We have been overwhelmed with the breaking news of national and international consequence. I leave those voices to reweave the news and now give thought to what we share in common when even sleep does not rescue us. Our efforts to make a difference seem embarrassing when the world needs a step -in by a Great God. But we know that life improves only when our behavior does.
Before throwing in the towel, let me post this journal entry scribed from July 17th, ’94 on making a difference. I had gone twice into cardiac arrest in May ’93 and my cardiologist tiredly pounded life back into me. As the last one of 8 siblings still here, I still wonder the why of me. We wonder if we make a difference? Let me give you this.
July 17,’94— On making a difference . . . .
You wonder if you make a difference. You do those things that escape the notice of people. But without the choice of kindness, of good, of decency, of courtesy, the world truly could not go on.
The smallest act of mercy has large repercussions. Remember that. When the smallest act of kindness is received it is passed on without thinking because the act gains a life of its own and struggles for expression. It gathers momentum as it moves through the person’s hands, their life and those about them.
It is these acts of kindness, of good, of love that keeps the earth’s purpose in mind. And the earth continues to vibrate its song and sings it for the ears that are destined to hear. One person can delay it but no person can stop it completely. Delayed only but never destroyed.
The many acts of kindness and goodness you dispensed took their proper route and touched many lives giving to each a measure of estimation they could not reach alone.
(we are the example and the cherished purpose. . . and I think that the smallest acts have no money value . . .because they are priceless and money cannot touch. . .)
family photo. . .
Veronica Hallissey has been writing since the 1960s, with her poetry published in a variety of small press magazines. Born into a farm family in Lockport, NY, and educated at the University of Buffalo and other midwest institutions, she brings and unusual point-of-view to her poetry, combining strong natural images with a deep spiritual language. She lives in Ramona, CA.
I was born dragging a foot still in my last world. When asked for volunteers, my hand went up. Not a walk in the park has it been. And with the events of this past Saturday, all the words have been said by the important voices. I have reached as high as I could and still be anchored to my commitments. Today I gave thought to a post as a lover of words and the sacred journey each word carries with our intent. I embrace the words, hopefully to your embrace.
THE WORD IS GOD . . .
In the beginning was the word
destined to touch the mind of man.
But the prevailing Spirit in its wisdom saw fit
to encumber each with the power to discern.
Meanings floated into space,
shaping themselves to fit the receiving mind.
Reaching their destination,
their shape changed to fit the owner.
Such turbulence! Such uneasiness!
Albeit because the word had taken life and risen
to meet the heart’s need.
The speaker’s heart had taken its intent
and placed upon the Ethers the heart’s desire.
It gathered cadence as it rode
to meet the receiver’s prejudice.
The sender’s intent lay silent, lost.
The heavens only acknowledged
its primordial meaning.
Can it be said in truth
that the word be god?
It is.
For within its power to create
it moves with desperation to voice feelings,
to give breath to visions and to heal.
The word created creatures and dynasties,
wars and rebellions, held peace in abeyance
and brought us to life.
So speak sofly when speaking.
Words carry the weight of the heart
with intent to topple empires
and worlds and men.
In the catalytic movement
of the word, the world’s heart beats,
years are gifted
and man’s future secured.
It is all we have.
Veronica Hallissey has been writing since the 1960s, with her poetry published in a variety of small press magazines. Born into a farm family in Lockport, NY, and educated at the University of Buffalo and other midwest institutions, she brings and unusual point-of-view to her poetry, combining strong natural images with a deep spiritual language. She lives in Ramona, CA.
I remember once or many times saying that I wish to pick up a book and understand what they were saying. I wanted wisdom. I wanted to understand. I wanted there to be a difference about me that others could see and say she is different. I am different. Our words are the same but meanings others cannot relate to.. . .
I wanted to shake the world and say, look what is going on. I want to say look at the heart of the other. And if you look at the heart of the other you will see nothing else. But before you do, you must look at your self.
