Adventure - dreams

I am sleeping in my brother’s home with my sister in law and nephew, along with three dogs.

I feel that our souls compress among others and expand the fewer humans there are.  I felt most expansive in the Yukon, most compressed in cities like New York, London, Istanbul, Kuala Lampur. The experience of being a thousand miles from others solo sailing in the Pacific was palpably so. The density of human consciousness changes one, bears down on them, creates a heaviness.  

I love the Czek book, ‘the incredible lightness of being’.   I  have a psychologist ballet dancer friend in New York whose joie de vivre seemed to lift her from the heaviness of humanity despite her living and working in the centre of the city.  Personally I feel the press of humanity and have all my life felt solace in the escape to the country.  

In recovery the social component is becoming a part of the human race again. Alcohol and drugs isolate and disconnect the individual from the group.  Our traumas do the same.  The intrusive thoughts and the feelings of infestation and alienesss don’t shake easily.  When you sleep with the devil or play with sulphur that scent lingers.  After being raped and betrayed and rejected and lied to I felt paranoid, closed, unsafe.  I have gone to the wilderness to heal. But in recovery the aim is to regain the comfort in community.  The monks of old knew this.  Today I go to meetings of others in recovery.  I believe the church was and in some places remains a place where you can ‘lay your burdens down’.  Yet too many there have a hierarchy of sins.  The gluttonous and avaricious look down on the lustful and angry.  

I dream often of a heavenly place which reminds me thoroughly of the Greek island Santorini.  The buildings and rooms are white. The climate is idyllic. The people and me are all like those in my college and university years. The singleness of purpose is higher learning. There’s a quality of Godliness, that essence of Magister Ludi.  It’s welcoming and we are mingling with adults and history and yet our common purpose of celebration brings us together as war and necessity are described as doing. There seems no past but only the moment. There are many mansions and many rooms and we can come and go to classes and feasts and activities, sports, dance, games.  I always think of this as heaven.  There is passion and love but I’m mostly arriving alone and joining the community which is fully welcoming.  Some times I see my mother, ex lovers, father and uncles and grandparents. They are just more familiar.

In the Tibetan Book of the Dead the teachings is we reincarnate again and again but not alone rather as a member of a caste of a thousand or so. Each person plays a role till all the roles are taken.  The whole collection of family and society binaries are played out like master and slave, parent and child, murderer and murdered all to be played out against in the next collective unconscious dance of consciousness.  Now reincarnation was a teaching of Judaism and Christianity till the Nicene Creed and intellectually it didn’t matter in the time of the ‘cloud of unknowing’.  We simply played our part the best we could and there were no end of rehearsals.  Everything was one day at a time and no rush.  Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Gandhi, Marx , the whole group of them were waiting till the last of us came home.  Maya was seen as veils and creations were infinite as stars.  The one became many and the many became one.

I also dream of another place that’s here in the west where we are all gathering in large groups in the woods and day lakes in the rural region. I remember the gatherings , the Strawberry Mountains Peace and Love Festival, or San Francisco dancing in the streets, love painted on my forehead in luscious red lipstick and flowers in my hair. The Rainbow festivals continue.  Then there’s the camp outs and sweat lodges and RV Parks and church camps and YMCA and motorcycle rallies. These gatherings are in  another dream and they are like the market place in Instabul or the labyrinth of shops in Bombay or Tokyo. This place seems to have money and ‘stuff’ and ‘experiences’.  It’s a bit like a circus and I’m again in that pivotal age of passage from adolescence to adult hood.  There’s a bit more disorderl and chaos.  I imagine this is closer to hell or purgatory but it’s exciting.

Last night I dreamed I was in this place and I’d had the content of my wallet stolen. I didn’t feel afraid just that I then had to find those contents. This week we’d gone for dinner and I’d left my iPhone and credit cards, license etc in the car.  Graeme found them for me and brought them back to the restaurant. I wasn’t afraid just annoyed at the time I foresaw I’d need to take to restore my ‘state’.  Like the time I lost my iPhone in the Seattle Airport on the way to New York.  Thanks to Apple I was able to get a new phone in Manhattan and have the information reloaded from the Cloud. A few hours detour from my schedule restored the ‘state’.  I felt the same in the dream but it felt like. I was at this reception without a tie or something similar.

In the heavenly Santorini like place I felt that no one would notice if I was naked and there were those who might be walking about as such. We mostly wore white togas like Romans did and there was never any need for currency as all appeared free like an all expenses included vacation where as the ‘other place’ was more like ‘the world’. It was darker to and people wore all manner of clothing western and cultural. There seemed to be no commonness of purpose and individually there was a self seeking which all manner of individual pleasure being offered almost like a booths.  I imagine the medieval art and literature depictions of Dante. 

Buddha said Desire is the root of all suffering. The idea of attachment is the source of pain. C. S. Lewis said stop looking for God in the wall.  The cult classic Lazy Man’s Guide to Englightenment by Thaddeus Golas focused on acceptance, love and enlightenment.  Positive psychology today describes ‘joy’.  Jesus taught ‘do not be afraid’ and the idea of Milton’s devil was the angel that preferred to watch his shadow than turn to face the light of God.  This disconnections or what 12 step programs call the ‘ego’ is the problem.  

In both dreams which are recurring there is no army war or police presence.  In both the meeting and greeting and sharing is like the idealized ‘savage’ tribes of middle european consciousness.  The glorified Islanders of Hawaii before they ate Cook.  The simplistic projection of the adolescent idealistic mind that doesn’t know the superstition and self absorption or self centered ness of the primitive mind. Courage is doing the right thing in spite of fear while there is the idealized notion of ‘fearlessness’ popular with those who have a similar thought of ‘pain free bodies’ but they haven’t treated the third degree burns of a person lacking nerve endings so they have no warning system.

In lucid dreaming one can intervene in their own dream and last night wandering about obsessed with my wallet and identity and credit cards I stepped out of that was in my truck and camper doing 360 degree turns down a road nearly missing cars and cranes and coming to a stop without hitting anything now with my whole house wheels and wallet and crowds but an amazing lesson is Christ carding for the falling bird. There I’d been like so many times on the verge of an horrendous crash and been snatched out harms’ way by ‘luck’.  I don’t believe in ‘luck’ but rather called that ‘God acting anonymously’.  

Constantine removed reincarnation from the Creed. I wonder what it is about reincarnation that makes the most prideful to want to have their vision of the afterlife and the means to achieve it and the ‘rules’ of this game of life as their. Of course there’ ‘control’.  I watched King Charles and the pomp and celebration of the Throne Speech and was amused to think that this was the surviving descendent of the Medieval Knights tradition.  I saw that the organization of society was the same in Azerbaijan with Romance and Chivalry the same as the Shield Wall days of Rome.  I loved Ender’s Game by Orion Scott Card.  

There is only now and only God and today with the lifelike computer game and animation and holographic realities and AI people are imagining with a whole other robustness.  I’m continuing in my gypsy mode, healer, shaman, author, philosopher, scientist, poet, dancer. I don’t know where I’m going other than ‘in’ and yet I feel I’m ‘okay’. I’ve a friend in ‘Jesus’.  His teaching was summed as ‘Love God and Love your neighbor as yourself.”  The present day emphasis is on being ‘kind’.  Kind and kindred suggest that the ‘other’ is ‘you’.  I am he, I am he, blessed spirit I am he is the Swami song of enlightenment. 

I love that Adam’s in Dick Slaterly’s Holistic Detective Agency needs Thor and the old English Gods and finds them in nursing homes talking about the clean sheets and lovely buxom efficient ladies cleaning the rooms and the regular good food . He doesn’t want to go out to the wild with cold weather and harsh days.  I supposed we forfeit freedom and individuality for conformity. The offer of the WEF and AGENDA 21 15 minute city is the well cared for comfortable cage.  Soylent Green and all the futuristic series of the ‘benign dictator’ who morphs into Nero or Caligula.  We have our new leaders , the Traditionalist Pope declaring all sex but marriage baby making sex unblessed.  L’chaim.  The war of weaponized jihadi children of Islam being fought out with Christian and Secular societies paying for those ‘fucking for Allah’ as aetheists don’t reproduce.  The age of the Trudeau selfie and the claim that mass migration is necessary for GDP is just disruption and control.  Scab labor . Scab voters.  Divide and conquer.  Favoritism for the in and exclusion for the out while all sing kumbaya and offer peace in the legendary deceit of politics and war.

In both my dreams there is peace.  I’ve not lived in war.  I felt the presecnece of God at Meteoria and Cappadocia and imagined those with the hoards like urban gangs surrounding and passing by.  The laws and police didn’t allow me to protect my self or my home and I feel safer in motion.  My brother lived here and trusted his society and felt safe from maurauders.  I miss that peace. Even as a child I feared invaders in the Cold War and felt my Dad would protect us.  Now I’m the old one and my back aches and I’m weakened with age . At the target range the tremor in my arm has made a pistol inaccurate for me. I must depend on a shot gun and laughed to see Stratham in his latest shoot em up movie using just that. 

Thank you God for dreams and mysteries and all the entertainment and hide and seek with Jesus. Help me to focus on the light and walk upright and forward. Protect me and my family from evil and harm.  Thank you for Grace.  Thank you Jesus. 

Yuma - love

I ward off fear every day.  I like that religion is for those who have never been to hell and spirituality for those who have been and don’t want to go back.  My very life and being and mind were threatened by a satanic man .  I knew fear. I’d seen the torture provided in the name of justice. I’d witnessed the grossest abuse of power.  I was afraid. I was experiencing ‘incomprehenible demoralization’ and cried out to Jesus.  I had felt beyond Grace. I felt every path I took was blocked. I thought ‘how could all these bad things be happening to a good guy like me’.  I felt the depth of betrayal and knew terror and despair.  I cried out to Jesus.  I cried out to God.  

“My God  My God why hast thou forsaken me?” “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’  I was in the long dark night of the soul.  

I survived. Later I’d be in a hurricane in winter at sea, days inside of the washing machine like sail boat unable to find comfort, totally at the mercy.  I  felt then the  same physically as I’d felt imprisoned by enemies.  This time I did not feel I was alone or that I had done wrong. I felt close with God.  I’d not turned my back on Jesus but knew he was with me. I had faith and trust in the Lord.  I’d clung to him in the darkest of times and been rewarded.  I’d confessed my sins. I was no longer alone and alienated. I’d been the Prodigal Son returning to my family. I’d sought the guidance and leadership of  Christian missionary doctors and Christian professors, and spiritual friends.  I’d begun the path back to the god of my understanding. I once again sought to know daily God and God’s will for me. I prayed daily and eventually ceaselessly as St. Paul had taught. I meditated as I had long ago learned.  I lived.  I humbly turned my will and my life over to God. I accepted I was powerless over alcohol and drugs and that my life had become unmanageable. I found the lost strength and hope within me. I attended church and meetings and studies.  I pilgrimaged to the Holy Lands and prayed in the places of worship of the holy.  I literally let go and let God.  

I contrast the time I have today with that turning point decades ago. I’d put my faith in romance back then and looked to sex and drugs and rock and roll for answers. Today I talk directly with God and ask for his forgiveness and guidance.  Each day I begin the day in gratitude and ask for the presence of Jesus Christ in my life.  I pray to God and the saints of all religions . I am a seeker and yet trust in the Hound of Heaven. I know the footprints in the sand and see the hand prints of God in my life. Theres’ a fourth dimension I often stumble into. . That flow or consciousness that is beyond all human understanding, the transscendence.   I fear at times I am a spiritual consumer seeking the nectar of God. It is a journey and destination. I accept I am in this life and enjoy food,  .exercise, sleep and fellowship that  is itself Godly.  I live in this world but I ‘ m not of this world.  I am a child of God but I am vigilant, less naive, older. 

I dreamed of being given marijuana by a taxi driver last night. I took the package and woke.  I still have dreams like that, not using, but as C.S. Lewis say thinking that God could be found in the wall of his creation. I want direct contact with God . The old tantric path was thoroughly explored. The journey is forward not back.  It served its time back when.  Now it has no future.  I don’t know why it came to me out of my memories, as a tease or temptation.   I imagine it was because I ‘ve been watching 007 and revisiting the 60’s.  I’m remembering youth and love and dancing in the streets of San Francisco with flowers in our hair.  I’m reading a book on the history of Northern Africa and remembering being in the Kazbah, me and Bobby McGee. I’m grieving my youth.   

Today I’m old and life has been a grand adventure with my Doystoeyski encounter with the sophisticated devil who offered me a choice. I look the road I did and the one he din’t not know. Now I’m feeling sometimes that I’m in Heaven’s waiting room but I know that’s decades a head.  It’s the weariness that assails me now sometimes.  I remember the single footprints in the sand then. I say All shall be well, all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. I remember Hal’s teachings on an Attitude of Gratitude. I try to get over myself.  I try to keep my head in the same room as my ass.  I know God is in the present. 

It’s best then I go for a walk.  My dog is always happy to walk with me. He’s a great teacher.  

Thank you God for rescuing me from myself. Thank you God for loving me as father and mother and giving me a father and mother who loved and taught me love. . Thank you God for this life of mystery and adventure. Thank you for the journey, companions and memories.  Help me do my best today, Grant me serenity, courage and wisdom. 

25

It’s a gratitude day. 25 years clean and sober.  I take my cake this coming week at my home group Burnaby Men’s with George insisting he’ll bring the cake.  I joke and say we celebrate the sacraments of cake and coffee of Bill and Bob.  It’s a long fast.  Thankfully the hang over goes in weeks to months though we clean up the ‘wreckage of the past’ for sometimes years’, making amends and just living sober.  

I was a binge drinker . Much of my life was intensely dedicated but I was attracted to the ‘chaos’.  I married women who shared my pleasures.  My family was orderly by comparison.  So much alcohol and mental illness with those I was attracted to or what I attracted.  I wasn’t called ‘Wild Bill’ because I was tame.  Always the first to dance on tables and do anything on a dare.  

I remember at Homewood Treatment Centre, Graeme Cunningham saying to me ‘some people run with the cheetah’s and some people run with the turkeys, you’ve been running with the turkeys’.  My dad called them ‘fair weather friends’.  He was what men called a ‘straight shooter’.  I regret that I didn’t listen more to him.  He transformed from the stupidest man I knew as a genius to the greatest man I knew as an adult.

When I stopped drinking, smoking tobacco and cannabis, so much of that life paled. We joke and say an alcoholic 10 is a  4 with a 6 pack.  Just so much of what people do when they’re drinking has no appeal sober. Like staying up late. I love the dawn now.  I love waking refreshed and alert. I can’t imagine why I would suffer a hangover and then go back and do it again.  

I can’t imagine today ‘not living life on life’s terms’.  I don’t want to be ‘dope dumb’ on marijuana joking about how stupid we talk even if it is like taking valium and relaxing. I don’t want to knee jerk emotions of alcohol and I never want the lack of peace of mind or the ability to appreciate a natural high.  Jesus said we must be like children again to enter heaven.  I remember thinking pot was coming out of my fat cells when I regained the natural love of life and joy de vivre. 

 Do you now remember the joyful times of childhood? a celebrity friend in recovery said to me.  

Suddenly I remembered myself playing baseball in a radiant green park with happy people and a glorious sun.  When we are depressed we remember depression because we are in the valley of our minds. Only on the peaks can we see all the joy of the truly high places as well as the lows and valleys of life.  Drugs and alcohol are depressing.

Asked to remember all the things in life I was proud of and would like to be remembered for I realized that the vast majority of them occurred sober, family and church and childhood, hunting and fishing, the great romances, provincial gymnastic and volleyball competitions,  dance training and competitions, theatre performances,  cycling across Europe, study of history and literature, studying  chemistry and anatomy, medical school training, working as a country gp, delivering babies, flying doctor through the sub arctic, residency training in community medicine and psychiatry. Then psychiatry and another divorce and alcohol abuse. Then work continued but my recreation increasingly was associated cigarettes, reefers and wine.  I’d gone camping to tent and fish but now looked forward to drinking a bottle of wine and smoking a joint around the fire. There was a shift.

At first it’s fun , then it’s fun and trouble, then it’s trouble..  I remember it being trouble sailing down to Mexico and then in Mexico, Instead of sailing around the world my partner and I stayed in margaritaville.  There were good times.  Sailing was spectacular.  Playing blues in the band was fun. Spear fishing and snorkelling and sun was great but it was going nowhere . When we came home she wouldn’t get help.  I didn’t want to be around her friends or my friends that drank and drugged. I’d liked her because she had her own group of dealers and prayers . Her’s tended to have university degrees but were no less ‘friends in high places and low places’ while I had friends who were interesting the sober ones in high place and the ones who crank and did dope professionals and bikers and rural.  

She would get so impaired she couldn’t work. I’d party on the weekend but I’d go to work and I was seeking help seeing professionals and told that my problems wasn’t the joint or wine I drank but the impaired wife doing cocaine. The lying and destruction increased . My unforgettable line was , “I can go to work and help. a hundred people or stay home and help one person. I can’t do both.”  I’d been years of covering for her.  I was so tired of being told a man would handle his wife. She was not a pretty site drunk and stoned though we’d both been younger. We were passed the magic forty year old place where you’re expect to be able to get your act together.  She lied and lied and lied.  It was impossible.  I never liked cocaine but she sure did.  I didn’t like the people around cocaine either. I’d liked the hippy wine and reefer world but this cocaine crowd was mean. My former friends who had fallen to cocaine were the same.  We joke that an alcoholic will steal your wallet but an addict will not only steal your wallet they’re help you look for it.

I just couldn’t carry on. I was working harder than I’d ever trying to cover for her when she suddenly refused to get out of bed forever or see a doctor. I knew this couldn’t go on.  She’d had a grow operation and with friends of her. She’d moved all the money I made into her accounts except for what required my signature.  In the end it was apparent that she’d been financially scheming for a year.  I remember thinking I’m trying to make this work and she’s been stabbing me in the back.  Separation and divorce.  The times she almost killed me and the times drunk when she almost killed us both. I saved our lives so many times, the worst being when I went off the bow wave of a tanker coming out of San Francisco harbour in the fog having again messed up the radar and lied when I asked if she’d touched it.  

I don’t want to ever be back in a relationship with someone drunk and stoned. I don’t want to ever be drunk and stoned again. I can see her behaviour clearly but only know that I was a mirror. I loved in AA the ‘restore us to saniety’ clause. I never realized how insane I was but I certainly saw how insane she was, yet I was with her and our friends were too. It was a bad sit com, something out of a Kardasian bizarro world.

I remember thinking that my life had gone wrong when I was sexually abused by my professor, when I was a psychiatry resident, when I committed adultery when I saw so much learning to understand the insane.  I thought when was my life right and remembered church and prayer and meditation. I was going to return to Winnipeg to talk to the people there I knew and trusted.  I was going to leave psychiatry and maybe go back to being a country doctor or just get out of medicine all together.  The psychiatrists I knew were drunks and addicts and as I learned the depths of my wife’s deceit and even the deceit of my therapist and authorities in general I became paranoid.  My fair weather friends stole from me as did my ex wife. Manly I’d taken nothing of hers and we’d lived on my income as most of our times she’d been a student and took her own income.  I remember thinking that as a man I was powerless and that maybe I could become a woman because I was really tired of having all the responsibility and accountability, all the blame and none of the praise.  I was utterly confused too. I’d spent 20 years with women to have a family but after marriage I learned they didn’t want children.  They wanted a daddy.  Their fathers were alcoholic or absent.  But God were they beautiful, brilliant and fun. I forfeited joy and peace for fun and drama. Not a bad trade when young but time marches on.  

I had been in church as a boy with my brother and mother and father and that was the oasis I aimed for. A Christian friend asked if he could help and offered to rent me his trailer . He didn’t smoke dope and rarely drank.  I returned to church.  She’d refused to go. In psyhiatriy the psychoanalytic professors hearing I meditated as a disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda and a follower of Christian Dr. Carl Ridd I was summarily told that meditation was harmful and must stop and that if I wished to continue my training with these two psychiatrists I had to leave community medicine and stop taking Christian studies courses while in residency.  I had left surgery and family medicine and now was told if I wanted to be a psychiatrist I needed to be a devotee of the megalomaniac analyst I who I frankly admired.  Psychiatrists then were a weird mix, mensch’s and devils.  All were charming and highly skilled. We learned from the psychopaths , narcissists and borderlines. We walk miles in their moccasins and they get under our skin. We are as much artists of the mind as scientists. I was naive and vulnerble.  I was also obedient.  Thise who rise high in systems much have this trait of obedience as the rebels get pruned.  Systems are like military organizations.  They’re like religious organizations.  The abuse of power is ubiquitous.  

I was willing to stay a doctor sober and clean. I was encouraged to go to AA and asked my friend, Kirk, who I trusted if he trusted AA. Kirk and I and been spiritual disciples our whole live, he a follower of Prem and me a Christian doctor who’d taken a detour in better living with chemistry, the tantra yoga,Daost path.  

“I think AA is a good group. I know people who belong and they’ve done well.  I think it’s good that you’ve stopped drugs and alcohol.  I didn’t think that was making you happy. I’m sorry that you and your wife have separated but I never thought she and you were that compatible.  But yes I think AA is a good thing.”  

I’d stopped drinking and left the drug crowd and was detoxing on a hillside with my Bible and my shotgun. The bikers I’d been staying with who stole my money, possessions and vehicle were threatening to come by one night and kill me for the registration.  They never came by but I saw they’d sold my vehicle without registration. I learned that I obeyed laws but so many didn’t .I was so naive. I’d also have all these ‘god’ moments. Events were constantly synchronistic.  Good came to me. I was free of the baggage and suddenly out of the dark I was in the light and it was uncanny how my relationship with God restored. I’d actually thought I was beyond God’s love.  

Bernie showed up in his new truck, the ex wife had destroyed my truck, I was riding a bicycle American Express wanted to claim, my ex wife having with her lawyer and her millions used up all my money on lawyers who said ‘she and her lawyer are refusing to meet so they’re using seige techniques to destroy you and ruin you financially.’  I’d given the last of my money to the lawyer to free my accounts to pay the rent. I was getting charity and food from the church and Christian friends. I went to welfare and the woman screamed at me saying that a ‘doctor can’t get welfare…welfare is for the poor people…you rich men can’t expect poor people to pay you….get out of my office…you’ll get nothing here.”  Every day was humiliation. I’m still hoarding food as again I was hungry like when I left my father’s home.

So i went to church and I went to AA and I trusted Christians .  I trusted godly people. I was lied to by the College of Physicians and Surgeons. I was lied to by psychiatrists but I’d been a family physician , a member of the family physician of canada before becoming a specialist in medicine and psychiatry. I found myself trusting family physicians and Godly psychiatrists. I’d extend my trust to Sam Sussman , an Orthodox Jew. I had named the psychiatrist who raped me drunk and stoned out of the blue and left field this powerful connected man ‘made me his woman’ and ‘bred me’ as my engineer friend liked to put it.  He was a misogynist.  I am still confused.  I was the wife in my marriages to female doctors doing the cooking and cleaning as well as working each day. My colleagues most had wive ‘s and mothers of their children and they went home to the traditional division of labour but I was married to female doctors and never had any support. They did school , I did the wifely duties, and worked two jobs for their ‘desires’ and maintained us while they brought in stipends.  I realized that the guy who said marriage was institutionalize prostitution was talking to me. I was destitute after divorce and they were wealthy yet I’d spent the marriage helping them academically literally dragging them to the library to study and sitting beside them as a study coach, I was ahead of them. But women repeatedly put me down projecting their anger at their husbands and boyfriends who somehow got ‘served’. I never got served’.  I cooked and cleaned and worked.  As a psychiatrist I was most interested in the escorts and their pimps. I was fascinated having pimps as patients and learning how they trained ‘their bitches’.  Exact opposite to all I did.

I read Gottman of Love Lab fame and learned that I was a master at verbally winning battles but lost the war because my wives held onto resentments.  They had horrendous relationships with their alcoholic families and their horendously abusive mothers and I’d had this straight arrow ex military engineer who supervised hundreds of men and a religious Baptist loving mother who had wanted a daughter but had me and couldn’t have more children. I failed her because while I was apparently the prefect child I left home. I preferred running with the pack and had this spiritual path that took me away from the safety and love of home. I truly was the prodigal son.  I came home after I left and then left again. My parents were always there for me. I feel sorry for so many who haven’t had that. The trouble was always my pride.  

Pride is the original sin.  Alcohol and addiction create the mental state of ‘egomania wth inferiority comp;lexes’.

I’m thankful to day because of all the people who helped me to surrender to God and let go of self. The Swami song say ‘mother father have I none I am he, I am he, blessed spirit I am he’.  In my training in theology I learned that there is God and me and if I wanted to know God more fully I must let go of ‘me’.  I had to learn to trust God. The last 25 years have been good. Better and better.

Sober I went to AA with the former head of UBC psychiatry. I continued to see Christian Psyvhiatrists who helped me deal with the addicts and alcoholics in government who abused their power rather frequently. I was blessed to know the lawyer Jonathan Meadows and lived in this great psychodrama of my life.  I was often not the centre state. The play was called William Hay but there were all these bad actors trying to make it all about them. Meanwhile I was listening to the big black Milton who in AA said he pasted a message on his mirror ‘you’re looking at the problems’ to remind him it’s his perception that is the problem.  AA taught me that alcoholism was first a ‘thinking disease’. I had thought I had thought I was spiritual but I’d worshiped the demon drink and demon pot and demon tobacco.  Now I thank God for the early deep breaths I take in the morning. Now I’m writing gratitude lists each morning thanking the Lord for my dog Madigan, my long term friend and lover Laura and all the precious people in my life. I also thank God for the ‘enemies’. The College of Physicians and Surgeons resident pervert was a trial as is the PM today. I was so thankful for the fourth step in AA and Bernie, Hank and Father John who helped me work thought my resentments and fears. I was so hurt and angry and frightened and betrayed. I really wasn’t a good man or a good husband. I probably was a pretty good doctor. I joke and say I fear a class action suit from the 100 babies I delivered who get together and find they share a thumb printed on their forehead because I held too tight guiding them into life. I also think that any day the thousands of people I convinced not to suicide will sue me for false promise.  Yet I did my best and thanks to the amazing teachers and those who went before me and the College of Physiccians and Surgeons, and the Royal College of Physiians and Surgeons and the Canadian Medical Protective Associations and the Society of Addiction Medicien and Christianity and AA and frankly and friends and dogs and cats I’ve done okay.

I’m alive and 25 years ago I so suffered indescribable and utter ‘incomprehensible demoralization.  I had such anxiety and was told by an old internist in a late night meeting of International Doctors in AA, “anxiety is a measure of your distance from God and a measure of your humanity.’  I know God is an experience and not an idea. I used to say I knew Christ and Christ consciousness but today I know Jesus as a friend. God is good all of the time.  

I continued to hunt big game with my friend Bill Mewhort shooting moose and deer and bear with him. I continued to sail and sailed solo on the SV GIRI San Francisco to Hawaii in winter through a hurricane. Thanks to Dr. Willie Gutowski I worked a couple of years in Saipan in sobriety so enjoying meetings on the beach with Frank beneath palm trees watching the sunset.  I loved learning from Phillip another sailor doctor and wise man.  I still struggled with the inclusivity of Christian churches caught between the LGBT include church of Peter and the exclusive church of my evangelical friends. I loved studying theology with the purest deepest Catholic psychiatrist John whose paraplegia he may as well have called his ‘glad gethseame’ like the catholic priest friend of Bill Wilson.  All the Christians I knew and admired were living inspirations as they were persecuted in Canada like the disciples of Jesus were.  I was blessed to go to Israel and make so many trips to conferences all over the US and be with the finest of men like Nady and Art and Carroll and Dick and men and women who are now dying or dead. I loved my friend George in recovery , another physician who would go for dinner with me before an AA meeting as we’d talk about baseball and life and love.  I’ve been truly blessed despite being a kafetch and having the worst tendency to slip into rabbit holes and whine with self pity. My military friend who told me ‘you’ve got one foot in the future and one foot in the past and you’re pissing on your day, get your head in the same room as your ass’ also said ‘get down off the cross we can use the wood’.  

Recovery is ancient healing journey. Just for today was a profound awakening for me as I felt that God , omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent was here and now and for me to be with god I had to be present. The journey I ‘d begun as a child and later continued in church and school and temple and love came to this point of intersection in the cloud of unknowing at the point of Stellate reality and Interdimensional experience with each day a beginning. I pray to know God more and to know God’s will more. I have quiet time.  I meditate. I do right livelihood . I listen to the spiritual teaching of the Bible and the Big Book of AA and Kurtz book, Spirituality of Imperfection, the great teachings of the world. Paramahansa Yolanda taught “I bow to the saints of all religions’.  I never thought of a hell and didn’t believe in the tribalism religions that said ‘our little group wins and your group loses’ but I liked Pascal’s wager and Eben Alexander the neurosurgeons ‘proof of heaven’.  I’ve known sacred and supernatural.

I would love more. I would learn to be more loving not in that sentimental way but in the way of the God of Gods.  God is all. God made the devil and free will and fate are central We like to choose free will when we do something good and blame the other guy but refuse to accept fate when ‘shit happens’.  It’s all ego.  God is good all of the time. The people like the man who abused me or the ex wife who lied and stole or the college administrator whose perversion obscured her vision , all of these people were bicycle lessons like the soldier who held me hostage threatening to kill me, or the native who shot at me and all those antagonists in my play of life with me as the protagonist.  

I’m so thankful to be sober so that I have been able to live this good life with knowing people like I do,  I struggle now with gender, sexuality and aging. At the point when I’m Shakespearean with desire greater than performance no longer a consequence of alcohol but rather a product of physically hurting and slowing. I struggle to stay fit when I was always active and climbing mountains to experience the joy above the clouds with a sober friends revelling in the beauty of existence.  I loved seeing the great works of arts and museums in Edinburg Oxford and London and Paris this spring taking Laura as a companion but missing Madigan yet knowing Karen and Belinda people I could trust with my puppy while I was away.  I can trust today and people don’t lie and betray me. I know that expectations are preformed resentments and I don’t have the unrealistic expectations I had younger.  I’m more mature. Who would have guessed. But I do miss the theatre and dance world and find so many older people still pretentious and tedious.  

