Posts Tagged ‘mental-health’

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 55: Defining Ourselves

August 17, 2014

Medicine BottleI wrote about this subject not long ago; [Chronicles in Ordinary Time 47: Black Care] I still don’t have any answers. So why am I writing about it again…
A comic genius died this week, a man who was one year and eleven days older than I am. A man I’ve never met; a man I’ve spent hundreds of hours with over the last 40 years. A man who made me laugh. Making me laugh isn’t all that easy.
Parkinson’s apparently was the straw that broke his will. Or not; ‘why’ probably isn’t our need to know.

For “15 minutes” the American public is going to be all concerned about depression. It’s a normal response; how one responds to a situation that is foreign, not part of our experience; one doesn’t really understand, and one can’t fix it. My guess is that if they are like myself, people suffering from Depression don’t talk about it all that much. I talk about it here, because this place is fairly anonymous; I could be a 14 year-old teenage girl… But I’m not.

I’m watching “Pay It Forward” as I write; probably not the best movie to watch when I’m in this kind of space. Or maybe it is… Haley Joel Osment just asked, “Is the world just shit?” And he just found out that it isn’t, always. There are lights in the darkness.

I’ve been on anti-depressants since the 80s or the 90s; for most of that time, I’ve thought of them as something that helps me sleep. I can prove it by the dosage I take. But, they’re still a chemical that affects the brain; they’re still an anti-depressant. Prozac got added, a year or so ago; maybe two years. This one I know is for the Depression.

Why is the Depression here? I do not know. My kids don’t know this, I never talk about it. I had an alcoholic uncle; he was a real SOB. A very controlling Dad; my kids know about him. Implies something about my grandparents. Genes.  How much of what we are is genetic? I think maybe we aren’t controlled by our genes. I think they are a powerful influence, but I think we can be larger than our genes. Sometimes it requires some assistance.

“I think some people are too scared, or something. I guess it’s hard for people who are so used to things the way they are – even if they’re bad – to change. ‘Cause they kind of give up. And when they do, everybody kind of loses.” Pay It Forward [2000]

I believe we can be more than our genes because I have had some success in getting past myself; getting outside of myself. Being the person I am, I’m going to attribute this to the Spirit of the Creator at work in my life. I’ve never been seriously suicidal. Meaning, I’ve never made an attempt. I’ve contemplated it a lot over the years; I know how I’d like to do it, if I ever got there. With my body “dissolving” the idea tends to seem more worthwhile…The ‘problem’ is, that there’s always a new day when I wake up. This should not be presumed to mean that I wake up in the morning feeling good; I suppose the event may have happened some time in the past, beyond my memory [and I just remembered an instance]. There were mornings at our family cabin. My bed was under the roof, at the end of the stair opening; from my bed I could see the fireplace. In the morning I would wake up to the sound of a crackling fire, the smell of woodsmoke, the knowledge that my grandfather was following his normal routine of making the morning fire to heat the cabin…

For years I’ve awakened each morning feeling crummy; my CPAP machine hasn’t helped. While each new day feels bad, I know from past experience that this probably isn’t the way I’ll feel all of the day. Some days it’s most of the day, and those days are the difficult ones. I get through these days because I am aware that the alternative will hurt my family; and that isn’t an acceptable solution.

I was writing a friend the other night; while writing, I described myself as a sort of ‘monk’. A monk with a wife, with kids and a home and a job. My wife added the label, “a Contemplative.” That works, too. A long time ago I gave my life back to my Creator; an odd thing for an atheist to do. I’ve made an effort to not become religious; and in spite of my efforts, I seem to have become really ‘spiritual’ compared to the people I know, that don’t give much thought to spiritual matters. I find myself coming away from conversations about Life, asking myself, ‘how did I become so darn spiritual?’ It certainly wasn’t my intention. And since I don’t have any answers, unlike so many religious people I’ve known over the years, it seems like an inappropriate allocation of ‘spiritual’. I sort of think of myself as being similar to Ellis Peters’ “Cadfael”—the soldier who became a monk in the 1100s, having grown tired of war during the Crusades—but I know nothing about herbs, and have never seen a murdered body; and I’m not very adept at solving mysteries. But I think about ‘God-stuff’ all the time. Being a commercial artist by trade gives one a lot of time to think. A lot of art is repetitive, and it doesn’t require continual thought to accomplish a task.

I’m doing Physical Therapy to help with the effects of the neuropathy; I’ve never been a guy who is into fitness. I find that I’m needing to ‘write’ a new definition for myself. I’m a guy who has defined myself by my work for four decades; willing to abuse my body to accomplish work-goals. That definition isn’t working anymore. I’ve purposely stopped looking for new work, in preparation for ‘retirement’—whatever that means. I can’t yet imagine not working.  I think it means that I’m going to start working only on projects I’m interested in, rather than taking whatever project comes along that will pay something. And I’m learning how to get interested in taking care of my body. I know that I’m supposed to reverse the last two sentences.

