LIFE ITSELF!

                     Fortunately (psycho)analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. 
                     Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.
                                                                    Karen Horney   Our Inner Conflicts 



All day I have been sitting in front of this computer--not writing, just sitting.   I've been  carefully turning and examining the big globe of the world that lives within arms reach of my desk.  I want to refresh my memory about the neighboring countries of Croatia (there's Hungary, Slovenia...uh...Bosnia-Herzegovenia and another former Yugoslavian country--but, I can't recall it at the moment and now the globe is turned to the South Pacific. 
I don't know what to write but I don't want to stop typing--now that I'm actually typing.  If I stop now I know I'll get all wrapped up in something that keeps me from my intended task:  noting down various motes of  thoughts, in their brief moments of existence, before they float out of reach as thought motes so easily do.  So easily.    Just now, I turned the globe around:  Montenegro!  That's the country I couldn't recall. 
Now, moments later, I'm checking out Iran.  I am planning to travel there in November.  I notice how big Iran is compared to Iraq, for instance. I touch certain raised surfaces of the globe indicating the mountainous areas in Iran and also in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan...My long-time fascination with globes and atlases and maps may or may not pre-date my life-long fascination with the great cities of the world and with exotic islands and mountain deathzones and desert oases and remote cultures of our remarkable planet.  I'll chalk it up to a simple--or not so simple--chicken/egg conundrum. 
Having tired (for the moment) of my global investigation of countries and their neighbors, I decide to read and answer some e-mails and facebook messages.  I aam restless, but fighting it.  I resolve (I'm frequently "resolving") to write a new piece for this blog, which is precisely what I'm doing now (not your "now", my "now"). 
Hmmm...When I'm not near my computer, I notice that I have lots of ideas for topics I want to tackle in my writing.  But, today, with plenty of time and access to this keyboard, I cannot quite locate a teeth-worthy topic.  So, I continue to read random passages from a book about a woman traveling alone in 1930's Persia...and I peruse the book section of The Sunday New York Times...

Then...PAUSE...maybe some tea would be tasty right about now.

In the kitchen, while making a pot of tea and finishing the Sudoku puzzle, I turn on the news:  Occupy Wall Street;   cruel destruction of a mosque in the troubled West Bank;   pundits discuss the "N" word;  joblessness;  Greece may default...Aaahrrgh!  I have passionate feelings about all of these topics but I am somehow (temporarily, I hope) unable or otherwise disinclined to slow down or to speed up enough to write about them with any depth or clarity.  The potential depth and clarity, that I feel certain exist for me, remain lodged somewhere between my bleeding heart of the matter and the never-ending matter of my wandering mind. This mind of mine loves to slide swiftly from one thrilling idea to another possible or impossible solution and then onto a new radical conclusion or an ongoing intriguing or thorny puzzle...hoping to land on an answer to an issue of monumental importance.

Forsooth!  Methinks this Ego, with whom I am intimately associated, doth not dally long enough in any realm in order to uncover the elusive truths for which it lazily yearns.  It is a dancer; a hip-hopper with a limp.  "...a player who struts..."

I cover my open eyes with the palms of my hands.  I look hard into the mano-manufactured darkness.  Is it possible, I wonder, with full purpose and intention, to see through these hands and through my self-created barrier?  What does this habit of self-imposed darkness tell me about myself?  I want to see something.  I want to see something more; something on the other side of the darkness---where the light originates.
 
Once again, I am searching through magazines, atlases, dictionaries, news reports, rooms, closets, memories, fantasies...looking for something to caress, to finesse---something that will hold my attention, something to take me away from the news and the books that need to be arranged and the table that needs dusting and the plants that need watering and the bills that need to be paid and the hunger that taunts me...I want to go somewhere or to be somewhere or to be someone who is somewhere, somewhere else... somewhere from which to return to tell others of the somewheres where I have been.  "somewhere I have never traveled, gladly..."  (e.e. cummings)

What is this restlessness?

My tea gets cold, steeping too long in the little white pot, while I retreat to my office to look up a quote that I think is by Alexander Pope---but I'm not sure.  Yes, it is by Alexander Pope:  "A little learning is a dangerous thing." 
But so is a lot of learning, Alexander!  And so is no learning, I hasten to add.

PAUSE

It's actually the next day---the day after I wrote what is written above.  So much has happened since the pause...I have no idea how much.  No one does.  It's unknowable.  Somehow I stretch (futilely, of course) to feel the weight and wonder of everything that has happened since I paused...I can't even fathom how much has happened to me, in my world and now (!!) I am imagining everything that has happened to the billions of people in the world in these few hours and, by extension, to all the animals and plants and inanimate objects that exist:  the accidents and the births and deaths and the tears (of joy and anguish) and the secrets and the clouds and the movement of the sands in all the deserts and...and I am so fucking awed by the everything-ness of everything. 