We were told the unexamined life is not worth living. If you can unabashedly, without an alibi and with courage of a supreme sort, look at your self and in a frame of reference you choose see what and who you are and act accordingly, you are on the right path It is as simple and as difficult as that.
The camouflage systems we construct are intricate. An architect would be proud and no doubt win kudos for. And we are architects and creators both and we deny this all the time. We choose to think we are thrust into a dervish of some sort, at odds with our environment and at the mercy of an unmerciful god. To think that we ourselves create and manipulate for advantages we are ill equipped to articulate, is an anathema. But we do this all the time. We deny what we choose. And we choose to forget what we choose to forget. Our protection is uppermost in our lives.
To remember would put a burden on our lives. To remember would demand an involvement that would be uncomfortable to say the least. We bask in the shaded twilight of our shadows, never ever knowing that to step into the light would reveal ourselves to us who we are. It would be our own liberation revealing who we are. We are afraid to know because at once we would know who we are and who our brother is.
He is Me.
Veronica Hallissey has been writing since the 1960s, with her poetry published in a variety of small press magazines. Born into a farm family in Lockport, NY, and educated at the University of Buffalo and other midwest institutions, she brings and unusual point-of-view to her poetry, combining strong natural images with a deep spiritual language. She lives in Ramona, CA.
If you are a front line worker, a miracle worker appearing first to cries of crises, and you are driving home at the end of the day, you begin to talk in the silence of your car. You vent and cry with fatigue, with sadness, with curses and finally end your discourse as you turn down the street where you stay either with others or by your Self somewhere.
But here you are walking home in the rain and loudly talking. You cry and the words are not elegant nor precise, just a wrench from a heart pressed for various reasons. None of which speak to the fairness of anything. No one notices your tears because in the rain everyone you pass seems to be crying.
But to whom are we talking? I sit here and have held conversations in mind that were company for who I am. And for only slightly more than 13 years have seen my words of mind printed by determination on the monitors. When did I become conscious of the arguments of an Other and the comfort of a companion mind in conference?
It is what I call the greatest love affair ever we engage in.
For when we reach the highest and best that we know, that bar set for the highest mountain we canclimb mentally still in our human skin, when we succumb to the intensity that has us roaring and venting, cursing and in great fatigue exposing our hearts in bas relief, that we are answered in likeintensity by the DivineWithin.
No respecter of social classes, but great respecter of our approach to work and our work ethics, of belief that the Each is of supreme value regardless what is held to be the currency value of the day. The intensity of purpose will reveal the Who of who we are and we are assured to be more than the disheveled one we appear.
It is then we have knowledge born to be ours. That we are companioned and never abandoned though this was lost to us. The night embraces us but in the morning we take our posts to be accountable. We never have the language to describe this affair of heart which only is alive in mind.
But we know now it is another pearl of great price.
Concordance. . .true harmony. . .
The heart reaches out in mute acceptance to that which is given.
It answers only that which it perceives at its Source.
Its depth is mirrored by the very essence of the soul’s reflections.
It wanders not among possibilities but perceives also
the very essence of the mind’s abstractions. . . .
art by Claudia Hallissey
Veronica Hallissey has been writing since the 1960s, with her poetry published in a variety of small press magazines. Born into a farm family in Lockport, NY, and educated at the University of Buffalo and other midwest institutions, she brings and unusual point-of-view to her poetry, combining strong natural images with a deep spiritual language. She lives in Ramona, CA.
I post today a subject close to my heart and mind that boundaries in thought subject our young people in ways detrimental to their growth and honesty. It comforts the adults to be sure but the relationship goes nowhere.
With Sunday’s go to church approaching, we are in a place where we can remedy our focus in the ‘twig is bent’ and add direction forward butbeing already bent, means we come with a history and if not completely sealed, we have memory. We should be asking memory from where.