I do most of what I do by routine; if I have a routine, I don’t need to think about it all that much. So now I’m working on making new routines; and it’s amazing, when I step out of myself, to see how difficult it is to make new routines. And how difficult it is to think of myself as the guy who takes better care of myself…

 

Della p7dwg

 

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 53: The Nothing

July 22, 2014

I’m addicted to movies; I have been for nearly as long as I can remember. My two favorite places to be, when I was a child, were the family cabin in the foothills of Mount Hood; and the movie theater. While I devoured books, I also loved to see the illustrations come to life on the silver screen. I became an illustrator because I was born at the end of the Golden Age of Illustration, when ‘adult’ books came with illustrations. The works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, Howard Pyle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Illustrators like N.C. Wyeth, Frederick Remington, and countless others. My hope was to join that fraternity of illustrators who brought the Classics to life. I’ve come close, in that I illustrated a Korean version of a Sherlock Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia.” I hoped for others; the company went out of business.

Scandal_P21Watson, Holmes, and “The Woman,” Irene Adler

 Our granddaughter visited us from Colorado, for close to a month. We haven’t been around her for that length of time since she was 3 years old; she’ll be 12 soon. Among the movies that was watched was the 1980’s classic, The NeverEnding Story. I have always been touched by the dialog at the end of the film:

G’mork: Foolish boy. Don’t you know anything about Fantasia? It’s the world of human fantasy. Every part, every creature of it, is a piece of the dreams and hopes of mankind. Therefore, it has no boundaries.
Atreyu: But why is Fantasia dying, then?
G’mork: Because people have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams. So the Nothing grows stronger.
Atreyu: What is the Nothing?
G’mork: It’s the emptiness that’s left. It’s like a despair, destroying this world. And I have been trying to help it.
Atreyu: But why?
G’mork: Because people who have no hopes are easy to control; and whoever has the control… has the power!
Atreyu: Who are you, really?
G’mork: I am the servant of the power behind the Nothing. I was sent to kill the only one who could have stopped the Nothing…

We suffer the attacks of The Nothing—the killer of hopes and dreams. My neurological challenges are an example of the Nothing. The Nothing is nearly everywhere one looks; and one has to make a special effort to see that The Nothing hasn’t killed off all of the hopes and dreams. The high school girl who invented a flashlight powered by the heat of one’s hand…towers in the desert that will one day be filled with water, sucked out of the air…the earth is also teeming with dreams that can come true, if they are allowed to flourish.

One of our most treasured National Monuments stands in New York Harbor:

Liberty“Mother of Exiles.”

I am the son and grandson of immigrants to this country. My mother was born in Norway, my paternal grandmother’s parents were still speaking Swedish when they baptized their daughter here in Portland. My paternal grandfather’s line goes back to Nottingham, England, back in the 1600’s.

Being a son of the American Legion, and all of the God and Country messages that go with that heritage, I grew up respecting that statue in New York harbor; welcoming those who came from Europe, Africa, and lands to the East. Some, more welcome than others…

Those who keep track of such statistics report that there are over 50 Million refugees on this planet, the largest number since World War II. Half of these refugees are children, many of whom will end up in the human trafficking “industry”. Thousands of these children are reaching our border from Central America; that portion of the Americas that our government has been screwing with for decades, helping to overthrow democratically-elected governments that weren’t to ‘our’ liking…As with all of our “Wars On…” we have created problems, rather than solving them.

I was discussing this with a friend last week, who mentioned the importance of protecting our borders; and how when our country can’t even feed our own people, we can’t afford to feed refugees.

It isn’t that our country can’t feed our citizens; the reality is that those with the power to do so WON’T do what it takes to feed our citizens, to create jobs that will enable the populace to thrive. The Stock Market is at all-time highs; Robert Downey Jr. [“Iron Man”] is the highest paid actor in Hollywood, earning $75 Million/year to make comic book movies.

There are close to 400 Billionaires in the US. #100 owns around $4 Billion. Each of these individuals could donate/collaborate/invest $1 Billion [I hear that it’s possible to get by on $3 Billion], and create a $100 Billion fund from which new companies could be created; companies that would create something like the WPA and CCC, and rebuild our country’s infrastructure. The problem isn’t lack of money, the problem is lack of WILL.

I have trouble with the concept that this country of immigrants is just too selfish to open its doors to refugee children; children who didn’t volunteer to be born into the slums, ghettos and gang-infested countries of this continent. Gangs that were trained in American jails before they were deported. The selfishness isn’t on the part of the people; the selfishness is that of those who have the power to create positive change, but don’t have the guts to do it.

There are those who mention the concept of “pitchforks and torches” as a way to facilitate change. I can’t think of any way in which pitchforks will actually work. Homeland Security now has its own arsenal.

Ashes of Hiroshima

 

 

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 52: Secret Identities

June 12, 2014

heroes1Secret Identities.  We all know about them. All of our childhood [fictional] heroes had secret identities in order to protect their families and friends, and to avoid a source of moral blackmail.
So what about the rest of us?
I grew up with these heroes; they were my role models. I had working parents, my first babysitter was a rectangular box with a fuzzy black & white screen. I spent more time with these heroes than with my family.

So why do I have a secret identity?
I’ve never been very heroic, I’ve never feared for my family, based on my heroic exploits.
I’m just not very fond of people.
I like persons. Over a long period of time, I’ve learned that you only get to know persons by putting up with people. It was awful for a long time. Some days it’s still awful. But not for as long, and not to the same degree.
When I was a building contractor, in my 20’s and early 30’s, I hid my identity behind a beard; supposedly it made me look older, but in retrospect, it made me look scruffy.

I got into sales. I studied personality, sociology, psychology and  self-esteem for years. Tapes and books whenever I wasn’t working at my job. I wore a suit. Shaved the beard, got haircuts regularly. My secret identity. Clark Kent, hiding Superman.
After a few years, I finally realized that I was viewing people as prospects and potential customers; not as persons. In the process of becoming a better me, I found out that I really wasn’t becoming a better me.
I dropped the suit; didn’t visit Marsha as regularly for my haircuts [she’s been cutting my hair for 30 years]. I tried to be more real with people, and to listen to what they were saying. To get a glimpse of their Secret Identity.

My Secret Identity today?
Mikey bushesMikey. My inner child. The kid who embraces zip lines and COPE courses; the kid who gets in squirt gun fights with other kids; the kid who plays with kids. The Secret Identity working in reverse. Clark Kent protecting Superman.

Another school shooting today; another ‘random act of violence’ here in my home town. And all of the ranting about guns and ammunition; and very little public ranting about broken souls seeking attention, seeking to act out their anger… People looking for meaning, or trying to cope with their lack of meaning, and acting out their pain.

Does violence happen more often because there are so few heroes today?

heroes2I think this is the reason. We live in a society of instant gratification, instant fame, instant popularity. People become ‘heroic’ by performance in a video game, and that heroism becomes more gratifying than life in a cubicle or life behind a food order.
And I think that we realize that it’s a game. We fear that it will always be only a game. I played games within games. My family’s favorite card game involved bidding on the number of hands that you would win per round, based on the cards in your hand and on the table. My cousin counted cards; I never had the patience, the planning. So I decided that I wouldn’t try to win, I would aim for winning a certain number of hands, which often meant sacrificing good cards in order to hit my number. I often won. Lost the game, won my game.

I knew a man who spent a lifetime beating on industrial sawblades with a hammer–hand-tempering industrial sawblades. Big discs of steel with teeth. Day-in, day-out for 40 years. He couldn’t understand that his son, and I, could not find jobs to stick with. In his private time he served his church congregation, carved wood and trained plants. He made his world a better place, and that was enough. A different pace for a different time.

I think there is a movement today toward longer-term thinking. It’s a movement that is being drowned out by the clamor of the 24-hour news cycle and the latest technology being obsolete in 2 months.
To succeed in this endeavor, it requires a willingness to step away from our Secret Identity and become real. To be willing to be willing to walk a different path–one that treats people in the manner we would like to be treated.

My wife is one of my heroes. She treats all people equally. She treats the homeless person in the same way that she treats those in authority over her. She doesn’t fear for her personal safety; she fears for people’s well-being. She’s an odd person, and she doesn’t care. Because she loves people. Far from perfect, prone to moods; and at the same time, willing to stop her world’s schedule in order to make sure that a dead possum gets moved to the side of the road; so that it can have a more-dignified death.

My goal in this next chapter of my life–to become more fearless in my willingness to live honestly.

 

 

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 51: Teleology

May 12, 2014

Part of me keeps wondering why I bother to write this stuff. Part of it sharing stuff that I’ve learned, that seems important to me. I suppose that mental health is involved in some fashion.

Teleology…a new word for me. “…ology” always means ‘the study of…’ so, at first glance my inclination is to think that it means something like…

media_head…the study of television.

But it isn’t. Teleology is the study of Purpose.

Do we have one…what might it be…why it would be…all of those kinds of questions.

I seem to be thinking about this a lot these days. I have a client who appears to be in remission from liver cancer. I spend more time listening to him, and discussing “purpose” than I would have imagined. Illustrating his book appears mostly to be a reason for me to be in his life. We have a lot in common. He’s in a lot of pain and discomfort most of the time, as am I, but for him it’s a new thing still. Not surprisingly, he hasn’t figured out how to integrate it into his life; and he wonders how much he has left. As do I…

I believe that my life is in the Hand of my Creator; my client is angry with God, and doesn’t want him to be in his life. I know I have a purpose, even if it isn’t clear to me; because I was created for a purpose. My client isn’t sure he has a purpose, now that his life goal may not be realized due to illness.

I was talking with my friend, Marilyn Keller, a couple days ago; she’s getting ready to head to Australia for her annual international jazz/gospel tour. I’m watching one of her performances in Perth, as I write this. To my surprise, in earlier years she worked with her dad in a chlorine gas manufacturing plant. They manufacture chlorine gas by running extremely high voltage through brine [saltwater]. She was telling me about the precautions needed in order to work on the machines, and being around 20,000 volts of electrical current. How much of the work is simply that of resisting the magnetic current that is created by high voltage. Having to force the giant wrench to stay on the giant bolt, when magnetism wants to suck it away from the bolt.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the concept of the Creator as pure energy. The Bible doesn’t contradict science, although there are a lot of people who seem to think that it does. At times in the past, I’ve felt that way myself. One has to realize that the Bible had to make sense to people who were very literal about life, thousands of years ago—what you see is what you get—the earth is mostly flat; the sun revolves across the sky, which is something that is possibly held up by tall mountains. The stars are lights in the sky; the sun and the moon are bigger lights…Some people feel that in order for the Bible to be True, it has to match our understandings of science today…Only, it’s not a science book. The Bible is a multi-thousand year ‘journal’ of man’s interaction with our Creator.

I’ve written of this idea a lot, I may be repeating myself—I was sitting in the yard one day, and turned over a rock; and all of these squiggly critters started running around. A couple thousand years ago the Creator entered time and space in the form of a human. Not unlike the concept of my deciding to enter the world of those squiggly critters under the rock; in order to help them understand how to make sense of their world. Only I wouldn’t do that. I have trouble leaving my office and interacting with friends; reaching out to strangers is extremely draining. The Creator entered time and space as a human infant, about the most defenseless creature on the planet; in order to understand our lives, and to give us some instruction as to how to make our lives better. And the message started getting messed up, as humans do, shortly after His time here was completed.

To the Creator, in some sense, the Universe is small. In the same sense as with the people who design an aircraft carrier. To a naval architect, in some sense an aircraft carrier is small enough to fit into the imagination.

The Universe is so immense that the planet Earth is a flyspeck in a small suburb of one of the millions of galaxies in Creation. We are so infinitesimally small that the Creator would have absolutely no reason to pay any attention to us. Sort of like those critters under the rock. But if the Creator is Infinite, what is Large? For that matter, everything, including flyspecks, are small, compared to Infinity. I believe the Creator is still Creating today; that’s what Creation is about. I’m losing my ability to draw; I’m losing my ability to write legibly, and pressing these keys requires more effort. And I keep looking for ‘work-arounds’ that will enable me to keep making illustrations. I can’t stop. My life only makes sense to me if I’m creating images. I expect that this is a gift from the Creator; part of my being Created in [His] image. I apparently also need to learn how to make sense of my life when I can’t to this stuff anymore. I’m not there yet.

I’ve created some characters in my career; they’ve never been famous. I still keep using these characters over and over again in other illustrations. I like them. In some sense, I love them. They are important to me. At their most tangible stage they are lines and shading on pieces of paper; at their most developed, they are bits–electrons on a monitor, or ink/toner on a piece of paper. I rarely throw drawings away [I have stacks and gigabytes of them]. Small images that are a part of some larger image remain in my files, and only leave when absolutely necessary. Like when I spill coffee on them, and the ink runs…they become ‘broken’ and I dislike losing them. They aren’t evil; usually they didn’t even choose to become scrap. But that’s what they’ve become.

There are a ton of people who are angry at God, and those who blame/credit God for nearly everything, no matter how nonsensical. I don’t blame them; I used to be one. Religious people can be very annoying, even if one shares their views. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the life of the religious is like a bubble—self-contained and purified. the universe in his hands_1

But the modern Urban world is a bubble as well. Not as pure, not as simplified as the religious life. And I walk a road that wanders in and out of both bubbles. There is no gate between the two, although some think there is. One can wander in and out.

The Creator is Infinite and Eternal; we are very finite and very time-bound. While we are Created in the Creator’s image, it is a large mistake to believe that the Creator exists in our image. The Bible makes a lot of statements that are generally interpreted to mean that the world is filled with ‘bad’ people—“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. That Jesus, the Creator’s presence in this world, somehow absorbs the Creator’s anger over our wickedness. He protects us from…Himself? Seems like that would mean that the Creator is schizophrenic. While the world is no doubt filled with a lot of bad people—read the headlines on any day—I think that the reality is that while Created in the image of the Creator, it is our human limitations/liabilities that are incompatible with the nature of the Creator. Like humans and high-voltage.

I’ve done a lot of electrical wiring over the years. I have this tendency to choose not to flip the breaker before starting to install electrical outlets. It works, if one is careful, and insulated. With 110v, one can get zapped if one does the wrong thing, but if one isn’t standing in a puddle of water, and is wearing rubber-soled shoes, one can get zapped and still get reminded that it would have been much smarter to flip the breaker… I’ve never been this stupid with 220v—I’ve heard too many stories. Suppose the nature of the Creator is more like high-voltage than it is like being human. Grab hold of high-voltage and you are toast. The Bible talks about how, at the end of time, all that we are will be burned as if in fire, and that only ‘the gold’ will remain [remember, this was written so that people living a few thousand years ago would understand—it isn’t necessarily wrong, but there was no electricity when Jesus was doing carpentry in Nazareth]. The smelting of metal made sense as an illustraton. To me, this seems to be consistent with the idea that the Creator is pure energy—high voltage—and we need to be changed in order to be compatible with Eternity. Turning our Free Will toward the Creator, rather than our own foolish pleasures. Things I do for myself vs. things I do for others. I think maturity is learning to focus my attention on others, and on things that will last, rather than things that fade with time. Like bodies.

the universe in his hands_mer
There’s a part of me that wants to write something that will solve most of the world’s problems–that will bring peace where there is anger. That will bring the assurance that we are Loved as we are; and that everyone doesn’t have to agree with each other in order to live together. That my having doesn’t take away from you, and vice-versa. We’re making a mess of this world, and we don’t need to; but it requires a ton of cooperation and a willingness to change for a higher good; a willingness to make some sacrifices. It means sharing, and that, in human beings, does not appear to occur naturally. It has to be learned, because sharing means overcoming the fear that there won’t be enough. That sharing means that we all deserve to live harmoniously with our world.

But I doubt that this will occur in my lifetime.

