[The Void]
well it happened.
2007-10-23
Well it happened, my dreaded fear. At seven thirty in the morning my patient went down and I did too. So after a day waiting for doc appt and paperwork I find myself at home with medical leave.
Damn....damn damn damn.
I can relook at the moments before hand and know where things were in a shaky place. And thankfully, the patient is all good without bruises or fractures. She was six foot one and weighed 267 lbs. I am five foot one and 140 lbs....so it wasn't easy. But the years of transfer safety courses and body mechanics saved me I am sure.
Doc popped a small part of my back into place again and left me with some really strong muscles relaxers and two days of ice packing on my arms. She says for the record it couldn't have gone any better~ nothing fractured, nothing broken, nothing permanet. Just strain. So yay, theres the positive. And instead of medications for months just some for the week and bedrest.
Even typing is still a bit uncomfortable, so this is short. I am feeling ok, just almost like....I tried to lift something too heavy to left and sore.
oh, and bit sleepy....manufactured meds are strong I tell ya. Not used of taking them. But can see why folks do. They got pills for everything it seems. Thank goodness I won't be on them for long. I will keep my addictions to caffiene and nicotine.
On a quick side note, took the kids to a pumpkin patch with a few older friends as well. We are all still kids aren't we? haha. Got a great deal on fifty pound pumpkins! fifteen dollars for all three, thats alot of pumpkin! Mine is decked out in spirals of course, and theres one for the family ancestory line.
The Gods smiled on us that day in all ways, even giving us a free ten foot tall tree I wanted so badly. It is a tulip tree. And she is a beauty. I had one growing up,strong tree it was. Beautiful shade.
The long path on the east side of the house is graveled into a walk way out of the two feet deep mud. I am glad I got that done before this injury. It looks marvelous!
I am finding some new faces around me lately. And it is a nice feeling. I do try to be more calm around folks I really do. But hard to maintain it. But when I am excited I am excited. And everything about my new house and its property has me excited. Meditating in different areas, planting, composting and harvesting...its a dream come true. So of course that is where I spend alot of my time. And when visitors come, they have learned to bring mud boots, cause we are heading outside!
Some folks are great nature lovers. muds ok, bugs are ok...and it doesn't have to be sunny to enjoy nature at her best. I don't feel like a big kid around these folks. Just another nature lover.
Big hugs I suppose. Its a beautiful October. And I am all ready for new year.
1 Comments | Link to This | Back to top
fall is here
2007-10-15
Things are for sure changing. Watching the seasons outside my window, stepping on the crispy leaves and feeling the bitter chill that blows through the trees. I have seen more deer in the last few days from a few weeks ago. Hunting season opened up, some have taken refuge in the back four acres. I brought my drum out and sang, its something I have only done alone or with my oldest boy. I sang to the animals and to the trees. Then opened my heart to my ancestors. This is my new home. And I want them all to know. Where I am laying in roots, where I am trying to start a new life.
It felt so crowded at first. You see faces in the trees, in the mysts. You see many feathered birds and squirrels still catching the last bits of nuts and roots. It felt like home.
I made a small fire. Burned some cedar and Fireweed blooms. Offered tobacco and did a small circle dance. I felt the outer barriers of this land with my fingertips...its amazing. I had never experienced something like it. I voiced out to the land where it was safe. Where the fencing line was, where the water still ran and greenery still grew. Little hiding areas, little dens to sleep in safety.
Samhain is coming soon, then the rituals of ancestory and family all t hrough November. We planted in our family staff at the back door entrance. We will make a new one this year out of Oak. After all the daily stuffs and helping paint the new mobil outside I came back into my house, and started to make wreaths and poppets. Over the weekend I collected dried weeds, tistles and thistles. Time to make some decorations with a magical effect for the house. So simple these charms are but have come very calming to me as well. Its not just something pretty but needed, as much as blankets on a cold day or dry wood for the stove. Each act we make is magical so they say, so make your actions meaningful and strong.
Soon we will cut the willows back, it leaves us good branches for weaving and amending other broken projects. The tall grasses are perfectly colored and hollow for the picking on bundles tied with prayers and good thoughts. I am making a few with my long distance friends in mind, with sweet lavender packed in the middle and some ginger for the heat of the hearth.