The where being life everlasting, world without end. Not given to understanding or curiosity, why work so hard? Since we consider the mind a gift, we appreciate also the responsibility. Leaders in religion too often teach by rote with no hope of revelation. As a recent pope opined as to his lack of accomplishments, caught as he entered his vehicle, he said ‘Jesus sleeps.’
When we limit by our lack of study, we limit by fear what the young could offer in lieu of being mental. How to know they were happier being Other? Memory?
If everlasting life and world without end were understood and not illusion, memory would then be authentic for knowing when Other they were happier. And who goes noted in this day as dealing with the invisible world? Except yours truly arriving with a foot still in her last world.
It is not fun and games. Isolation is more the status. If invisible life were acknowledged, and there is more than sufficient knowledge, it would be easier to say I remember being happier ‘Other’, keeping our young authentic.
With proper counseling and time doing its healing, the conclusion reached would be less traumatic. Susan Howatch, in returning to Oxford, wrote in a work, that some philosophers believe that human nature cannot grasp the concept of reality at all. There are some people whose brains have matured with areas open to the invisible challenge.
It is not an easy journey at best. But the young are closer to being born than those of us chasing the century at closing. They should not carry what we chose not to work through.
More’s the pity.
Veronica Hallissey has been writing since the 1960s, with her poetry published in a variety of small press magazines. Born into a farm family in Lockport, NY, and educated at the University of Buffalo and other midwest institutions, she brings and unusual point-of-view to her poetry, combining strong natural images with a deep spiritual language. She lives in Ramona, CA.
5/31/24. . . There is always a someone in mind when I wish to repeat a post. A reason because I want to shout to the world that here is a person of worth and high calibre that the rest of the world does not know as we who know and love her. And she says to me how she loves the lesson in strawberries that I wrote. So for my in law daughter Lori this is for you. These are your strawberries give them to whom you wish. You are generous with your harvest. And we are grateful you came into our lives.
I was a young girl of 12 and it was our first summer on The Farm and it was a hard one. But it also was filled with good food straight from the warm earth. My mother had a talent for growing things in the city despite its polluted air even 70 years ago; people knew it then to be unhealthy. But in the clear air of the country, in the soil of her loam filled garden, her talents blossomed as did her crops.
We were getting produce ready for the stand near the road. As we were preparing the fruits and vegetables, selling them as fast as we put them out, friends from the city were arriving. They were diverse characters. Some were people in her circumstances with many children and little money. A few were wealthy but the outstanding characteristic of all these relationships was mutual respect.
Toward the late afternoon, I was tired and whiny. The source of my irritation was the fact that my mother was giving to her friends, without charge, the best and finest of what we were putting out. A bushel of potatoes here, quarts of strawberries there, a basket of fresh vegetables here.
But the strawberries were my argument. I loved them and the ones she grew were the reddest, juiciest and largest I had ever seen. They were sweet clear through and the dream stuff of that first June on The Farm. With the heavy cream separated from the rich milk the excellent cows gave, these were mine she was giving away. The strawberries summed up my resentment.
‘You can’t keep giving away our profits!’ I said. ‘You have given away half of all our produce!’
She turned to me and in a voice I have not forgotten with the lesson that has stayed with me.
‘These are mine’, she said. ‘I will do with them what I please. These are for me to give away if I want to. No one can tell me who to give to. My friends may never do anything for me but if one of them does some thing for my children or my grandchildren, then that will be payment for me.’
I have thought often of that lesson in gift giving, in giving what is yours. In the course of my days, when someone did something for me I did not expect, there was the lesson in strawberries. When so much has been done for our children by their friends and ours, the lesson in strawberries comes up.
When time, whole weekends of time, have been given to sit with a sick child, to listen to an impoverished spirit, to make dinner when the task seems insurmountable and appetite non-existent, to do any of these when time has become our most precious commodity, it is a gift of Spirit. When a check arrived unexpectedly from someone whose only reason was ‘I remember how I would have felt to have received this’ or the someones who oftentimes helped our children through school because ‘it was done for me.’
I thought of the lesson in strawberries.