 

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 49: Odd Things

April 4, 2014

This is a two-part post; the second half of which is too long for a blog. I have a link at the end of part one that will take you to the second half…

42; or, Jesus in the Garden

In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, [if I recall correctly] one of the characters ask a supercomputer for the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. Time passes [this was in the days when a Megabyte was huge], and eventually the supercomputer spits out the answer: “42”.
Being somewhat confused as to the nature of this answer, the character then asks the supercomputer, ‘What is the Ultimate Question?’ Time passes. The supercomputer eventually spits out the result: “What is 7 X 8?”

The nature of the Universe.

I have this tendency to think about the odd things in the Bible.

Not having been raised with “Bible Stories,” I don’t have any “Bible Answers” coursing through my veins. I didn’t learn Bible Stories as a child. My first hearing of Bible Stories was as an adult [Bible Stories, first heard as an adult, can often be strange]. I had been accustomed [thanks to my Senior English teacher in high school—another interesting coincide-ence in my life] to critical thinking by the time I left high school. Critical thinking was part of my college years, although not as much as in that one year of high school—“Appearance vs. Reality as viewed by Pirandello and Kafka” or some such title—at least that’s my recollection, four decades on. All of my careers required/have-benefitted-from critical thinking. The practice of critical thinking has affected my ‘walk of faith;’ I’m rarely satisfied by simplistic answers to difficult questions. So the odd things in the Bible have always attracted my attention, and I have trouble settling for simplistic Church explanations for odd things…

Jesus prayed by Himself in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before His crucifixion. His buddies, who were supposed to be praying with Him, were asleep; twice. Buddies often are. The Bible says that Jesus shed drops of blood due to His internal anguish. Anguish over what? His upcoming torture? I’m not convinced, now that I think about it.

I’ve lived with chronic pain for four decades, more or less. Migraines [starting in 1979, continuing into the 2000s], fibromyalgia/rheumatism, a ruptured appendix, a bone chip in my ankle joint from a torn ligament as a kid, trampoline accident in high school; three ‘totaled’ vehicles from which I walked away [‘any landing you walk away from is a good landing’]. A consistent back pain, every day of the last 40 years, except for a brief period when it mysteriously disappeared, after attending a Crusade [would the back pain have remained gone if I had made that experience a key element of my life and faith? I don’t know; some would say that it would have]. That particular back pain has mostly been superseded by other back pains; and the damage is visible in an MRI. Pain is a fact of my life; but I work at not making it a big deal.

It’s hard to say which of the pains has been the worst. We are blessed that we don’t remember pain clearly. I remember the fact of those past pains, I can remember some of the feelings associated with those pains; but thankfully I can’t reenact the past pains. The migraines were probably the worst in terms of effect on my life, and were pretty continual from age twenty-eight into my early fifties. I remember “lost weekends” as I called them. Weekends spent in the dark with my head packed in ice. I never lost consciousness because of pain; I frequently let go of consciousness in order to sleep; and get away from the pain. I don’t know how similar the two are. I certainly never sweat drops of blood because of my pain. Nevertheless, it’s really hard for me to imagine Jesus sweating drops of blood because of the pain He probably knew was coming at the hands of the Roman military government. We Christians have a tendency to focus on the suffering that came with the Cross; I think it’s more appropriate to focus on the suffering that came with Jesus taking on the punishment that was rightfully ours in history; the punishment He accepted for what followed His Presence here on earth.

As I think about it now, I can imagine Jesus sweating drops of blood over all of the hatred and evil that was going to be done in the centuries ahead, all in His Name. Suppose, for a moment, that Jesus was given foreknowledge of the martyrdom in Rome to come in the next decades and the following centuries; the Crusades; the Inquisition; the Nazi death camps [in a not consistent way, the slaughter was done in His name] the lynching by the KKK [also done in His Name, to a degree]; the martyrdom that continues today, two millennia after His death on the cross. Blaming Jesus for all of the torture and brutality and evil that was going to come; evil that had nothing to do with Jesus and His teachings; yet was going to occur because His followers down through the millennia would get it wrong… To have entered time and space from Eternity and Infinity, in order to teach these pesky humans how to live in tune with their Creator; and to find that not only was the teaching going to be ignored throughout history, but that He was going to be blamed for the cruel death of tens of millions in the centuries to come… I think this might be a reason for Jesus to have been in anguish to the point of shedding blood.

The first thing Jesus did, upon being arrested, having spent hours dripping blood, was to heal the ear of Malchus, a servant who got in the way of the Peter’s sword…

garden gethsemane rev2

The second part of this ‘Easter meditation’ can be found here in a separate pdf file which will open on a new page…

 

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 48: That Old Man

March 22, 2014

I’ve always enjoyed Science Fiction. Granted, I’m more inclined toward ‘cowboys in space’ than I am toward the many other genres within science fiction. Science fiction is one place where morality and philosophy can be discussed without some of the claptrap that religion often brings to the table. I think the ability to analyze ‘who I am’ is probably the most significant aspect of being a human being, Created in the image of the Creator [Lost some attention right there].

I’m also a big fan of Stargate SG-1. The episode I watched tonight deals with the issue of war crimes and redemption. Teal’c, the ‘bad guy’ turned ‘good guy’ [and in my opinion, the hero of the series], stands trial for the murder of the father of a boy grown into manhood. At the end, after all of the dust has settled, and the SG-1 team helps take out the bad guys, Teal’c turns himself over to his accuser to be executed.
“I am the Jaffa who killed your father.”
“No, you are mistaken. That Jaffa is dead; he was killed by you.”

