Grampa says. . . . when the grandparents are SLOW, you sometimes have to do the set up work
YOURSELF !
no job too big,
or girl too small,
we are kin
so do them all !
What Will You Do. . .when they tell you?
Only by observing on a constant basis the differences of genetics and environment on your own children, can you begin to see how unequal we are born. This has been an ongoing study for me because of my own differences and peculiarities as compared to my 7 siblings and also these same differences and similarities in our 3 sons.
The topic has been repeated with added nuances and differentiation as the years progress. Strangely there have been fewer inconsistencies simply because time kaleidoscopes into simultaneous events with my scribing.
When reading Doris Lessing’s Shikasta series the psychiatrist raises the significance in quality of thought. Just two percent difference in the quality of thought puts both people, the talker and the listener in different countries and maybe worlds.
2 % is enough truly for different worlds. All we have to do is look about our world. Within families at the table, one notes the differences in emotional maturity. When listening to the arguments, especially when tempers rise, one wonders who are the children and who the adults.
It is staggering to the senses when one notes with alarm the maturity assumed by the sons and daughters with the preponderance of classes in debating. The elders, whether in Congress or in business depend greatly on sophistication that comes with experience. And assume those will carry their argument.
My generation still assumes that all are created equally. I cannot come to any word describing even one characteristic having no exception. Coming to mind are the two girl playmates on the train to Chicago. Both beautiful, different skin colors. . . overheard talking about birth marks, with one having a large visible mark.
Some of us have them on the outside, said one and some of us on the inside. They both agreed. And some still harbor the notion that all are a clean slate at birth to be written on by our compulsory education. Even though educational systems differ throughout the country but this fact escapes their thinking.
We must stress the abilities of unique differences. And how these enrich our lives. When we look into the eyes of children we should see angels walking into our hearts. If you are fortunate they will call you Baba knowing you are the safe one. You are the haven they require if the world is to progress and they are to contribute.
When you see how much you invest in each child to instill needful habits you realize the great differences. And muttering in exasperation where did you come from? What would you do or think if you truly knew from where?
And what will you do when they tell you?
artwork by
Claudia Hallissey
Claim The Difference. . .
From a July 24,’84 entry—-because I have integrated simultaneous time during my adult life (it was not easy and I also am familiar with dimensions of no time with dream frames posted on my blog), the following was an early topic of discussion (from a cosmic view, yesterday). I have quoted Albert Einstein on simultaneous time and also philosopher Robert Nozick on World Creation (0thers also) during recent years upon discovery. Since I am not credentialed, these have been in over half a century of Independent Study I have researched.
I was told and I scribed the following. . . I asked. . . was it a different world?
It was, it was. It was a world where belief had the power of logic. Where prayer was direct communication with what was the belief at the time, where the arch angels stepped between man and his desires and procured them for the supplicant. It was all those things and more.
Man did not roam the Earth without an anchor at will or put his faith in the machines that mimicked his mind. He conquered what he needed with the virtue within. He did those things because he did not know he could not.
With all that he was he was able to do. Anything.
With all that he thought, he was able to bring under his dominion all that he thought had life. And he brought these under his dominion. Until he tired. Until he became less entranced with the trivialities of the dailiness and became enamored with the glitter of his toys.
He could do these things because the thought that he could not do them did not enter his mind. Think on that for awhile. It was a different world.
It was a world where the jester could make the common man laugh. Because the jester was comical.
And the common man was not conscious of what made the comic a comic. And now everyone is a comic. Everyone is what he thinks he is by mimicking what he sees, what he reads and what is heard.
We do not resent what we see here. Instead we ask what did we not do? We take into account that you say the difference is slight. We say to you then, claim the difference. Do not allow those who are limited, limit you.
Knowledge is innate. You know the difference in worlds. Use it.
Prayer in Concert (excerpt). . .
now you tell them
in languages understood
how deep the hunger for knowledge
can be as if for bread; to keep alive
a mind from sleep;
(like scourge it contaminates
all minds of men).
We wake them up and
put to work the fathers
of the children forever seeded
with memory from a place the angels tread.
Someone probably said, considering there is nothing new under the sun, I knew the journey my spirit would take would be the one closest to my heart. That would be the earth and sky of course, a farm.
The details would be only as difficult as I could overcome and not more than I could handle. I would of course argue that premise. In retrospect it was the most influential segment of my life.
Directing and encompassing the who I became to love the Earth Planet as the grandest classroom ever given to viable, developing creatures with potential who worship learning.
Having said that, my wish is for overwhelming intellects equipped to keep our planet safe and prospering healthily so the young need not worry they will have no dotage.
It is a beacon to the Universes and we are more than one. And nowhere are the conditions as ripe for ideas with materials becoming expressions as this planet. Pray that we take only good what moth and rust do not destroy when we terminate our stay, so that we only enhance life elsewhere in whatever form, in gratitude for what we are gifted.
