This Weekend

The horrifying events in Connecticut were breaking as we waited to board our plane to Las Vegas. We were headed there to celebrate forty years of love, friendship, family, and community with those who hold special places in our hearts. We were going to reconnect with people we haven't seen for decades: old college friends, family, people we met along the way and who managed to stay connected even though our paths took us all over the planet. We went to celebrate old and new weddings, friendships formed in one place and finished growing in another. We went to share the gift of our love for each other with our friends and family who never met before, or who attended one of our long ago weddings, or who sat in college classes with us, or who lived in communal households during our formative and idealistic years. We went, more than anything else, to share the profound and deep love we've built together as a community. It was our gift to each other, our gift to those we loved and cherished the most.

And all over the country as we waited to board for one common destination, a horrible tragedy was unfolding. I know I wasn't the only one trying to block it out. The sound was off on the airport screens, but the images were impossible to shut out. Grief has a way of cutting through the silence, and even brief involuntary glances at the faces let us know this was a grief beyond words. It was a horror unimaginable to those of us in that waiting room together. It was the complete opposite of the reality we were living in, the life of tolerance, and love, and hope, and common dreams built and shared over decades of love and friendship.

And yet, we blocked as much of it out as possible. We were on our way to a different reality and topics such as death, dying, and tragedy were personalized to something we could take in wound by wound, sadness by sadness. There was an awareness of those in our lives who would not be there to share in this amazing adventure months in the planning. The dead had faces we knew, people we'd loved and said goodbye to in the last few years, some as recently as weeks before. We'd already shed tears for them before boarding the plane because they weren't able to board with us. To cry for strangers would have opened our own personal wounds again and we already put them on hold for the weekend.

We were also aware of the short time many of our group have left on this planet, us included. The youngest of us all have gray hair and gravity has definitely won. For some of us, it was clear that time was something we called "now or never." For every year we put this off, our group of friends and family would grow smaller. Mortality sort of creeps up on us. One day we think we have forever, and then so quickly we look in the mirror and see that forever has a shelf live and we're on the losing end of it.

As a group we have survived illnesses that would have killed the less strong. We are the ones left, the ones who get up from the chair more slowly and ache after a hike or a stroll through adult Disneyland. We are medicated, creaky, and definitely dancing on borrowed time. It's why events such as ours are so important. We are so aware they are now or never events and we hold them close to our hearts.

But the families who lost so much in that awful tragedy, they were in their forever times of life. They sent their children off to school as they did every morning and had no reason to  believe they wouldn't do the same next day and the days after for many years to come. They were parents who were giving their children a childhood, a memory to take forever into adulthood that would form the basic of bonds to come in later years.

We had that. No matter how horrible and dysfunctional our personal childhoods, we didn't fear someone coming to our schools and killing us. That was the only place we felt safe. It was a refuge. The teachers were our adult protectors. It is unimaginable to us as adults who grew up in that time, to think of our schools in any other way.

And yet, there's a whole generation of children who have grown up not feeling that sense of security,  that safe place of our childhood. The first school shooting students are now adults and it has happened so much that we now have several generations of children who don't believe they are safe at school. Sonja, one of the cherished friends who spent the weekend with us at our adult slumber party, returned home to her kids and I'm sure hugged them closer and tighter than ever before, and then she described how the world has changed in this very succinct and poignant way:

"I just demonstrated to my children what one does if one hears gunshots, and made them demonstrate what they had learned. I then gave them several boxes of Lego and instructed them to resume their childhood. I proceeded to the bathroom to cry until I barfed."

I can't imagine the grief of those parents. I have wept many tears at the loss of friends, but they were ill and their deaths were not unexpected, or they died in accidents after much of their lives were already lived. But when a group of children are murdered in such a horrible way, whether it is in war, or disaster, or murder, we lose a piece of our hope in the meaning of forever. We shut down a piece of ourselves that dares to dream of a better world, a safer and more tolerant planet, a more loving and sane humanity.

That is why it is so important to have weekends like we did where there was so much love that everyone who walked into that room was wrapped and cradled in it. It is the only way to fight back. As my young cousin Anna's shirt said: Love is the answer. We must fight back with love because that is the only power than means anything. We must fight back with tolerance because that is how we measure our personal worth as human beings. We must fight back with joy and happiness and acceptance of each other as imperfect and frail creatures doing our best to pass through this life with honor and integrity and a sense of fairness.

I really don't know how we can stop hurting each other, how we can stop killing each other. I have no answers for that. But I do know if each of us makes time to spend a weekend together with those we cherish the most, if we combine the best of our friends and family together in one place and share our love for each other without holding back, without expecting anything in return, without holding on to old wounds and stupid misunderstandings, then we create a force that can fight evil as one unified beam of love.

So send out those emails, make those calls, post it on Faceborg, tweet it until your fingers ache, but start planning your own weekend with each other. Don't tie it in with the holidays. Make it its own holiday. Celebrate being alive and loved and then take that feeling forward and help make a better world, because if we don't, then who will?

Peace.

This Weekend

Anna's lesson about selfish people

After a break to deal with present day issues, I spent some time today catching up on Anna's archive of memories. For those of you wandering by for the first time, I've been helping Ryan's daughter, Maria, sort through his sister's digital storage unit, which numbers hundreds and hundreds of entries.

We call it our five year project. She would have been fifty this year and this is our way of honoring her memory. Out of the twenty or so emails waiting for me today from the archives, one especially long journal entry that covered several single-spaced printed pages decided to make itself the topic of the day, because once again her uncanny ability to size up people amazed me.

It's about selfishness. I chose it because it was a topic she often went on about, and she was one of the first people who taught me that many people we consider unselfish are actually quite the opposite. Here's her rather prophetic description of someone she knew only from his emails to her, and a couple times when she literally hid behind a stage curtain to watch him to make sure what she was sensing about him was true. She did this because at the time he was someone I was fairly close to and her opinion of him mattered very much to me. I wanted her to like him. I remember being angry when she refused and told me I'd one day understand she was right about him and I was wrong.

(note: the original entry was written in German and was addressed to her brother. It was translated into English by Maria. I've cut and pasted it without fixing any of the errors.)

His emails to me are always about him and feelings he feels for me. It's why I don't want to meet him. It is always how perfect I am for him. He says I am his woman but he only writes about how I am his woman for him, not how he is man for me. There is no me in his talk. So I watched him dance tonight and it only makes me think even more this is true. It is how he approaches a woman like it is a special gift that he decides to present himself to her. You said he is dating both women he danced with. But he does not care enough about them. You can see it all in their faces. They hurt from sharing him and he doesn't care because their hurt is selfish to him. I am thinking anything someone else wants is selfish to him.

Do you know what I think this man will do? I think he will be in your life only as long as he has need of some favor you will do for him. He will pretend and say he does this for you, out of unselfishness and altruistic good boy fantasies. But with him always look deep to see who is really benefiting from his altruism. I will guess that he does.

I will say he is the kind of man who goes and buys a car for very cheap. Then he needs money. So he goes to a friend and says to him that he has this car that came to him as a good deal because he is such a good person and so he has good deals fighting to come to him. So he will make this man want to help him because he will help a good person by purchasing his car at a good price.

His friend purchases the car for double what the good fairies sold it to the man for. Then the car does not run so well. So the friend says hey you sold me car for too much and now it also no longer works and I have to spend rest of money owed to you to fix the car so I can drive it.

So this man suddenly becomes very angry. It does not matter that he has already been paid more than he paid. He has already earned profit. It does not matter that he sold a car that does not work and is too expensive. He is suddenly all angry and accuses the person buying of using him of taking advantage of his good kindness. It becomes a story all about his betrayal by others and how his unselfishness was used by other people.

One day he will say such a story about everyone in his life. He will talk about how he was used when all he wanted was to help others. He will gather points of unselfishness so all the world knows he has all the unselfishness points and everyone else is a bad person who has used him so badly for his kindness.

Eventually everyone will understand it was him and not them. I only figured it sooner than the rest of everyone so I will decline to meet and be friends with your friend.