I miss the closeness I had before with folks around me...but at the same time something is keeping me from feeling so lonely. Maybe my dreams are to come true. That this will not be a lonely hideaway, and my happy go lucky smile still brings in the friendly folks from around town. I have met a few, and some few still travel down to see me.
One friend Diane is coming down to help with the color schemes we want for the house. While still awhile off from actually painting we are trying to buy the paint. Right now it is still the odd pastels of pink and mauve...soft blues. I am sooo not a pastel gal. I was wanting more green in my kitchen. Browns, so a nature theme we have come up with. Stenciling the leaves, acorns and ferns into the woodwork. The livingroom area we think the north wall will be grey like rock. Its textured like it right now with a huge arch that looks like a brick/rock wall. I bought some grape stencils to go there.
The eastern and western walls already have a deep textured wave look to them. Not sure how easy they will be to paint. But looking forward to the more natural color lines coming back into the home.
All in time I suppose. All in time.
0 Comments | Link to This | Back to top
friends
2007-10-10
You know....I have two words: Free speech.
And I was just so damn relieved those still exist today~ in relationships, in society...damn....I am tickled pink. Just to open lines of saying~ blah blah blah, and having someone actually return the favor even risking it offending your ass~ they do it anyway.....Hot damn! That is freakin wonderful, fantastic, awesome, supertintglitterly beautiful Baby!!!
You need to be able to say this is what I am pissed off with. This is where you fucked up. And me be able to say~ ya know...I don't think so. And still...the sun rises and the wind blows cause tomorrow is a beautiful thing.
Choices....I honestly think its the beautiful gift of choices. What are you choosing for yourself? Baby...I choose you! Cause you rock~ cause your trying~ cause you keep trying....that baby is the tinkle in orgasims...
So the world knows~ theres this hottie named Kat in Oregon, she rocks and is my friend. I piss her off more often that you would like to count but not all people are weak~ shes proof.
0 Comments | Link to This | Back to top
sometimes people are mean
2007-10-08
I was excited to see a family we know get their house tore down and rebuilt on the television last night. It was an awesome sight. My daughter as well helped with that building! Although didn't make it to the final episode cuts. Ah well, I am not worried about that. I am just so damn proud of her for taking the time and effort.
Theres folks that make a mark in your life more than you realize till much much later. Maybe its my lack of awareness I suppose that didn't take account how close. This person in detail is in her 80s and I have known her for more than three years. Seeing her through some really hard times. Today, I held her so close while she watched her husband of 50 years ride a wheelchair that will not take him home...but to a retirement home.
I felt my heart open and bleed. I do not know this pain, Her pain. I only know my heart is breaking. And one day, the same possibility is also open to me. I didn't offer words that are lies....and didn't try to make light of it. Just saying what I told her when I first met her, I will be here. I do care, and I want to do what I can to make this survivable.
When I walked back inside I started to realize how many folks I do know. Here, in this small community. I was amazed, recounting how many can recognize me. And say~ theres one special gal. It was an ego boost I really needed to hear today. And gave me the soothing I needed to finally forgive myself for the loss of a dear patient last week. I did the best I could, I am not even in the arena of being powerful enough to stop it....however....it doesn't take the sting of realizing if I was ten minutes eariler..I could have helped ease the pain even though I couldn't have stopped death.
That is not my job. And sometimes I have to remind myself of that. I cannot stop death. I cannot amend what is broken. Only their body can do that, and with guidence of a trained professional. When it comes down to my DO list....I am the comforter, I am the little helper in the shadows. And really, I like it there.
I like to be there when bad news hits. I hold their hands when no family is around. I make folks comfortable. Using what little ability I have to sense their pain when they cannot speak. I wish I could say I was born with it, but it is a well nutured trait I have picked up over the last ten years. If thier heart is open you can really sense so much about a person. Which has been a huge lesson for me this year. Open folks....I never realized why I was an open book. Why it was relatively easy~ not that it didn't require work but that I never had the idea of blocking it. I didn't see why. We are one flesh, I believe that. We are all human, I believe that. We are all part of the same cycle. This also I hold close to my heart. When these folks come together, you can read almost everything about them.
