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. 

When the Pointing Finger Points to the Mirror

"Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.  For example, a person who is habitually intolerant may constantly accuse other people of being intolerant. It incorporates blame shifting."--from Wikipedia's series of articles on psychoanalysis.

Do the Cheeto and the GOP at large suffer from this psycholocical malady?  Or is their propensity to condemn their "enemies" for exactly the dirty tactics they have so successfully employed for the past several years merely an exercise in revisionist propaganda?  

Or are they merely honing their skill at making the best of the first by employing it as the second?  If fate hands you a lemon as an ideological leader, make...

Kool-aid.  

Save...What?

Right-wing "economists" harp that Americans do not save enough money. Many Americans are working two jobs to pay housing costs that eat up 1/3 to 1/2 of their income. Health "care" is another 10 to 20%, or more--and that's just the cost of insurance. If they actually get sick or have to take drugs, it's more. Now pay for food, utilities, gasoline and auto insurance, a car payment or auto upkeep, a cel phone...if you're lucky, you can throw in cable tv or internet. What's left to save?

Say I have a couple of pennies left over at the end the month to put away. I'll get a whopping .25% (yes, that's 1/4%) interest if I put it in a bank account, and I'll probably end up LOSING money through bank fees. If I should somehow squirrel away enough to buy a CD, I won't be able to touch that money for at least six months, probably several years...and for that, I might get as much as 2% apr. Where's the incentive?

No...the 98% have been screwed. If we want to save money at all for retirement, we have to put it in a 401k and let the stock market have at it. If we're lucky, we'll at least have what we put into it left when we retire. Forget about any kind of reliable return.

I'm 62 years old, and looking retirement squarely in the eye.

It scares the hell out of me.

Knees

When I do my devotion to the four directions in the morning, I ask each of my spirit guides to guide me in some way connected to what I have discerned is their "specialty," as it were. 

My Spirits of the South are hawk and owl--who have the ability to see things from far away and in dark places.  I ask those spirits to guide me to insight and vision--kind of a request to help me walk with an understanding of what I  normally might not see.

What I've had in mind has been more of an understanding of the motivations of other people in my life--people whose actions might piss me off or frustrate me.  It's all about ME, in the end, isn't it?

But, as usual, I've discovered that the Universe answers requests that you didn't know you made, knowing there are things you need to experience that you didn't know you needed to...or flat out didn't want to. 

Getting old is not for the faint of heart.  And being one of the younger of my circle of family and friends, it has almost been harder to watch the physical deterioration of my older siblings, than it has been to deal with my own descent into decrepitude.  Partly, I'm sure, because I'm resisting going there with every fiber of my being. (Though not enough, apparently, to be dedicated to exercising or keeping my weight down...)

My brother-in-law and my husband have both been suffering with knee issues for the past several years (and the husband is younger than I am!)  And I have to admit, I have looked upon them with a certain amount of impatient "get over it!" clouding my vision of their issues.  It has rankled me that, one by one, my family has aged out of things like hiking trails in the woods or even walking a mile on the beach.  Again, it was all about me.  "Poor me...I have to do all of these things alone." 

Well.  The Universe saw fit to give me a little better understanding of knee issues.

Three weeks ago, my left knee suddenly went tits up for no particular reason.  And I do mean "tits up." 

I've never experienced anything quite like this pain.  And the weird stiffness that comes with swelling inside the joint.  Yuk! It's just...horrible.

So I guess I will need to be a little more sympathetic to my crowd of achy-kneed siblings and assorted hangers-on.

But I have to admit to being a bit miffed with my Spirits of the South. 

I guess the moral of THIS story is, "Be careful what you wish for..."   

True Fact

Hang Your Head in Shame

Yes.   People voted for a man who displayed this kind of unconscionable boorishness on the campaign trail. 

He is the face of our national character, now. 

I STILL cannot wrap my head around it.

Lessons Learned

Still smarting from the aborted vacation.

My self-confidence is in tatters.  My yearning for change sours and burns for want of an outlet.  My courage and fortitude are acrid ashes at my feet.

Best, perhaps, to focus on lessons learned by the experience:

There is a certain amount of comfort in being alone among the familiar.

Guess if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look further than my own back yard. 

Sigh.