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 

Blue Sky in May

I have returned from walking Madigan. He’s now enthusiastically waiting for breakfast treats not knowing I’ve decided to fast today. I have my coffee and orange juice but no protein bar or yoghurt to share. Certainly no bacon or eggs

I’ve more work this morning.  Working helps me procrastinate about cleaning away winter clutter and tidying. I’m thinking I’ll learn to pull this big rig and to do that I will need to stow. 

I’ve been focussing on truth , that which I know is not hearsay but what I’ve experienced or even heard first hand by trustworthy reputable human source. I learned that Descartes did something similiar.  Knowledge.  Then there is memory.  What I know and what I believe. I’ve journals for this and yet there is little need to consult them. The liars persist in lying even when confronted with the truth and the courts continue to put politics before justice.  Even now there is censorship at all levels.

I’m happy this morning. I woke from good dreams, more of the peninsula and this time I had an apartment and looked out at the sea.  There is hope.  I had the back pain getting out of bed but walking it was gone.  It’s just the transition from lying to standing.  I’ve applied Balm of Ilead again. I’d wanted to go to the chiropractor now that I know the X-ray has nothing new.  Yet I let the deluge of work this week with the despearate and angry demands over ride my own needs quite again.  I miss the personal staff who once protected me by ensuring and remembering to not put two vampires consecutively. I was drained of energy before one morning ended and shuddered to face the afternoon.

I’ve been enjoying the dog walks with the black and white gang. Our little dogs, Dave’s Emory, Peter’s Luka and Bella.  Men walking and talking. Kind of like those A&W coffee meets of old men but here we’re walking and the dogs are happy in the gang.  I’m so much alone with work that the casual conversation is a treat.  Billy joined us talking about singing in the choir and his girlfriend .  He’s in his 80’s.  We’re older. George called and is helping. The other George has countless stories and experiences.  I worry about Murray and must call him. Barry called but didn’t leave a message. 

I’m connected this way.  I touch people and am touch.  We text and share social media as well.  

Each day I appeal to God.  I ask God what is my purpose. I ask for guidance. I would know God more clearly. I’m able to sense God .  God is an experience not so much an idea. I feel the presence of God. To do this I just have to detach from immediate cares and get out of the worries and fretting. Today I was just looking at the blue sky behind the clouds. Contemplating.  I was absent from myself for a bit there.  The ego is back of consciousness and the self and over self emerge.  

My mind is so often on tasks and improvements and things to do.  Business. I’ve been thinking of licensing my Harley or trading it in. I really would like to have my camping trailer. Frazerway has had it in their shop since last November and two insurance claims of $30,000 have been made but they wanted more money and frankly I don’t believe it’s worth it. They sold it to me and Laura and I heard their salesman promise there was no water damage. That’s a ‘precondition’ which was at issue in a previous rig so we were adamant about obtaining assurance about that.  I think he even said they peel back places and made sure there was no damage before selling the unit. The seals were checked by Erik that sumner.  I have my seals checked each year.  Then Frazerway said the seals needed to be checked every 3 months and no where is it suggested RV owners climb up on the roof and check the seals .  So the insurer is saying the water damage is pre existing but pre-existing the accident but that could only be a month to when the assessment was done but when the repair folk talk it’s like it’s months and years and they seem to suggest that they can tell the difference between 1 month of water damage and now it’s 6 months or more in their yard damaged so I really can’t see how they can know by observation and accuracy that the ‘pre existing occurred in 1 3 or 6 month.  The point remains they sold it to me ‘without water damage’. It’s only a couple of years since I bought it and now they’re saying this $40,000 unit has need of essential $50,000 repairs and I need to pay $20,000  more. It’s obviously a whole lot of ‘clever’ buck passing and I’m deluged with patients knowing that all my life I’ve worked under market value when I’m not doing charity work because of the ‘clever’ and quite inferior business work sorts nickel dining and playing insurance games.  I hate to think I’ve got to get a lawyer to deal with this sociopathy because they would rather wheel and deal than actually work but it weighs on me. I told this insurance company that I would have to ask a lawyer to deal with this because it’s no distracting and soul destroying. I hate the betrayal by the company. Either the water damage occurred after the accident or was there when Fraserway sold it.  I’d settle for parity but to have this abuse of elderly. We don’t have the potential years that these hustlers have and I can’t sell a unit in their garage.  

