Santa Fe

And...

Patience or Persistence?

One of my spirit guides is Heron.  Heron is, in fact, my power animal.  Though I know I have not delved as deeply as I might into the details of the mystical relationship between a person and her power animal, I do feel a special affinity for Heron.  And I feel that Heron can guide me in areas in which I am particularly needy.

In the morning, when I do my salutation to the Four Directions, I call on my spirit guides to guide me through my day.  Heron is one of the first that I salute, when I face the rising sun in the east.  Heron guides toward balance, and for many months, when I began to realize I was obsessively focused on one thing or another, I would call upon Heron to guide me to balance. 

About a year ago, when we acquired a new family member whose stubborn, willful personality was proving to be a nettling challenge, it was whispered to me that perhaps another of Heron’s characteristics might be desirable.  Think of a heron, standing for long stretches of time in a field or shallow water, waiting for a meal to present itself.  Patience! I thought.  That is patience.  And if there is one thing I need, whether it’s in the framework of my relationship with the new family member or just in general, it’s patience. 

So I added “patience” to my morning request of Heron.  It is no secret that patience is something I have lacked my entire life, and whatever small quantity of that commodity I had been given originally has been thinning almost apace with my hair, here in my golden years. 

Applied to my relationship with the puppy…I asked for patience because the training methods we were using seemed to be having zero effect on her, and she was driving me crazy.  And I was guided in patience, when I asked…I didn’t kill her, or decide that she was not for us and attempt to re-home her.  

Lately, though, I’ve been feeling led to reevaluate the “patience” message.  Yes, certainly Heron spends many hours practicing stillness in order to feed itself.  But is that patience…or is it persistence?  “Patience”  implied if I kept at it the way I was going, things would ultimately work.  That was when I realized that perhaps persistence, rather than patience, was really what was needed here.  Define the goal and keep angling to get there, trying different things if the first one or two or six don’t work.   

The two concepts are certainly related.  Perhaps they are the active and passive  characterizations of the same concept.  Both involve a certain amount of projecting toward a future goal, rather than instant gratification.  But “patience” implies…waiting.  Quietly, almost zenlike.  Being content to bide one’s time until the desired outcome occurs.  “Persistence,” on the other hand, is more about actively pursuing what it is one wants to achieve…  Sticking with it, not giving up…but not just sitting there waiting for it to drop into your lap. 

And I’ve realized that persistence is more my style than patience…always has been.  Anyone who knows me knows that I cannot in any way be accused of being “passive.”  Ever.  And in this late stage of my life, I've found there are times one needs to embrace what one is; think of your ways in a positive light rather than always trying to purge from your personality those persistent things that for years you have rued as "negative."  These days, there is a certain amount of understanding of when I am setting myself up to fail.  And who needs that? 

Patience? To set myself the task of sitting quietly and waiting for something to happen…well, that just isn’t going to work. I’m not going to idle around and twiddle my thumbs til the goal arrives on my doorstep.  That is just not me.

I’ll wait, I’ll hold out for the ultimate goal.  But I'm going to be looking at it from different angles and trying new approaches in the meantime.  That is persistence.  

So now, I turn to the east in the morning, and ask Heron to guide me to balance and persistence.  It feels so much more right.

     

Get Me Out Of Here

An Open Letter: (to the husband, or the Universe, or whoever...)

We need to put this house on the market. 

Now.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a housewife.  I am not married to this house.  (I’m not sure what I’m married to, any more, but that’s a different letter.)

It cannot be me who rolls out the vacuum cleaner after I’ve been away for a week and has to suck up three inches of pet hair off of…everything in the house.

It cannot be me who scrubs every toilet, organizes every closet, and throws away every ancient leftover.    

It cannot be me who has to load and run the dishwasher that has not been run since I left the house on business five days ago.

It cannot be me who has to worry about painting four decks and a fence, controlling weeds, planting bushes for curb appeal, prettying up the yard so it’s actually a nice place to sit…(then again, I’m the only one who sits out there…but if that’s going to be the case, I need a much smaller space to tend for my own personal enjoyment.)

I am 62 years old.  I have the aches and pains and creaks and squeaks of a 62-year-old body that has been rode kinda hard and put away kinda wet.  This body is no longer adequate to the task of being the sole caretaker of a 2200 square foot house and a ¼ acre of suburban property.  If it ever was.  And while there may have been a time when my “nesting” instinct imparted a desire to maintain and decorate a space of this size, those days are way gone.  We’ve been here long enough to know that we’re not keeping up this oversized house so that we can entertain family, friends, or out-of-town guests.  Our closest family lives a hundred miles away, we have no friends, and my niece visits from Wisconsin every two or three years.  If that. 

The resident sister hides in her bedroom 90% of the time she’s here, and the husband would as soon live like a bachelor.  I don’t think he notices the difference between a clean, orderly space and…not.

So what the fuck am I doing?????

It’s too much.

I can’t do it any more.

I don’t WANT to do it anymore.   

I’m done.

     

Wise Words We Have Forgotten

"There is a moral obligation that those who have should give to those who don't...We have a debt to each other, to humanity. Maybe some people don't feel that way. I rather pity them. I think people like that live such an isolated life and don't have the joys of helping, of changing the world little bit."

“As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others." --Audrey Hepburn

Welfare-bashers say "Let the churches and the private sector help the poor. It's their responsibility, not the government's." 

My answer, "How do you think tending to the poor fell into the lap of the government to begin with?" Because churches and the private sector were not up to the task, either because of greed, tribalism (we only help THESE people) or the sheer enormity of the task. When members of a society do not, will not, or can not take responsibility for moral justice, it is left to the state to step in.

And the larger the income gap between the haves and have-nots, the worse this problem will become. The have-nots have no resources to spare, and the haves not only hoard what they have, but relentlessly go after the rest.

When you get right down to it, most of the welfare-bashers are from the segment of the have-nots that is just high enough not to need help to survive.  They begrudge the poor the barely  sustenance-level "benefits" provided by the government.  Dollars to donuts , the majority of these folks don't give to charity or church.  They follow the example of the 1% and hoard every penny they make, to the point that they rail against the few dollars taken out of their pockets in the form of taxes and used to give a leg up to society's least fortunate.  They stigmatize the poor as lazy moochers in order to justify their cantankerous avarice. 

The 1% aid and abet that notion...in their own quest to get and keep...everything. 

"There is a moral obligation that those who have should give to those who don't." 

Yes.  Yes, there is.