120805 13:01
I can be and often am a jerk especially in public. A neglected child I’ve struggled to be accepted, loved and acknowledged as worthy of benign attention, if not love, at least acceptance. As something other than wallpaper or nothing at all -- not there.
Leaving the ER at 03:30 I chanced to remark to a male nurse; “We’ve all got to die sometime somehow” his reply was “I know I see it too often.” And this parting was after his reading me the riotous consequences of smoking cigarettes -- Stated in simple terms based upon his experience of attending whatever walks in the door 24/7/365. Stroke, hear attack, impotence, the list is endless the consequences of my malevolent and savage indifference to my self. And at that, amongst civilians I know too well the other deaths lingering for perhaps less than twenty years. About which I ask, would I be willing to endure?
In the company of humanity I’d rather be a nurse than anything else . . . by penchant, proclivity, inclination and nature I touch people. My understanding of this is dim yet I am gaining a sense of what M implied when she said, “you can heal” (people, myself, what?) and only years later when I requested amplification she said, “you will.”
We are all artist creating our Self and every moment in our life and death a self portrait. It is no longer a matter of belief or faith but experience graven in the stone of my self indifference. From pain, suffering, comes a new person. We are called to be the best we can be. While others neglect the call and thus die never having lived but merely exist inanimate. Or. Worse intoxicated with their deadly ideal of God idolatrous.
Accustomed to chaos, well versed and trained in it, as all are who are victims of PTSD not just the wars in foreign lands, or at home as first responders; but those who were neglected as children who become adults ignorant of their actual worth in God’s providence.
Using myself as an example, there have been many rites of passage -- on going -- continuing. And in writing this I am made aware that it has been, consciously or unconsciously, the choices I’ve made given what I received. The rock become a dove? I can change nothing within the Universe except myself.
I have listed many heroes/heroines in what I’ve written yet I am equally aware of many more, if not equal nearly so, who left their trials and confessions for us to learn: there is a sovereign estate within each of us untouchable by all pain and suffering. Unsought becomes the motive for avoidance and pain greater than any hell could ever be.
This concluded my time there; six hours of the staff’s patient endurance of my telling them that I too am a medico of sorts. Something I seldom do in any other circumstance. It is perhaps -- or do I now pray -- the last time I will pretend to be something or one ‘special.’ To myself I am essentially, if not quintessentially, indifferent no longer with a vengeance but acceptance and purpose.
The All, The I Am, what we occident call “God” is by any or many names the Servant King of all life. I am not sure I would want a being exclusively male so in my prayers I always include the feminine. Yes the best part of love is asexual and immaterial called friendship. And so find The All in all people.
My life willing and able to surrender itself to the inevitable at this moment.
© 2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved
