Warning Signs: Honoring Your Mom

Warning Signs: Honoring Your Mom
Excerpt:

My Mother lived to age 98 and was my dearest friend. She was an internationally famed authority on wines, an author of several cookbooks, and a teacher of gourmet food preparation for some three decades. She was a cheerful person whom my late father adored...

We Are One: Learning to honor women

We Are One: Learning to honor women

Trauma Writes Its Own Script

  “That’s not the shape of my heart.”     -Sting

Dis-ease exists.  Its ubiquitous nature twists and turns in smoky veils in and out of the crevices of the mountains.  Yet the modern, stultifying and skeptical stoicism increasingly forces denial on sufferers. To continue on this path of irresponsibility in caring and respecting people who are in pain and need is not just a society choosing to embrace ignorant indifference, it is a sinful, gross negligence and has led to great suffering.  A patient wearily responded to his therapist: “A fuckin’ pill is not going to heal me.”  That being said ‘wise diagnoses’ must include safe, efficacious medicines proscribed by mature, healthy and qualified ‘healers’. 

                                  There’s a point isn’t there?

“Comfort My people.” –God

The dis-ease in almost every case is a result of societal unrests along a continuum from family to government to institutions.  The dis-ease in almost every case is strongly affected by the creeds and ideologies of the variety of groups.  As the drug culture hammers away at the foundations of our civilization destroying not just individuals but whole families, the myopic views toward the nature of being and suffering become one more nail in the coffin of tormented sufferers.

And since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let each exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith; if service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching; or he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness. (Romans 12:6-8)

...that is, that I may be encouraged together with you while among you, each of us by the other's faith, both yours and mine. (Romans 1:12)

And we urge you, brethren, admonish the unruly, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with all men. (1 Thessalonians 5:14)

 

Metaphor provides an avenue of indirect communication between patient and therapist, later to be exchanged for a more direct communication, and also provides the patient and therapist with a measure of relief not available with encounter of a more direct nature. Cox and Thielgaard (1987)state:

We found that an image could safely hold experience which was too painful, too brittle, or too broken to be firm enough to tolerate analysis. Such patients enabled us to see that the image, activated by metaphor, could be the location of exploration of the fabric of support. (p.xiii)

Cox and Thielgaard (1987, p.xiii) use as a key to their book, the words of Bachelard: "But the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface."...

Cox and Theilgaard (1987) describe how the metaphor 'I wonder who would win the medal for skating on thin ice?', introduced into a group session, furthered a therapeutic process in both an exploratory and a supportive direction. Sometimes a fusion of inner and outer world phenomena is encouraged. For example, one patient in the group referred to the failure of his social supports while another referred to the 'thin ice' being inside him, implying threatening loss of internal control. They say: "each member proclaimed experience which would have remained concealed, had it not been for the skating on thin ice mutative metaphor." (Cox and Theilgaard, 1987, p.80).

The metaphor energises alternative ways of viewing experience, bringing to the surface material that the patient has hitherto tried to suppress and placing that material in the "pending action file" (Cox and Theilgaard, 1987, p.99).

The metaphor permits the therapist to sail as close to the wind as possible in the face of the ever present risk of going too far too fast, which could block therapeutic movement and progress. Cox and Theilgaard (1987) refer to Kahn's (1979) statement that metaphors have the ability to intensify the patient's already deep initiative by taking the therapeutic process a step further.     ~Dr Aharon Segal, Metaphors in Psychotherapy

...“there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” Then an odd, reflective look crosses his face, as if he’s taking in the strangeness of this scene: Allen Frances, lead editor of the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (universally known as the DSM-IV), the guy who wrote the book on mental illness, confessing that “these concepts are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries.” For the first time in two days, the conversation comes to an awkward halt...”

However, I find the statements by Allen Frances comforting because no one in the health profession worth his salt can long deny the reality of the unique sanctity of each human being and the awful individualistic realities of the causes underlying ‘mental illness’—a misnomer.  Labels are skeletal outlines—at best.  The ‘focus’ should always be the total human being suffering, in desperate need not the ‘outline’ or the ‘bottom line’.  Those who slap ‘propaganda’ and ‘agenda’ into the healing arena go way beyond performing a ludicrous dog-and-pony show.  The act is criminal for it breaks the healing code of ‘do no harm.’  The inept, vacuous greed-mongers should not be allowed in the profession nor should the practice of taking money from drug companies et al ever again be tolerated.  CV’s and annual salaries are not the basis of worth and efficacy as a healer.
Addendum:  


He consulted the DSM-IV and concluded that the patient had obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“Did it change the way you treated her?” I asked, noting that he’d worked with her for quite a while without naming what she had.
“No.”
“So what would you say was the value of the diagnosis?”
“I got paid.”
  ~From article on interview with Allen Frances...