MALCHUS 2.5Malchus’ Ear [detail]

I created this image some years ago, inspired by part of the Easter Story, a part that is somewhat underplayed. The part about Jesus choosing to die, as opposed to being betrayed by Judas. When the Roman guards come to arrest Jesus, a servant named Malchus is attacked by Peter, using the sword that Jesus told him to bring. The more famous part is ‘those who live by the sword shall die by the sword;’ overlooking the idea that this apparently was planned; or at least, not a surprise.
Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? Mt 26:53
Jesus wasn’t worried about a few Legionnaires.
I’ve always wondered about the ear… The Gospels teach that Jesus healed Malchus. So, did He ‘glue’ the ear back on; create a new ear; or somehow reverse time, as far as the ear is concerned? We don’t know. My favorite mental image is of Malchus’ mantlepiece and this shriveled, mushroom-looking thing lying on a special cloth or plate. The ear that was lopped off. Maybe an ear ring in his new ear…
Peter was no doubt confused about the whole thing. Why was he supposed to bring a sword if he was going to get chewed out for using it?
When did Jesus know that he had more than twelve legions of angels at His beck and call? The whole time? That night in the Garden?
There are apocryphal stories of the boy Jesus molding birds out of mud, and watching them fly away…

………………………..

Through the Creator’s Grace we have the ability to become a new creation. To become a new person.  Some would say that it’s because of evolutionary development, psychology, or the power of positive thinking, or any of a number of explanations; and I suppose those explanations are accurate in terms of the means by which redemption takes place.
I look back at the last 40+ years of my life, and the guy I was in my first years of college. I try to imagine what my life would have been like if not for the ‘simple’ decision as to what I was going to choose as my major; once I found out that ‘my plan’ didn’t exist at Oregon State. At the time I didn’t realize how momentous a decision that was; it was simply choosing how I wanted to spend the next 4 years of my life. A couple years later I discovered that the number was really 5… It’s only from the perspective of 40 years that I see how my life could have been entirely different.

I look at my adult kids, wonderful people, and I can see who I would be, if not for an encounter with Brad. Brad opened a door into the world of Grace, which led to another door, and innumerable doors that followed. I made a decision to change my life, and become the person I wanted to be, rather than the person I was being led into becoming.
Because Life has a way of making us take a left turn when we’d planned on going right, ‘the person I wanted to be’ is not the person I’ve become. A person for whom the Creator is more important than I could ever have believed; and a person who realizes that what I believe is a Mystery… I will continue exploring the Mystery and probably never get closer, in this life.

Joni Mitchell is singing Judy Collins’ “Both Sides Now,” as I type.  I don’t really believe in “random” music selection. Joni is probably in her 50’s at this time. An adult voice singing a song I listened to a lot in college, when the song was new.
The apostle Paul talks a lot about ‘shedding the old man,’ and becoming a new person.
The ‘old man’ that I was has been replaced by this old man…

Mikey avatar 3

 

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 47: Black Care

March 14, 2014

scan0004Draft image for a book about a dying man

NARRATOR: Theodore Roosevelt embodied America at the turn of the century — the confidence, the exuberance, the aggressiveness. It was all there, all in him. ”Roosevelt,” someone said, ”was a steam engine in trousers.” Cowboy, soldier, explorer, scientist, a world authority on large mammals and small birds, the author of 36 books and more than 100,000 letters, he made himself president by the age of 42.
None of it was easy. Shadowed by illness, haunted by the deaths of those most dear to him, he learned early, he said, that ”Life was one long campaign where every victory merely leaves the ground free for another battle.” ”Black care,” he wrote, ”rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcript/tr-transcript/

My pace apparently isn’t fast enough. This has been a crummy week. Black Care at my back.
Why would I be telling anyone about this? It’s certainly nothing I want to brag about; and I don’t have any solutions. I also don’t really have any explanations as to why this week has been worse than others. Part of it is the pain; but the pain hasn’t been any worse than at other times. It hasn’t been any better, either.
I seem to be communicating with folks who are dealing with difficult stuff. A woman who has just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s; a man who may be dying from a damaged liver; damaged by the doctors who were supposed to be treating him. So much grief…

I listen to music all day; much of which is what I’ve labeled, “songs for broken people.” Lyrics that I want feeding my brain, an alternative to the stuff that my brain wants to shove out into my thinking.
I have a small heater blowing hot air on my feet all day, and they feel painfully cold. They can’t be cold, but that’s what the damaged nerves are telling me. Having spent much of my life living on aspirin and barbiturates, and having toxicity/self-poisoning the only likely suspect that hasn’t been ruled out; I’m working at avoiding pills to deal with the pain. It’s possible to be addicted to ‘non-addictive’ meds. One merely has to hurt bad enough, often enough. I see the pain doc in a couple of weeks; not a lot of expectations.

People don’t talk much about pain; I suppose this is mostly because we all hate it; and people feel they should have answers. I don’t have answers. My belief is that this life is short compared to Eternity. While I would never have wished for 30+ years of pain, it’s the hand I’ve been dealt, and my Creator understands why. I believe that every one of my 61+ years has been known by my Creator since before my birth. And all of the days I have left. My Creator has known about the lost weekends in dark rooms, with my head packed in ice. All of the time I wasn’t able to give to my family; and if I’m honest, time I wouldn’t have spent with them, because of other stuff.

