Emphathy

In my tiny sphere of awareness in the rural community within which I live, there is a microcosm of life.

Of course, this is similar throughout the world; there are billions of microcosms, but most of us do not take the creative mind thought of awareness into the heart. We take it into the ego emotion of what isn’t, what could be, what hopes and wishes we desire and what we fear we will not experience.

In my neighborhood there are the young and their families. There are the elders and their children and grand children.

The elderly that were here, for nearly 60 years in the same home,  just transitioned to another community for greater care and they will be missed. A young family has purchased their home and is about to move in. The cycle continues.

That makes me and mine the elder by age default. A role I am not too anxious to assume. Then too, not to far away, there are the alone ones. Alone is OK for some. Lonely is different. There is a profound difference between alone and the lonely. The lonely struggle to be connected to anything this time of year without seeming to be needy.

It’s not easy especially when everyone else is overtly happy.  Life is hard.  Hearts are soft and wanting and there is the pain of want and hope in between the two. We all know the ache of unfulfilled feelings.

So what are we to do?

There is only one balm, one assuagement, and one sweetness to the acidic illusion of life. It’s LOVE. Be it! Give it!

Health Care?

I am wondering today if there is sometimes a motivation far below the higher calling of healing from some of America’s medical professionals and institutions.

Here’s my thought.

An elderly neighbor of mine was diagnosed with ovarian cancer about a year ago. She initially had trouble finding an oncologist who was part of her health care system.

Eventually she found one and her new doctor recommended chemotherapy. My neighbor did that and was told they got it all, but “a little bit.”

A short time later, in follow-ups, she was told they would have to operate to remove the “little bit.”

They did. She had a slow recovery as most 87 year olds would have. Then the doctors did more chemotherapy to make sure they got it all.

Now my neighbor is entering hospice. She does not have long to live.

I did not ask this question to my neighbor, but I wonder if she was told all the implications of her disease and the truth about her diagnosis and prognosis? Was quality of life ever in the discussion?

I don’t think she was told everything based on a limited conversation with her.  I also wonder if she was told the whole truth, would she have chosen to go through all the pain, all the discomfort for a tiny bit more of life.

The desire for life, the struggle to survive is an immutable instinct endemic within each of us. We all think we can be the one. We can beat it. We can be cured. It does happen and when it does we call it a miracle.

But for most, it does not.

Cancer treatment is very expensive. The doctors, the hospital, the drug companies, all got paid. My neighbor got very little for the cost.

It's Begun

It’s Begun
© 2009 Rolland G. Smith

It has begun, the grasp of snow
That ushers in a winter clime.
It comes in white to set the glow
For creatures all at Christmastime.

The trees no more in silhouette
Against a sky of gray and blue.
They’re bright in white as statuette
Before the sun bids snow adieu.


Rejoice my friends the cold is here
To last for just a moment’s time.
For next is when the spring appears.
Nature’s cycle is most sublime.

The Christmas Season

The essence of the human heart is wonderful.  It can, by choice, expand and embrace both the suffering and the celebrations of the world, but every once in awhile it needs to connect to the human spirit, so that tragedy and pain is softened with compassion and caring.

            Christmas is one of those special times for the heart to re-energize and become enlightened again. Christmas is an energy,  a good feeling, a warm glow, that recharges the heart when we do something nice for someone else.

            You can't see it, you just feel it.  It comes from the little gifts:  a courtesy, a gesture, a smile, a hug, a handshake, a kind remark, a willingness, however momentary, to place oneself in another's shoes and share the struggle and sanctity of life from a different perspective. 

            It happens when we choose to give what we seek the most.

Universal Thought

This is one of my favorite Sonnets, hence its reprive.

Universal Thought
© 2007 Rolland G. Smith

Would that we could see far beyond the eye
To where the mind oft goes to be alone.
Where mystery blends with thoughts that never die
And magic melts the ice of what’s unknown.
The miracle of mind is what’s not seen
Except when artist’s hands can clearly show
The Universe and time set in-between
The silence and the thought; a vast tableau.
What greater gift is there, but to create
And greet imagination at its core.
It is in bringing forth that we await
The opening of wonder at the door.
The mind is just the hook to hold the thought
Before we let it go and what it’s wrought.

NDE

A friend of mine recently had a serious accident and was in that space between life and death. He knew it and in his mind invoked the names of the archangels.

He also said he felt the prayers of those attending him from the air ambulance to friends who prayed as he went through several days of touch and go.

This in some ways is the classic experience of an NDE, a Near Death Experience.

When one has lost conscious thought and balance within the illusion of earthly life there is an awareness of comforting light and love that descends and then transcends the density of our creation. It brings our etheric being into the NOW in a singular moment of being.

In some disciplines this is called Nirvana, in others it is called “living in the moment,” still others use the words “rapture” and “atonement”, (at-one-ment.) Certain types and kinds of meditation, hallucinogenics, music, chants, and drumming will also bring one to this enlightened brink of choice.

There are many ways to get to the precipice of NOW, but the most common is a surprise accident, as in a spontaneous trauma to the physical body where knowing consciousness is ripped from the intellectual mind and awareness is then manipulated by the divinity within us. We are then confronted with a profound choice. Do we stay or do we go?

Sometimes the answer is made for us by angelic beings and we are sent back to finish the life cycle we choose only a moment ago in another realm, but years and years ago in this illusion of time and reality.

Sometimes, it is us who chooses to return to this density when powerful images of unaware possibilities and unattended consequences are presented to our divine nature. We then choose for unconditional love and finish our pre-life choise.

The caveat in all this is the phenomenal power of prayer. Prayer can pull you back into life. It can heal. It can bring you from the addictive attraction of the loving light to the knowing individuation of spiritual promise.

Prayer is the freeing essence of unconditional love and the most misunderstood anecdotes of all bodily traumas.

As Spock says, “live long and prosper”.

Walden Pond

Henry David Thoreau was an American writer, essayist, naturalist and renowned author of “Walden,” an account of his two years and two months living in the then Walden Pond semi wilderness.

Thoreau went there, built a small, ten by fifteen foot sideboard cabin on land owned by his friend and teacher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau wanted to experience nature at its simplest. He was not a hermit, but he did live and write in a solitary environment some of the time. Most the book was collated and edited by him after he left the woods.

Thoreau sets his criteria. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live” and he adds, “"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

There is probably much more to Thoreau’s life there than is accounted for in his writings on Walden or in scholarly research of his life and times. His parents lived about a mile away and one would suspect he visited for an occasional meal and probably laundry. It was also an easy walk of a couple of miles into the town of Concord.

I mention this history because I walked around the pond recently and visited the site where Thoreau’s cabin existed.

I have one negative comment, but I do understand its necessity given the 600-thousand visitors to Walden’s shores each year. The path for visitors to circle the pond is a narrow four-foot channel, fenced in on both sides with barbless wire.  There are a few places where you can stray up a hill, but never near the water accept at the beach entrance to the park.

My walk with family was at a moderate to slow pace, pensive at times and conversationally wondering at other moments about why Thoreau did it and what this life experience accomplished for him?

I suspect Thoreau was looking for life’s meaning and its kinship with nature. He spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the social conditions of the time and elevating his spiritual transcendence to blend with his seasonal observations. He rarely condemned his fellow beings, but he did condition their worth with succinct and erudite prose. I enjoyed the book and the walk.

Even today most people have never experienced raw nature. Perhaps that’s the legacy and value of Walden. 150-plus years later Thoreau lets us live it vicariously without the commitment to do so.