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enitharmon
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Name: Mei
Interests: hand drum beats/barefeet/literature/art/life forming inside the womb/beauty/justice/water/moonlight/tall black boots with skirts/asia/healing
Finding Jesus Christ and Truth
Expertise: nursing student
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
9/17/2005
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| As I struggle with questions along my Journey, I continue to find breaths of yearned for revelation in the compelling realness of physical care.
It is amazing what the flesh of the elderly, the flesh of the youth can draw from your spirit. It is amazing how far presence in the most mundane and vulnerable moments of human life can go in bringing humility.
May my honor be in serving all the days of my life, so help me God. | | |
| i think that chosing nursing may be one of the best decisions i have ever made.
the jobs and experinces i have realted to nursing this summer - caring for an elderly alzheimer's patient, working in the neo-natal intensive care, and spending time in support groups with HIV positive and chemically addicted men and women-have made me realize a few things about this journey i have only began to take.
my work does not always make me happy, my work does not usually make me comfortable ( in fact it can be both physically straining and emotianlly incrediablly stretching and challanging), my work does not usually make me feel adequate or as if i am bringing the great answer to easily solvable question. My work can be full of stench, loss, shattering disability, dependincies, and harshly broken or achingly trying realities.
but my work does something that to me is far more important and far deeper than any of these concerns. My work makes me want to be a better person. My work makes me want to stop and say "I appreciate you, I appreciate life." My work makes me want to look out in the super market for a struggling brother or sister who needs a hand of support. My work makes me want to stop on the corner of a crowded, dirty city alley and look into the intoxicated confused eyes of a sensitive crying soul that i feel is my very own. My work makes me appreciate life - the morning cry and the evening wrinkle. the struggling helpless limbs of the newborn and the worn shoulders of tired old age. The humanity of every stage of life is rich and varied and distinctly expressive.
and there is more. my work makes me believe in God. My work makes me crave his presence.
rather than making me feel like a hero, my work reminds me that I am a human and that while i can stretch far to bring newness and quality to the lives around me, sometimes all that i can do -the best thing i can do - is to just be there. sometimes all there is is a backrub, a shared tear, a word of encouragement. sometimes all there is are the hours that we have to beleive are worth something side by side. perhaps the situation won't improve tangibly. perhaps addictions will go on. perhaps death will even come. but certainly there is more than solving - there is being, there is sharing. i am learning to tell myself that even when it seems grey and confused and, at moments, useless, that presence matters. to share presence may be all we can live for.
my feet may ache, my heart may ache with sorrow, my mind may ache with wondering why the lives before me -so precious- should be allowed to feel the confusion and agony of a broken state, but i consider the ache the reminder of why i must keep going and why i must trust God.
there are deeper things than happiness - deep, stretching, strong things that ache and burn and cry with others, that rise in determination and motivation. Perhaps they are the things of joy. | | |
| -for those discomforted by society's careless acceptance of aggression
Road kill. Blood spilled. Senseless death. I cringe every time I see it. Life shredded and past by as if it didn’t even matter. I begin to think. When a differing of ideals arises in our small circles, in our domestic life, on our streets or in our community we are held to certain standards. If a man resorts to violence or killing in these circles he is considered a murderer, a social outcast, a criminal. He is not respected, supported or rewarded for silencing another whose way of life did not seem right to him. But yet, look at us on the broad scale. When we differ in ideals as a country with another nation we rise up and kill. We slaughter masses for ideals. Perhaps the ideals are justice and freedom. But perhaps these things are what the man in his small world was attempting to bring forth. Why do we justify our killing, our ending of human life and hope when it is large, governmental? Why do we think it is ok to ravish whole nations when we grieve and avert our eyes from the ravishing of a single man? Why is the collective and powerful mind seen to be making the right decision when we know and have proven the individual mind of every human faulty?
Why when we kill in our own determination of justice or defense are we ruthless and when we kill in the name of a land or a leader we are noble? There is no logic in this!
There is no logic in trying to separate these two fields as we do, applying morality to one but utterly disregarding it in the other.
