was not weak, crazy, or incompetent on purpose. I was not a lesser being. It was normal to feel as I was feeling.

This green beret, marine, navy seal training in spiritual submission has been extended for 409 days thus far. And so I can forgive myself for bouts of depression and weeping. I can forgive myself for asking the question, “Is it worth it, this life?’

The time that I have found myself the most triggered and emotional is when someone sends me a message, “You are strong.”

My mind resents the implication that somehow because I have endured childhood abuse, cancer, Rheumatoid Arthritus, raising two small children alone that I have somehow shallower emotional roots. Things don’t hurt you as much as they do other people… seems to be the message. But I know this is just my ego trying to get me into a mind lock.

To see someone dressing up in their victim clothes and dancing at a martyr party curdles my blood. My ancestors were staunch, unflinching, and capable of enduring beyond what was considered the normal limits.  I know I can get through this long period of solitude and pain. But the thing that most fills me with grief is the question, “why?”

And so there were two periods of time when all I could do was weep. It was like a storm at sea carrying me wave after wave, out of control. There was no date on the horizon offering me optimism that it would end. There was no comfort in watching the health care system with the valiant nurses and doctors desperately trying to help people and not succeeding so many times.

The grief was like a bleeding. The pressure had built up and it just had to leave my body. I resigned myself to being human. I resigned myself to the feeling of being abandoned. I resigned myself to enduring pain with every movement.

It was what Joseph Campbell calls a heroes journey. It is a twisting dark path that suddenly appears. All who are alive on earth have traveled it at one time or another. “When will this end?” we ask. It is part of the human contract we sign when we choose to be born.

It is as if the very cessation of this one particular challenge will take me to the land of pixies and fairies. There will be unicorns being fed rainbow popsicles by flower sprites. At the end of this stage of my life, all the roses will have butterflies and dragonflies lighting on them. This is what I tell myself.

I have had to travel into the deepest tangled wood of submission and understand that my brain chemistry was changed. Pain and stark solitude have a cost. It changes us.

At the end of the journey, we can only hope it has taught us compassion. We now understand intimately that just to stay alive in a challenging situation is courage.  Those walking past my picture window are in the process of learning a lesson. Each of them is meeting challenges, making brave choices. It is why we need to love one another, no matter what.

Every struggle is a chance to grow, to learn, to be kinder. The lessons are why we were born.

 

Sannyasa: The Fourth Chapter of Life

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Awareness of the movements, chapters, seasons, and acts of life are distinctly different when viewed from a distance of age.

The contained existence in my childhood through grade school to high school was controlled, enforced, and structured. Those who lived before me had stories, egregores, and trauma-marked cells that surfaced in my own biological blueprint. That era, the abraiding of intersecting cultures wearing away to a single smooth surface of belief, I see as almost cult-like. We believed what we were taught to believe.

at 4 years old

My arrival on the earth was the year that WW II ceased. I shot out into a time of rabid hunger for growth. The depression reduced choices for my grandparents and in the childhood of my own parents. But NOW we were like the starving crowds let loose in a field of food. The norm was for us to gorge ourselves.

We paid close attention to what our neighbors had newly purchased. The fins on our cars grew to sci-fi proportions. We were propelled into competitive hedonism. My father bought the first TV set in our neighborhood. There was a cache´, an undisputable sense of status that a family could achieve instantaneously.

One could move ahead of the pack. One could be the house that people pointed to as they drove past. The Thunderbird in the driveway; the TV antenna reaching out beyond the roof to outer space; the books lining the bookshelf on hypnosis, self-improvement, some with bright pictures of modernist houses insistently and rebelliously sleek; the lounge chair covered in orange fabric in the living room that was impossible to sit upon no matter how one contorted the body, all signaled patriotic dedication to consumerism.

