111224 08:10
Joy to the World?
“Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.”
"Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn't come from a store."
"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple." --Dr. Seuss

My favorite gem is a pearl. It is formed around agitation within an oyster--more organic than a diamond. Thinking back at my manifold dysfunctions; sexual, interpersonal, experientially self-denigrating--malevolently so. I see the armor of an oyster's shell better describes my defenses than any other thing or process.

The first quote is healing, salvific, unitive. Healing is not something you can buy it is process and transformation. At this time of year I know this from people who casually ask; "Are you ready for Christmas?" When I reply in a sincere and transparent way, I find that they too find this seasonal event: The Kid's Birthday!

Difficult.

A child does not know these things. Randy, my son did. On Black Friday I took him to purchase a remote controlled toy Porsche. He looked up at me when I handed it to him and asked; "Why?"

I cannot now remember, thirty-five-years later, if he could see my tears or maybe he was as intuitive as I am.
He replied; "Oh." We had been told that he would not see Christmas that tenth year of his life.

I could not find work as a photographer, my reputation at the time precluded any confidence that I would do menial job-lot photography for any employer. I was working, happily so, as a carpenter compelled to take a salary of $75.00 @ week by Supplemental Security Income received for my son. I refused to "work under the table" (receive my normal pay) but would occasionally take, or assist in, "spare time work." We lived by the gifts given us by friends from our Christian community: car, rent, food and finally a donated plot, head stone and Styrofoam coffin.

Advent is difficult for me yet I rejoice that I had the time with my children. I am even more joyous now that I never followed though cutting my throat in the bathtub or flicking my Bic while drenched in gasoline.

Grief is a very personal, specific and explicit experience. It did not help that I was summarily informed that I was a "Kill Joy" throughout my dysfunctional family times. Then I heard that I had F**ked Up the Christmas of my wife for years; implied or inferred before and after Randy's departure.

I was an emotional cripple eating the dreck of my parents, then wife(s) lovers, et cetera. I had learned when in conflict to shut down. The feeling was electrical, like a short circuit; a white noise that eclipsed everything. Yet I persisted in pretending to still be alive. Love can heal that but it only works if you accept yourself totally. Breaking though the defenses and becoming fertile soil for love to grow.

Recently I discovered:  "But faithfulness can feed on suffering, --George Eliot.
. . . axiomatic to me, now, looking back, never to return. I chose my mates and if they did not replicate the distrust I had of my mother--I made them so.

Do not harm yourself, as I continue to smoke, as I said malevolently self-neglectful. It is difficult to receive love since I am constantly trying to define what love actually is. The best I can do, reductively, is accept myself exactly as I am. Becoming more fertile ground by the grace of All Creation, The Kid whose birthday is celebrated tomorrow and the loving friendships given and received.

Adapt, improvise, prevail.

If you cannot negotiate a settlement; Walk away.

Healed/healing I can heal others something like The Kid . . . and there are others but you need to ask, look for and care enough to do something besides cry. Always remember there is no quick fix or magic bullet. God loves you just as you are but you need to work on growing large enough to receive it.

“When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within him(her)self, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment he needs help. That's the message he is sending.”

"Peace in ourselves, peace in the world."  –Thich Nhat Hanh

"No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."  --Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
. . . my take on Matthew 13:45-46

It all starts with you.
Stop being a victim.
NOW! . . . do no harm, love your enemy as yourself.
I spent time with a woman doing a life sentence for setting her sleeping husband on fire after dousing him with lighter fluid.
Only God knows true justice.

111222 06:55

A grief healed . . .

Until very recently had we met face-to-face and you queried “who are you?” I would reply; “I am the parent of two dead children.”

Remember the story; a sailor home from the sea free at last of the sometime terror of that life. Walking inland with an oar over his shoulder continuing on until someone asked; “What is that upon your shoulder?” And the sailor was home at last.

My grief was like the dead Jesus walking after death dragging His cross. We do that, you and I, wear the symbol as decoration oblivious of the resurrection--He arisen--ever present.

There is an end to grief; not a goal or termination. The sledge hammer blow fracturing everything we seek to keep sacred, safe and secure remains--accepted, integrated--not bowed. Most hide, isolating themselves for no one else can know the specificity of our pain. Neither in kind nor degree. And those who we seek comfort from are terrified to confront their own mortality. It is for us, we the left behind, that I seek to heal by what I write.