As I review a life where so much has been done for me and mine, from sources unexpected, I am grateful for the lesson in strawberries. My mother gave what was hers to give, what she worked for and gave freely. She was paying it forward long before the idea became novel. I do notforget.
When we are asked to pay forward for gifts given and received, we must remember the lesson this lady of ten thousand lions strong leveled me. As the world works and fights to uphold democracies all over, we must remember from where most of us come.
I see my grandmother in the wrinkled old faces that I find mirrored every day. With tears pleading simply to go home. Will I forever see Richard Engel embrace that lined face younger than I am with a history I will never match? And a devastated country fractured beyond recall surrounding?
Let us pay it forward so the children’s children not have to assuage our anguish forever. Pray let it be so.
Veronica Hallissey has been writing since the 1960s, with her poetry published in a variety of small press magazines. Born into a farm family in Lockport, NY, and educated at the University of Buffalo and other midwest institutions, she brings and unusual point-of-view to her poetry, combining strong natural images with a deep spiritual language. She lives in Ramona, CA.
I will drink this cup of gall, swallowing the bitterness setting fire to earth’s waste.
But first I caress this chalice. Its depth mirrors my heart, shaking the foundations of my very own selves.
Now splendid trepidation challenge the ultimatums by which the earth rocks.
Challenge me, o gods, not to see the outside that has no bounds, nor the inside that does not
set feel to the outside, nor the depth which encapsulates other worlds.
Winds that know me by my name,| sunlight that weeps with my tears and the night sky which covers my brittle bones with the white moon will continue to call me . . .and remember.
I will drink of this cup and set loose the forces that muddle the minds of men.
In chaos they will seek order. . .and there is none. In the written word they will seek understanding. . .and there is none. In the marriage bed they will seek delight. . . and there is none.
Cross the stars. Challenge the arch angels. Banish the gods. And quickly I will drink of this cup. But tell me. . . .
Who will teach the children?
Veronica Hallissey has been writing since the 1960s, with her poetry published in a variety of small press magazines. Born into a farm family in Lockport, NY, and educated at the University of Buffalo and other midwest institutions, she brings and unusual point-of-view to her poetry, combining strong natural images with a deep spiritual language. She lives in Ramona, CA.
How Not To Attach The Fabric Of The Global House. . .
They say. .
You have to keep it singular. . . You have to keep it nuclear. . . You have to keep it private. . . and remembering different in any way is not good.
I tell you. . .
You have to keep out the likes of the stable boy who was my grandfather. And keep out the likes of my grandmother who could speak seven languages and and the likes of me from being born.
For, I, in a sometime life blazoned with the year of 1790 walked up a hill in a country called France. As a monk in a robe of brown burlap with a heavy cross across my shoulders led a group of people past boarded windows with dust flying to save human rights. The time was the French Revolution.
We would be immigrants vying for freedom from a world of oppression; seeking liberation for a chance to breathe fresh air. Rich with history, making a small difference to be sure, infected only with Earth’s virus called learning. Our need to know life’s passions helped to escalate human evolution.
Was this to be called a criminal act and we the criminals?
a small difference?
(photo of the healed bird of my brother Stanley taken by Diane)
(photo taken of birds by son John with camera in hand)
Veronica Hallissey has been writing since the 1960s, with her poetry published in a variety of small press magazines. Born into a farm family in Lockport, NY, and educated at the University of Buffalo and other midwest institutions, she brings and unusual point-of-view to her poetry, combining strong natural images with a deep spiritual language. She lives in Ramona, CA.
My ears cleaved to the door frame of the dining room. Her whisper was hoarse, were there many?
Lots, he said, lots, as he held the letter that told him what they saw. They pushed for space, women and children and their men for best viewing. They wanted to see. My people saw he said.
Their words burned my brain as I strained to listen, afraid I wouldn’t catch a sorrow hushed. It didn’t last long he said, because they fell into the pits. Matko Bosko she said. They killed our God he said, remember that.
