New life comes from shedding old skins and pressing through the darkness toward the light. Spring is the season of new beginnings and of growth. -Karen Kaiser Clark
And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled.
If at all.
- T. S. Eliot
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you...
- Don McLean
"I took off my own hat and saw it was empty. I began to feel like an empty hat myself."- Carl Sandburg
A year ago, last April 2003, I wrote about a woman I had met who was only one year older than myself. She had cancer in her brain stem: she just found this out a couple of months ago, when she started having trouble with her balance and then one side of her face froze. Her adult daughter was helping her and she was planning to start five weeks of daily radiation therapy next week. She told me that she had asked about her prognosis but that the doctors didn't seem to know. "Even they don't know; they are not gods." She was emotional, she was crying. She was struggling to make sense of it all and spoke of having episodes of losing her "will to live". She knew that she might die, she knew that maybe the best she could hope for was a little more time. I told her that it would be alright, that either way it would be alright, because it would have to be. She thanked me and told me that I am kind. It is hard to believe that those words are ones of kindness. Sometimes saying what is true when the words bring tears to your eyes is about as kind as you can get.
She did not say it, minimizing any information about her psychiatic history, but I knew she had problems with anxiety and other emotions that would steal over her, uninvited. Her daughter, a young adult with little chldren of her own, was there with her mom. She was loving, kind and attentive. She amazed me with her strength and courage over the next several weeks. The daughter was a good caregiver and looked as if she knew the role well, repeatedly demonstrating this while helping with the weeks of radiation treatment, the nursing home placement and accompanying her mom on that long unintended walk we are required to take sometimes.
The woman went to stay at a nursing home in another county, close to her treatments and out of my geographical area- the case was transferred. After a while in the nursing home, when the radiation treatments were done, the daughter called me to say that her mom was no better and the radiologist would not tell them anything. They had a meeting scheduled for the next day to review things with the doctor and I encouraged her to be direct in her questions, to find out what she needed to know.
I heard again from her shortly- she was crying and very angry. Her mom had been told, finally, that she was terminal and arrangements had been made for hospice care. "And she is calm!" "It's like she's accepted it- like it's ok!" She was furious with her mom for finally going gently into her emotions. All of these years, all of these decades, she had been ofttimes her mother's care giver, her mother's parent. She had been the balm for the emotions of her mother that needed soothing and now, in what should be her mother's hours of greatest need, she was not able to give that part of herself that she knew how to give. She was having to deal with, to adjust to, a mother who had become an emotional adult, who had become what she had needed all of her years. The loss looming on the horizon had been made so incredibly complex, and more painful than her wildest imaginings.
Traveler, there is no path. Paths are made by walking.- Antonio Machado
From the Seattle PI newspaper: Internment of Japanese Americans, 1942: In the first evacuation of local Japanese Americans to internment camps in California and Idaho, 225 residents of Bainbridge Island are rounded up, delivered by ferry to Colman Dock and escorted onto trains by Army troops Mar. 30, 1942. A crowd watches from the Marion Street overpass. Eventually, 12,892 people of Japanese ancestry from Washington state were incarcerated.
Click on picture...
"...and the Jews inside would be poisoned."
"A life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think."- Adolf Eichmann (in writings reported in the NY Times, 8/13/99)
"Speech has power and few realize that words do not fade. What starts out as a sound ends in a deed."- Abraham Heschel
"The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves."- Ellen Goodman
"There are things of deadly earnest that can only be mentioned under the cover of a joke."- J. J. Procter
"Reality is only a collective hunch."- Lily Tomlin
From: Cyndy Roy
To: Cindy Jardot
Subject: Craig's gone
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 07:12:4
He left at 4:00 this morning.
He did get your email, not too long before he slipped into his semi-comotose state on Monday.
Cyndy
"I am looking for a new planet.......no media, no flags".- Craig Baker, 2001
The picture at left is Craig and I walking in Ann Arbor during a visit August 2001.
The picture at right is of Craig and Cathy the last time I saw them, November 2002.