The other major thing, you have to really give it all to get it all. Emotionally, mentally and spiritually for this to be full cycle. When I have been myself, my normal self. I see the world so differently than the 'eggshell self' that I sometimes fall into. Did I say that right? Did I make the right decision? Did I watch my body posture? When I can throw these worries off, I can just be energetic~ spiritually. And i have noticed how much that attracts the best teachers.
I took a moment to realize my blessings today. How much I am loved, appreciated, thought of. How that makes me feel, and what I did to recieve it full circle. How often I go without armour. And if that is the path I was meant to stay on...or the lesson I was to learn not to do. Talk about a crossroads. It would mean changing my entire life to bar up my heart. To cool down my emotional self.
I talked with a few pregnant teens today. We talked of how hard it is to really go the route they are heading into. We talked of the possibilities. No judgements~ last thing they need to hear is how stupid they are, or how it was a big mistake. No one likes to hear their kid is a mistake. I was frank~ its going to be all uphill. No one thinks your going to make it, and some folks~ even if you are doing well will always say you messed up and thats that. Point being~ do whats right to you, your family and your higher self.
We ended the conversation in a few tears. Some retelling of the courses they are going through right now, and never realizing there is a whole different possiblity to the ending of their story. That there is a possiblity of success. Was that what they were not told??? My Gods! Why? Do you want to just stomp on them when their down? These are going to be parents in charge of little precious souls. How in the hell can they do that feeling like they are useless? They don't need a shove down, they need a light. Heres what has to be done, heres what has to change. Heres what your new life can be like. And really~ those that kick ya when your down are just preaching what they need to learn the most. We do that~ us humans.....its in the miracles class. We often preach what we need to learn the most. Six of the ten are finishing school. Three of them are already employed in a self managed job. There is hope there. And now, they feel it too.
If I can help alittle, in a big world....I think there is still hope for us as humans.
3 Comments | Link to This | Back to top
Columbus Day Celebration
2007-10-07
| Published on Monday, October 11, 2004 by Common Dreams |
| Columbus Day Celebration? Think Again... |
| by Thom Hartmann |
"Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise." "Christopher Columbus not only opened the door to a New World, but also set an example for us all by showing what monumental feats can be accomplished through perseverance and faith." If you fly over the country of Haiti on the island of Hispaniola, the island on which Columbus landed, it looks like somebody took a blowtorch and burned away anything green. Even the ocean around the port capital of Port au Prince is choked for miles with the brown of human sewage and eroded topsoil. From the air, it looks like a lava flow spilling out into the sea. The history of this small island is, in many ways, a microcosm for what's happening in the whole world. When Columbus first landed on Hispaniola in 1492, virtually the entire island was covered by lush forest. The Taino "Indians" who loved there had an apparently idyllic life prior to Columbus, from the reports left to us by literate members of Columbus's crew such as Miguel Cuneo. When Columbus and his crew arrived on their second visit to Hispaniola, however, they took captive about two thousand local villagers who had come out to greet them. Cuneo wrote: "When our caravels... where to leave for Spain, we gathered...one thousand six hundred male and female persons of those Indians, and these we embarked in our caravels on February 17, 1495...For those who remained, we let it be known (to the Spaniards who manned the island's fort) in the vicinity that anyone who wanted to take some of them could do so, to the amount desired, which was done." Cuneo further notes that he himself took a beautiful teenage Carib girl as his personal slave, a gift from Columbus himself, but that when he attempted to have sex with her, she "resisted with all her strength." So, in his own words, he "thrashed her mercilessly and raped her." While Columbus once referred to the Taino Indians as cannibals, a story made up by Columbus - which is to this day still taught in some US schools - to help justify his slaughter and enslavement of these people. He wrote to the Spanish monarchs in 1493: "It is possible, with the name of the Holy Trinity, to sell all the slaves which it is possible to sell...Here there are so many of these slaves, and also brazilwood, that although they are living things they are as good as gold..." Columbus and his men also used the Taino as sex slaves: it was a common reward for Columbus' men for him to present them with local women to rape. As he began exporting Taino as slaves to other parts of the world, the sex-slave trade became an important part of the