And I knew the god they called upon to save us from whatever they feared their kids would do. They killed him, he whispered again, somehow making this horrid time an all right matter. My people saw them, he kept saying.
And I loved those two who were our parents who made things seem right when my heart knew was evil and my head fought them
and argued till I would vomit.
We would go into holy week and pray
just as my cousins who saw what was done
went back to their tables and had lunch
and dinner as if nothing had happened.
These were friends and relatives whose prayers were different and that made them different than us.
And the us that I was born into made me sick to my stomach and I kneeled in front of the hopper and emptied my shame washed with the tears of I am so sorry and threw up all of my ten years
and so went my trust.
January 18, 2018
Veronica Hallissey has been writing since the 1960s, with her poetry published in a variety of small press magazines. Born into a farm family in Lockport, NY, and educated at the University of Buffalo and other midwest institutions, she brings and unusual point-of-view to her poetry, combining strong natural images with a deep spiritual language. She lives in Ramona, CA.
May 13,2024. . . (I remember watching this particular morning show with concern because I take things personally. A dear friend said to me that was a hard way to live. If one does not take life personally, one then is a ‘walk through’. Where then is the meaning in life? And whose meaning would I accept? And isn’t that a thought worth the work?)
With pen and tablet I watched Morning Joe and felt I was auditing a class with Joe Scarborough and Jon Meacham, both knowledgeable speaking about the fragility of our democracy. And the lasting words of Professor Meacham were the thunderous grievances of our previous leaders that cannot thought to be ended.
But in fullness and strength it is but an ebbing and flowing throughout our democracy that will require constant vigilance to contain. It is not ever over though we like to think so.
I understand more fully this day because this is a classroom deemed to be so, we cannot be fooled that we are done with class. There is more to learn and we must assume student postures to learn what we must.
Lawyer Scarborough mentioned we must acknowledge the strength of our Federal Judges and Courts to not allow the denigration of our laws because of grievances held by anyone. Professor Meacham pointed out the sublime respect and strength of the court system of our trinity government to the Constitution of these United States.
Though part of Congress was enjoined politically with the Administration, it was our courts of law with federal judges who were the stalwart support of our Democracy.
We will know by name the ones who attempted to overthrow the very fragile structure of the faultless idea of democracy that all men are created equalin their humanity. Not in their gifts and talents, but in their humanity. This therefore being the democratic basis of universal living with potential in good governance, universal living means all worlds.
Hard as life is in the various aspects of living, as in the simultaneous essence of time and the reflections of worlds in conflict that we also reflect, we are the promising experiment of diverse cultural living on our planet. We began our birthing as the land of diversity with the world’s demeaned and our birthing as the land of diversity with the world’s demeaned and dismissed seeking life in this new land.
We are still learning to see how our humanity binds us and what physical differences might blend to unite us in peaceful coexistence and progress. The enhancing of all life forms and goodness innate even in newborns, begins the teaching in this best of all classrooms.
Because I have lived long enough to see changes come and see how much we have been given, I conclude still we are hereto learn. With moments of light and laughter yes, but as students with concern forgreater universal life we all aspire to.
We all get to the place where we tire of games, but the real problem is our Earth running out of resources and may not be able to support the games much longer. Take it straight to heart. It is a truth and we run out of time.
We must beg for help from those still needing to be convinced that we are in real trouble. We are in calamities together, with global warfare, autocratic warlords, and climate problems never before encountered. We have learned calamities are not pretty.
Did we not have someone stand on a rock and say to us all, earth is a reflection of heaven and heaven a reflection of earth? How did we not hear that?
Where can we go?
Veronica Hallissey has been writing since the 1960s, with her poetry published in a variety of small press magazines. Born into a farm family in Lockport, NY, and educated at the University of Buffalo and other midwest institutions, she brings and unusual point-of-view to her poetry, combining strong natural images with a deep spiritual language. She lives in Ramona, CA.