And the above is what I sense I sense in those times when I cover my open, searching, wondering, wandering eyes. With the palms of my trusty, well-used hands with all their lifelines, relationship lines, wrinkles, freckles and veins, I attempt to touch the fathomless and unfathomable universes in this particular Time and Location in which I have placed myself---in a (I know, I know) hopelessly naive effort to figure things out...to figure out this Self of mine...

To me, I am a fascinating and super-complex, Gordian knot-like tangle of the memories, fantasies, plans and confessions of a wondering, wandering totally incomplete creation (or creature) made (simply) from Time and dirt and air and static and some magnificent secret ingredient...

                                      "We dance round in a ring and suppose
                                       But the secret sits in the middle and knows."
                                                                                       Robert Frost

THOUGHTS ON KILLING AND FORGIVENESS

                      "...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind;
                       and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
                                                    John Donne  Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions


It was through ignorance and impatience that I killed the unhatched/unborn robin.  And it was through sheer neglect that I killed the tiny turtle with the pink flower painted on its tiny shell.  Sixty years later, I still feel some guilt, some sadness when I recall those killings.  I get a queasy feeling and I gently clench my teeth and I squeeze my eyes shut in apologetic acknowledgement of those long ago crimes against Life.  Small crimes.  Still, I think those small killings have left a tiny black speck on my soul--all innocence notwithstanding.
Over the years, I've killed ants and mosquitos and other insects as well as the occasional spider...but not so much any more.  Now, I shoo their peskiness away...or I leave them alone...or I gently remove them to an unobtrusive place.  I do this not because I am slouching towards Buddhism so much as because I find that I am moving, naturally, to a place of compassion for all living things.  Although, I still sense a snippet of ego in my actions/non-actions toward all life.
                                                And so I wonder:  Why am I not a vegetarian! 

In the long ago seasons of love (circa 1960 something) I killed a rattlesnake...days after I had been taught how to load and fire a little 22 calibre Smith and Wesson.   You see,  my gun-savvy husband was insistent that I should be pistol competant---living, as we did, off the grid, in the wilds of the New Mexican desert.  I didn't shoot the rattlesnake because he/she was threatening to bite me.  No.  It's not like the rattlesnake was invading my home or about to eat the quail that lived nearby.  Nor was the rattlesnake in the corral where it might have spooked one of the horses---thrusting its poison-filled fangs  into the leg of my Palomino.  No, the snake was by the side of a country road, far from any so-called civilization.  My husband spotted it as we were driving from one rural place to another.  He stopped the truck.  He handed me the twenty-two colt revolver.  He encouraged me (coaxed me) to get out of the car and to shoot the rattlesnake...

It was coiled up in rattlesnake fashion, next to a yellow chamisa.  I stood at a safe distance.  The snake looked at me.  I pointed the gun.  I pulled the trigger.  BANG!  The little bullet went through the snake's body several times.
 
I never shot the gun again.  I can still recall the place in the road where I killed it.  I can conjure the blue sky, the autumn foliage, the distant mountains..and I can still see the mangled piece of flesh that once was a creature---minding its own business, doing no harm, thinking about crossing the road...thinking about getting to the other side, perhaps.

I have a t-shirt that says DO NO HARM.  I got it in Greece during my weeks with the passengers of The Audacity of Hope/International Peace Flotilla;  a gathering of people who would not kill, joining together-from the far corners of our world to stop the killing and harming of others---to stop violence through peaceful means...wearing shirts that plainly said DO NO HARM.

Do peaceful means succeed in stopping killing?

TROY DAVIS was killed last week.  MURDERED

     "You never had time to learn. 
     They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base
     they killed you."
                                                    Ernest Hemingway  A Farewell to Arms

Troy was executed, murdered.  Despite the pleas and various peaceful protests and despite the petitions to stop the killing, the execution was executed. It was carried out in order to satisfy the decades-long cry from a few angry friends and some family members of the slain victim---an off-duty policeman.  The angry and unforgiving people were tireless (and ultimately successful) in their pursuit of retribution.  Retribution?  There is no righteous retribution to be found in the murder-for-murder form of punishment.  And in a justice system that is sometimes unjust, who can justify strapping a young man to a gurney and---in a semi-private "screening room"---injecting him with lethal poisons! 
People watched this spectacle.  Yes, they did! 
While hundreds of caring anti-death-penalty friends and strangers stood outside the death penalty prison with signs and prayers and petitions (petitions with thousand upon thousands of names of people asking the government of the state of Georgia to stop the execution, to have a new trial, to consider the "recantations" of the original witnesses and the clear evidence of reasonable doubt and the pleas from The Pope and Bishop TuTu and President Jimmy Carter) a few people sat in stone silence and stillness and watched a man be murdered thinking it would (at last, at last) assuage their pain or end the annoying, ongoing questions:  to kill him or not to kill him?  Guilty or not guilty?  Right or wrong?  Forgive or withhold forgiveness?