Given the St. Michael the avenger statue on the wall I know that God doesn’t want a good doctor abused and the consequence of the betrayal and deceit is as usually their themselves and their families being cursed for their evil.  It’s always happened. I look back my back trail and see all these cases of disease and don’t think it’s just me but the mental state that has one conniving is sickness inducing. Further as I’m a nice guy when this is done to me then it’s likely they must have done this to really bad people and a whole ‘list’ so the attraction of evil incarnate they have explains the apparent ‘random’ bad luck they experience. I don’t wish this on them though if I’ve cursed someone they see to be cursed by so many. I pray for my enemies and struggle to let go of resentments so that I can focus on healing but with the devolution of Canada to a communist dictatorship under an aethest pervert criminal the most unethical idiot in our history it’s hard to let go of resentments.  Jesus was killed by government and church .  We get the government we deserve.  I pray for healing and for all to be better.  All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.  I will consult my mentors and the multimillionaires and those in construction and the judges and MP’s soon to see if I need a champion or advocate. I expect these folk are just scared and recovering from Covid and God will solve this conundrum. I may just license my Harley and get some wind therapy so I’m not distracted in my meditation by the distractions.

I really am blessed. My home is good here. I have to clean the fridge.  I shook out the carpet and cleaned the living room floor. I cleaned the toilet this week and last so I’m managing. There is clutter. My run to the storage locker was good.  I might have to consider another. It’s the weekend and I worry about losing potential errand and work time by whittling it away reading.  I have been thankful for my increased walks and swims.  

Right now I’m trying to get the apps and passwords working again on the replacement iPad,  It’s another task done.  I am thankful for this new iPad but hate waiting on the phone to deal with assistance. Yesterday a n hour on the bank addressing their online password,  Even the help couldn’t help and I was thorough frustrated by the offensiveness of their security people. I forget that the paranoids and sociopaths are employed and I only see the worst of them in my office. Whole industries celebrate paranoia especially now that there is war in Ukraine.  It’s like the constant threat of the skies falling. Now we’re back to being threatened by nuclear war to add to global warning and Covid.  There’s just not enough space in my mind and heart to handle the level of government hysteria and greed. I struggle to reassure patients they’re not going to die today and it’s okay to go outside and visit and yes wear a mask and yes get a vaccine but increasingly these are little more than burning sage the way the government arts students interpret the sciences and the lies and outright fraud in the sciences makes it all seem greed.  I continue to take vitamin D and pray for the sun.  I laugh to think that if Trump had been wholly pro vaccine and made a campaign for it then half of America would have rejected vaccines because of political affiliation. It’s seems to me the left wing moves emotionally and the right wing move intellectual meanwhile I’m afraid of the body of the bird where the beak and claws are an that great ever growing cancerous belling of the Beast of Government

I want to know more joy so must think of media and government less and focus more on the blue sky The sun has come out this morning. Hallelujah.

Thank you God for the sun, for skin, for air and blood and healthy hearts and healing and the children and the mothers and the parents and the fathers and the family and the friends. Thank you for the dogs and cats and safe homes.  Thank you for clean water. Thank you for all your blessings.  