It took a few years but I finally admitted she was right. It's not worth going into the lurid details and it's enough to say that this person is no longer in my life because she was absolutely right about him.

But I also have to say that he was not the only person who taught me there are some people who do good just because they want to portray themselves as someone who does good. It's an ego thing with such people. They will always tell you how unselfish they are. They will brag about it. They will parade it around like a trophy they've awarded to themselves.



Until they actually have to give, that is. And then they find some excuse to work on what really matters--getting more for themselves as their reward for being such good human beings. And if you can't give them what they want, then you become the user of their unselfishness. You become the bad person, the one who took from them instead of gave. For people like that, any giving at all has some very sticky strings attached. That's how you can tell the fakes from the genuine ones.

Anna was genuine. It's important to note here that while Anna gave away most of her fortune, she never said she did. We knew she helped a lot of people but every day more and more is revealed in her meticulous records of exactly how much she gave away and how she never once felt the need to use it as proof of her unselfishness. Those who talk rarely do was one of her favorite sayings. And Anna never talked. She just did. And she did it quietly, completely, privately out of the immense goodness of her heart. It was not an ego thing with her. It was real.

I've mentioned before that I learned she paid a very large hospital bill for me when I became ill. I always suspected her but until I saw a copy of the paid bill, I never knew for certain. It was just something she did because she cherished our friendship. That was something she did talk about. She never let a day go by without letting me know how much she appreciated me.

And that's why I spend hours on her archives, why I help Maria. Because I've never been good at expressing my feelings to others. In my own limited way I was able to let her know how much she meant to me, but helping with the archives will hopefully make up for the words I couldn't say then.

The really mind-boggling part of all this is how it helps me deal with the present world where selfishness is treated as something close to a virtue by so many. If I hear one more person say they need to focus on their own needs, grow their own self, feed their own desires in order to grow, I will probably vomit on them or something equally as rude.

Get a clue, folks! The world is in the mess it's in because too many people focus on themselves instead of others. There's awareness and then there's self-indulgence. Until you can let go of the self-indulgence, the perpetual gimme gimme me me me game, awareness will be just a concept in a book that has too many big words in it to comprehend until life teaches you want they mean.

I have a suggestion for people who are so obsessed with themselves and their own dramas that they can't even see how it affects those around them. Get over yourself. Once you're no longer wearing diapers, it's no longer about you. It's about your place in the world and how you can make it a better place for everyone, not just your own pitiful little needs.

We are all bigger than ourselves and if we don't start to understand that, if we continue to be the kind of people who can't think outside our own needs and desires, then we are doomed as a species and really, who would even mourn the passing of such a plague? I'm certain most of the planet would celebrate the demise of such parasites.

Spider Heart by orsobear
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Anna's lesson about selfish people

Love, Friendship, Harmony, and Peace makes a better world.

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Love, Friendship, Harmony, and Peace makes a better world.

Hanging With Dead People

For the last couple months or so I've been helping Maria, Ryan's daughter, go through his sister's journals and emails. We don't really have a method or a purpose other than wanting to organize what she left behind. Since she burned most of her writing and deleted a good deal of her emails, we both figured the stuff she left behind had some meaning we've yet to determine and that she left it deliberately for us to find.

It's fascinating reading until I remember how much I miss her and the confusion that made up the year we spent together as friends. Even now, after all this time, no one has come close to the pure honesty of our conversations. She had a way of putting things into words that was both a talent and a fierce determination to preserve the truth before it was polished into an acceptable memory. She had this eerie ability to stand outside a situation, look at it with the keen and brutal eye of the unvarnished observer, and lay it out in all its bare and hideous honesty.

I was often horrified at what I perceived at the time as her callous objectivity, and she was equally horrified at what she called my Pollyannish approach to the world. And yet, we both came to know the roots of those points of view and learned to respect their validity in each other. It makes reading her words now so much easier. I understand them more than if I didn't know what drove her to write them. And I know that when it came to altruism, Anna made Pollyanna seem like a self-centered little twit. My heart is a lot more open from knowing her and I thank her nearly every day for such a precious gift.

The emails Maria sent me today were mostly about her relationship with men, written in three different languages. Hard as they are to translate exactly, what comes through is that like so many intelligent women, she was absolutely stupid when it came to men. She preferred a certain type: intense, brilliant, and totally lacking in social skills. Of course, they made her miserable. Of course, she returned the favor. Of course, she believed if there was no passion, no pain, no remorse, it wasn't worth the effort. Of course, I understood this side of her completely.

For Anna, relating to anyone was a series of stripping away the dishonesty. I was always trying to get her to come to parties, to have dinner with a few close friends, to come dance or go see a play, anything to get her away from the dark world that had become her life. But she would see through everyone so completely with just a few email exchanges, a two minute phone call, a brief meeting in passing, that after a while I began to completely dislike everyone I knew. I had become friends with them through my heart and she forced me to look at them with my eyes. It wasn't always a pleasant awakening.

She had a tiny circle of trusted friends and an appreciation for what was then the forerunner of social media that was way before her time. This was 1989 into the early 90's. Instead of Facebook we had bulletin boards where we logged in and typed back and forth to each other. And email when we didn't want to make our conversations public with the other members of the community. And it all took so long and required so much patience and dedication.

She also had a wicked sense of humor and a chameleon like ability that allowed her to assume several personas and carry them all off credibly. One time she created two characters and had them relate first to everyone and then to each other in some weird sort of schizophrenic dialogue that as far as I know, no one figured out they were both her. There was no reason for it other than she could. And when I expressed some discomfort over it, she just shrugged and said there were far worse things to get upset about in the world, that it was a way for her to get to know what people were really like before she met them in person.

Anna would have loved Facebook. It was the world she imagined when she thought of the future, an online world community that was limited only by the individual desire to connect. Even with a computer that had less memory than a cheap calculator and a modem that screamed when it  finally connected with some duct-taped contraption in another part of the world, Anna was able to accomplish so much it is astonishing even now to read about it.

And reading her emails, the why of it all starts to make a strange sort of perfect sense. She had a focus that was driven by compassion. She truly cared about people and took an interest in the lives of people she would never meet but who touched her in some way. As she always told us, the electronic universe can be one helping big hand for humanity if you opened your heart.

And her hand helped so many. I am awestruck by how many people she was able to help. I always knew she gave away a very large fortune, but I never knew all the details of exactly what she did with the money. I know she paid my hospital bill even though she never admitted it. But other than that the pieces have had to wait years to fall into place so we could at least see some of the results. She never felt the need to explain or get any credit for it.

Somewhere in all the old diskettes that are being transferred over to online storage systems, there's probably a list of them all. She was that way. She would have kept track, if only to make sure there was a way to prove the recipient was entitled to the money and help. But for now, we can only guess until we find the actual files in the thousands that exist, or we find the occasional email we run across that explains how she was going to help the person writing to her, or the occasional legal document that spelled out the details. Few of the documents and letters are in English and so the process is more difficult to untangle. But Maria and I manage with our combined limited knowledge of several languages and some great online translators.

We know they were mostly women, mostly in countries that were at war or had been devastated by wars. She once told me everyone had their price, so she was able to accomplish things that were impossible because she used that uncanny ability to size people up to find whose palm to cross with some silver. There was always a palm and she had lots of silver. Ryan once joked that his sister helped enough people to populate her own village. I think even he would be surprised at what the final number will probably be.

The contrast between reading her emails and remembering her kindness and willingness to help those less fortunate, and the selfish rich and callous little asshats that are so prevalent today often leaves me bordering on extreme depression and anger. I find myself asking why more people can't be like her, why can't they set aside their selfish little needs and help someone, give to others, share what they have, and help make the world a better place. She was able to do it with an ancient modem and an antique computer. It was so simple and yet so effective.