I’m becoming ornery with age.  I’m happy alone.  I’m less afraid.  I worry I might drink or smoke dope again and fall into the psychosis of believing the false is true.  

It’s 25 years. A quarter century, much longer than the entire time I smoked or drank. I still don’t know what I will do when I grow up.  Right now I have to go have my hair done and the biggest challenge is whether to wear a skirt or slacks.  I’m having a lot of first world problems and very few third world problems .  I’m full of gratitude and know grace.  I really am blessed but often don’t know what next. I miss the Sturges expedition.  I knew I wanted to ride my Harley there and back like I knew I wanted to visit the church’s of Ethiopian and see the black Jesus.  I knew I wanted to go to Athens and the Vatican and Mexico City pyramids ,  I’ve known what it is I have to do but now I’m able to plan the day but don’t have any real idea for much into the future. I felt last winter I was kedging my life off the sand bars of Covid and the WHO . I’m aware that Trudeau is the devil incarnate and that I’m at best a hobbit in the spiritual warfare of today but it’s hard to see.  I’m in the cloud of unknowing and just keep walking forward with Jesus.  

I need to be sober because the world is so crazy I need all my wits about me. I don’t want to be an ostrich that puts it’s head in the sand and doesn’t know who kicked it. The Donovan song, season of the witch and beatniks are out to make it rich makes me ware of my vulnerability.  I am learning to trust God more in old age. 

I’m thankful for sobriety and don’t believe I’d have achieved the long term sobriety that Vaillant of Harvard fame wrote so eloquently about without AA.  

I’ve a doctors in AA meeting tomorrow. So I know I’m looking forward to that. I’m continuing to work. I’m here. I’’m muddling along. I have a principle responsibility to Madigan who is dependent on me.  He’s a messy room mate.  

Thank you.  25 years. Thank you, Thank you God and as I learned in AA God works through people. Thank you.

I remember being tormented after I stopped drinking and smoking. I think the tobacco was as bad as the pot. I was in withdrawal for weeks to months, hiking all day and visiting a Christian psychiatrist, going to church, praying, meditating, writing, doing odd jobs to pay 

Tuesday, Thank you for waking me up God

Thanks to my doctors I’ve learned that stretching before getting out of bed reduces the sharp pains of getting out of bed, moving from horizontal to vertical and dealing with gravity.  My spine is better capable of doing the shift if I do some stretches before getting up, “Like a cat, ‘ she said.  

I saw the chiropractor and that dulled the pain. The sharp pain is what bothers me most. I can live with the dull pains and have for as long as I can remember. I was depressed I’m convinced because the background pain came to the foreground and reinforced my self pity.  Exercise helps it.  I’m best after swimming but kids have been in the pool this week. I get pool time like others get laundry time trying to find when no one is there.  I’m doing pretty good. Walking Madigan throughout the day is good too. I call him my dog physiotherapist.  He’s right now chewing on an old bone my foot found in the night a couple of nights back. Felt like a big Lego in the dark.

Laura wrote and said sun is promised this week.  I’m looking forward to backyard sun bathing.  

Frazerway RV continues to delay my camper repair.  It’s now 9 months of their corruption and incompetence.  Such a shame for a business to function that way and then expect perfection of doctors.  We’d have mass death in our communities if our doctors and nurses functioned as Frazerway RV Abbotsford.  It used to be Abbotsford was a Christian community but it’s anything but Christian at Frazerway RV.  Customer service is communist if anything.  I am convinced they vote Liberal by the failure to work.  I bought a defective unit from them and when an insurance claim exposed they’d sold me a defective unit they simply won’t repair it and to date have put nothing in writing. I’ve waited, turn the check 40 times 40.  Don’t express concern.  I am used to dealing with insane and psychopaths so I wait. Everyday they are more and more incompetence and bullying like Ottawa.  I wake thinking about the utter abuse.  I never would have thought in a thousand years when I bought the unit and heard all the promises and claims of Frazerway that I would be without a camper for 9 months working through covid and now continuing to work with more and more people struggling with the increasing number of bullies and despearate sociopaths .  Each day I hear of people struggling with inflation, cost of food, evictions and I am distracted by my own demonic attack by Frazerway RV obviously possessed as they continue to communicate with callous arrogance. I suspect as always it’s the drugs the staff are on. This level of offensiveness almost always indicates drug abuse and alcoholism. I deal with it every day in my work and find that if a person is an asshole, you just have to add alcohol or drugs to make the person an asshole turbocharged.

 Meanwhile I figure like Jung teaches that I am attracting this and am trying to detach with love.  I pray for the lost souls of Frazerway RV.  It’s a country in a world of fear led by the devils own Justin Trudeau the incompetent corrupt perverted dictator wannabe .  As Bob Dylan sings ‘there’s blood on the saddle’ and the world has gone crazy.  

I am exhausted selling life each day to the suicidal, wrestling with the devil trying to have a person stop the slow suicide of addiction.  It takes all my energy and at the end of the day I’m utterly exhausted.  Meanwhile I’ve errands to do and distract myself with whatever works.  

The war is real.  

The Wuhan virus continues psychologically.  The damage to families and connection is only now rebuilding.  Deaths continue.  

I’m finding it harder and harder to reassure people. I’m an eternal optimist and know that people like me who believe in the success of patients have a 30% greater success rate than those who don’t.  I’m feeling burnt out despite my strategic R&R and the use of all the things I recommend. But the back pain,, I was in a plane crash on a mercy mission as a flyin doctor to the northern reserves,  Later my car was hit by yahoos as I was driving to a hospital to deliver a baby. Thank God my colleague could replace me.  I was in an emergency myself being assessed that day.  A guy going through a stop sign hit me as I was bicycling down a hill on my way to church and truly I thought I was going to be paraplegic after i flew over the roof of the car and landed on my back behind him.  I am so thankful to UBC and the doctor who returned saying that the Ctscan showed my spine was fine.  I am reassured by technology on occasion. I know all pain as psychosomatic and feel ever in a fight between life and death, sensitive as I am to the yin and yang.  

It’s all light and darkness. Without pain I’d not know pleasure.

I’m truly blessed. I’ve known so much joy and wonder in my life. I’ve had such depth of joy in study. I’m get such glee reading an learning. I’ve such fun in nature. It’s such a joy to be there helping a person ‘change’ from dying to living. I love watching the light come on in their eyes. I enjoyed watching the spirits return to bodies in the ICU.  I feel auras expand when the hopelessness goes and life returns. It’s a real pleasure to be with people helping them out of the rabbit holes.  I’ve walked so many miles in so many moccasins I don’t judge. I was told by Jesus to Love God and Love my neighbour as myself. I ‘m learning everyday to be more loving.  I’m living more in the moment each day. I’m evaluating truth more clearly by separating hearsay and disinformation. I’m struggling but doing the heavy lifting of forcing my mind to turn from the propaganda and loud brass bands of the bullies to the wee small voices and the cclestial bells.  It’s amazing I’m still alive. I never thought I’d survive so many times in my life when all I had was faith and grace was ever kind and generous.  

Thank you Jesus for your presence and teaching.  Help me and those I know and love another day of this sacred journey. Thank you for Madigan and thank you for Laura. 

Saturday Hunt, Success and Failure, God is Good all of the time

At 130 am I awoke in the camper, chilly, with alarms beeping.  I got out of bed.  I found that there was no electricity except enough to power the propane sensor alarm. I went out side and turned off the propane. It didn’t stop the alarm.  I cut the wires.  I can’t stand alarms when I’m trying to think. 

I plugged in the truck cable and ran the truck. Electricity ran to the outside lights of the camper but didn’t do anything to the interior. I flicked the fuses. I pressed the electricity reset. Nothing. I couldn’t look it up on utube because I didn’t have wifi or cell beyond one cell line which allowed me to text the dealer and let him know my situation and ask for advice, knowing I’d get an answer in the morning at earliest

I was delighted to have the manual bar to ratchet down the happy jacks. I”d worried about that as there was no power for them. Having tested I could lower them I was relieved.

It wasn’ that cold. A chill wind but just sweater weather. I used the toilet but without a water pump I had to use a Nestle bottled water to flush.  I climbed back into bed. I was cozy with the comforter and Hudson Bay blanket.  I slept till 730.  I thought of coffee and Macdonald’s breakfast.  I could have gone for a morning hunt but decided I just wanted to get back to civilization.  I’d forgotten to bring my generator and thought I could buy one. I could buy new batteries. I could even drop off the camper and go home.  

I manually lowered the happy jacks.  I unloaded the gear from the Honda 420 Rancher ATV.  I loaded the ATV onto the trailer.  I tied everything down. It was comforting to load the dog into the truck and start her up.  I love my truck.  I drove off with the Argentinian 20 gauge over under and the Ruger stainless steel 30:06 rife. I road hunted back to the high way. It was something.

When I put the rifles in to the camper to drive onto the freeway I found that there was a dim light happening from the overhead and the refridgerator was showing numbers. I’d later realize I’d have to turn the propane on again. I did and fridge was working .In Hope I tried to buy a little generator.  Say 500 or a 1000, something small I could stow in the camper.  All they had were 2000 or more, no different than what I had and had left at home by accident.  I almost bought batteries but decided to wait. It looked like everything was working fine. I’d bought some fuses and a crimper at Lordco along with more flashlight batteries.  I still didn’t have water so I pulled out every fuse and checked it.  The water pump worked.  Don’t know what I did but it all worked now. 

I decided to head to Harrison Lake.  That was in number 2 zone so bucks and grouse were open.  I don’t get much holiday and needed a break so figured I’d continue on.  Mistake.

Somewhere between Lordco and camp I hit a bump and the whole camper smashed down. I didn’t know what it was .  But there was significant damage to the back corner either front the jack catching, it was up higher than the truck under carriage or just from the smashing up and down. The back stay had come off so it wasn’t held down,  

I camped by the river. A nice spot. Unloaded the ATV and packed it for camping.  Madigan was in his glory, jumping up on the seat and waiting there till I was ready to go, guns and packs and spare gas all loaded. Because I had this fear the day before that someone would break into my camper I bfought my laptop iPad and iPhone along with ny passport and vaccine I’d in the bag with me. I tied it onto the back of the ATV.