Now I know this entry will meet some skepticism. But here I am attempting to work through things in my mind that beg and itch and disquiet my sense of acceptance for how the world works. Quietly it works, and no one seems to blink but a few that we call radicals.
I move on. In almost all large-scale things it seems we have collectively decided to disregard the principles we hold to zealously in small-scale things. What we demand from our person, we do not demand from our clan. For instance, we believe that we ought to turn the other cheek when an enemy strikes us. We are told to strive in the spirit of God to love continually, honestly, and deeply, to live as bearers of peace. We are told to forgive until the last drop of heart blood has run from our bodies. These are the purposes we are to ascribe to. But, then, why is it that, as a land, we seek vengeance?
Many cry in response, “But look at the necessity; what would become of us if we did not react, defend, retaliate? What would we be as a nation if we could not protect our own people?” But, how can what is evil in our own life – aggression for aggression, evil for evil – be permissible in the realm that affects hundreds, thousands of lives? Is justice silencing evil through violence? Or is justice the harmony of honest goodness in the inner parts, in the soul of a nation. Is justice rightness? Is justice acting in accord with the principle of goodness established at the creation of earth? Could justice in our own lives, in the life of our nation, be the humility of non-aggression? ‘Impossible,’ I believe almost all say. But how can what is supposed to be possible in our own lives be impossible in the life of all us banded together? What would it mean to follow the path of humility and forgiveness in all realms of living? I cannot see the logic in turning our eyes from evil and calling it good when it involves seemingly powerful hands and national needs when we refuse to allow such principle in the paths we walk in our own lives. How little I understand about what we dismiss so easily.
Do not judge my thoughts as if they were decisions and certainties. I only think out loud the questions that torment me.
And while we are on the subject of violence, what on earth allows people to think it is ok to use violence as entertainment, to laugh at stories of cruelty and strange torment? Who has whispered numbness into the hearts of this land’s people that they can stare and watch vengeance on a screen as if it were nothing more than a kiss of love? Why can we trade stories of people passing away casually and then move on without pausing to feel for a moment the reality of so many others whose worlds will never turn in the same way because of this death? Why can we hear of crisis and then eat, drink, and be merry as if no reality but our own had consequence? Walk outside; experience each life as one of great consequence. Attempt to breath in the truth that all you see are full beings with meaning, with need, with trial, with eternal soul. Let us attempt to walk as small grains of sand in the far stretching beach of human life so that we remember that our small picture of the world is not the encompassing story, is not the lasting song. There is a Great Story. There are many grains of sand. And we are but chaff and fraction on this earth of massive need.
If reality is so large and we so small is there futility? No! By all means, no! Only the driving need to enter a greater reality, to tap into the large story and flow with its themes. Only the burning hope to swim into as many realms possible, to experience the worlds of as many true beings as possible, to taste the agony, love, joy, need, celebration of as rich an array of human life as possible and to then share in the color of the Great Story.
I am finished with violence. Any eye or stomach I may once have forced myself to have for it I shun completely. I am ready to believe that the principles, that the way it ought to be, can overpower the supposed necessity and the faulty human logic that asserts that what has been and is is more reliable than what could be. I am dying inside to embrace a consistency of all parts – a consistency of morality with action, a consistency of belief with movement, with protest, with voice. True honesty is the harmony of all these parts, the flowing symmetry of what is within, what is spoken, and what is acted out in all the wide realms of human existence.
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| -Empathy-
They shot you
And my stomach ached all day
The baby kicked in your womb
And bled out of my vagina
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| The season of disconnected gas (slipping through icy fingers)
You came for the third time
In Lucille’s season
I looked out over the parking lot
And saw the naked form of black trees
Against the grey sky
It was cold
And the streets were slick with rain and puddles of melting snow
You came in the season of broken eagle wings
And our love was the half fainting
Slide of the raven
Against the undulating grey of the mid-afternoon sky
You came in the season of power lines
Of course it is always grey behind black
And sometimes starlings rest there in the rain
Sometimes it is not raining and still they rest
I stare from the window and my hand is ice.
You take it in your mouth and my life is sucked away with tears
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