And so as I moved through my life, I watched the carefully cultivating craving. If only…. if only I could get good grades. If only I could graduate from university. If only I could earn a master’s. If only I could find a husband, a house, and have children. Always, always moving toward a goal whose dopamine hit of pleasure disappeared as soon as it was achieved. It was decades of crawling through the sand to arrive at a mirage.

I watched as the cultural imprint caused people to balloon from an average size of 6 to size 16. I watched as the slavish pursuit of power, pleasure, and fame became currency.

what did I buy?

Today, our striving for clout on social media is like showing a membership card to an exclusive club. I am acceptable to myself because I have masses of friends, masses of followers, a new dress, and a new achievement. But I also watch as the fleeting moments of the new sign of personal value fade away. It is like having an entry card to a club that disappears in the hand. It was once in my grasp. But now it is gone. That sense of being special so we can be considered normal haunts us.

I worked 70 to 80-hour weeks for decades in the hopes that I could be recognized as a valid human being. It was a caucus race as in Alice in Wonderland. Quickly run to nowhere so you can stay in place. This was my period in life when I was in hot pursuit.

But now, now I am in Sannyasa. In Hindu lore, this is the period of time past 70.

Everything and nothing

In Eastern society, it is believed that everything is already in existence. Art is already complete and it is only up to the artist to remove the unnecessary. And that is the explanation for this time of life.

We grow weary of the accumulation; the caucus race; the unfocused blind pursuit of goals that do not serve our souls. Instead of a list to accomplish, we now have the wisdom to discard the unrolling scroll of itemized effort in the day. It becomes easier to say, “Does this decision, this effort, or this action make me a better person?”

We are now able to discard the trivial as unsatisfying. The imprinting of my culture, because of when I was born was to run on a track of acquisition of things, of pleasures, of status bijoux objects.

And now, in this last stage of life, it is easier for us to understand ourselves. We no longer pay attention to what the culture requires of us. We drive through the images, the ideas, and the demands like a car plows through the rain. The water just rolls off. And we begin to divest ourselves of all the burdens that we were told were treasures to be held close. We free ourselves.

We understand that an accomplishment can be just to sit in the now and feel the wind passing over us. We watch the clouds so carefully that we can see they are moving.

We are doing something. We are learning to control the mind. We are learning to be inner-focused, to be at peace, and to keep our flame of compassion for others alight. We are finally beginning to understand our purpose. It is the time for that.

Oh What Fragile Beasts We Humans Be

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The illusion of toughness gets in the way of self-care. I often think of how my understanding of my “margin for error” has just been insanely optimistic. At 78 years of age, I have learned that we never know what is spilled milk and what is an irretrievable error.

self

learning the self

The car passing on ice cutting off a semi flips and only through the skill and intent of the professional driver do we survive spinnimg around, smashing multiple times into the guard rail, and sitting finally still and shocked in the totaled car. How many times previously had the driver next to me made that move with impunity? But this time could have been ‘the exit.’

The last straw, the last exit from disaster, the minor blithe ignorance of the howling voices of the carnivorous wolves in the forest is something we simply don’t understand. We are so disconnected from our mortality that we are like children.

My family narrative was that we were tough. My father and mother could take countless risks with their lives and their children’s lives because we were of sturdy stock. Two times I had pneumonia and because we were inordinately stoic, I was left at home with a tray of soup after getting a penicillin shot.

The message was: “Don’t be a wimp.”

My mother was enfeebled by double pneumonia when I was 14 and refused to be admitted to hospital. I was kept home to keep her alive. Even though she worked in a hospital, or simply because she served as a nurse in the hospital, she distrusted the germ-infested atmosphere.

And so we were praised for not crying; taking our shots without holding a breath; enduring small bone fractures without medical care and our very strength in never asking for help was a badge to be worn proudly.

But it was worn inside the clothing next to the heart. One never bragged about being a stalwart and resolute soul. That would be a sign of weakness.

For most of my life, I have been like a driver who has been given a new car. It is fancy and technologically complex and I have never been sure how to read the gauges.