Sadly the place I ‘d wanted to hunt which I’d hunted in spring was closed. They had a gate up and sign, active logging.  So I drove onto the other logging road. It went right up the mountain and huge ravines were cut to stop flooding. I saw 4 grouse. 2 and 2 more and they all flew up into the trees and from there further.  Madigan liked all the action.

 I rode right up to the top and has the most spectacular view of Harrison lake.  On the way down I saw another grouse and this one I bagged.  Madigan is not ‘with it’ regarding grouse. I had to unleash him from his tangled two point tie downs.  So the bird had stopped flopping around .  I said ‘where is it’….‘git it’….and he didn’t know what I was talking about. I showed him the bird and he stepped on it before looking down and getting really excited,  We’d come across a couple more grouse that ran into the ditch but he wasn’t leaving the road except to follow me. I did but having had to untie Madigan and get the gun, that one was long gone.  

I used the spare gas before heading down. No deer . No bear.  But lots of fun.  Back at the camp I filled the tank and the spare tank and we headed out again, north.

I came across a logging trail which led into lots of bush …I drove through Wisteria/lilac  bushes and vines. I  got down into a river bed in dense woods and bush looking for a place to turn around. I finally did. Night coming on and worried I’d get lost.  Thankfully I found my way back to the road.  I hea ed off full speed on this wide open logging road, almost a gravel highway. The ATV did 60 km /hour on the flat.  I checked one short trail and then saw the river. Magnificent. I was heading up another short trail when I realized my bag with my laptops and passports was gone. It had fallen off. It was dusk already.  I retraced my steps at high speed and thank you Jesus! Hallelujah!, I found it in the deep bush muck I’d struggled through.  The handle on the bag must have  caught on something and pulled the bag out from under bungee cords.  Thank you Jesus!

I was ecstatic. It’s like those nights when I don’t get game but God helps me find my way home. Here was a find better than that. I just thought of all the trouble and cost I’d have losing my computer and passport and vaccine passport.  I was trying to keep it safe taking it with me. Like those times I hide things for safe keeping then can’t find them when I return.  I really felt God was taking care of me. 

It was dusk. I saw more grouse but they were running full blast ,  I had 2 grouse now though. I ‘d found my way out of the deep bush.  I had found back in and found my lap top and passport. Against that was a damaged camper I hope insurance will cover some of.

Along the ride back a guy shouted . I thought I was trailing something or  something was wrong.  Turns out this guy camping with friends are camped on the side of the road. He says, “I just wanted to ask if you had any cocaine. But with a dog I guess you don’t.  We came to party and ran out of stuff.’  I don’t know what having a dog has to do with cocaine but he had the idea that guys with dogs didn’t do cocaine. He had a girlfriend and buddies. 

“No don’t have any cocaine,”. I carried on on the ATV. I prefer natural highs. 

When I got back to the camper, once again, No electricity.

I’m sitting here in the relative warmth. It is warmer down by the lake than it was up at Coquahalla Summit.  It’s really quite balmy. I’m glad I found the candles.  I’d also charged up this iPad off the battery pack.  

The refridgerator is cold. There’s still ice in the freezer. I took out the bread , some drinks and the left over 2 smokies. I put the grouse in the freezer. The latest one’s  not even cleaned .The English weren’t big on cleaning right away. I’ll let it unthaw later.  

I’d thought to do the morning hunt but think I’ll probably do as I am doing mostly these years,  using the last day to pack up and travel,. I’m not far from Chilliwack.  I’m good at packing up. I’m not bothered by anything like I was once, I just go about tasks and solve the problems as they arise.  I don’t catastrophize or even focus on the negatives. It’s just a challenge. I feel when things go wrong like I ‘m back alone on the boat and have to fix it so I can go onl. The camper had been pretty reliable with some little glyches  but this is a major day with damage to.

The grouse are probably $1-2000 each.   What an adventure!.  This weekend seems like weeks of a holiday.  Getting to the tops of mountains on an ATV and seeing the magnificent views is incredible. All the quadding it high concentration and high risk up in the cliffs.  It’s all chiropractic in motion. Looking for deer, scoping hills, enjoying Madigan’s company.  Seeing the joy he takes in everything.  So much excitement.  From Thursday night to Saturday night it was a rush with one event after another and so much action. 

I’m looking forward to getting back to the ‘norm’ of work. I don’t hunt again till October and by then Far Out RV should have fixed the camper electricity.  I’ll have to take it in to Frazerway. They make them so will do a good repair.   I’d not been off the grid without my generator this year. We’ve been staying in sites with electricity.  I think the actually batteries may need replacing or the in-house charger generator or the truck cable connector is faulty too.  

I’ll not forget my generator any time soon.  

 

Monday, April 20,2019 Covid 19 Quarantine,

It’s another day in paradise. Spring is certainly beautiful here this year. Never have the flowers been so intriguing and delightful. Each day walking the dog I have enjoyed watching the buds blossoming. It’s like being a kid again with my mother who had a famous green thumb and loved to point out each plant and flower as it opened itself to the new year.

Life has slowed down in so many ways.  Less rush.  Waiting. Like the experience at sea.  The weather often decides the set of the sail and the angle of the tack.  So Dr. Fauci told us all the virus has it’s own time.  But now the juggling has begun again in earnest.  The commander must decide what is the risks of boat failing, wind pressure, seas, experience and tolerance of his crew.  Each person has there own concerns and perception but the balancing and juggling act is far beyond the parts that make up the whole.  

We had a lock down and quarantine to delay the rush on limited health care resources.  We needed time to get labs up and running to speed. We needed to train personnel. Here the College of Physicians and Surgeons brought back retired doctors at lightning speed. In the US when hydroxychloroquine was found to be a miraculous cure ,the FDA burocracy which normally would take a year to repurpose a drug, did it in weeks at presidential order.  Countless lives have been saved.  Locally Mr. Horgan, BC Premier, found 140 respirators decommissioned and set the amazing engineers and technicians to refurbishing them. It’s been a race against time.  The BC CDC has reported all the breakthroughs on it’s wonderfully researched pages. Dr. Bonnie Henry, our incredible Chief Medical Officer,  has daily told us exactly what we needed to hear.  Locally the response has been an overwhelming success.  

China’s lost millions and lied again and again about the disease and about their response. As did Iran with their mass graves, denied, but showing to the overhead satellites. Here we have been blessed with great leadership and some luck as well since ,we’ve missed a very big bullet. In New York it struck with a vengeance because of elevators railings and buttons. In Japan they had to early recognize the trains as vectors of spread. In Italy it was the close family communities and vulnerable eldersly. But everywhere in the west, as had been done in the Asian democracies ,people rose to the occasion.  Authoritarian and malevelent forces tried to carry out their own agendas without consideration of the whole. Despite all this the good prevailed. 

Despite the corruption of the WHO ,so reminiscent of the failure of the Red Cross in Canada when the AIDS epidemic struck, wiser minds ,less greedy and self seeking moved, forward and filled the horrible gaps.  

My young schizophrenic patients began to do the shopping for their elderly neighbours and family members leaving groceries on the doorsteps and saving them from going out into the the temporarily hostile world.

It’s a marathon. Social distancing, hand washing, masks.  But now we’ve businessess preparing to return to working. In weeks more and more people will be back to work. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The weather is increasingly warm.  The sun is shining.

We have every reason for praise and thanksgiving. Thank you God and thank you all who have done so much good to bring us through this first phase of such a wantonly unnecessary crisis. Now the economic restoration begins.  The anxious shouldered the heavier load while the depressed more often than not were lifted out of themselves seeing that others needed them and finding health in purpose.  

I’m enjoying walking my dog. I’m enjoying the morning commute from bedroom to living room. I’m loving the slower pace. I’m glad to be over that initial terror, those early days of uncertainty and fear.  I feel sad for the third world and the dictatorships where human life individually doesn’t count. The illness and death will persist longer there whereas here we’re already crested the wave. Local companies are making more masks. Pharmacies are finding more hydroxychloroquine.  Pharmaceutical development is shifting from untrustworthy China to Israel,the recipient of so many Nobel prizes for research and manufacture. More lab agents are being manufactured and testing here has surpassed South Korea. We know so much more thanks to Italy and Spain and Iceland and those stalwart souls trapped in cruise ships for the duration.  

We are past Easter, a time of renewal and resurrection. Today is 4/20, the time when Willie Nelson appears to so many .  The saddest part of this all has been  we can’t hold hands or hug in circles. The saddest are the family members separated at the time of death.  The loneliness has been heart rending. 

 I miss my dear friend Laura who continues to work in close proximity with high risk patients. I have friends who I’ve reached out to but have yet to hear back from. I’m so thankful my family has been well and safe.  The immunosuppressed, the elderly and those with heart and lung disease all suffered most from the fear that if they became ill there might not be a hospital room or a respirator.  That’s how fortunate we’ve been here. No hard choices like they made in Italy or Spain.  I’ll never forget the older priest who died having said that the young man could have his respirator. I’m so thankful for the pregnant women with Covid 19 who survived the disease and now are reunited with their new born babies well.

It’s been an emotional roller coaster with the wonderful reprieve of great humor and great funny songs.

A couple of weeks more or days and we’ll be safer as the economic risks increase and threaten us as once the disease itself had.  I remember sailing through hurricane force winds. I’d pass through the eye of the storm and the confusing seas get hit again by more winds before the winds would die.  The winds would die and tthe seas would be churned up for days would remain high for another day before the calm of wind and sea returned. .  Even though the ultimate dangers of high winds and terrible seas had passed it was a day or two before the seasettled.

Fair winds and following seas, I wish my family and friends today. Thank you God for grace and kindsness. Thank you all for love and humor and joy.  Hallelujah!