Why would the Creator allow pain in our lives? Wouldn’t a loving God want his children to live without pain and suffering? Most of the world’s pain is caused by Man. Where would He start in changing the way a person behaves? I spent a lot of the time I had, visiting as a kid in an Eastern Oregon town of 3 digits in population, killing ants. I was bored stiff and there were a lot of ants. Not really damaging anything as far as I could tell; they were mostly doing what ants do all day. It sort of bothered me, but they were only ants and it was something to do…just ants…
Created by my Creator.
To my Creator, I may not be that much more significant than an ant. Made in the image of my Creator, and I’m not really sure what that means. I doubt that it’s my mind; the image probably refers to my ability to choose how I live my life. What I do with what I have.
Americans waste so many of our choices.
I shot a bird once; I was aiming at it, but never imagined I’d actually hit the thing. Dead by one BB. I am aware that I have the capacity for violence; and I’ve avoided it as an adult.

Natural disaster. The Earth moves. We feel as though we have some sort of protection from natural disaster, but it happens. Thousands of people, every day, damaged in their bodies or their souls by stuff they couldn’t predict.

The only answer that makes any sense to me is that we are Eternal beings, and this lifetime however, long and painful it may be, is only an eyeblink in the span of Eternity. Watching my children growing up, comforting them in the everyday pains that children encounter, I realized I could not protect them from hurt; and that if I could, I wouldn’t be helping them. We learn through pain. It’s a really lousy answer, but it seems to be the one that makes the most sense.

So I rant at the Creator. Whine and grumble, more than rant. I was given a Gift this morning, during my mostly-daily walk through the cemetery up the hill from us [I live on an inactive volcano, one of several that surround Portland]. Three deer came out onto the road ahead of me, one at a time. Watching me as they came out of the creek bed, and continuing on their morning adventure. The one in front seemed to be the most daring, the most adventuresome…projection on my part. While I realized that seeing the deer was a Gift–it’s been close to a year since I’ve seen any deer at the cemetery–I was also aware that I was still bitching about how I felt; frustrated with the state of my business; frustrated that a large check I received from a potential client was fraudulent. I already had the check half-spent, in my mind. Frustrated that I can’t be everything I want to be; frustrated that my time for being that person is being cut short.

Time for another hero movie. Time for some more drawing, while I still can.

American Heroes

 

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 46: Everything’s Amazing And Nobody’s Happy

February 27, 2014

My apologies for stealing the title. Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/02/25/282516865/everythings-amazing-and-nobodys-happy
Watch the video, also.

This is the first map of radioactivity in a supernova remnant, the blown-out bits and pieces of a massive star that exploded. The blue color shows radioactive material mapped in high-energy X-rays using NuSTAR. Heated, non-radioactive elements previously“The new view shows a more complete picture of Cassiopeia A, the remains of a star that blew up in a supernova event whose light reached Earth about 350 years ago, when it could have appeared to observers as a star that suddenly brightened. The remnant is located 11,000 light-years away from Earth.” http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/image/nustar140219a

picture of Cassiopeia A
whose light reached Earth about 350 years ago
located 11,000 light-years away
If these aren’t OMG phrases, I’m not sure what are. And we are so complacent.
I am so complacent.

People are walking around with more computing power in their pocket than any of the Apollo astronauts had, traveling to the Moon. And it drops, and the glass cracks and you have to pay a huge amount of money to replace it; even though it’s still in its “trial/return period” which does not replacement of damaged phones… Because 3-digits-before-the-decimal may be a large chunk of a paycheck that is already stretched to breaking…

When I was a kid, I used to get up early to watch the Mercury and Apollo launches. On a fuzzy black and white cathode-tube television that Einstein only dreamed of [slight exaggeration for Albert]. I remember NOT watching the launches, because they had become more commonplace.

Pulp-O-Mizer_Cover_Image

Today I carried on almost-simultaneous conversations with a client in London, a couple somewhere in Mongolia and a client in California… OMG

One of the ‘spoilers’ is money. Smart phones cost a lot of money, as do utilities, food and the other stuff that fills our lives. I don’t have a smart phone; I only have a dumb phone that I often forget to take with me on those rare days when I leave my office. Of course, I also have two desktop computers and a laptop computer, all of which run 24/7 for most days of the year. I also have two other laptops mostly in disrepair, and a stack of dead ones, as well as two or three desktop computers that don’t- or barely run.
Money means employment; employment comes with its own headaches.

The cares of life beat the ‘wonder’ out of us. Jesus, my mentor and my example, teaches that wonder can be part of our life every moment; but I haven’t learned that teaching very well. My children, now adults, have been some of my best teachers of ‘wonder’ and they mostly don’t remember how to do it; due to their own cares and concerns.
My recollection of the adults in my life, growing up, is that they mostly were wonder-proof. I remember telling my father that he worked too much, and was missing out on too much of life. I have become my father. Fortunately, my own kids are somewhat wiser.

I wonder if, as a child, I was ever a teacher of wonder.

wonder

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 43:

January 20, 2014

valley of the shadow
A friend of mine was describing the images that came to mind as he read the 23rd Psalm–“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…surely Goodness and Mercy shall follow me all of the days of my life…” He described angels watching over him. This is the image that came to my mind, as he described his image.