I still find tears flowing when I realize that a ‘dis-ease’ shrouds my own being and my everyday life.  I have studied and fought the battle from chemistry, pharmaceutical essays, physiological treatises to religious tracts, the Bible, papal and saint writings, healing gifts to poets and their lives to psychotherapy tomes to epistemologists, philologists and philosophers. My complex journey through the mountains of the mind and soul and heart only confirm the presence of more mountains, more ravines and more oceans.  There is little I have not only read but studied, hard.  I and thou are realities for me as are subject-object. 

A child in trauma—whatever the source—doesn’t have the toolbox of resources to withstand such horrific forces tearing into his entire being.  It is tremendously difficult enough for the adult for the duration of his life to deal with such deep and profound things. 

But for a child...

 

                                    

                     

First Known When Lost: A Single Flower

First Known When Lost: A Single Flower
Excerpt:
As I was out walking this week, I noticed a single flower growing in a seam of the sidewalk.  It had five yellow petals, and was about three-eighths of an inch in diameter.  I searched, but I could not find any similar flowers nearby.

The world around us contains innumerable small dispensations of this sort, doesn't it?...........

An Inner Fire

                               'A Fire Shared'

This evening I have spent
in the Irishwoman's room.
A fire shared is a fire cheaper.
A twelvemonth since
I knew her not at all.
Our hearths were crowded then
but now it is fitting
that one of them bides cold.
A fire shared is a fire cheaper by far.
She has enough English now
for January tales
of our slavering bargeist
which stalks these dark flagged yards
intent on the taking of children.
She would not have understood a year ago.
A year ago her English was just enough
for blessing or cursing,
to ask the price of bread
or direction to a pump.
But now a fire shared
is a fine instructive tutor.
She has enough English now
to match my bargeists and goblins
with pookas and suchlike,
and I find I have learned what these are,
from many a night
spent sharing and cheapening fire.
A twelvemonth ago I would not have known
the Irish for 'sorrow', 'cholera', 'children',
or who stood by me at the same wide grave-mouth
as we wept after each of our fashions.
But now I know these things,
which are things I have learned
in the school of the ruined hearth,
which is held in both our rooms,
where a fire shared
is the cheapest fire of all.    ~Peter Didsbury, h/t Books: Guardian:UK, Review, 6/28/10
                                'On A Vulgar Error'

No. It's an impudent falsehood.  Men did not
Invariably think the newer way
Prosaic, mad, inelegant, or what not.

Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot
Upon the church?  Did anybody say
How modern and how ugly?  They did not.

Plate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hot
With rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,
Were these at first a horror?  They were not.

If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food
All set us hankering after yesterday,
Need this be only an archaising mood?

Why, any man whose purse has been let blood
By sharpers, when he finds all drained away
Must compare how he stands with how he stood.

If a quack doctor's breezy ineptitude
Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightaway
All that I can't do now, all that I could?

So, when our guides unanimously decry
The backward glance, I think we can guess why.     ~C. S. Lewis, Poems (1964), page 60.
                                     'End and Beginning'
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

Again we’ll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was.
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about
already find it dull.

From behind the bush
sometimes someone still unearths
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass which has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out,
blade of grass in his mouth,
gazing at the clouds.            ~Wislawa Szymborska(translated by Joanna Trzeciak)

Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.

And With Love...

 Update: Sorry.  Forgot: h/t Dolce Bellazza blog...
"...I did a Google search and discovered it's nothing more than a MacGuffin. "A MacGuffin?" you say, "what the heck is that?"  Funny you should ask, as I did, for here's the definition from Wikipedia:

A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or maguffin) is "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction".

Sometimes, the specific nature of the MacGuffin is not important to the plot such that anything that serves as a motivation serves its purpose. The MacGuffin can sometimes be ambiguous, completely undefined, generic or left open to interpretation.

The MacGuffin is common in films, especially thrillers. Commonly, though not always, the MacGuffin is the central focus of the film in the first act, and later declines in importance as the struggles and motivations of characters play out. Sometimes the MacGuffin is even forgotten by the end of the film.

So, even if you don't like Madeleine L'Engle (impossible as that is for me to imagine), or fantasy (which is less impossible), you have now either learned something new or been reminded of a literary technique. Fascinating, huh?

Specific to A Swiftly Tilting Planet, though, is this beautiful 5th century Irish poem named St. Patrick's rune:

At Tara in this fateful hour
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness
And the earth with its starkness
All these I place
By God's almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness."

...More important to me than the plot, is the message within it: as always with Madeleine, a message of faith despite what one sees..."

Καθολικός διάκονος: How does grace work?

Καθολικός διάκονος: How does grace work?
Excerpt:
I don't know how grace works, I only know that it does. What's so amazing about grace to me is that God always meets my need. I know for a fact that it is not because I deserve it, or because I have done something good. I guess that's the part I don't get....
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in