The Farm Woman . . .
Woman of the Earth, you are loved.
You gather the fruits of your labors
to your bosom and feed the children.
You’ve inched your way along the
dusty path with back bent in great fatigue
and cultivated rows yielding wise fruit.
You would feed out of your mouth those
you think hungry and then beyond measure.
The fruits are the heart of your labors , the harvest of
your mind’s philosophy, spilling indiscriminately.
Who is left to feed you, farm woman?
What commissary is left open to feed your
hungry soul after hours? What bookstall will
house the words between stiff covers
to increase your harvest?
Labor, till the sun closes its blinds on the day.
Restless legs will speed you through the night
to find the bins ever full.
The Teacher speaks. . and I scribed. . . .When you realize that understanding is a bigger or heavier burden than not understanding, your behavior or course of action is already decided. The reason is this.
When you have the knowledge, you have the obligation. Not knowing the reason for a person’s behavior gives one the right to rage. Knowledge takes away this right. Yet who is to blame for this behavior, if blame is in the picture? There is no one. There never was.
Each person is a result of a compilation of errors destined for the head of man. And yet within is the spirit destined also for refinement, for an attuning that would bring the human species to the finest place of all. It is a testing ground for angels; each being the angel that decided to try his wings in a place that doesn’t allow flight but instead demands a rooting.
Some behaviors one can ascribe to fact. Yet most things properly belong to a generation of characteristics. Or many generations of characteristics. Not all things are a learned behavior to gain certain results. Some things are passed through the genes. And do not need to have anything done about them except to talk of them and aired.
There is generally a self righteousness about ourselves because we have nothing else in our frame of reference. We do what we do because anything else would be foreign to our natures.
When you understand the why of behavior you realize that understanding does not necessarily make the behavior easier to live with. But when you understand, when knowledge is yours, the obligation to do the correct thing is yours also. It is an incomparable growth experience. No one said it was going to be easy.
(In retrospect I see my life lived the only way I could in good conscience. Born with an open head and memory, I did the best I could . There are still some things to reconcile. Those may be easier when I am not in human skin. When you know you know, you know also that the way narrows and there are no options. As my granddaughter Jessie says, you suck it up.)
Genetic Memories. . .
Lurking behind every door are ghosts
from a shadowy past, eager to be translated
to a dubious present.
Impregnated in genes are the memories
of these ghosts, split second DNA with desire
housing the delicate substance quoting life.
Stupid am I to allow others’ memories,
lurking in my fresh Being, to
suck life out of my present.
But power filled even to think that I could
release their tenacious hold from a life
unfulfilled and requiring recompense.
Helplessness rages simultaneously,
pleading a judicious balance
to satisfy life’s imbalances, yet knowing,
I cannot do it.
artwork by
Claudia Hallissey
In February of 2001 I journaled that I had a feeling pass over me that said (not the first time) that this world is but a fragment of illusion. The reality is that there is no reality.
That when we leave we take our world but it stays in our memory bank like a rolling file, where we go back to see what was and how it came about because of who we were.
Last week I sat and watched a micro something swim in the pool and expand itself as it swam. When stopping, it was a speck of something. But when swimming, it was lit with 10,000 bulbs and glittered.
Brighter than the sun on the water but in shade, it still glittered. Nothing else glittered. I watched spellbound.
Son John came to the door and I told him what I was seeing. He did not see it even when I said it was glittering. Walking to the other side of the pool he saw a moth, the white fleck in the water. Amphibian? Creature of land and water? I told him it elongated and glittered. He thought it was the sun.
When he came out later, he got the net and fished the moth out of the water. I said if it is a moth, it is able to swim from the left side of the pool under the hose of the vacuum and had fins to weave in the water. In the shade as well as the sun the water moved on both sides of the creature.
I remember my friend Jan saying when I described the butterfly swooping up the spider’s web and carry it (I repeated that post two weeks ago) she said I only had eyes to see that. I thought again of my Mentor, the Nazarene, who said in Mathew 13:13 that having eyes you will not see and ears you will not hear.
And again as I have repeated in my blog when my world crashed Dr. Cassidy asked me what I saw when I went down Michigan Avenue. I closed my eyes and told him what I saw and when I was through he whistled through his teeth. ‘You understand not everyone sees what you see? You don’t.’ I was too afraid to ask him what others saw.
I never related that conversation to my husband. He grew up next door to Salem, MA and knew what happened to witches.
I want to think the moth was set free to soar. It did light brilliantly so I could see it swim distances and stop if tired? I can now feel sorry for my husband being married to me. I said if the government knew people like me existed, we would be treasured quietly and used.