You and I, all of us, are precious, unique, like snow flakes--none alike--yet no better, or healthy, than the secrets we keep from ourselves. We melt too. Falling into the warm river of the cosmos flowing towards what we do not and cannot know.

I am finally at peace. The pain become a dull constant beat in my heart. My rage over the loss knew no boundaries in height, width or breadth. I am finally able to laugh, and cry with joy for the gift of those children. And I am no longer a victim but grateful for their gifts to me. I am equally aware of the people lost without any accounting; simply disappeared and wonder at their pain.

With agony I remember the times when Jodi, our adopted daughter, would cry inconsolably in my arms. Her mother gone with the sick child to distant places for extraordinary attention. It helps me now to remember all the other siblings left behind bereft of both their missing family member. The loving attention diverted to the child in crisis. Sometimes life is more difficult than dying and death.

At times I recall the heroes of legend set adrift. Abandoned to a fate unimaginable by those who chose, of need or neglect, to set them loose. What does not kill us makes us stronger. Eventually.

Those taken in addiction, children with drugs, adults for whom there is never enough, money, sex, love, housing and warriors broken in combat. I know from what they flee attempting to save themselves from the inevitable.

Pain is a given, suffering is optional.

You might find, as I did, succor in giving small gestures of kindness--acceptance--attention. Compassion, not sympathy, for someone walking the same path. I do not celebrate the suffering of my children any more that I do that of Jesus or any other convicted of crime. We are a people beyond the veil of illusory normalcy grown strong in love for all life. It is those who left us their legacy. Honor that.

I wish I had the ability to share in words what in reality has happened to me. For some bereaved religion is the key, others, science or drugs, money, sex or even self-inflicted death. We are all works in progress. I love the potters craft. Think in terms of clay from which we arose to where we return. Some broken and mended others ground into dust and recreated. Or is that resurrected?

Love does no harm, does not murder.
Find this within the clay we are and infinity will be your daily bread.
. . . at times I find God better through a sense of absence than presence--as shadow revels form when lit.
May the Peace that passes all understanding be with you all your days and beyond

12-year-old music prodigy. [VIDEO]

12-year-old music prodigy. [VIDEO]
"I despise a world which does not feel that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy" --Ludwig van Beethoven

A simple request listen yes! But equally attend your own genius whether it be to cook, bake, fix a washing machine . . . seek and be that gift you are. As for me I am, at times, happily/joyously merely an audience.

There is an overwhelming synchronicity explicit within this forward to me.

I have a friend purportedly dying who now walks and no longer needs assistance--he will die sooner or later--but never gave up on himself. To him, in conversation yesterday, I described what this young person incarnates and manifests through the agency of our current common technology.

Intellectual property issues are attempting to bend the will of Congress to limit free access to the World Wide Web. In my estimation it is the greatest teaching tool since television. I beg you to not allow that censorship. Since in plain reality television has become a sewer of commercial intent deforming the minds of our children. As for adults there is no objective news. Infotainment prevails. I fervently believe it is not the audience who sets the standard but we the people who have been drugged senseless by the addiction: power and greed.

111215 01:39  A Lesson in Humility:

I have appreciated, postmortal, the response of a lover who voiced approval of my attention to their pleasure & joy. Think “Little Death” as in a euphemism for orgasm. My favorite is the British; “arrival.” There is an intimacy beyond sensual pleasure and joy. It is transparent honesty; exponentially more unitive than congress itself.

I entered hospice service at the behest of a person who will remain anonymous. It took me two and a half years to make the first step. A measure of my grief, unresolved after thirty-five years. Not plainly the deaths of my children, but friends, strangers, parents, the dead baby pigeons I observed at four--marriages and liaisons assassinated by abandoning them.

This hospice uses a form inquiring exactly what the nature of my gift was. Would I be willing to work with ‘patients,’ do lawn work, wash dishes, et cetera. I indicated that I would do anything required of me.

At first I was tasked with visiting the homes of the dying to relieve their care giving family members for a respite. Usually an hour or so.

Given our crisis  precipitated by greed and power gone insane; not simply the politicians and bankers but our own search for more--yet again more-More-MORE! Which is the primary definition of addiction. There is nothing wonderful about addiction it controls and contorts the victim, you, me all of US.

In short order the crisis hit the care giving industry--Hospice is an organization that runs 24/7/365. Think electricity, toilet paper, staff, clean sheets and floors. Staff people move on, die, whatever, and they cannot be replaced due to budgetary constraints--think Pentagon versus Health.

