Friday Morning Early

I awoke early this morning. It’s Hallow’s Eve.  Samdain.  The world of the dead is closest to the world of the living.
I dreamed a great dream  I was in a multi storied house.  There were people congregating throughout.  I’d been camping on a beach. There was a woman with sunshine in her hair.  I’d smelt the scent of the sea. Then I was in this dance hall, a place I’ve been before in my dreams.  Sometimes I’ve been dancing.  It’s a dancer’s paradise.  Men and women dressed formally but casually enough for the exercise of dance.  I remember doing cha cha and jive and waltz.  Tonight there were black men and white and some women wore wear.  The hardwood floor was well polished.  Immaculate waiters served food to tables.  Some smoked I think. There was wine being served. I ordered coffee.  I didn’t dance, just looked around at this world of wonder and joy.  I was alone.
Waking at 5 am I first noticed my feet ached.  I have pain in a hip.  My back hurt climbing out of bed. I’d begun to worry about work, worry about patients, wonder how I was going to face the depressions again and again.  More and more I see people unhappy who don’t want to change anything but want this life they’re living to bring them joy when what they persist in is not joyful.  Some magic pill is supposed to save them in their isolation and self pity and self recrimination.  I encourage them.  I am positive. That only makes them angry. It’s as if I should agree with them that suicide is the solution.  And it kills me to rise to the challenge and convince them day after day to live another day.  I’ve walked thousands through these days. There’s no reason to go on.  Life sucks. Our loved ones fail us. There’s no truth in politics. The promises are all false. This world is a lie.  My life is a litany of failure.  And there I am again and again saying get out of bed, face the day, move on. Take this pill, take this therapy.  I know the government wants you dead.  I resist euthanasia.  My colleagues are giving out heroin.  The studies out of Wales tell us the threat to sobriety is in these people who have no faith in you.  I have faith but they say I’ve got compassion fatigue too.  We all do. Here in the front lines.  On beaches in Mexico and Hawaii it’s much easier to see the pleasure in life.  Lying in her arms I always felt life was worth living till she ran from life and kill our baby in fear and celebration.  Now it’s 5 am and the thoughts and past are on me.  Like twin vultures of fear and hate they sit at the top of the bed waiting to pluck out my eyes when I wake.
I looked up his name yesterday.  A patient asked for something from Winnipeg and I looked at my old university, searching a name for them.  And seeing all the other names. The road not taken.  I left the snow and cold and curse or blessing.  It’s easy on Halloween to think of witches I’ve known, beaten by broomsticks of despair.  “You’re supposed to make me happy. You make everyone else happy. Why don’t you make me happy.”  The screams like etchings on a bridge.  I found silence in a ship at sea. I think of sailing often too, wake from dreams of being in gales or just sailing in trade winds, the sweet loneliness and silence.  Then the cries of seagulls.
I’m all messed up overwhelmed by details and demands.  I balance precariously this sanity I cling to reaching deep down into the abyss to pull another out.  I’m afraid each year I’m older my grip is weaker and the tree on the ledge I cling to has roots but how much more can they take.
I’m a human busy.  There are men in accounting and women with white panties in offices that sit at computer and think of things they’d like everyone else to do and they demand it and bill more for themselves and self aggrandize.  My day is spilling over while they work 9-5 or more likely 10 to 2.  They decide what I must do and threaten me with all manner of threats.  If you don’t do this you won’t get paid, you won’t have a job, you will be blacklisted even more than we’ve blacklisted. The patient is anathema to them. They care not for anything but themselves and their kissing the ass of the next higher up and the new colour tv.
There is never enough money.  There is never enough air or life or love or sex.  There is never enough entertainment. Even sailing trips and hunting trips come to an end and then are contrasted by the sheer magnitude of stress and work and service.  How can I explain yet again that joy is not found in a pill, a bottle, or a ‘feeling’ but rather joy is that comparison.  I love my chair because last weekend I was hanging from a ledge.  I love my stomach today because sailing in a storm my gut was wrenching.  I compare the present with the negative not with some idealized television positive.  Hollywood is such farce.  Life is all about living. No platitudes. No adult children games.  Good work if you can get it.  Artists and all that.
It’s not about healing. It’s about doing protocols. It’s a vast call centre and the scripts are being written by boys in shorts and big girls in little girl panties.  Their parents had money.  They want more money.  They have this idea for mass production of protocols. These protocols are what save the world. And there are millions of courts that ask if the protocol was followed. Everyone is dead, mind you.  But was the protocol followed?
“It’s all about man and machine,” he told me today.  Someone sometime had called him schizophrenic.  But the man’s IQ was so much higher than my colleagues.  His ideas frighten people.  Indeed I have to agree. It really is about the woman and the machine. Man and machine was yesterday’s news. Now the woman is in love with the machine. Her vibrator, her protocols, her suction vacuum, her toaster oven, her iPhone.  It’s all about the woman and her machine. And that’s what men fought WWI and WWII , wars to end all wars.  But she refuses to accept that her lipstick was bought by a better machine gun .