I soldiered on through pneumonia without an adult in attendance. I healed angrily inflicted bruises quietly under clothing. I went to work every day for five years with bowel cancer that was undetected. I did not know how to advocate for myself and so I assumed the exhaustion was my mistake and I was unable to ask for tests from my doctor.

My learning has been slow and sloppy. My ego was puffed up and gruff when I saw other people whining on about hunger or cold, or disappointments. I was taught our family was superior. We did not need to be babied.

The family egregore was built around me like a walled castle. We were special because we were not special.

I remember as a teenager reading about a man who lost his legs in an explosion and crawled for an hour to help. I thought to myself, “I could do that.” I was 15.

The years have taught me to fall in love with my body as if it was my baby. If the body is hungry, I feed it. If my body is tired, I lay down. If my body is in pain, I cry out and ask for help. It has taken me decades to leave behind the ancestral trauma that made our family members feel ‘special’ because we lacked empathy for ourselves.

tough people

And always, always, always I talk lovingly to my body now. I thank it for warning me when I have drawn the last straw. The body knows far more than my mind can ever understand. It knows far more than my subconscious, my ego can ever know. It knows how to survive and thrive.

I am growing into myself, at last.

 

Transitions Are Constant

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In Western culture we are not taught to see transitions. Or if we do see them we are taught to fear them. Our fragility spiritually is magnificent and stunning. It keeps us adolescent, dependent and irresponsible.

One way we are shown our error in judgement is our agape, stunned surprise when the world does not roll down the bowling alley lane like an expertly thrown ball. Control, we are told, will stave off disaster. We still have not made peace with mortality and it makes us half blind.

Control will protect us

As I watch thousands of homes swept away by the clearly, repeatedly, scientifically predicted vulnerability of coast lines, I see how the Western mind seeks shelter. “If we only had better tornado insurance, or earthquake insurance, this loss would not be happening.”

A gigantic yacht tied to a now shattered pier is reported to have been swept inland. It destroyed small nestled homes.The destruction is impressive on so many levels. As those who have lived in cabins for decades and have learned how to endure the predictable chaos of clinging to a shore line have their homes erased, I picture the reaction to a violent intersection of these two worlds.

If only there were insurance for the damage that climate catastrophe is expending on the earth, then all would be well. ‘Somebody’ is supposed to protect us from our own bad decisions.

But the contemporary world is taking the protecting wrapping away from those who believe that there is a way out of mortality. COVID showed up and no matter how expertly the political leaders spun the narrative, we all began to see that if one is vulnerable then all are vulnerable.

Fragile people

I liken it to Voodoo… it is that primitive. We will make a chalk line around ourselves, our families, our cities, our race, our social purchase place and then we are not vulnerable to the vicissitudes of morality.

I remember watching a special about a rural Canadian community that offered no jobs for those who were growing up in the village. They developed a tradition of buying a lovely new suitcase for the high school graduate (usually male) and put the person along the road to flag down the Greyhound bus. It was time to grow up. This was the initiation ceremony.

The show impressed upon me the idea of a group of people realizing that they could not deny conditions. The protected child now had to take responsibility for the future.

In some ways, I think we are like that now. We can dither and cluck around like frightened poultry. Or we can decide it is time to make the difficult choices.

A person interviewing others who have gone through war, famine, plagues, the depression, a carpet bombing of their town or village always comes away understanding that the human condition is not one of weakness. The goal is not to extend adolescence past the 40’s or 50’s. And inevitably a sense of altruism grows in these conditions. What happens to one, happens to all.

And perhaps it is the time for learning from those who trust the universe enough to find the strength to endure the inevitable “slings and arrows.” Perhaps it is time to realize that each individual person is strong and capable of growing up enough to take responsibility for his or her own decisions. Perhaps it is the time to realize that we can change the way we live with one another so we understand how fragile we all are. We need one another in order to survive. What happens to one, can happen to all. It is called mortality.

We are one