     "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. 
     But those that will not break it kills.  It kills the very good and the very gentle
     and the very brave impartially.  If you are none of these you can be sure that
     it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." 
                                                        Ernest Hemingway   "A Farewell to Arms"

Forgiveness.  Now, we who cried when Troy died, we who signed petitions to spare his life, we who stood outside the execution prison must forgive those who---decades ago---rushed to judge him, tried him, found him guilty, sentenced him...It is up to us to find, in our hearts, forgiveness for those who wanted him executed, who held on to their anger, who denied him a new trial, a polygraph test,,,We must forgive the parole board, the governor's office, the Governor...the Supreme Court...We must "forgive them" for---in the words of a great man of love and peace (Jesus Christ)---"... for they know not what they do."

Or words to that effect.

I want to know that I am forgiven and that I have forgiven my childhood self for forgetting to keep water in the tiny turtle's habitat that I kept in the abandoned chicken coop in the back of my neighbor's yard and for my misguided notion that I could speed up the hatching of the little blue egg by wrapping it in a paper towel and placing it in a little metal bowl and warming the bowl with some matches my friend Margie stole from her brother's room...and for the unnecessary murder of the rattlesnake...and for the accidental killing of the jackrabbit in the road one night very late, driving home from an evening of idle conversation...

And while I'm at it:  I wonder if I might forgive myself for all my lazy or cavalier or thoughtless killings of... ideas, and friendships, and Time, and opportunities...And finally, let me strive to understand and to remember that, not  unlike Hemingway,
               
                "I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after
                 and what is immoral is what you feel bad after." 
                                                                              Death in the Afternoon

RESTORE RESTORETH RESTORATION

"...shepherd...I shall...want...to lie down in green pastures...still waters...
restoreth my soul...righteousness...fear no evil...art with me...
a table before me...my cup runneth over...goodness and mercy...
all the days of my life...forever.                                
                                                                excerpts from Psalm Twenty-three

(Caution if you are squeamish!)
My left big toenail and the second toenail of my right foot are growing back--after falling off.  First the toes were injured.  Then they were infected, sore and fragile.  Black.  Soon the nails were dead.  Now they are growing back.  It's amazing, isn't it, the way the body restoreth itself.   I've been wearing a band-aid on the big toe since early July...so I've had a summer of unfortunate pedicurial realities to endure.  Not an earth-shaking inconvenience...I wouldn't even mention it except...
Last evening, in the middle of a luxurious mountain pine-scented bubble bath, I looked at that offending/offensive toenail...and noticed that it is actually restoring itself, reproducing those peculiar cells.  And, I began to wax semi-poetic and philosophic about the way in which virtually everything works; about how things begin and how they are affected by other things or events and how they respond to those events or things and what the various effects and outcomes are and how...just how, things are restored.

I believe that I, we, you, he, she, it, they shall be restored.

There is a desire for order in the universe...I think.  And it all seems so alternately mysterious and predictable.  I am thinking about those tests in which one is asked to predict the next number in a series of numbers.  But how can one answer accurately without considering how at that next number perhaps the whole pattern would change and the series would have to be reconsidered and reconfigured from the point of the next unexpected number.
I wait, and I search while waiting, for the next expected or unexpected number or incident or accident or event.  And I wonder if there is something that should be--or might be--observing me and wondering or predicting just what to expect with my next move or accident...Probably not.  And yet...I muse on...
YES!
"Re" is such a wonderful suffix.  So forgiving.  Restore.  Revive.  Rework.  Rearrange.  Re-evaluate.  Re-energize.  Remember.  Revisit.  Relive.  Relieve.  Resuscitate.  Resurrect.  Resume...
Restore order...in the court of public opinion.  Restore our faith in humanity.  Restore a sense of optimism in the land---across the land.  Restore confidence in the future...That's what I am struggling to do.  Confidence in my future and yours and ours...Restore a sense of community, a sense of purpose, a sense of goodness...
Restore our collective pride in our family, home, neighborhood, town, city, country, world...a sense of cooperation.  Restore our trust in our neighbors, our laws, our leaders.
We are weary from the erosion of so many valuable things in our lives--in the environment, of course...but even more so in our values...
My father lived by the saying "My word is my bond."  It was his truth.  We could rely on his word.  He valued it.  We valued it.  Today?  "Sorry Sir, we don't take words for bonds.  We're going to need to see some collateral."  Collateral.  My collateral has been damaged...I only have my word.  Of course they're going to need to see some collateral.  Because Trust is gone.  It has no value in today's world. 

But...couldn't it be re-built? Couldn't we realize that it was injured.  That it was sore and that it got infected?  And that it is fragile...Isn't it possible to realize that there is in Nature (including Human Nature) a force to restore.   Let the land lie fallow so that it will be restored so that it can hold and nurture and nourish that which is planted in it...

What do we as a PEOPLE value today?  What did we value that we now have lost?  Do we want to reclaim it?  How do we reclaim it, given that we've done what we've done and are where we are?

                    "I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought
                      with the atomic bomb.  Perhaps two thirds of the people of the earth
                      might be killed, but enough men (and women, I add) capable of thinking,
                      and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be

               restored."
                                                                                               Albert Einstein, 1945