Ten of us--from one-hundred and ten or so available--were recruited to fill in, on a rotating schedule, for an absent staff member.  At first I had no idea what was required, it was not stipulated. Later I discovered that the (and I’m imagining/extrapolating) job was “Ward Clerk”: Answer the phone, direct calls and so on. The issue is that one cannot simply sit idly while others are in need. A delicate balance is struck between probable and actual number of residents at any given time and the number of personnel to serve them.

The needs volunteers can serve are prohibitively limited. None of us are trained nurses, or nurses aids. The requirements of the patient are often simple: turn on the ceiling fan, turn on/off the television, a light, a cup of water; scratch my big toe. At first I sat there while the staff worked themselves to the bone. Then it became apparent that this was an opportunity to learn. Lacking a formal education I am desirous of leaning and deem anything I can learn a gift.

What we give without expectation is often returned amplified--enhanced. Personally the experience has impelled me to question my vanity, ego, every hidden fear, greed for acknowledgement, affirmation, belonging, longing to be loved. In short: all the crippling dysfunctions of being an abandoned and abused child. This and more has been healed by they who serve, those who die and their families. Convicted I now know love is what you give regardless of what you receive. The ‘abuses’ were given by people who in their turn had been neglected, abandoned and abused.

“What does not kill me, makes me stronger.” --Friedrich Nietzsche

“Love seeketh not itself to please, 

Nor for itself hath any care, 

But for another gives its ease, 

And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.” --William Blake

Experientially I sense humiliation is a function of ego refusing to be seen; held accountable and altered. Humility is accepting the lesson and moving on.
Expansion versus contraction.
Response versus reaction.

Exalt the young who serve shoulder-to-shoulder at grave’s cusp. Having yet to know, in fullness, losses sorrow as we elder so near those we serve. To die to self, then dying altogether, knowing face-to-face the loving light we share.

111214 07:52
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” 
--Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

At one point Randy asked; “Can I stop this?” Meaning stop the medical intervention struggling to get him into remission with Leukemia. The survival rate then was five in a hundred. Susan and I agreed. He had several good months. I now remember better his riding a bicycle no hands through rush hour traffic laughing. Trapped between cars I was helpless to do anything but admire his panache.

I continue to smoke cigarettes having long ago decided that should I get the Big “C” I’d not accept anything but palliative  care. Suicide has been a life-long study. I’ve even considered keeping a gallon of gasoline for self immolation instead of being subject to what I, humorlessly, call medical care today: ‘Going to the Midas Muffler Shop.’--up on the rack so to say.

Been there, photographed it, walked to the bitter end with and carried people who died in my arms. I’m not trying to be a ‘tough guy.’ Women being tougher than men go more gently into that good night than we.

I cried this morning when I discovered the quote I opened with. Remembering the gift of his works given by Delouse Palmer and his wonderful female lover. At sixteen I met them through curiosity about who, how and the way they lived. I was once a painter wannabe myself. When Delouse died I put my head upon his hallow chest in homage at the funeral parlor. 

I won’t say I settled for photography since it has been my magic carpet to all that is good and holy in life. Without photography I’d be a snuffling beast residing in a cafe or under a rock in the desert. The desert that’s where my dust will be even if I have to crawl into a rattlesnakes home to get there.

I cannot emphasize how highly I regard this article: http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?sid=136

111213 05:35
Sometimes, more often than not, God speaks to me through the quotes I collect. She whispers endearments for the glory of all Personhood. Whops! Nearly said the “M” word and implied Mankind or HuMANkind.

Whops again! God, at least what I love as God, is binary man/woman, light/dark. . . . Now I’ve really stepped in it!

Flowers cannot be -- at least I don’t think so -- exclusively male or female.

--Georgia O’Keeffe
    "I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move."
    "To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage."
. . . I was envisioning her tree painting rendering cracks in the starry night sky
. . . and thinking of how touched I am by Tom’s brush drawing & then I thought The Tree of Life
Trees are as much about the sky as the earth enveloping their roots. The reason for posting this lays deep in my shame implied by mother’s choice to take my six year old sister to a gynecologist . . . maybe that’s why I’m a life-time member of The Society of The Virgin Mary and eventually my shame/guilt informed me that virgin birth has nothing to do with maidenheads but more to do with the virginity of one’s soul. . . .And it follows that we are both male and female; Carl Jung’s thesis. Most people, not in equal measure but some are, or become so by choice. Which in Jung’s wonderful imagining implies becoming Whole as in Holy as in Jesus and or Mary.