Advent is near

My Lord cometh.  In the deepest darkest nights of the winter year a remembrance of a baby’s birth is celebrated at Christmas. Not a God from a far. Not a machine like presence. No cog in a wheel. But a God become human in the womb.  A visitting God reviewing his creation and the co creators he made.  Obviously not all were good.  Among his own he couldn’t gather even 10 Good men. As one was too fond of money as those who are addicted to money are. The power seekers and the crows who like the shiny.  One day he would say you must give up your wealth to follow me to one who was addicted to gold and pomp but wanted too the love that was this God.
Do not be afraid, he said.  Love God. Love your father as yourselves.  I am the son of God. I am the son of Man.  From his teachings the trinitarian God was born. For when he left this one with the father son of God said he’d send the Holy Spirit to comfort us.
When I think of Jesus Christ, a name which means ‘god within’ and ‘god will come again’, I remember I’m not alone and that my life is playing hide and seek with God. When I forget the spiritual I am sucked into the morass of the material.  I lose sight of the incredible lightness of being in the gravity of the earth dwellers.
God is love.  God is omniscient and omnipotent, transcendent and imminent.  When I am still I know God. Be still and know that I am God. I run this refrain through my mind as a reminder. I can be one with God in such a moment
In advent I celebrate the coming of Christ. The coming of Christ is the coming of light.  In winter we fear the sun will not return. The superstitious childish ancient fear that this is the last of summer and the last of days comes over me in the darkness of the rain. Driving home at night I am troubled.  In the morning I can celebrate the dawn but by the time I leave my work the dusk is gone and it’s as if the sun has been stolen. I feel already like I’m back in the arctic with hardly a few hours of daylight.
Constantine worshipped the sun before he became a follower of Christ.  Love is light.
“Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for Thou aren’t with me.”
I had that sense once of being alone. I’ve been so often alone without people but for a moment I thought that I was outside the sphere of God. I’d become so hardened and scarred and had like Satan turned my back on God. I was fascinated by my own shadow. How big it seemed. But then I turned around and again began walking towards the light and didn’t feel alone again.
Amazing Grace. “I was lost but now I’m found”
I love the idea of Grace. That I the seeker of God am being sought. I’m chased by the hound of heaven. Even today the Birth of Christ is coming at me as I am slouching as a beast towards Bethlehem.  I don’t feel particularly good. I value truth and live in a world of increasing lies and those who don’t even know their lies.  Worse there are those entrusted with the protection of truth who have fled from their service, bought for so few pieces of silver.  But then who am I to judge? So often I have denied God even before the cock had but crowed.
I am a ‘sinner’. To sin is to miss the mark.  I do that which I don’t want to do and I don’t do that which I want to do. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The ‘outcome analysis’ of my endeavours shows the deviations that are still me.  I am flawed though seek perfection , impatient when I would be patient, unkind when I would be kind, quick to rage when I would be more forgiving, speaking when I would be silent. The list is endless.
I pray today that I might be the man my dog thinks I am. I pray today that I might be more loving and kind. I pray to day that I would expand my personal kingdom in service of you. I pray that I could be a better follower and be better in my work and service.
Christ above me. Christ below me. Christ behind me. Christ beside me. Christ in front of me. Christ around me. Protect me Lord.
I pray that I do the best and be the best in my person and my work that I can be this day.  Thank you Lord for all your blessings. Thank you for my parents and family, my teachers and my friends. Thank you for this life Lord, this sacred and wondrous adventure.  Thank you Lord Jesus. Thank you God. Holy Spirit Come!

The Cosmic Christ and Jesus

Jesus was the man who was God born incarnate.
The zen master asks, "Does the butterfly think the philosopher or the philosopher think the butterfly?
The relationship between God and man is a covenanted one.  Grace is the action of God.  God freely gives of his love and we receive.  God is the prime doer.
But the God of Biblical proportion is Omnisicient, Omnipotent, and Omnipotential and absolute,  alpha and omega. So that means that there is divine reality.  God created the heavens and earth. God is the heaven's and earth. All is God stuff. God is imminent and emimnent and all such words and transcendent and elsewhere and present, all and beyond.  It's God.  God is.
Life is matter and energy and as we mature spiritually we move from seeing the solids to the energy and the web of light that is life. We experience the Godness of stuff and existence and ourselves and our love.
The question of existence is 'do we exist?" What is reality? Are we imagining this or dreaming this? Are we the dreamer or the dream?
The Jesus story. Jesus is the baby then Jesus is the man. Jesus lives.
 It's the most incredible idea that God came down. A key story in the Bible is Jesus washing the feet of the disciples. On earth prior to Jesus ,leadership was only top down.
In the normal conventional earth social reality, shit falls down on the little people and the littlest gets the greatest shit. It was the reality of the Christian world before Jesus.  It's military rule.  It's Herod and Caesar and the Chinese Emperor.
By contrast in the Jesus story God humbles himself to be a baby.
In all the other God is either separate or if man becomes God he raises himself to be a God and transcends this world.
But Jesus said the Good News was with his death ,reality, which had been rather and sordid, became immensely different. The death of Jesus was the enlightenment of creation.  There was darkness then there was light. The light is in all creation now. A switch was thrown and never thrown back.
The death of Jesus, the sacrifice of Jesus, was the God becoming God moment of light throughout the universe.  The experience of Christ Consciousness is like Samadhi or Nirvana or mystical rejuvenation or enlightenment or rapture or transcendent bliss. It's pure Joy. It's in effable . Christians have collectively described this with all manner of miraculous experiences  and real behaviours with extraordinary otherworldly gifts. Not only is it something personally experienced, it's also been well documented and evidenced so much so that it's just another everyday event to anyone but the rulers of this world.  There is love and fear.  The rulers of this world are so afraid, so terrified, so inhuman that they killed god and to this day continue to kill God in denial of God, love and light. Straw men.
There's fear and love.  Jesus is love. Fear is absence of love and absence of Jesus.  A dark hole.
Jesus and his followers are in a spiritual war on earth individually and collectively. Evil and Good.  Right and Left.  Wrong and Right.  Up and down. Odd and even.  It's an intrinsic dilemna for the individual, a moral and ethical dilemna and a community and world spiritual war..
Choose Jesus or don't choose Jesus.  Choose God or don't choose God.
Interesting.
That said Christ Consciousness is like a state one comes and goes with, that second sense of feeling alone and not alone.   I can reach for God but God must reach down to me.  It's a dance. It's a love match.  I hug God . God hugs me.  It's the song of song.
In the Sistine chapel God and Adam touch.   Christ is the light in between. Jesus Christ is the Word.  
The Holy Spirit is the interface.
When Jesus was baptized by John,  the Holy Spirit descended like a dove upon him. Jesus said, 'the advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and remind you of everything"   The Name of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ the Word.
The spiritual is the lightness of being.
There's a 'gravity' here, a 'graveness', we are weighted down in this world by the deathness of this place  But "Yea though I walk through the valley of the Shadow of Death, thou aren't with me."  
 Jesus said "I am the way and the truth and the life."
We are reborn in Jesus. As Christians we become intimately aware of our immortality. Reborn we  do not die at death.  We pass through death to new life.  That is the God news of Jesus Christ.
Hallelujah!