The world now has so many more options and yet, even with something like Facebook that can be and is often used for good, it often seems that her efforts were somehow different, somehow larger and more sincere. Maybe because it was more difficult. Maybe because she had to log on to her computer instead of just moving the mouse. Maybe because it took time to communicate with someone in another country, to learn their language, their culture, what made them special and unique. Maybe because it wasn't so easy to see how much evil there was in the world and so the effort didn't seem so worthless. Maybe it was simply because she knew one woman acting from the sincerity of her heart, really could change the world.

And when I mention that evil in the world, if anyone knew about evil it was Anna. You can't spend the majority of your adult life as a therapist for war victims and not hate what passes for humanity in so many parts of the world. But as much evil as she saw and tried to heal, I think she would be appalled and disgusted at the utter meanness and selfishness that is so prevalent nowadays. And yet, she would be the first to say stand up to it, fight it, don't let it win because you are better than evil, you are better than selfishness. Don't let the mean people win. You are better than they are. Own it.

I know that for certain because I just read it in an email she wrote to me in early 1990. It's one she didn't delete so she expected me to find it. In her own amazing way, she somehow knew how important it would be for me to find it now just when I was starting to let myself get discouraged, just when I was starting to feel like the mean people were just too mean for me to take on anymore, that I was too old to do battle for the planet, that it was the realm of the young, the strong, that the future belongs to those who have one. Reading those words today let me know there's still a fire burning in this old soul and a whole lot of fight still left.

Burning Love Fire by Crazy_Card_Lady
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Hanging With Dead People

War of the Classes

Maria and I have been exchanging emails on what Anna would have thought about the Occupy Wall Street movement. On the surface, when you measure the response against how she lived her own life, how she gave away her own wealth to help others, it seems something she would have embraced wholeheartedly.

But, as I wrote to Maria today, Anna was much more complex than that. She detested simple categories and would have peeled back current events with the precision of someone peeling layers from the last onion on the planet, because she detested one class more than she detested the wealthy life of privilege she was raised in, and that was the middle class.

She believed everything about the middle class was fake and that it didn't really exist. It was an invented category to keep people working at jobs they hated,  a myth to keep them chasing a carrot on a stick that would always be just out of reach, and it forced people to live on credit to make up for the lack of decent wages and benefits they needed to support a middle-class lifestyle. It was all on the surface and there was no depth to it. It was a bridge built over someone else's dream.

I hate their perfect teeth, their boring clothes, their shallow friendships that ask only what you can do for them. I dislike their horrible little spoiled children they're inflicting on the planet, she wrote me when I asked why, as such a devout Marxist, that she detested the average person just struggling to get by.

Anna believed the middle class was actually the servant class putting on airs of superiority to hide the fact that everyone was their master, unlike the poor who knew they could always get another shit job, and if that didn't work out, they could find another one and other one. There wasn't any shortage of shit jobs, she always said, and being able to walk away from one was a freedom the so-called middle class has long forgotten existed. The middle class couldn't walk away because all that mattered to them were things and more things. They could care less about people unless those people bought them new toys that were bigger and shinier than their neighbor's toys. They were owned by their things. People didn't really matter much. They could always be exchanged for someone new if the old friend or lover didn't work out.

But she also knew it wasn't always this way, that there was a time when people could work and not need credit just to survive. It was when jobs came with union wages and benefits. The tax base was strong because  the jobs were there to pay into it. That meant roads were fixed, bridges kept in repair, and schools well-funded.

We had many discussions about this because she was the ultimate realist and saw deep through the superficial perfection of the time. Yes, it was a better time in that way, but it was also a time when racism was considered normal, women who wanted something more than marriage and a family were considered psychologically ill, and when the kind of small town mentality that festered under the guiding hand of some unholy intermediary preaching fear from the pulpit, made the churches of America the most segregated buildings in the country.

Anna was an Atheist but she truly believed Ronald Reagan was the devil because it was under his presidency that the real decay started. She had a magazine cover from one of the subscriptions her father read religiously. It was right after Reagan was elected and it had a woman in a mink draped over an expensive sports car and the headline said it was okay to be rich again. That's when the war really started. And it was a war against those who were poor, those who thought that if they worked hard enough, they could reach the mythical middle class that awaited them just beyond the horizon.

For Anna it was a war that became extremely personal. She never thought much about the source of her family's considerable wealth. She grew up with the children of other wealthy parents. She went to the private schools they all went to together. She described her early life as uneventful.

What changed it for her was an internship she did for her PhD that sent her into poor sections of the country. She didn't know poverty like that existed in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. She was ashamed for America, embarrassed that so many of its most vulnerable citizens, the young and the old, were forced to live in conditions unheard of in many parts of the civilized world.

Shortly after this experience, her grandfather died and while going through his journals and translating them, she discovered he'd been a Nazi and the source of the family wealth more than likely came from unsavory business dealings he made during the war in Germany.

You would have had to know Anna to understand how this devastated her, how completely it destroyed her emotionally. This was a woman who was kind, generous, compassionate, and didn't have a bigoted bone in her body. The realization that this man's blood ran through her own veins horrified her so much that she had nightmares of draining all the blood from her body and replacing it with someone else's. The self-hate was so thick it filled the room with her agony. Everyone was afraid she would kill herself to escape the pain.

But Anna didn't die right away.  I'm convinced it was during this time that she became an addict because nothing else numbed the pain. She went through rehab three times but each time the pain would win, the emotional devastation would keep her from being able to get out of bed in the morning. But one day she woke with a sense of purpose, a desire to make up for the harm her grandfather had inflicted on humanity. It gave her enough strength to crawl out and then spend the next two years undoing what her grandfather had spent decades putting together.

I will never know the complete list of places that benefited from her generosity, but I do know that many domestic violence shelters received anonymous donations, usually in small towns she had traveled through on one of her extended backpacking trips across America. I know that some promising, but poverty stricken young women, found themselves with hefty college funds. On a personal level, I know that a very large medical bill I had suddenly disappeared one day. She never admitted it but there was no one else who had that kind of money and wanted to just give it away without expecting anything in return.

One of the most important things she did was train a group of colleagues in Europe on how to work with children of Holocaust victims and the children of those who put them there. She believed if the hate was stopped at the children of war victims, then maybe there was hope for peace on the planet, so she worked on teaching them how to forgive, how to move on, how to stop letting the past cripple them emotionally, while at the same time never forgetting the evil that had caused it.

She was fairly controversial in her methods because she blamed wars and the hate they spawned on the greed of the wealthy and the lack of honor and ethics money inflicts on people. In this she was inflexible. She truly believed you couldn't be both a good person and wealthy because what made you good was destroyed by the greed that takes root when you have so much wealth. She said it was like drugs, that you wanted more and more and more because it was never enough. And like drugs, it made you not care who you stepped on and what you destroyed in order to get more wealth.

In the last year of her life Anna became rigidly inflexible in how she perceived the influence of the rich and powerful on the world. She refused to meet any of my friends who had trust funds or who had inherited more than a few hundred dollars  from a dead relative because she believed inheritances planted the seed of greed in them, that they would someday sprout that seed over some money issue.


The poor, she wrote me once, they forgive you not having money. They understand when you can't pay back that twenty dollars. But those little trustafarians, they'll cut the friendship off if you don't pay them back their dollar. And the wealthy, they'll make you sign a note and charge you interest and if you don't pay them back, they'll take something from you, like your house or your car. Like gangsters. Or drug dealers. Or bitter exes.


Anna did a lot of good with her wealth. She spent it well. She gave it freely. She washed the blood from it and made it work for good instead of evil. And one day, it was gone and she was living on the proceeds of her cabin she sold the winter before, in a tiny studio apartment with a computer and two cats. We had spent the winter on her final project helping women from the Bosnian war learn skills to teach them how to survive on their own after losing the breadwinners in the family to genocide. She helped children of war find homes where they would hopefully one day heal from the wounds of hate.