St Patricks Day Reminiscences

On lunch break from working at the Doc-Side methadone clinic I took Gilbert for a walk in nearby Gastown.  A couple of Irish girls at the Irish pub were selling hats and tiaras. I bought one for myself and some for the staff.  The Filopinas  looked great in Irish.
I enjoyed the music and celebration on the streets.  I have tickets to visiting U2.   I’ve always loved St. Patrick’s Breastplate Prayer.  Christ above me, Christ behind me.... I only wish I’d had a green jacket for Gilbert to celebrate the day.  He’s definitely my personal leprechaun.
I’d just read the history of Irish Slavery. In many cases it was worse than the slavery of blacks but history excludes it's mention regardless of the horrible treatment and high death rates.  Partly it's because the 'brand' of 'slavery ' is racist and the rampant slavery that continues today by blacks of blacks and the fundamental slavery in the moslem worlds doesn't fit the 'racist' narratives of modern media.  Even the 'black Irish' those whose blood was heavily influenced by Spanish don't count.  The forgotten masses that followed the potato famines are of no account.  In the US they've had a Kennedy and an Obama so perhaps this era is finally behind us.  Today's main slavery is 'sex slaves' and it will be some time before the great armchair debaters of historic issues will let the light shine on the darkness that threatens girls and young boys from all over the world.
Laura and I are planning on visiting in Ireland in June. There’s a conference in Trinity I want to attend for a day.  We watched the great movie, Michael Collins starring Liam Neilsen and Julia Roberts.  Theres the whole history of Irish independence from England and the later Troubles to consider.
When I was working in England the IRA were bombing.  Baiba, my wife at the time, was working across from a building the IRA bombed.  Glass hit her face.  It was a frightening time. Working at the television studio I was evacuating weekly because of bomb threats.
Grand dad was from northern ireland, an Orange Man.  Protestant.  My brother Ron found his grave when he travelled there a few years back with his lovely wife. Mom was fond of her Irish roots.
I early followed more my father’s father’s Scottish roots, the Aberdeen connection and my Glasgow grandmother with the aunts and uncles and cousins we all learned to love.
 I think  Ireland seemed more a foreign country to me because being protestant, once the Catholics took over, it seemed the IRA had one.
Laura’s Catholic and her great grandparents married in St. Patrick Cathedral.
In a way I think I thought of St.  Patrick’s Day  as more a Catholic victory celebration than a day of celebration of Ireland and St. Patrick.  This St. Patrick’s Day, for the first time I thought of Ireland as Ireland, beyond all division, a place of people.  My desire to finally go to Ireland is a decision to own my roots.  I don't so much think of Christians as divided either coming back from Istanbul where the 21st century confronts not the Moslems but the 15th century jihadists . In Istanbul I met moderates and secularists and Christians and Buddhists and enjoyed the spiritual movement which puts division secondary to inclusion.
I think too that the alcoholics I befriended once in my youth were Irish Catholics and I got a skewed view of Irish as drunken stupid louts who’d betray their grandmother for a tot. Now I know that alcohol and drugs reduce any human to the beast and reptile so I’ve separated Irish from their downfall with drink.  Ireland today is a land of monasteries and literature, the arts and industry, not a place of breweries and strife.
Indeed I’d argue that so much of the Irish ‘troubles’ and fighting had as much to do with booze as it did with politics. By comparison more sober  Canada and Australia gained home rule and independence from England without the use of the very jihadist tactics which we condemn as ‘terrorism’ today. Admittedly America,  India and Ireland  paved the way for us younger sons and daughters indeed.
It’s been difficult for us all to accept the mutual unravelling of civilization that occurred with the Irish, Prods and the British military.  I enjoyed the movie Michael Collins as it captured the highs and lows of this struggle, the guerrilla wars and the internal betrayals.
In the end Michael Collins wasn’t killed by the British or the protestants but by fellow IRA’s.  Jesus himself was betrayed by his disciple Judas.  In the same way, personally I find that the enemy is me as often as it is you or them.
Today we know that war is only profitable for the war machine at the cost of the men in the front.  Further, the chance of being honourably killed by the enemy is slim because a third of those killed are killed by ‘friendly’ fire while another third are killed by rank stupidity of the leadership like Hitler sending his troops into Russia without proper winter clothing.  Only a third of those killed can even hope to be killed by the enemy.  In days gone by it was more likely you’d die from cholera or other diseases including syphilis, a great scourge of soldiers.
Obtaining my master in divinity I’ve been following the ecumenical study of Christianity and comparative religions.  Embracing the Orthodox in Moscow and Istanbul I was ready to study the Celtic Christian tradition with it’s Scottish Iona connection.  The mysticism of the Sufi’s and the mysticism of Hinduism and Buddhism connected with that celtic ‘fay’ nature that is celebrated in the monastic traditions of Ireland.
St. Patrick advanced Christianity in Ireland mostly by developing the monasteries with their Abbott rule and the importance of the Christian school.  St. Patrick had been influenced by Ambrose and Origen and the Dessert Fathers.  Meditation was central to the teaching of the saints of Egypt.  In Cappadocia I visited one of the famous monasteries and schools of the day similarly influenced.  Now I look forward to visiting the monasteries that kept ancient education alive and celebrated learning.  The church has been always so central to education and medicine.
In contrast to the modern media misinformation the church kept the light of learning burning through the dark ages.  The great book, How the Irish Saved Civilization records how the monks of Ireland taught the political bullies who had taken over Europe.  Politics and war not religion reduced Europe to the Dark ages.  ISIS today is not Moslem but more a bunch of killers and very creepy people who want to have sex with underage girls and cloak it in the respectability of religion.  ISIS has killed more real Moslems than Christians or Jews.
The Celtic monks continued to reproduce the writings of old, passing on the learning and being the photocopiers of their day as well as recording the ongoing teaching.  I so look forward to seeing the famous Book of Kells.
In the Bible the celts are the Gallatians.
The Danish Vikings though brought freckles and red hair to Ireland.  My mother and brother are red headed and I was actually entered into a freckle contest as a child.  I suspect my nautical ways have something to do with the piratical genes I came by honestly this way.
We just watched the movie Calvary about the sacrifice of an Irish priest.  I’m reading a study of Celtic Christianity and was thoroughly annoyed at the Pelagius and Augustine Debate.  Pelagius of the so called “Pelagian Heresy” was from Scotland and believed children were innocent at birth and celebrated women as equal. This offended the Roman African Augustine who literally attacked and hounded Pelagius in a horrible way giving us ‘original sin’ and “infant baptism’ instead.
John Smyth centuries later would break from the Anglicans and stop infant baptism insisting only adults could make the conscious decision to renounce sin. The Baptist Church now is a hundred million and in the United States is the largest protestant communion against the Catholics. I was raised Baptist, became United, then Anglican and am in my own way looking back through my own personal religious journey.  Ireland is definitely a stop on that journey.
Now it’s time to get to work.