Mended things are often stronger than that which remains whole from the potters hand. So too with people who become more loving than destructive or vindictive. Love trumps destruction as in Georgia’s case; abused by Stieglitz she equaled his memory in history and in this child’s mind (growing younger every minute) trumped him.

We are all broken in one way or another. Get over it--move on. Go into your heart you’ll find the Tree of Life there and know peace eternal for the first time.
God loves every fallen leaf.

PS Yesterday, at hospice, I was asked to stay with a new admission. He was agitated kicking, grabbing, pulling his diaper off etc. We do not restrain people like in the loony bin, neither chemically nor physically. I stood by his bed in my heart of hearts thinking, “that could be me.” Vallory walks in, young-black-gorgeous, looks at him, looks at me; “I could be there as well as he.”
“Yeah I’m going to buy a hand grenade and wear it on my belt.”
When you walk to the bitter end with Parkinson, Alzheimer yada yada you don’t see people the same way ever again. . . .We all die. Be Kind!

As for Vallory: she’s bright: all diamonds, lasers and needles, intelligent; wants to be a L.N. or R.N. Me too but there is so little time left. . . . She should become a doctor. If I had the money I’d give it to her. Gratis.

Memorial for our children who died

111210 05:41

Remember “ROCKY” ‘. . . its Thanksgiving to you but just Thursday to me . . . “

This date thirty-five years ago broke overcast cold and typical of Rhode Island in winter it had been so for days and would continue as such. I don’t remember the day of the week but somehow I knew it would be today that our son Randy would die. I intuited his leaving long before,  at his diagnoses (Leukemia @ four) yet in this instance while cradled in mother’s arms. Remembering the pietà I photographed them together and it was in that capture the pain roared into consciousness. Sometimes, especially when I photograph the people I love, or even those I care deeply about, I see things I don’t want to know.

This is just one of several reasons I’ve trashed or abandoned all my work prior to 2000. That is instead of simply killing my self in grief. It wasn’t just December 10th 1976 but the day is memorable for Thomas Merton’s death, different year, and now for the astonishing discovery that it is Emily Dickinson’s birthday.

I was working as a carpenter then and tarried the day longer than usual; last man on site. He waited and I am forever grateful that he did. He hugged my legs and said; “I love you Daddy” then turned, lay upon his bed and twitched as he drown in his own blood. I’d heard the Dragon of Terror all my life, burping noxious gases and occasional belches of flames searing my eyes into blindness but especially so that black Advent day.

Everyday has become Nativity, Crucifixion and, now, Resurrection. What will we call this ‘resurrection’ day, Epiphany!? It just now occurs to me that our resurrection, or that of the great teachers whose lives incarnate The Collective Consciousness of enlightenment for which some were murdered by their culture while most passed of old age. They did not “Preach” so much as teach. Jesus was called Rabbi in his time, not Christ, a latter title and not his surname.

Recently I discovered a quote, one of hundreds collected, that suggest and defines a personal perception, or concept, of a Collective Conscious Mindfulness we all need attend. First in our hearts experience, then one-to-another that we survive as a species. The quote--I will not give you verbatim--since it suggest that I attempt to voice my own “Preaching with a paint brush.”

I loath being preached at. The “Shoulds & Oughts” infuriate me so I’ve hidden behind a camera and the images begot. All the while weeping inwardly for the joy of soaring through the stars alone with words, theirs and mine. Thank you Emily D!

Robert Frank said it best; “It’s astonishing all the crap you have take to make a living.” Politicians, Bankers and Stock Brokers have stolen all my money and retired I subsist on sub poverty social security . . . yet am happier and richer than anyone else I know in the entire world.

Poetic! Isn’t it!    Think about all the rich folks who profit from the sweat of your brow while stealing the future for our children.

I digress, it is the nature of my mind: The relates to that and implies . . . etc.

The tragedy of my children’s deaths--not at the same time--is now--as it should be--eventually, celebrated as were their births and lives. Here I am tempted to pitch volunteering at hospice, a primary source of my healing/reconciliation, but I am too consciously aware that charity and love are synonymous.

We all die, it is dying we fear, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jesus come to mind--St. Francis (imagined) too. Faced their passage with equanimity leaving the world as they would have it not as their executioners desired. The love we give to those who cannot, or will not love themselves, is our truth and our greatest gift. Be fearless in that beloved.