Maria was one of those children and when I think of Anna, I think of Maria and her sisters and countless other children. I believe Anna would be out there with the Occupy movement because there is no more middle class. There is rich and poor. There is ruling class and working class. The world she always told me really existed beneath the facade has come to pass and she would be the first one out there telling people to wake up, to take back their lives, to value each other, to honor friendships, to forgive but never forget, and most importantly to never forget the power of love because it can't be bought, it can't be traded, it can't be lost. In the end, it is all any of us ever have that truly matters.

Starry Night by orsobear
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War of the Classes

Happy Birthday, Anna

You would have been fifty today. We were ten years apart, a decade of differences that we managed to bridge because we both cared about the same things.  I've been remembering how we talked about this magical transformation then, about the party you would have, the places it would be held, the people you would invite. If you were the kind of person who suddenly overnight decided you liked parties. But I think you would have made an exception for your 50th.

It's interesting to me, as a devout Atheist, how strong your presence is in the last few weeks. I will not insult your memory by calling your presence angel or god or any of those imaginary hallucinations you detested and blamed for all the ills of the world. I completely agreed with you then and now, which is why I'm more inclined to believe I reshaped you from your ashes because I needed the purity of who you were to keep me company in what has been a confusing time for me.

Or maybe it's because Lydia's choice was taken away from her, because she wasn't allowed to exit gracefully as she planned. I wanted to fight for her. I wanted to bring up the explicit instructions she left. But in the end, I couldn't do it. I gave in to the grief of others who were with her, who spent their lives loving her. There are moments when I feel as if I betrayed her by not sticking up for her wishes. And there are other times when I think, well, maybe she waited too long on purpose. It could have been her choice at any time. Who am I to say it didn't end exactly as she wanted it to?

Maybe that's why I feel you so strongly. It's not just the whole milestone birthday thing. It's remembering how passionate you were about the right to choose anything and everything. The whole idea of someone making decisions for you was an impossibility you refused to allow into your life. I respected you for that because at the time I was still looking for my strength as a person. I was still letting others define me and my life. It was a confusing time, just like now.

You hated rich people. I always thought that was funny since you came from a very wealthy family. It seemed strange to me that you would feel so strongly about it. I envied you at times, being able to travel, to buy anything you wanted, to be able to help people and not think that feeding the hungry meant you couldn't pay the power bill. Those weren't choices I didn't think you ever had to make.

But I was wrong about you. I didn't know until your brother told me, that you had given away most of your money, that the truth was you had less than I did at the time. I didn't know the grant you said funded your project came from your own pocket, that you spent everything you had to tell the stories of war victims. I didn't know it was your money that bought all the equipment we used, all the clothing we bought for the refugees, all the deposits and rents and food supplies we filled their rented apartments with. I just didn't know.

I do remember you telling me it was a good thing I didn't have extra in my life because I would just give it away to the first person with a sad story. I wondered how you knew me so well. Now I know. You gave all yours away to a whole lot of people with sad stories. You used what you had to help a small piece of the world heal.

Maybe that's why you're so much with me now. I look around at the appalling selfishness of the wealthy, of the whiny little complaints of the privileged little divas too many of my friends raised because they thought if they gave their kids everything they wanted, they wouldn't turn on them as teenagers, that everyone would be pals forever. Now it's my friends who want to turn on their kids and are ashamed of their selfishness, of their shallowness. And all of us look to their children, the grandchildren we would have had if we had children,  instead, the ones who started the Occupy Wall Street movement, the ones who really are unselfish and altruistic and truly care about the planet more than themselves and their own needs.

But it's how we were too. We rebelled against our parents and embraced the wisdom of our grandparents. You told me once that the grandchildren would save the world and I didn't really know what you meant. I do now. Sadly, I do now. But at the same time I have hope. Yes, my dear and closest friends have children they love but don't like. It's the relationship you had with your parents and my parents had with me. It takes skipping a generation to be understood. It makes old people relevant again at a time when we start to feel like useless burdens on society. Maybe that's why my friends appreciate their grandchildren so much. They know in them is the planet's salvation. As we both often said, altruists aren't born; we need something to object to, something so foul it awakens the humanist in us and propels us to act.

I think back on one of the last conversations we had. My father had just died. You knew we weren't close, that I had run as far away from his violence as I could without leaving the country. You knew how his abuse turned me into a fearful creature who was always afraid of upsetting people because my life taught me that upset people inflict pain. We talked a lot about that, about the people I chose to surround myself with, the users, abusers, and as you said, the ones with hearts like parking meters. Those were the ones you told me to look out for because until I learned that I wasn't a bad person who didn't deserve better just because I'd spent a life time getting that message, didn't mean I couldn't one day find my strength and walk upright.

You would enjoy my uprightness these days. I still have my moments. I still don't fully trust people. But I'm working on it. I let more of my friends in than I work at keeping them out. And I've done the necessary pruning you long ago suggested would improve my life considerably. I grew strong just from that one decision.  I thank you for maybe not planting the seed, but at least providing the nourishment that helped it grow.

So happy birthday, dear Anna. I've known some amazing women in my life and you're at the top of the list. And your work lives on. You'd be happy to know that. The people you chose to take it over for you did a fantastic job. Your wish that world peace would grow from the money that came to you from sources you considered too evil to spend on yourself, have been scattered as many small seeds and they've taken root. The world benefitted from your life. That's more than many people can ever say.

Rose Bud by northwest_photograph
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Happy Birthday, Anna

This thing called LIFE

During one of those conversations we have in our lives and then set aside in the memory banks until it's time to make use of them, I remember an elderly woman telling me the worst thing about getting older was not the deterioration of the body, nor the shock of realizing you have less years left then you've already lived. It was saying goodbye to those you loved and cherished, over and over again until there was no one left but you.

I was young enough when she told me this to feel sadness for her but I had no way of understanding what she was saying. I thought it was about loneliness. I thought it was about having no friends or family left. I thought it was about being alone and not having a choice about it.

It was none of those things. It was instead something I can barely put into words but that anyone who has experienced the continual loss of friends and family understands all too clearly. The closest I felt to anything like this before was in the 80's where it seemed I spent most of my life going to funerals and memorial services for people my age who died of AIDS.

It sounds horrible to say, but part of you does become numb after the first dozen deaths. It doesn't mean I or anyone else loved or cared any less for those that died. It was just that after so many a part of you begins to shut down as a self-preservation mechanism so you don't go throwing yourself off a cliff from the unbearable grief.

And now after losing so many friends to illnesses and so close to losing yet another one, I find myself retreating emotionally into that safe place of numbness. But I pull myself back because I don't want to be that elderly woman so many years ago who tugged at my heart with what I thought then was loneliness but was instead just overwhelming despair at being the last one left.

I think of that. Being the last one left. I have so many people I love. I am surrounded by people I love. Just the thought of losing one is too much. I can't imagine losing them all. It's just too horrible to contemplate. But being old makes you contemplate it. You see the age and the sickness on the faces and bodies of those you love and it's the most horrible feeling in the world. And each time you have to let go, you have to make yourself strong to endure it one more time. And through it all, you have to stay whole and sentient and honor the meaning of the word "alive."

For me, part of the healing process is writing about the person I lost. Tonight I'm writing about Lydia. She's still physically present but we said goodbye several days ago because we both understood it was time. There's a point where even typing becomes an effort, where someone has to hold your head up so you can read the words sent in return, and it starts to seem ludicrous. She still managed to overwhelm me with her courage, her wisdom, and her compassion, but I sense it took all the strength she had left to write the words she did to me. I will cherish them because I know how important they were for her to say them to me.

She was the youngest of our writing group, the most emotionally scarred of the group of women who met once a month to camp out in the Sierras and write together and try to heal something in ourselves and each other. No experience in my life will ever come close to matching what that did for me, and no friendships will match the depths we all explored in each other.

There were fifteen of us, with three or four who were occasional participants. We are down to five and soon, much too soon, we will be down to four. And yet, even grief is a measured thing, even sorrow is something that becomes small and selfish when measured against far larger griefs. Our time in the Sierras was a way to try and understand, to put into words what happens when the world we think we know, becomes a world we are horrified exists.