Justin Trudeau,Spirituality and Politics

After my Baptist Aunt Sally died I asked everyone who knew her,  “Did you ever hear Sarah say anything bad about anyone?”  Everyone reflected for a moment, looked puzzled and then replied, “No, come to think of it. I never did.”  As a Christian she truly believed that “if you have nothing good to say about a person, you should say nothing.”  I owe Justin Trudeau an amends. I’ve been bad mouthing him ever since he admitted to smoking dope when he was a teacher and when he was a member of parliament.  Even now I believe he is smoking dope by his behaviour.  Further his wasteful wanton spending of Canada’s money overseas scares me. Neither reason is sufficient cause for me to denigrate him. It would be sufficient to say I disagree with his policies.
 Yet, it is as if I can’t resist ‘ad hominem’.  I denigrate him, the man, believing he may be possessed by Satan or a drug addicted sociopath.  Neither is true.  They may be but I don’t know.  I just find everytime he speaks his voice literally is like nails on a chalkboard. It’s effete and whining and entitled to me.  But Christianity that makes him my angel.  In Christianity I am to love my enemy.  Spirituality I am at most to think of him as a sick person, not hating him for his error and disgusting behaviour but rather understanding it and forgiving it as one would a sick person.  At most he suffers a spiritual disease and it is my job not to return like for like but to love him.  I call him my angel because he teaches me the limits of my own spiritual growth and shows me how I might think I’m growing spiritually but put to the test of Justin Trudeau I’m a babe in arms.  Love your enemy.  Obviously he is my enemy and I believe he is the enemy of the Canadian people but that is the nature of politics.  Politics divides and looks at the world in paranoid terms, us and them.
It’s easy to be spiritual on a mountain, or meditating on an island. It’s the most difficult to be spiritual faced with politics.
When one is offensive oneself then it’s important to note this.  As a Christian I ask forgiveness of God for my fear and anger towards Justin Trudeau. His dope smoking has made my life as an addiction medicine doctor a nightmare.  When I try to get young people off marijuana because they are now doing oxycontin and heroins and cocaine and stopping everything results in the greatest success, they say, the Prime Minister smokes marijuana and so do all the Hollywood actors actress and the rock stars.  And I say, it’s not okay for you. You nearly died of an overdose last night. You’re only 20 years old. I don’t want to see you die.  I don’t want to see you die. There are tears in my eyes these days.  There are so many deaths.  The examples we set have lead to this. I once did drugs and I tell people it was wrong. I was breaking the law and I shouldn’t have broken the law for something so childish and ultimately dangerous.  I have made amends for my error and continue to pay immensely for my wrong.  I heard of two more deaths of people I knew yesterday.  They were so young.
When I hear of Canada’s inflation and see how little I can buy with the money I have, I am afraid.  Yet, anxiety is a measure of my distance from God. If I truly have faith I will put my trust in God not in money or banks or pensions.  Yet, I see Justin Trudeau squandering the hard earned Canadian money overseas, giving it to corrupt tyrannies where all the knowledge I have tells me so very little of the money will help people. It will only make deceitful treacherous corrupt people richer and give them more power to betray and enslave their people.  Canadians frustrate me because they are reasonably upset that the Charboneau enquiry finds that Quebec’s government is run by biker gangs and mafia with millions of dollars going to corrupt French Canadian politicians. Yet they don’t seem to grasp that there are not even Charboneau enquiries in the countries where Justin Trudeau is giving away billions of Canadian dollars.
But my fear for my own aging future causes me to hate this little shit. I call the poor man that. A little turd and then ask.  Did Jesus call even Herod a little turd.  No even though Jesus threw the money lenders out of the temple asked about money he said, “give unto Cesar, cesar’s due’. He said that a bird doesn’t worry about whether God will love it so doesn’t God care for his children at least as much as he does for a bird.  So the problem isn’t Justin Trudeau but rather it’s with me.  Again Justin Trudeau is my angel because he teaches me how little faith I have and how much more prayer and meditation I must do to become spiritually “fit’.
Some of my Christian friends have their own politicians that they struggle with , Donald Trump, Merkel, Obama, Clinton.  That is for them to face.
I must remember my aunt.  I must hold my head high in politics and not descend into the scrapping and mudslinging that goes on in that realm.  I can retreat to the mountain. But the Dalai Lama saw his people killed as a child. The Chinese invaded Tibet and slaughtered all the holy men and women, mowing them down with machine guns in an act of genocide that continues today.  I visitted Cappadocia to see how Christians had built underground cities and churches to escape to when the Islamic hoards invaded their land killing all the Christians there.  We hear of the Palestinian and Israel but the  Muslim massacre of the Armenian Christians is never talked about because political correctness is the language of lying and selection.  The whole of the middeeast once a land of churches and Christians in the hundreds of thousands were decimated and slaughter by the Muslim invasion just as the HIndus and Sikhs were slaughtered in Indian.  Just as aboriginals were slaughtered in Australia, America and Canada.  The question is when do we ‘start history’, when do we set the ‘terms of reference’.  In Ireland the Normans conquered the Celts. These displacements have gone on through history but today we don’t really seem to have somewhere to escape too.
There is talk that the elite have built colony world’s in space.  There are all kinds of conspiracy theories many of which have proved true.  But I visitted the Monasteries of Meterora where the Christians fled to escape the pillaging barbarians who raped the women and slaughter the men and took the Christian children into slavery.  There is no high place where we can hide. The Tibetans are still being killed by the Communist chinese and the Christians all over the world are being persecuted.
CS Lewis and Churchill encouraged the Christians to fight back.  Even Jesus limitted the abuse a Christian must take to 70 times 70.  I feel I personally have turned my cheek that much at least by now.  Yet the issue is not defending oneself. Because we are taught, love thy neighbour as thyself.  So if an enemy who is childish and sick and ignorant by definition were to attempt to kill me I must not let him because my own death would not be loving myself and making him a murderer would not be loving him. So I am spiritually and as a Christian beholden to protect myself and my neighbour from violence and homicide. Life is sacred to Christians.  That’s why we disagree with the Aboritonists and the Euthanasia gangs.  That’s why I found Hillary Clinton so wrong.  I find Justin Trudeau’s death policies wrong as well.
As I Christian I believe in life and believe that there is a morality, actions that promote life and actions that promote death. Even Freud described these drivers as Eros, life drive and Thanatos, death drive.  The idea of light and dark, good and evil is embedded in the Torah and ancient history, to the best of my knowledge , in all religions and all people.  The idea of social relativism is an intellectual construct which doesn’t have any history to speak of and much destruction to it’s name.
The issue lies not with my enemy but rather with my action and my fear.  Spirituality I am behaving badly. I admit that watching my brother struggling with cancer and eventually dying shook me to the core because he was such a good man who gave his life for his family and served his country.  I prayed that God would take me in his stead because really I’m not a particularly good man. He was a steady Eddy. I’m kind of a spiritual fool. I’ve been a doubting Thomas. I learn mostly by mistakes and I whine and complain and fear and hate.  My brother by comparison was a rock.  He cared for his family and loved fully.
I have been overwhelmed. I’m still grieving. And when one is hurt they tend to revert to earlier mechanisms of coping. I have coped with Justin Trudeau much like an adolescent. I think I’ve come down to the political level. I watched Justin Trudeau with his attack campaign against Mr. Harper who I knew is a good man, one who doesnt do drugs , who loves and supports his family , is a stead Eddy, a man much like my brother.  A good man, a Christian. Justin Trudeau by contrast is much like me. An evil twin or what I was like when I was smoking dope and arrogant and so easily deceived by exotic psychopaths with such silly ideas about finances and economy and believing that the ‘grand ideas’ were so important.  I know today that the ‘devil is in the details’ and I’ve read with enlightenment Paul Johnson’s enlightening book called the “intellectuals’.  The proof is in the pudding.
Well, my spiritual plan is to make amends and clean up my side of the street. I will henceforth try to emulate my aunt and say less hateful things about Justin Trudeau and consider him a sick child who needs love and nurturing.  I will do my best to avoid being hurt by him. I certainly disagree with his policies.  But I will instead look and support those who are doing good.  I like Kelly Leitch’s appreciation of values and can say good things about her rather than disparaging Trudeau. I don’t need to put down a bad restaurant as much as I need to praise a good restaurant.  Just because I got diarrhea eating at the Trudeau cafe doesn’t mean I have to focus on that but instead should celebrate the marvellous dinner I got at the Conservative restaurant.  I must be more like my aunt.
Thank you Justin Trudeau for teaching me to be a better man.  Please Lord forgive me and help me to be a better man. Help me to focus on those who are doing good and celebrate their contributions.  Help me to keep my eyes on the light and be more steady in my path.  Thank you for all your Grace.  Thank you Lord Jesus for your sacrifice.  Thank you for the Cross. Guide me in being a better person.

It's Strange and Gratitude

I have just recited St. Patrick’s Breastplate.  I like St. Paul’s put on the armour of Christ.  I feel safer when I pray these prayers as the sickness in my family distracts me and makes me vulnerable. I feel like the rats come out to attack whenever I am not perfect. One can never be perfect in that sense but the expectation and demand is there.  I pray to God to protect me.  I love the psalms because they are so often the prayers of David on the battlefield surrounded by his enemies.  The more good one does or tries to do the more one is attacked. I take comfort in knowing that the Lord was crucified and so many of his followers. I know that Christians are persecuted more than any others.
My Hindu friends find so often it’s their own people that are attacking them from within.  This is the experience of Christians as well.  The jews were so often plagued by betrayals.  The Taoists developed martial arts to defend as much against their own as against others.  The Hebrews building the wall of the temple found they had to split their company in two with one holding swords while the others picked up axes and shovels.  Whenever a person picks up a pen there is someone who is picking up a dagger to assault them.  Islam is at war again, invading while the Saudis finally admit they back the extremists.  Corruption is so far reaching that the Clinton Foundation sounds like something out of the House of Thrones.  Justin Trudeau’s backers have millions invested in street drugs and drug pushing.  Politics makes strange bedfellows.  Trump has the strangest hair do.
The communist have succeeded only by promoting perpetual war, the essence of Marx, with Sharia Communism, two philosophies of perpetual war until all are conquered coming together today in the strangest of sexual congresses.  Extremists fight in the street.  Feminists ironically support the backers of ISIS who call for sex slavery of women.  Reminds me of the Donovan song, “Must be the season of the witch, beatniks are out to make it rich…and its strange, so strange."
I’m praying to God to protect me. I work with very angry frightened sick people.  Many are just sad. So many are beaten. But some are sociopaths and psychopaths.  Even sadder.  I remember the oaths I’ve taken as a doctor and feel a dinosaur.  The government calls my patients ‘customers’. That seems worse than ‘clients’ as neither reflect the covenanted relationship. There is no spirituality.  I was told by senior government doctor that they’re the ‘enemy’.  Even now I know a person who would ‘kill the messenger’. I tell people they can work and they hate me.  I remember the pedophiles that hated me when I had them locked up. It’s all matters of degree but no longer are the police or doctors protected by the selfie taking Trudeau who has his personal body guard of armed men and trust funds and multimillion dollars given by tax payers.  The new politicians of the left live in dachas and palaces. I fear frightened living in Communist Canada.
Every communist country killed millions and stole the wealth of their neighbours.  They took over beautiful churches and made them into halls like the churches that I saw made into mosques in Constantinople.  All that beautiful painting painted over. Thank God for Ataturk restoring these works of art as museums.  Now ISIS Muslims destroy the architecture of the ages like the censorship pornographers who destroy books. I week thinking of the loss of Alexandria.  Ancient losses while today we are struggling to archive so much for posterity.  I like the ‘cloud’ but the bonfire of vanities remains.  Everything is fleeting.
I’m aging.
The young are savaging the old.  Experience, once so valued is no longer. Old white men are the worlds bain say the mouthpieces of the old red, brown, black and yellow women who never forgive send their children to war as white women sent theirs, all of us living under queens, the conniving genius behind the ‘strong man’.  Alexander would be nothing without his mother.  The feminist lie of the weak little woman, a chivalry icon of the pregnant.  Now in abortion culture the fascist feminists tie these girls to the railway tracks and deny them weapons and self defence ,promising them protection for exorbitant prices.  In Japan more and more remain virgins, men and women.  it’s a weird world.  With education women have only three children regardless of religion or race or culture.
Protect me God from the insanity of politics, the convoluted illogic and emotionalism of todays twisted comic book media.  Protect me from all the strange and weird and frightening alienation of the drug addicted intellectualism and the power hungry gluttony of greed.
Thank you Lord for the light and this earth. Thank you for family. Help them to be well. Protect and care for them now. Be with friends and comfort and protect them this day. Help me dogs and the dogs and cats and other pets, even the snakes, and especially my fish Lord.  Keep them safe and healthy,
Thank you for your dreams and my dreams. Thank you for the 10 fingers and 10 toes. Thank you for digestion and indoor plumbing. Thank you for running water and heat and waste disposition. Thank you for my vehicles. Thank you for Love. Thank you for family and friends. Thank you for work. Help me be a better physician and more caring thoughtful psychiatrist. Help me in every way to help others as you help all.  Guide me in my daily endeavours to serve and work.  Thank you for the teachers and books and the research and internet and the iPhone and Epocrates and Merck and 5 minute consults and PuBMed and my offices and colleagues. Thank you for the institutions that serve to bring care and kindness to all in need. Thank you for communication and distribution centres and trucks and trains and supermarkets and street markets and the Bay and the banks and all those who are working today.  Help the disabled. Help those who can work work. Thank you for work and for vacation and leisure. Thank you for boats and motorcycles and 4 x 4’s Thank you for Gilbert. Thank you for this place I call my home. Thank you for the hot tub and it’s healing my back and thank you for the swimming pool and walks in the woods. Thank you for airplanes. Thank you for the ocean. Thank you for the Garden, the birds and animals and all the plants and flowers and trees. Thank you for the green of Burnaby and the bustle of the city.  Thank you for this day Lord. Thank you for all your blessings. Thank you for Grace.  Thank you for life. Thank you for consciousness. Thank you for senses.  Thank you for perception.  Thank you for life.
Thank you Lord.