I have always been partial to “fear not and behold!” angels as opposed to the Hallmark kind. If one reads the descriptions in the older parts of Scripture, one doesn’t find Clarence Oddbody nor the cute little angels found at Christmastime. I’ve always figured that angels must be fearsome to behold, since fear seems to be the first reaction the angels have to deal with.

For much of the 40 years that I have been following the Creator I’ve heard this continual subtext–that good things will happen to the Believer who is following the Creator closely; that trouble will stay away. This hasn’t necessarily been the overt text, but it has been the subtext, and I’ve always found it confusing. 1] it isn’t Scriptural–if nothing else, Scripture assures the Believer that there will be trouble; 2] I’ve been battling chronic pain for half of my life–something like 30 of my 60+ years.

I’ve never been very religious; just can’t force myself into that mold.  Part of me has found this notion to blame; but then I read the Book of Job–the oldest part of the Bible, which basically says that being religious has nothing to do with a life that pleases the Creator [it seems that serious acknowledgement is central to a faith that pleases the Creator]. “shit happens” seems to be the best explanation as to why bad things happen to good, and not-so-g00d people. It’s a part of Life.

I’ve also come to believe that there is a part of Life that is much harder to figure out. The Apostle Paul writes that we are like players on a stage, performing for an unseen audience. Physicists postulate that there are 11 dimensions, rather than the four we know about [length, width, height and time]; I have come to the conclusion that if there are 11 dimensions, then one of these dimensions is a dimension of the Spirit; or that the correct number is at least 12.

There has been so much of my life that has pointed me to the Creator; events that have happened to me, or to my family, that have been so personal that I can’ t prove them to anyone. There is no proof; and at the same time, there is little room for doubt.  Mostly in the context of a middle-class [and sliding], non-adventurous life. Not much drama; nothing from which to make an interesting movie. Crises, an ample number of them; from which we mostly survived fairly well, although not cheaply.

Through all of my life I have felt that I was in the presence of unseen Presences; formidable angels seem to qualify. Amidst the crises, there is much that happens on filmed stories that have never happened to us. Burglaries with minimal damage; car wrecks without death; accidents without death; deadly illness that hasn’t. There are unseen wolves that have been held back by Guardians we cannot see. Perhaps.

pilgrim col

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 38: Choices

November 10, 2013

Law Office FourGrnA recent image, created for an attorney who chose not to comment upon the image, and also chose not to pay me… I can’t say that I’ll ever recommend her.
I find the bulk of my work [numerically] by trolling Craigslist, across the country. Sometimes I run into good projects; other times…

“How Shall We Then Live?” The title of a book by Francis Shaeffer, from the last century, but still a valid question. Today I watched a movie about the abduction and murder of a Wall Street Journal journalist, working in Pakistan a few years ago. He chose to interview the wrong man, and ended up paying for it with his life. There was no clear reason why he was killed. Maybe because he was Jewish, though non-religious; he was accused of being a spy, and wasn’t. His kidnappers wanted the behavior of the US government in regard to Guantanamo to change; that was his ransom.

I came across a great website today:
http://themetapicture.com/how-to-interact-with-the-introverted/
a perfect picture of my life.

We make choices every day. Sometimes, even relatively small choices can have dramatic outcomes. The things we say to the people around us can change a life.

At present, I’m struggling with a FEAR [False Evidence Appearing Real] about picking up a pencil and drawing again. I haven’t done this for a few weeks; most of my work lately has been digital. My hands have started shaking a lot when I try to make ‘small motor’ motions. Another side effect of the neuropathy, I imagine. Threading a needle is probably impossible. That’s the fear. Holding a mouse works; although clicking the button correctly is sometimes challenging.  My fear is that I won’t be able to finish the drawing I’ve laid out digitally; and the subsequent fear that I won’t be able to finish the book I started a long time ago.

Coping. Work-arounds. Finding ways to accomplish what I really want to accomplish. The ‘importance’ of what I want to accomplish in the light of a typhoon that has killed possibly 10,000 people in the Philippines; all of whom had their own goals and dreams. None of whom expected to die that day.

I don’t know what introverts do in Pakistan…maybe they move out of the major cities. So many people; I’d want to scream all the time.
I am so accustomed to my life, and my lifestyle. I’m so accustomed to my life looking like Portland. I was in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week, helping Medical Teams International with a project. The city of Oaxaca is comparable in geographic size with East Portland; and has several thousand more people. Many of the people live on the hillsides surrounding the town; they don’t have running water. Tin shacks next to stucco three story houses, next to bark huts. Electricity carried by lamp cord. Antennas on top of tin shacks…

One of my coworkers had a Margarita too many and was talking in the mostly-non-English restaurant about how Oaxaca should become like a city in the US; apparently oblivious to the fact that Oaxaca has been there for centuries. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, across the plaza from the restaurant we were sitting in began construction in 1535 and it was consecrated on July 12, 1733.  Fortunately, most of the people in the restaurant did not speak English, or we might have been thrown out.
My four companions were all rich, and very conservative, and were there for some reason I couldn’t discern. I was there to be Jesus’ hands and feet. I didn’t have much to say at dinners; because they lived in a world that was almost as far away from mine as life in Oaxaca was from me. They gave me an opportunity to talk about my interests on our last night there; can’t remember what I said.

I’ve posted this before; it’s about the only thing I can say about the Philippines, the Middle East, and all of the victims around the world.

Ashes of Hiroshima

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