We were children of war, born in countries that suffered from the tyranny of a small but powerful few. Lydia and her mother were the sole survivors on her mother's side of the family. I still remember the horror I felt when she read a poem to our group about trying to grow a garden and finding pieces of clothing,  long forgotten household goods, a pair of broken eyeglasses, a child's toy stained with blood.

Both our grandmothers were Yugoslavian when it was something they saw grow from a desire to live in peace as one people, but both moved away before the dream came crashing down: mine to Trieste, and Lydia's to a small community just over the border in Slovenia. Both our mothers married Americans and came here with us. Both of us grew up and became writers in the adopted language of our mothers. Both of us created art and poetry and spent hours and days and years dreaming of that magical world we knew was possible if only human beings woke up and discovered their similarities instead of their differences.

The first day we met, we recognized all that in each other without having to say a word in explanation. It was in our eyes, in the words we wrote, in the way we sat in a beam of sunlight and listened to the creek's song high in the Emigrant Wilderness of the Sierras. We knew each other. We knew what it meant to be exiled in body and spirit and that was and will always be our bond.

Last December when Lydia learned she had Inflammatory Breast Cancer and that it was terminal, I was the one who fell apart. I walked around like a zombie for days, cursing everything I could think of, yelling at life for doing this, for the unfairness of taking away my one friend who knew my soul almost as well as I did. I was angry. I was depressed. As someone who rarely experiences mood swings, this was a new thing for me, and I didn't deal with it well. I retreated. I didn't want to talk to anyone but Lydia.

And for months we've exchanged hundreds of emails of the kind two crazy writer women exchange. They went on and on and on and covered everything we could think of: stories we remembered from the writer's group, the strange man who was hired to be our guide through the unfamiliar canyons and trails and who kept to himself, the husband of one of the women who was so stunningly attractive we all stared at him like silly little giggling girls, and the many hours of lives translated into words by women who were all raised speaking a language other than English. Our words were in one language and our memories in another.

But we also shared uniquely American experiences, ones that we learned to laugh about but at the time drove us mad with the insanity of it all. We talked fondly of our mutual success story, a woman who lived two blocks from Lydia in the huge apartment complex. We knew she was abused, that the bruises on her face were from her husband, and that she was terrified.  It took weeks but Lydia slowly gained her trust and together we managed to get her away and into a shelter. Since it was a time in our lives when we were both fairly poor, we hit up everyone we knew for money and furniture and household furnishings to give her a new start. When she graduated first from High School at the age of 41 and then completed college just short of her 50th birthday, both Lydia and I felt like proud parents.

And then we talked about her evil twin, the woman who used both of us with her sad story. We believed her. We once again raised money and found furniture and a place to live. But this time the story was completely made up and we fell for it. But in one of our conversations a couple months again, we laughed about it, at how easily she managed to find the soft spot in our careful armor. But at the same time, we knew that one bad experience was worth all the women we helped in our lives. We may be suckers for a good story, but so what? There are worse things to be and when one of our success stories wrote a lovely note to share with those who helped her, we both cried because two years before that the same woman was illiterate. Life evens out that way.

I promised Lydia I would write my memories of our conversations so her daughters would one day know that side of her. I've been doing that. It's been hard. I cry a lot. I curse at the world a lot. And I hug my friends a lot.

And now as Lydia lies in that place of half here and half already making the transition, I think of what she taught me that will carry me forward with her passing and that of all the passings to come: I always make new friends. I always find room in my life and heart for more people. I've grown increasingly picky, but I do add to the assortment of fruits and nuts periodically. It's my insurance, my comfort to know there are people out there who I have yet to meet who will one day be my friends. It's how life works or none of us would be able to get out of bed in the morning.

So to my dear Lydia. Thank you. And may your transition be easy. You've earned the right to have it be easy. I love and cherish you and bless the day we met. It changed me in a way nothing else could. Thank you so very very much.

Sunset Clouds by northwest_photograph
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This thing called LIFE

And so it ends again...

When someone decides to go for a motorcycle ride in the middle of the night after spending the last five years trying to drink himself to death, does it really qualify as an accident or is it just suicide by another name? And when you add various substances said motorcycle rider probably injested as well because he learned a long time ago that after alcohol doesn't really numb the pain of too many wounds on the soul, the question becomes more complicated.

It's that complicated thing I'm dealing with right now. I want to be angry at him. I want to be sad over him. I want him to still be alive but I also feel the truth of that stupid and trite saying "he's now at peace." I hate saying that. I hate feeling it because it really explains so little.

He told me suicide ran in his family a couple weeks after we scattered his sister's ashes in 1990. She was my friend and I tried to save her. I was young and foolish then. I really did believe people could be saved from themselves. Anna proved me wrong. She showed me that sometimes salvation is taking yourself out of the picture of human life. It took me a long time to forgive her but I finally did. I haven't changed my mind that suicide is the most stupid and selfish thing you can do to those who love you, but I forgave her. Mostly because her brother asked me to.

He had a kind soul. A very deep and vulnerable soul. He had the kind of openness that people zero in on and immediately find a way to take advantage of it. We had that in common and we exchanged many mournful and supportive emails over the years on how people needed to come up to our level and not force us to sink down to theirs. We wrote each other and said be strong, hang on to your principles, be a person of integrity and compassion, even if others are not, even if others use all that in your for their own purposes. We assured each other the occasional using was worth the good we could do in the world just by staying kind, compassionate, caring, and strong.

Ryan was a lot more optimistic about it than I was. Often he was the one who wrote me and begged me not to give up, not to isolate myself, not to run away from people who were mean and selfish, that I had to let them see the other side of life, even if it hurt and cost me a few pieces of skin. "Skin is ego," he was fond of saying, "and road rash is humility."

But in the end it was he who suffered over what the rest of the world did. He was not the type of person to stand back in silence when wrong was being done. He spent most of his considerable fortune helping others, mostly children in countries torn apart by war. He had a soft spot for the innocent victims in everything and he spent his life saving them.

But in the end, he simply felt too much. I read the downhill slide in his ever more infrequent emails. Where once there was hope and optimism there was far too often despair and depression. He took far too many drugs to cope with what he could no longer face. His nightmares took over his days. I often wondered how far it would go before he killed himself.

I always thought it would be by something clean and efficient, an overdose from the many bottles available. A staged and dramatic setting that wouldn't  inconvenience anyone too much. He didn't want to leave a mess for someone else to clean up.

A couple weeks ago he wrote me a rambling email that covered much of his life. I remembered thinking it was the kind of thing one wrote after drinking all the alcohol in the house, swallowing the pills, and typing furiously before it all kicked in.

It was probably that way. But it was a beautiful night out. The moon was full. And the road called to him, the winding mountain road in a northern Italian setting. I imagine it was beautiful. I imagine there was a moment of elation, a moment of fear, of sadness, a thought of those like me who would be hurt. But his pain was too strong and the night too beautiful and he knew I would forgive him.

Right now I'm not sure. It's only been a week. I still think of him in present time. I still want to write and talk him out of it. I want to leap through time and take his keys away. But Anna taught me such things wouldn't change a thing and my only option was forgiveness.

Maybe that is the story of my life. Maybe that is what he left me with, that often in life the only option we are left with is forgiveness. I have to accept that for now.

And so it ends again...

Dysfunctional Planet

Sometimes we are so blinded by the bigger picture that we fail to notice it's made up of small pieces of exquisite and painful artistic moments that pass for our collective lives. And there's nothing like a death in the family to bring everything to a flash of blinding and humbling clarity.

For me, my mother's death and the circumstances around it painted a very clear picture of the world we live in. We are one large dysfunctional family who desperately need to change our relationship to each other and the planet if we are to survive as anything but wounded automatons. Within each of our own families are the families that occupy this planet. Within each of us and our respective villages lives both the cause and the cure. We have to open our eyes and our hearts and set aside the divisions or it's the end of us as a species worth anything but a scornful footnote in the passage of time.