My friend is a woman. She talks of walking with friends in the hills.  She has no silly city girl illusions about the source of her make up.  She has sons who served.  Her daughters serve.  She raised her children to be citizens and to participate. She loved her man long enough to matter. She didn’t demand that there be no other voices but hers in the home. She wasn’t a tyrant.  She knew the value of democracy of parenting and had no desire for tyranny.  She’s one of many women who amaze me.  I’m reminded so often of my mother and her business woman sister.  I loved them all.  The ex wives too.  And girl friends.
“You’re a sexist”, the young man said to me.He’s learning not to use his fists in anger but has picked up the most violent words of our times, ’sexist’, ‘racist’, ‘Christian’ .  In another country he’d have different slogans “capitalist” “westerner’.  Anger within seeks an outlet like volcanoes.  I stand near with God’s fire extinguisher. He’s pushed so many people away with his anger. Maybe I’m the latest sacrifice.    He’s spent most of his time mental masturbating and alone.   I think of the quarter century or more I shared my bed and life with women. So little of his life has been devoted to women and none to children. He’s served himself and only now is leaving to serve others.  But he’s such a fool, so vulnerable, thinking of women like porn stars and such, not knowing them for their ruthlessness and sacrificing himself for the liar who keeps teasing him and then calling the police to protect her.  He hates me now but finally he has locked her out. Finally he’s respected women enough to fear them.  Now there’s hope he’ll meet some real woman, a girl who knows her diabolical self, knows the power of her sex and will not abuse this.  He’s ready to meet a woman who will want to work together with him and not solely think of herself and how she can use him to further her goals for wealth for herself.  I’d been afraid he’d go to prison because he didn’t respect women.  I’m weary of name callers and ad hominems and the violence of those who don’t know ‘namaste’.  You are an idiot. Namaste.But then the students all want to be the teachers and the quickest way of the cannibals is to kill their leaders and eat their brains.  Why not?  Sure is easier than reading a million pages of books or listening to a million hours of lectures.  I work with street people and they call me anything they think will hurt because if they hurt me they think that bleeding I will be less a threat to them in my wholeness.  They destroy rather than create.  Their fear is such they are always looking for ‘precious’.  C.S. Lewis asked, ‘why are you looking for the architect in the wall’.  Such is the limits of materialism.  There’s never enough money.
We all have descended from cannibals.  We’re all survivors.  Our parents parents killed to be here.  We didn’t live by chanting om.  Now I chant om, but I know that there is creation and destruction and renewal.  Projection is that unconscious process where we deny our own violence and attribute it to the other.  Parents watch their children grow out of stages and then they see the same in nations and friends.  Just the other day the sweetest child in a moment of devilry poked a finger in my dog’s eye.  My dog was older and more mature and avoided the blow then moved away.  Humans can be so dangerous.  But the power today is in false accusation.  Lies are alive in this lying society.  The tyranny of communism was all about the lies.  The arrogance of judges is in their believing they can decipher truth without the basis of solid evidence. Even the Pope acknowledge science but it will be a long time before the Judges show humility.  That’s the irony today.  The elected are nothing before the appointed. And that’s how democracy dies.
If I go back to bed I might have another hour of sleep.  In Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron recommended daily creative writing, writing without the editor, just sharing whatever was on the mind. I called it ‘squeezing the puss out of the brain’.  In analysis it’s called free association.  Right now I’m troubled by these self selected ‘activists’ and their ‘group think’ cronies ,  Why can’t anybody see the merit in hewers of wood and carriers of water.  Instead we have these money grabbing resource sucking ideologues but such is a kind of capitalism.  Most of the non profits only profit those that make them.  They lack the true respectability of a real corporation that must show value beyond self aggrandizement.  But really, if I go back to sleep I might wake up more hopeful.  I could pry and meditate and read holy borks. That’s certainly a positive use of time and then one feels guided by the silence within.
Gratitudes lists are good. Thank you God for everything.  Really. Thank you for everything. Help me to appreciate more your wonder and all your myriad manifestations. Help me to love as you love.  Guide me today in all my activities. Overcome my world weariness.  Lessen my pain.  Sing to me Lord. Let me hear the sweetness of your voice in my inner ear.  Help me know your laughter in the essence of my being. Help me share your love. As St. Francis says, let me be your channel.  It’s Samhain and All Hallow’s Eve.  Let me reach out with my being to touch those departed, my father, mother, aunts and uncles, grandparents, friends and pets. Let me this day know the closeness of those once nearer in this space.  I love you all more with age. I love you all who are departed and thank you for all the love and lessons you shared.  I am remembering too the Halloweens and costumes and parties and fun and parents and schools and friends and silliness and laughter.  We had so much fun with the girls all those youthful decades and the dances and the music.  Thank you lord for all the hallows eves.  Thank you for this summer and the harvests and the harvests and the harvests.

Emmett Fox wrote for this day:
The Consecrated Life
Of what doest the consecrated life exist?  Your life is a consecrated one when you are ready at all times to do the will of God - when you are willing and anxious that God may be fully expressed through you, through your thoughts, words and deeds, during every hour of the day. You are not concerned with the questions of results.  Results belong to God.
“Here am I; send me” (Isaiah 6.8)