Clicking on either picture will take you to a page I had to remake from scanned printed copies of a web page I made in 2001 of a visit there with Craig, Cathy and Steve (in March I think)...
From an e-mail Craig sent me in 2001 or 2002: "It is from a recording of Brian Gyson (William Burroughs' mysterious Moroccan friend/poet/painter). I lifted it
from a rare CD just to add a little WCBN type of weirdness/humor. You think I threaten you with complicity?"
CRAIG DOUGLAS BERNARD JOHN BAKER
April 14, 1952 - April 15, 2004
Once again, you are the voice of insight, yes there are different kinds of intelligence and you have pointed that out more clearly than I point out anything.
And so, friends by chance, friends by fate, friends by free will, together exploring, together considering what life brings, and together chasing away what threatens to change everything...
"The fundamental fact about our experience is that it is a process of change."- William James
Click either picture- August 2001 visit.
God Shuffled His Feet - Crash Test Dummies
Written by Brad Roberts
======================================
After seven days
He was quite tired, so god said:
"Let there be a day
Just for picnics, with wine and bread"
He gathered up some people he had made
Created blankets and laid back in the shade
The people sipped their wine
And what with God there, they asked him questions
Like: do you have to eat
Or get your hair cut in heaven?
And if your eye got poked out in this life
Would it be waiting up in heaven with your wife?
God shuffled his feet and glanced around at them;
The people cleared their throats and stared right back at him
So he said: "Once there was a boy
Who woke up with blue hair
To him it was a joy
Until he ran out into warm air -
He thought of how his friends would come to see;
And would they laugh, or had he got some strange disease?"
God shuffled his feet and glanced around at them;
The people cleared their throats and stared right back at him
The people sat waiting
Out on their blankets in the garden
But God said nothing
So someone asked him, "I beg your pardon:
I'm not quite clear about what you just spoke -
Was that a parable, or a very subtle joke?
God shuffled his feet and glanced around at them;
The people cleared their throats and stared right back at him
============================================
And so, what does it all mean? Is there an answer that is not for us to know? Or is it so complex that we have yet to figure it out? Has the answer always been the same and, so, has always been there? Is God waiting for us to find the answer ourselves, thinking that we can only really understand the meanings that we arrive at alone? Maybe we are all part of God, maybe we are all God and we have access to everything, inside of our self.
I don't know, but I thank my Dearest Jay for holding me and for playing this song for me this morning.
Well, one thing I know for sure is that my God likes to laugh (God likes sex too, but that is another story...).
A jumper cable walks into a bar.
The bartender says, "I'll serve you, but don't start anything."
A sandwich walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Sorry buddy, we don't serve food here."
A dyslexic man walks into a bra...
More blasts from the past...
Click on the picture of me from 9th grade, at right, for pictures of the old Everett work group from summer of 2001. Click on the picture of Carol when she was using her walker in August 2003 for pictures of my Seattle work group from the fall of 2001.
"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."- Albert Camus, 1913-1960 French Existential Writer
An April view from the deck...
Jay and I both like to piddle around the house. Sometimes it seems like we accomplish a lot and other times it seems like we are making no headway... 
We have been working on the yard some, and gardening- planted some beans, onions, melon, brussel sprouts, tomatoes and zucinni this evening. I planted a bleeding heart perennial flowering plant by the back door a couple of weeks ago and it is doing well.
We are still working on the construction of our greenhouse- needless to say, the seedlings did not get the early start we had thought about. Oh well, we keep busy, piddle around and get done what we get done, enjoying the task and each other. Life is here.
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.- Richard Feynman
Judith Viorst's book Necessary Losses is one of my favorites.
Click book at left for excerpts.(Added to 2/17/04)
All pictures posted on my pages link to somewhere in the cyberworld... try clicking on each of them.
E-mail comments to: thecindyj@hotmail.com or click MAIL TO
Click on our mailbox to view comments (after I've added them).
Thanks Grappler!
Music: Click on the Lips Page Created April 2004 |
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