Think carefully on this because it means our survival. Think of the last decade, the Bush/Cheney/Rove years, the divisions, the taking of sides, the losses, the rage, the despair,  and apply it not only to my family but to your own, and then apply it to the planet.

Look and see how expertly our fears and hurts and disappointments were and continue to be manipulated by those who can see what we no longer even recognize in ourselves anymore--that we are being led to the slaughter by those who care nothing about us other than the material sum of our parts. We are used by the politicians, the churches, the greedy until there's nothing left inside us that is our own anymore. We belong to them and they use us and then toss us aside because there's a continual replacement for us when we no longer suit their needs.

They are able to do this because dysfunctional is the new normal when it comes to families. How many of us have family members who don't speak to each other over something that happened years ago, something that I doubt most people can remember in complete details anymore if asked to explain it to someone else. All that remains is the gaping chest wound of misunderstanding, of division, of taking sides, of the us and them that divides us all.

How many of us have people in our lives from broken relationships that fester in pain, that isolate us and them from the heartbreak of loss? How many shattered friendships do we have that can never be repaired? How much of our lives are taken up by avoiding people instead of welcoming them? How much hate grows inside us like an evil little seed waiting to destroy everything in us that can love?

When we are like this, we are weak instead of strong. The users come along and find easy pickings. All they have to do is put on a TV show that gives us images of those we fear and then play upon that fear. Why, in the 21st century, do we still allow manipulative and evil entities like Fox News and its hateful talking heads, the Rush Limbaughs pushing drug-fueled hatred, the politicians who are beholden to corporations instead of people, to define us?

Can anyone on this planet who swallows that crap on a daily basis explain to me in anything but slogans why they hate someone? Or is everything now a talking point written by someone else, reduced to a sound bite with no substance, with no purpose but to divide us from one another?

How far back in time does someone have to go before the immigrant becomes the invader? When these hatemongers talk about taking our country back, who do we take it back from? The Native Americans we stole it from, the Mexicans who were disenfranchised from it because white people wanted it without having to pay anything for it? The Canadians whose boundaries crisscrossed our own so often we can barely tell each other apart?

Where are the papers of those who invaded this country and filled it with hateful white people? Under what justification did those same people enslave other people based on the color of their skin and think of it as anything but the most evil of actions another human being can perpetuate on another?

When did religion become an excuse to hate, to divide, to conquer? Do these haters even bother to read the Bible and its message sof love, tolerance, and acceptance? When did unholy intermediaries with hateful agendas become humanity's direct link to spirituality and connectedness with nature and each other? And why in this supposedly advanced civilization do we still allow the same people who believed the earth was flat to define who we love and marry? What the fuck is wrong with us that so many swallow this crap so easily?

I think the answers to all these questions lie within our own families, our own relationships, our own discarded and destroyed friendships. We are the small pictures within the large picture and we need to take a very close look at it before any hope of a better world for those that come after us, dies with us. Will our decade be the one that destroys hope for the entire planet because we were so obsessed with our own wounds that we failed to see how deeply others were wounded too?

I'm asking people to start within themselves and heal at least a small piece as a precious beginning to a new world. My own family never had a chance because war took their humanity before it had a chance to grow into something strong enough to fight against the divisions. But that doesn't mean I can't heal at least a small wound in myself that is there because of their wounds.

Maybe by doing so I can forgive those who hurt me so they won't continue to hurt me by taking up permanent residence in my heart. I understand all too well my parents were victims of things beyond their control but that doesn't mean I have to follow on that path. I have options they never had and if I let those options go to waste, then what was the point of their hurt, for nothing exists just to exist. Something gives it birth, something feeds it to make it live, something makes it grow strong and powerful.

I've said over and over again that working for peace is not for the weak. It takes strength to move forward when others view it as wasted idealism. It takes courage to look war in the face and say I will defeat you. It takes setting aside the divisions and working together to stand up to power and say we are stronger than you. It takes finding the place inside yourself that wants peace and making it strong enough to defeat hate.

That place is there inside us all. We must find it. We must ignore the noise machine of hate and work together for a better world, one where corporations don't destroy our planet in their greed to satisfy our own greed. We must simplify what we believe and how we live. We must reach out to each other and stop putting up walls, stop blaming others for things that are our own fault. We must grow up and be accountable for our own actions and quit using Bibles and religions and dead friendships as excuses to be complete and total jerks. We must embrace our humanity or we will lose it forever.

Love's Truest Language by orsobear
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Dysfunctional Planet

The Flowering Self

"Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality." -Nikos Kazantzakis

One of the most life changing lessons for human beings is the realization that everything in life is a choice. From the moment we get out of bed in the morning, we choose who we will be, who we will present ourselves as to the world. We put on our clothes as costumes, as disguises, as props for what we want to convey and then we step out on the stage and perform to audiences of individuals all doing the same thing.

There's an absurdity in this behavior, an unconscious mocking of ourselves for playing along with a game that gets refined by whatever hands are currently pulling the strings. But the thing is, we give our puppetmasters the strings to control us with. It's our script they're using to control us. It's our fears, our biases, our intolerance, our judgments that create the strings for others to use on us. As a result everything we are is a costume someone else has dressed us in so we can perform in their version of reality.

The tragedy is that we aren't born this way. We came into the world as optimists, as believers in the theory of all possibilities that could be picked up, tasted and swallowed. The world revolved around our own vision of things. It took shape according to what we wanted from it, what we perceived as our place in its universe.

But somewhere along the way, the shaping of group consciousness took place and the individual self was subdued and steadily beaten down by tools such as religion, school, and that scourge of all decent humanity--consensus. We were no longer free to stick things in our mouth and taste at will.

If we tried to stray from the path set out for us, we were reminded of the perils in doing so because there were no good ways to say individual. Instead such people were described as anti-social, not team players, fringe dwellers, and lone nuts.

And yet we worshipped the cult of the individual, especially the rugged variety. It was a mythical cult that was and is still written about with awe, with wonder, with the sanctity of breath reserved for wondrous things and unattainable desires. It's like heaven and the old saying that everyone wants to go to there, but no one wants to die to get there.

We grew up worshipping the individual but feared him or her at the same time, and it's easy to understand way. Think of a herd contained within a wild pasture. See the comfort of knowing all the animals are in place. Visualize the ease of drawing a pen around them all in one flawless slash of movement.

Then imagine that one little sheep, that one individual little creature who never stepped outside the "taste as you go" school of life, but instead kept stopping, kept rewriting the plot to reflect changing consciousness, different realities, new ways of looking at the world. This little sheep became the source of all fear just for getting up in the morning and being his or her own sheep.

It is why churches came along and put controls on sex and love, two states that no amount of self-righteous pontificating can interrupt once they are set in motion. There's more rules for controlling those two behaviors than any other. But it is wasted effort, a moral version of beating one's head continually against a wall in the hope that the wall will collapse before the head does.

It is why forests and all wild nature was either destroyed or put under control of some entity that wanted to either exploit it or preserve it by keeping anything but sanctioned and approved individuals from it.

The control freaks saw that Nature was far more powerful than humans, far more powerful than any deity. They saw it had the ability to capture, to hold in its grasp and transform the ordinary in us to the extraordinary that goes beyond self. Once that metamorphosis took place, they knew control was a lost cause.

It is also why any kind of substance that allowed mental escape was controlled and either outlawed or puritanically dispensed at high cost. Drugs were designed to put people in a state where there was no disturbing reality, no too obvious change from one mood, one truth to the next. Variation of mood, of being, of relating was seen as wrong. Stability of existence was seen as a positive instead of the most spirit killing weapon ever devised--other than religion.

And it was especially why hate and division was always promoted over love and tolerance. Like those penned up sheep, humans wer easier to control if they were all hungry, tired, horny, and ready to be eaten at the same time. It was far easier to pipe canned entertainment into the pen than it was to hand the stage over and invite something new to emerge from the chaos.

But within that stew of overly simmered sameness, there was always the sheep that strayed outside the herd, the one that was a bit odd, who preferred the taste of flowers instead of grass, who gazed at the sky and saw clouds and birds and tall mountains instead of some scolding, foul-tempered deity.

