Journeys, journeys, journeys. Everyone is a journey in her own right. Waltzing through life on one hand and stumbling around on the other. Seems too often the one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing or where it's actually headed. We think we know. But in the long run most of us barely have a hint. Somehow I think that it takes a whole lot of years of conscious and super-conscious effort to understand even a fraction of our corner of the world out.
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Issue-fatigue
I have issue-fatigue this week. Issue-fatigue is not my cup of tea. I like my tea with gobs and gobs of honey, and my biscuits spread with butter. I gotta get away for awhile. My situation is starting to get on my nerves. It's finally been warm enough to cook and eat outside, but it's also very messy situation inside as well as out doors. I've been digging out of my winter mess, washing tables and dishes that accumulated over the winter when it was too cold to keep up with all the domestic chores. For the first time in my life I relied on paper plates and cups for my everyday use, but still there was a mess of stuff to wash outdoors.
My issue-fatigue is mostly because of the demands on my time. While I am not about letting other people's sickness make me sick along with them it is sure hard for me to resist helping someone when I have so much and they have so little and they seem ready to die for lack of attention. Here's this week's story.
My colleague is my land-lord. We live peacefully under separate roofs on his property. I in my 30ft RV and he in the top floor of his house. He's a super expecaladocius genius. And as geniuses go, is quite short on a few other life-saving and life-enriching skills. He has a few other colleagues that are on the same par with him. I was hired to be part of a project because I have to admit I fit their strange equation. Each one of us has a genius in our own way and each of us is sorely lacking in some major area. He has a special lady friend who floats in an out of his life between her affairs and homelessness. She is attractive and charming to men, high maintainence with serious health problems. The kind of woman-girl you'd like to wrap up in a blanket and carry her home to mother to help make her well and wonderful. My colleague did just that last summer. She was suffering some pretty serious domestic abuse at the hands of her brother who rescued her a few months before that from another abusive situation. Seems as though she has gone through this sequence of house hopping from one abusive rescuer to another for the past 20 years. She is in her mid 40's now and so ill she stayed upstairs all day and all night not even walking her little dog. My colleague did that for her. Yes, I worried about her and my colleague confirmed my worries that she was doing very poorly as well as fighting a lot with him, not eating, passing out, and not sleeping at night. He did have to pick her up off the floor one day and carry her to the car and rush her to emergency. My fear was that she would fall down the stairs while he was gone and die and nobody would know until he got home. Not wanting to get involved with something I was not qualified to do but afraid that things could get real messy I encourage him to send her my way for a sisterly talk and see if I could help him convince her to seek professional services. Sigh!
The social service community everywhere in this country is frustrating. The welfare system is a bit of a mess. Substance abuse treatment is dicey. Nutritionists are poorly educated. And this dear woman has let herself go for so long it now looks like she is going to die any minute. We talk. And we talk again. And I take her shopping and out to lunch. And gradually after a couple of sister-dates a week she is starting to use her food stamps more wisely. She knows a lot more about nutrition than anybody I know. Seems she learned a lot from her Seventh Day Adventist Church buddies. She buys real food now and starts to do real cooking instead of shoving a box dinner into the microwave. Social Services came and whisked her away last week and put her in an apartment all by herself and now things are less stressful around this place. But as far as I can see, putting a sick woman into an empty apartment all on her own doesn't seem like a smart thing to do.
I ask myself several times a day, is this any of my business? Am I just a bothersome old lady?
And yet I keep insisting that my garden is all I care about right now. It's spring, I say. Time to plant. We have had no more than 3 days without rain, cold and excessive icy wind. I want to get naked and dig in the dirt. My colleague is always gone, our yard is surrounded by 40 acres of thick bushes and trees. No one can see me and I am free to do as I like ... being a freak for nature and an artist and a practitioner of singing as loud as I can and all that kind of stuff. But my heart is heavy whenever I think of this dear stranger who crossed my path for so long and is now somewhere out there in the shabby part of town living all alone. Strange world this is.
I am not from this planet. My people are from Mars. It's my ancestors fault. My parents weren't informed as to why they were here. Every cell of my body reminds me that this planet needs some drastic intervention and I have done my best ever since I was a kid to learn how to get it right. I seem to want to have fun more than the people around me. It also appears that I like peace and quiet a lot more than most people. Oh, don't get me wrong I love a noisy restaurant, a noisy concert, a noisy airport, car race, swap meet. I just like quiet forests a lot more! I like passionate attitudes; I enjoy my friend's rantings. I even dig their anger. I just don't like the vengeful, thoughtless kind of noise. I quit. I really just quit. It's not that I insist on quitting, or that I try to quit, or that my head tells me I have a right to quit, or that I ought to quit. I just quit. Like a car that stalls along side of the road and won't start up again no matter what you do to get it to go. It waits till the quiet and cool of the evening when nobody is around and starts up on it's very own. If you've ever had this happen to you, then you know what I am talking about.
I once attended to the needs of victims of a serious car crash one dark night in the desert. I pulled 2 people out of their smoking car, got blankets to cover them from my camper, talked calmly to the truck driver who collided with them, drove 25 miles to an open diner, set my kids at a table with $5. for breakfast, went back to my camper and collapsed with severe stomach cramps and couldn't move for 2 hours. My kids were so scared they actually sat and talked quietly for the entire time.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k6d6J0_mdU
I just watched a video on youTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k6d6J0_mdU
exposing the monster oil companies and their destruction of the Amazon and its people!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k6d6J0_mdU
What an outrage! That's why I didn't own or drive an automobile for almost 25 years! Now I am getting old, a bit frail and tired so I bought a little truck and I use it on very special short missions. I'll be damned if I will support monster corporations any more than I absolutely have to!
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