business, as Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500: "A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are now in demand." However, the Taino turned out not to be particularly good workers in the plantations that the Spaniards and later the French established on Hispaniola: they resented their lands and children being taken, and attempted to fight back against the invaders. Since the Taino where obviously standing in the way of Spain's progress, Columbus sought to impose discipline on them. For even a minor offense, an Indian's nose or ear was cut off, se he could go back to his village to impress the people with the brutality the Spanish were capable of. Columbus attacked them with dogs, skewered them with pikes, and shot them. Eventually, life for the Taino became so unbearable that, as Pedro de Cordoba wrote to King Ferdinand in a 1517 letter, "As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth... Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery." Eventually, Columbus and later his brother Bartholomew Columbus who he left in charge of the island, simply resorted to wiping out the Taino altogether. Prior to Columbus' arrival, some scholars place the population of Haiti/Hispaniola (now at 16 million) at around 1.5 to 3 million people. By 1496, it was down to 1.1 million, according to a census done by Bartholomew Columbus. By 1516, the indigenous population was 12,000, and according to Las Casas (who were there) by 1542 fewer than 200 natives were alive. By 1555, every single one was dead. This wasn't just the story of Hispaniola; the same has been done to indigenous peoples worldwide. Slavery, apartheid, and the entire concept of conservative Darwinian Economics, have been used to justify continued suffering by masses of human beings. Dr. Jack Forbes, Professor of Native American Studies at the University of California at Davis and author of the brilliant book "Columbus and Other Cannibals," uses the Native American word wétiko (pronounced WET-ee-ko) to describe the collection of beliefs that would produce behavior like that of Columbus. Wétiko literally means "cannibal," and Forbes uses it quite intentionally to describe these standards of culture: we "eat" (consume) other humans by destroying them, destroying their lands, taking their natural resources, and consuming their life-force by enslaving them either physically or economically. The story of Columbus and the Taino is just one example. We live in a culture that includes the principle that if somebody else has something we need, and they won't give it to us, and we have the means to kill them to get it, it's not unreasonable to go get it, using whatever force we need to. In the United States, the first "Indian war" in New England was the "Pequot War of 1636," in which colonists surrounded the largest of the Pequot villages, set it afire as the sun began to rise, and then performed their duty: they shot everybody-men, women, children, and the elderly-who tried to escape. As Puritan colonist William Bradford described the scene: "It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they [the colonists] gave praise therof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully..." The Narragansetts, up to that point "friends" of the colonists, were so shocked by this example of European-style warfare that they refused further alliances with the whites. Captain John Underhill ridiculed the Narragansetts for their unwillingness to engage in genocide, saying Narragansett wars with other tribes were "more for pastime, than to conquer and subdue enemies." In that, Underhill was correct: the Narragansett form of war, like that of most indigenous Older Culture peoples, and almost all Native American tribes, does not have extermination of the opponent as a goal. After all, neighbors are necessary to trade with, to maintain a strong gene pool through intermarriage, and to insure cultural diversity. Most tribes wouldn't even want the lands of others, because they would have concerns about violating or entering the sacred or spirit-filled areas of the other tribes. Even the killing of "enemies" is not most often the goal of tribal "wars": It's most often to fight to some pre-determined measure of "victory" such as seizing a staff, crossing a particular line, or the first wounding or surrender of the opponent. This wétiko type of theft and warfare is practiced daily by farmers and ranchers worldwide against wolves, coyotes, insects, animals and trees of the rainforest; and against indigenous tribes living in the jungles and rainforests. It is our way of life. It comes out of our foundational cultural notions. So it should not surprise us that with the doubling of the world's population over the past 37 years has come an explosion of violence and brutality, and as the United States runs low on oil, we are now fighting wars in oil-rich parts of the world. That is, after all, our history, which we celebrate on Columbus Day. It need not be our future. Excerpted and slightly edited from "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late" by Thom Hartmann. http://www.thomhartmann.com%20/ |
0 Comments | Link to This | Back to top
Created with ShoutPost