That was the one I wanted in my life. That was the one I wanted teaching me. That was the ones I wanted to love and call friend because he and she were what gave meaning to my life. But more than anything, I also wanted to be that for them as well because without the circle that leads us back to each other, we don't really exist as authentic, empathic human beings.

Inner Peace by sun_signs
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The Flowering Self

Imperfect Humans and the cleansing of memory

The end of one year and the beginning of another seems to set ghosts dancing on the edge of my days until I acknowledge them in some way. I usually pacify them by writing a poem, making some art, or just sitting with a glass of wine and remembering what they brought to my life, what would be lacking without their transit through my reality, and how they left the dust of some of themselves on me in some way.

Today the ghost took the shape of a man I met many years ago. I was at a very disillusioned point in time. I'd just survived a serious illness and wasn't sure I wanted to get my hopes up and believe I was going to live. I was like a rock in the river that the water washes over in degrees of cold, heat, purity, and sediment-stuffed surprise attacks. He was the ultimate cynic and of course I had to check out what made him this way because he seemed to come by it so naturally it was almost a gift.

There's an old joke that the most dangerous words a woman can say are "I can save this man." But in his sense of salvation it was less the man himself I wanted to save, than it was I wanted to understand what he represented. I thought if I could understand the depths of the system that made him who he was, I could learn something previously unexplored about the nature of war and use it for peace in that roundabout way of believing if you know the enemy, you can defeat it on its own battlefield.

For us the battlefield was mental. He was arrogant, opinionated, highly intelligent in that raw, forced disciplined way of being intelligent that comes from systemic discipline rather than desire to know and understand. He spent much of his life as a piece of machinery in a country that didn't value him as a human being beyond what he could contribute as a functioning piece of working asset.

That made him shit to relate to in any way but intellectually, and in that he excelled. His mind was a mysterious path that I jumped in eagerly to explore. I wanted to know what made him so cold to those he professed to love with a passion found only in the pages of his favorite literature, and I realized it was because he never learned to value human beings. He grew up knowing he could be easily replaced at any time, that he had no value beyond what he could provide in the moment, and that if he wanted to succeed in maintaining a relative and safe anonymity, it was best not to dwell too long in the emotional realm because that was the path to danger.

Of course this was unacceptable to me. I was and am the ultimate romantic when it comes to people's mental playgrounds. I know there's something special hidden inside everyone and I dig and dig until I get a glimpse of it. Sometimes that's enough for me, and at other times it is the hand that reaches out and drags me down the rabbit hole.

He was the biggest rabbit hole I ever fell into and it was a trip that while I have no desire to ever repeat again, I wouldn't trade for anything because it gave me an understanding of what war, what meanness, what lack of respect for a humanity creates in a population.

I'm a stubborn woman and because I believe in people's essential goodness, I was able to relate to him in a way that satisfied me at the time. I stuck to the path that we shared: literature, cultural music, and nature. I didn't want to look too deeply inside the part of him that was cruel and callous, that could profess friendship and then cut your heart the next day for his own amusement.

He was the little Prince of every mother who thinks her son is the chosen one, and the nightmare of every woman who tried to relate to him on an emotional level. I watched him go through relationships as if they were disposable jars he could stuff with his dreams and then throw away when they became too ordinary.

I think if anything defined him, other than being a train wreck son of a flawed human system, it was that he feared the ordinary. As he was growing up, the sensitive child he must have been at some time was brutally smacked down and he learned to adapt and mimic the ordinary mediocrity of existence. He didn't stand out. He didn't draw attention to himself. He merely existed.

But within that existence there was a lovely and nurturing escape: books. It was our deepest connection to each other, this eternal appreciation of books as lifesaving devices. I always carried a book around with me as a child. It was my foil against the shyness that haunted me most of my young life, the fear of interacting with strangers, the terror that someone would hurt me or tease me or try and destroy me. For him, it was the small glimmer of hope that maybe one day life would resemble something close to what he read about rather than what he was forced to live on a day to day basis.

But for both of us, the books that saved us also spoiled the ordinary for us. We could never settle for anything that was tedious, mediocre, boring. Life had to imitate art or it was neither life nor art.

I eventually couldn't handle how he treated women, the callousness in which he broke their hearts and walked away without a second glance when they stopped being princesses in magical kingdoms needing rescuing, and instead became ordinary women. I could understand it, but I couldn't condone it. So I walked away. It broke my heart in a way I never expected it to, but to stay would have damaged my honor, my integrity, my sense the world as a beautiful place.

Even after all these years he remains in my thoughts and for him, for all the potential that I hoped he would one day realize, I made something beautiful for him, something to contemplate, something to say thank you for the first lessons on what it meant to point a camera at something and have it return back at least a small piece of what the eyes and heart saw and created together.

Gandhi Quotations by orsobear
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Imperfect Humans and the cleansing of memory

Godless Damned Degenerate for Peace

I'm the first to admit that my inner beast is a stubborn one. It grabs hold of something and doesn't let go until there's some kind of ending, some resolution that doesn't stink of enforced compromise, or that hasn't been steeped until tasteless through the filter of consensus.

Yeah, that's me. But I'm also someone who doesn't waste my time with lost causes. I have no use for people who have given up on themselves, who have turned their brains and hearts over to some master pulling strings they don't even know they have.

It's why religion annoys me. There's nothing democratic about religion. There's some power-hungry asshat behind a pulpit preaching his biases to a crowd of people who are so afraid of their inner selves, they turn themselves over body and brain.

I hate unfair fights and there's nothing more unfair than a power whore abusing those weaker and more desperate than him or herself. The average preacher claims to be a servant or emissary of god, often using the same language as other historical mass indoctrinators of human consciousness  used those words to raise armies in the service of their own special friends.

My main objection to religions is that every one of them has its blood all over wars using some mythical deity as an excuse for the pillaging and slaughter.  One of the many reasons I don't believe in god is that if one existed then he/she/it would have smacked the holy shit out of these morons starting wars and killing people using him/her/it as an excuse. And if I am wrong, then what kind of human being would I  be if I allowed myself to get sucked into these mass murder cults that demand blood and hate as some sort of twisted homage? I couldn't live with myself if I gave up my humanity that easily and for so little. What kind of evil monster would demand such horrid obedience from me that I would literally turn over all that is loving and kind about myself to him/her/it so they could kill and destroy even more?

But every day I see people who do this, people who are so insecure, so afraid of the perceived demons inside themselves that they march sheeplike to the cadence of their masters. This is what war truly is, the strong manipulating the weak and frightened so the powerful may grow richer and more powerful. The only god they're fighting for is money and power. And they use religion to keep people from noticing their hands picking the pockets of the people as they make others die for their own personal enrichment.

This has always been the story of war. It has nothing to do with honor, with glory, with democracy or saving souls. It has everything to do with powermongers who sell weapons to everyone, no matter what their politics or religion. It has everything to do with politicians who are so willing to use the lives of others to score points in some demented game of human chess, they don't even consider the casualities worthy of being referred to as human beings. It has everything to do with land grabs, with historical grievances, with family feuds among the rich and powerful. And religion is the noose they drape around the neck of the sheep so they will die willingly and ask no questions.

But it all doesn't happen so easily. To convince the sheep to enter the slaughterhouse, they use their evil minions, the purveyors of hate and propaganda. They use the lowest of the common denominators to instill hatred and rage because that way they can control the masses. Those who love are beyond the control of evil masters, but those who hate already have one hand on the leash and are ready to hand the other end of it to the first hater who stirs up the venom in their hearts.

As human beings who have the responsibility of passing on a whole and healthy planet to the next generation, we have to understand that love is the only thing that will save us and preserve something worth passing on. Love is the only way we can move forward in a time where hate is a prison waiting to enslave us all. We need to speak up. We need to make some noise. We need to understand if we don't use our own power to create a peaceful world, then it will be taken from us and turned into a weapon of hate that will be used against us. We need to reject hate. We need to reject the cultish behavior that leads to mental imprisonment. We need to stand up and very clearly state: there's a better way of going through life and we are that way.