The science gods have made it terrifying for families to have the likes of me among them. I bless them all.
Illustration by
Lucinda Cathcart, (my niece)
of TinyStudioCrafts.com
The Door Closes . . .
You say the door closes
behind me and you cannot follow.
I take my place beside the one
who holds my ceded heart in his hands.
All I know is here is the place I belong.
No other place feels right.
Though as I walk in other places,
they seem to be the places needing work.
I miss the belonging that once I had
in the arms tightly holding heart to heart.
It is now an isolation that accompanies my every day
with an emptiness that does not leave.
Nighttime brings my companion
and I to his side. And I am at home again.
We walk my fields and I do not rush away.
It does not last, for morning
brings to light the day’s increment
of work and commitment. Time was
when we wound our arms tightly but Conscience
awakened me to finish a work once begun.
Those arms no longer fit the who I am
so it is my loss and isolation.
Yet that will be remembered always
as the time our arms fit and wound tightly.
When one has knowledge, one also has the obligation.
*****
God is a word most people stop at because the mind balks
at its meagre knowledge to proceed.
*****
To not remember to lock the vault leaves it to be burglarized.
Or easily opened at best to remember without those whose presence
would have made the memories bearable, either in joy or sorrow.
*****
To put memories into a vault and tightly lid them is
to crowd the emotions into a body with only death as a release.
*****
It is a work when to sit down to rest in front of the fire
one has to build it first. But no fire made by another’s hands
warms as completely as one’s own effort in building and fanning one’s own flame.
*****
All labor is divine for it is the creative principle at work. And
it is the creative principle one should cherish.
*****
There never was an all right in anything.
The all right is always conditional.
*****
How great a problem is,
is already decided by the forgetting.
*****
Conscience is installed to monitor one’s life for one’s survival.
*****
Conscience is memory of acts done to one
with the memory of pain.
*****
Two by two was for the Ark.
But two by two can only be because someone has moved over
to allow space for an Other.
*****
We are better than what we think but never as good
as what we know.
*****
This bouquet is for you. . .
Tish, Marylouise, and Dorothy, Jan, and Joy, heart friends gone but always upfront; now some cyber friends distanced including (few) males attesting publicly to science, but attending silently to problems not to be tested by science gods in their pristine laboratories.
All friends of caliber, all honorable characters with huge depth, with problems in the confines of earth habitats; the streets of cities and living rooms in homes. My gender confronted mostly in the kitchens, midst getting dinner on the table or cleaning up afterward.
These are the laboratories where reality lives, while the one buying food for the table with the currency of the day sails out the door with a you take care of it dictum, (with an I have bigger fish to fry, like maybe world peace?)
But in today’s world drama, the difference is the one left also needs to get to a paying job because two salaries are required to maintain the premises or a trained talent wants their fair share of today’s kudos or currency. For particular reasons, that is the drama.
Since questions loom in many corners, what bears leverage on the troubled soul? Is it visible to be handled or invisible with an I could not help it attitude? The latter must be dealt with kid gloves or at best a saintly demeanor else we have worlds collapsing in quarters unable to be rebuilt.
Do we need religious or professional help or can we work it out with agencies designed just for this kind of thing? A conundrum, to be sure.
If invisible, is it genetic, inherited, meaning other members of the family have had this problem? Or a new one that deals with unmentionables, or drugs, from alcohol all the way to end of the alphabet, or something best left to experts?
Known is that no one ‘s upbringing prepares them for parenting in today’s world. This is what is known as OJT. On the Job Training. This is how recruits are assigned jobs in the Military, no matter one’s background.
Good friends of caliber are required in life, someone or a handful to inspire or calm when crises loom. Someone in Congress? Today, hard to believe. Or a lawyer? (I called for a friend) Or an ear to listen to heart hurts? (too many times to count).
Or a nurse/friend like Cati who held our fractured family together when David was leaving us, or young neighbor Cherl, who became like a daughter, or friend John, magically appearing in crises.
These are godfriends (correct word) who hold the leaky boat afloat when water rises and family cannot or is unable. I wrote that heaven does not play favorites. They don’t. Everyone is cherished. I was not spared the mountains to climb but had godfriends to journey with. They gave the supreme gift of heart needed.
What can I say when language has no adequate thank you? I call them godfriends.
It has been said with anger
that I set the bar
too high
for mere mortals to scale.
It was not for them
the bar was set
but for me,
to rise as high
as the immanent god
had deemed for me.
I could not know
that they would try
to jump for me.
I was not the reason.
It was for them, you see,
for someone told them
they would never do it .
I showed them though
they could .
And they believed.
And they surprised themselves.
(Please understand that even when I learned that I was not abandoned, I was not spared. This was not a known premise for me until I was quite aged. Heaven does not play favorites. The log was always in my eye; hard going.)