The 5K Fun Run, IDAA, Norfolk, Virginia

I won’t say I came in first.  Others took the prizes for that.  I’d just like to say that my run/walk/grimace/curse was a miracle. I’ve had a few injuries these last couple of years.  Running that 5K Fun Run was something personally special.  A miracle really. Albeit a little one by global standards.
I blew my knee bicycling.  My painful limp occasioned my good friend physician, George, to corral me at church one morning. He did a brief examination on the pew and insisted I get an ultrasound and X-ray.  I didn’t even think of the ultrasound. Since things weren’t broken, I didn’t think the X-ray was needed. I certainly didn’t think I needed to take time off from work to look after myself.  But the ultrasound and X-ray did show that I’d had a partial medial ligament tear with significant calcification.  I could feel an unsightly lump on my knee that was decidedly different from the other knee.  Anti-inflamatories and some physio instruction surprisingly decreased the pain and hurried the healing.
The left and ankle and foot  took a bad twist on a motorcycle. It swelled up so badly I was sure it was fractured.  I didn’t want to know that denied it.  My denial capacity is a well honed defence.   I guess I mentioned it to George because he again  intervened and insisted I take care of myself. This time I knew the radiologist.  She was understanding and loving like a sister. I think my fear must have shown. Probably the fetal position on the slab with my thumb in my mouth gave it away.  I was joking but inside I was catastrophising big time.
I’d been a professional dancer, trained with the world champion, Doreen Key, in London, danced on tv, taught dancing, been called ‘disco doc’ when I went astray into medicine.  Laying on that slab waiting for the news that something serious was broken and torn and might not likely heal seemed to take an eternity of time. I never thought I should give up riding motorcycles again. But the idea that I’d not be able to dance again was frightening.
I was supremely grateful nothing was broken. I was on crutches with a partial cast for a while.  But a soft tissue injury can sometimes be worse.  This was.  It became a ‘trick’ ankle.  Despite all physio I couldn’t rely on it.  Mostly it was excruciatingly painful.  I’ve been an egomaniac with an inferiority complex at times so now with chronic pain I was kind of a stoic in public and a crybaby alone.
I actually  got a barbwire tattoo as “protection’.  I was ready to go to any lengths to walk pain free.  I  believe my physical self is an extension of my mental emotional and spiritual condition.  Maybe demons really were sticking red hot barbed forks into my ankle.  For whatever reason Ironically the tattoo worked.  I looked a bit like a pole dancer but the pain stopped.
But the left large metatarsal got injured when I missed kicking the ball for my dog, Gilbert.  I was on my sailboat and not paying attention I missed the ball and  kicked a wall cupboard instead. It was a cumulative thing.  Dancing and soccer had caught up with me.   So again I was struggling with this left sided pain and suffering.  I concluded my right brain must be unhappy..  Our body is cross wried.
The right brain is the creative brain. I figured I wasn’t listening to it, always working, always in fear, playing the hero, rescuing my patients,  always fighting the drunken drug addicted authorities and their insanity. With all the pain it didn’t seem that my struggle to save lives at the loss of myself was going the way it should. I felt I was getting too old for this shit and that my creativity, all that guitar playing, song writing, painting and wood work I wanted to do was being sucked into the miasma of beaurocratic wars.
As a doctor I ‘d decided on my own what that joint needed was mobility.  It didn’t matter that that just kept making it worse till again  my friend, George picked up on my wincing.  I think he has a stake in the X-ray company because  again he insisted I get a damn X-ray.  Not just any X-ray either. A weight bearing X-ray. I didn’t even know these existed.    With the X-ray in hand, George decided I needed orthotics. Apparently the doctor, I was listening to, myself, was quack.  Months after I was using the orthotics I was walking pain free.
I’d flipped my ATV hunting elk a few years before injuring my low back again so with all the compensation with the left sided injuries, and the ice cream, I’d gained weight and wasn’t keen on exercising, especially as it caused pain.
My friend Derrick, a  physiotherapy personal trainer, Derrick, came by weekly after that and showed me how to walk properly overcoming the maladaptation and doing some exercises to improve mobility.
I work with an Ironman,  Garry. I ride  my Harley Electraglide a hundred miles to go camping on the weekend.   Gary rides his nearly as expensive bicycle a hundred miles in the evening for fun. He’s lean to my pear shape.  Even if he is a decade younger, his example was hard to miss. With George, and Derrick and Garry I kept plugging away.
And this  spring, walking the dog, with new running shoes,  I tried running. I could walk all day by then running was another thing. I gave it a go.  Even when my joints with all the traumatic arthritis weren’t limiting me, I found that I was soon breathing heavy and my heart was pounding.  I was cursing smoking younger years smoking,  Knowing that smoking marijuana might not cause cancer like tobacco did it sure was the cause of this old man wheeze.
I'd signed up for the 5 k Fun Run, only to support the event last year. I didn’t expect I’d actually run it. However,  one of my favourite times in IDAA  had been walking with Carole and Bobbi talking up a storm. Julie had been there too. It was sunny and fun.   Cheryl had gone by like greased lightning. Some of the guys and I were just ambling along with these glorious women. We were talking about books we ‘d read. And laughing.  It could have been the Bloomsbury Circle on the English moors.   I was happy to be alive and that wasn’t something I’d felt much around that time.   I cherish those memories. Can’t remember what we were laughing about but I just felt like a happy young teen ager with the very best mates.
This year I was cursing getting up so early but  I did.  I told myself I  going to walk with Julie and discuss books. I wasn’t going to run. .   I was just going to walk with Julie and her New York friends..  Bobbie wasn’t there this year. Her and Tom were probably flying off in his plane somewhere like Tofino.  Carole hadn’t signed up for the run either.. Art had had his whole new knee replaced and was  walking erect again but not up to running yet.  Air Force, he’d given me a gung ho “First in All In” US Marine t shirt the previous evening.  I’d put it on that morning telling myself if I did decide to run  I’d run for the shirt.  I certainly couldn't shame a US Marines shirt.    But watching that first group of runners take off , wearing that US Marine shirt, I had a sort of manic psychotic break. I began to run too.
I lost sight of John immediately. He was running like a wild stallion. John’s a young psychiatrist.  He’d told me he was doing an Ironman next month.  This 5 k was a break for him from his more arduous training.  I caught sight of Cheryl up ahead. I was running and running I was feeling like a god. Something about chasing a beautiful woman does that to a bloke.
But pretty soon my mind was naturally telling me I was going to die. This was definitely a stupid idea  People must hear me wheezing that old man ex marijuana smoker wheeze.  My mind began saying I could run through the pain but maybe I should just walk.  But  there was beautiful woman up ahead in short shorts and I should catch up at least just to say hello.  I thought I’d like to say hello and maybe wave at Cheryl to show I’d tried before I keeled over and died.  But catching up to Cheryl   took up a good part of the run.  Next thing I was  running beside a  battle ship thinking I could use some big guns like that had on my sailboat.  I passed some Oriental gardens and by now had figured I could stop as long as I made it look like I was doing it to take a picture.  The further along the more pictures I took.  I was finally walking because I was sure my blood pressure was high enough to cause a stroke and at my age I need all the brain I have left.
I walked for a bit till the blood stopped pounding in my head.   Then I had to run again because these young  volunteers were watching.  Vanity made me run. Especially past the beautiful psychiatrist I’d just met with her husband the night before.  With the battleship as back drop I kind of imagined I might look just a bit like Tom Cruise or maybe  Clint Eastwood.  I just hoped she didn’t hear the old man wheeze.  I  sucking up my gut too because it was swaying a bit  and might cause me a torsion injury.
When I came to the finish line ready for the brass band I found I had another third to go.  I was dying by then.  Walking more than running. Fuck the shirt.  I’d given up thinking of glory and begun praying for grace.   John passed me going the other way  that last leg.  The fast folk were finishing as I was beginning.  It was definitely the longest loop.  I was  slouching towards Bethlehem when the young military psychiatrist volunteer cheered me on. I thought of Art and the shirt and began to stagger run again.   Somehow I got to the end.  I was covered in sweat and took a swig of offered cold holy water.  I sat beside Cheryl.  She’s a chaplain.  Sucking air,  I appreciated that she’d waited  in case I needed last rites.
In stead I  was doing this annual IDAA Lazarus thing happening.   I couldn’t speak for a bit. My heart was demanding all the oxygen my  lungs could supply.  Eventually I babbled out to Cheryl that completing that 5K was a  personal miracle.    Cheryl laughed. “You did good Bill, You did good." She's always encouraging.  It's the soul of IDAA.
I took a selfie after that.  Just for the shirt.
The 5 K Fun Run this year will probably be the most important event for me.  Sometimes its the inspirational speakers.  Sometimes it's the banquet camaraderie.  Usually it’s talking in a small group discussion with other psychiatrists, Nathan, Adam, Art, Darryl, John.   Sometimes it’s cyberdocs, Dave, Paul, Dick.  Often it’s making a new friend.

I’d not have been able to do this run without the group.  John, Julie, Cheryl and all the volunteers and organizers.  All the other participants made it possible for me. That first IDAA in Toronto, the banner message had been “We are not alone.”  Now it sure felt good to accomplish something I thought I’d never be able to do again.  Now I'm ready to dance again.  That will be another miracle.