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Godless Damned Degenerate for Peace

You Must Be Kind

I was talking to a friend tonight about the kinds of things old friends sit around and discuss over a bottle or two of wine, such as friendship, how it grows, how it's formed, and what holds it together. He asked me what I instinctively look for in a friendship, what separates it from mere acquaintanceship for me. He knows me well enough to know I can count my deep connections on one hand and the rest range in superficial to moving up the food chain of my heart.

I sang him one answer from Uncle John's Band, which he joined in and sang with me: "what I want to know is are you kind?"

Our connection has always been a literary feasting of souls and we share a love of many of the same books that range from classics that we struggled through in college and then learned to love as grown-ups, all the way to current well put together bits and pieces we find on the web and send to each other.

We "met" at an online book club over ten years ago that discussed one book a month for an entire month. After a time you begin to see patterns of discussion emerging and ours always crossed paths. I reminded him of the quote that he posted when we were reading  Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater "There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

And truly, kindness is the base of any friendship for me because it allows a person to step outside of themselves, out of their own needs and selfishness and focus on someone else. It allows them to give, to heal, to nurture, to support, to hear and listen and love. Without kindness all those wonderful things are just empty words.

Kindness prevents the kind of malicious and mean gossip that is so prevalent among many small communities and eats away at it from within. Kindness nourishes tolerance so others are accepted for who they are rather than what they can do for you. Kindness allows a generosity of spirit that allows a person to give of themself as naturally as they give to themselves. Kindness prevents war and violence because it won't allow you to inflict cruelty, pain and suffering on another living creature. Kindness simply makes a human being whole, because without it, we are nothing more than a sort of societal leech that always takes and never gives back.

So, yes, the base of the friendship pyramid for me is kindness as I don't ever see myself being satisfied with a friendship that is less than that. It would be meaningless for me, empty, unsatisfying. It would not be worthy of the title of friendship.

kindness, tolerance, love, Vonnegut, Grateful Dead, friendship

You Must Be Kind

War And Peace, Truth And Lies

There really isn't that much difference with a war between countries based on lies and a relationship between people based on lies. The common ground seems to be a hefty dose of self-interest rules above everything else and fairness be damned.

Yes, any of us that could read beyond the second grade and ventured beyond the "programming" of the mainstream state-run media, knew that Iraq had no WMDs and Bush/Neoconmen didn't care if we did or not. They had an agenda and it was going to run, truth be damned. It was easy to get the mandatory bleating chorus to be both cannon fodder and war drum beaters.

It was surprisingly easy. All it took in far too many cases was free hot dogs, some brown corn syrup, and a racist CW pawn to sing them to sleep. The rest of us could only protest in our wire cages called "Free Speech Zones" and keep writing the truth until people got tired of losing their children and other loved ones to a phony war.

Before conquering other countries, they practiced on us first. A dishonorable group of liars studied the tyrants of history for ways to subdue its people. They found the time-honored method of divide and conquer. They divided and then conquered us one newspaper, one TV station, one radio station at a time. They fed us crap in a repetitive and disrespectful way all day long. Missing blonds. Murderous Moms. Scary dark people. They made Peace a four letter word and they made war the will of a god who hadn't demanded so many sacrifices since the dark ages.

And the ugliness spread to the relationships between people. Previously normal people began to fear each other. The stench of mistrust permeated everything, even love. Nothing was true anymore. Nothing was meant to last. It was all a tower built on the unstable sand of lies and fear. Arguments became petty bickering over stupid shit in order to create a reason for a larger confrontation. It was all around. How could people not embrace this stench into their own lives? How could they be satisfied with each other when the world was going mad and a group of madmen were plotting to destroy the very earth?

Most of my friends split up in the last year. They took on everything around them and became personal little war zones fed by lies, mistrust, fear and the sheer terror that love would never be enough and Peace was a dream for fools.

I stood back from most of it for the same reason I avoided most of the people in High School. Just as petty little men bent on power formed groups to abuse and mislead and lie, so too did my circle of friends and acquaintances revert to their High school years to do the same. Just as it repulsed me to watch grown men throw innocent people to their deaths for oil, money, land grabs and power, so too did it repulse me to watch people I previously cared about turn into petty little tyrants forming sides intent on making war on each other for things, for property, for the right to say I own this corner of the world and I took it from you.

This is how the rot from the top down infects everything. This is how the world becomes when we become a nation of Lawyers instead of a nations of laws and honor and justice. What happens between countries has always happened between people. For that reason alone, things have to change or relationships between people will be fleeting encounters of meaningless mating. If you don't care about someone, it's easy to make them the enemy. If we don't change, we condemn ourselves to a destiny of being nothing more than cannon fodder for wars of all kinds.

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War And Peace, Truth And Lies

Three Steps Toward World Peace

I went for a walk today in Whatcom Falls Park, a beautiful piece of green heaven here in the Pacific Northwest. It was one of those perfect late summer days of sun, a slight breeze, and temps in low 70's. The park has some old, majestic trees and I went to photograph them to make some more calendars. It was quiet with just the sound of leaves, wind, and the many hidden things that scurry around just below our clear level of hearing.

It was such a calm and peaceful environment to be in when in so many other places the world is in a crazy turmoil of mean-spirited, warmongering hatred that never seems to end. I wanted to bottle the peace and pass it around. I wanted to say "Here! Inhale this and go be nice to each other." I wanted to spread it all around and let people know what it felt like so they would stop being so mean and so cruel.

But peace, like love, like friendship, like anything requiring a relationship between self and the outside world, depends on more than one person. I can want peace and most of the time I'm lucky to be able to find it in some form or other within a few minutes of the desire making itself known. Others who are trapped in abusive relationships, high stress situations, and war zones can't have it no matter how strong the desire. But all of us can drop a few seeds here and there that might turn into peace. Here are a few suggestions to help them grow:

1. I put this one first because it is the most important: LEARN TO THINK FOR YOURSELF. Those who let others do their thinking for them find themselves trapped in situations they never thought would turn into a trap. If you learn to question what others throw at you as absolute truth than you are less likely to get suckered into something you don't want. This applies equally to love, religion, and war. We all have the "I can be fooled if I want to gene" and it's time to knock that little creep back into the shithole where he/she/it belongs.

Those who don't question and who feel insecure about themselves can be tricked into supporting a war based on lies. They can be tricked into believing there's such a thing as compassionate conservatism. They can be tricked into believing that wrapping oneself in the flag and screaming loudly for someone's blood is Patriotism, and not ignorant and stupid bloodlust based on bigotry. Timeline that led to War

2. The second most important thing is to BE KIND. We've become a mean culture. All you have to do is look at the movies we watch, the books we read, the politicians we elect and you will see how empty our spirits have become. I often find myself shouting to the wind Kurt Vonnegut's immortal words: "There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- "God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Commit a random act of kindness today. It doesn't require very much to think of something. You can drop a bag of groceries off at the food bank. You can mow an elderly neighbor's lawn. You can spend time with people in a nursing home. You can bake cookies for someone who is sad. You can cook dinner for someone who is tired. You can save a dog or cat from your local shelter. You can feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and shelter the homeless. You can say thank you to strangers on the other end of the phone who helped you. You can let someone cut in front of you in traffic, in line at the supermarket. You can smile at a lonely person. You can hug the unhuggable. You can give the smallest gift and have it grow into the largest gesture of kindness, caring and compassion.

3. BE YOURSELF! Most of the problems in the world are caused by those who can't accept who they are because it doesn't fit the advertising propaganda we're assaulted with on a daily basis. Those who are different, outside the norm, geeks, nerds, shy, weird, untameable, and just too damn smart for this planet are the ones who have the biggest hearts. But only you can spread the word, so get out there and quit apologizing for being real in a world that has been totally screwed up by fake, cruel and insincere people.

Three Steps Toward World Peace