February 12, 2007

Groundless Isolation

I am sitting in my car, rubbing my cold and hive-ridden hands together (I'm allergic to the cold), fussy that I forgot to bring my lunch to work which meant I had to go out in the cold. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her. I'm not sure I've ever seen someone move so slowly in my life. She's probably not even five foot tall - even in her winter snowboots. Her hair is completely covered by a scarf and she's wearing a puffy, old-skool type jacket, powder blue. She shuffles her feet through the snow and ice covered sidewalk, moving forward perhaps three inches at a time. And the whole time, her mouth is moving as she is muttering or reciting to herself ... it's hard to tell. Her lined face concentrates deeply on her path and holding her grocery bags. My light turns green before she reaches my door. I think about opening the passenger door and offering her a ride, but I know the cars behind me will honk, and I'm hungry, and I'm fairly certain it might take her half an hour to get into my car. Not to mention, I get the distinct impression she'd either say no, or beat me with that blue vinyl purse. I drive back to work.

The last few weeks have been bitter cold here. We're up to the mid 20s today and it actually feels warm. We don't have as much snow as upstate New York, mind you, but our streets have been messy and slippery and accident-prone for even the most careful of drivers.

I drive through downtown South Bend on my way to work. I pass the Hope Rescue Lodge, the Homeless Center and a few other charity organizations. Along with the crazy military surplus shop. (Look, there are military surplus shops that are awesome ... and then there are the ones run by psychos ... this one is pretty out there.) So for the past two weeks, I've seen them more and more.

Usually men in ragged coats, and I mean each one wearing multiple coats, trying to layer every piece of clothing onto their bodies that they can find. One of them was pushing a shopping cart of stuff through the snowy sidewalks - and if you've ever gone grocery shopping in the snow, you know that pushing that cart just as far as your car can be easily the day's cardio. There's a grim and determined look to them ... and something of a hopeless look as well.

They're tossed out of most shelters by 6 a.m. ... the library doesn't open for hours ... and they're often tossed out of there after a few hours.

Recently, four men were found dead and stuffed down the sewer system here. All four of them were homeless men who went around town looking for scrap metal to sell. It didn't make them a lot of money, but it kept body and soul together ... well, until someone started to target them, anyway.

I know plenty of people who say, "Hey, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps ... no one helped me and I didn't wind up on the streets, begging and pitiful."

It takes so very little to wind up on the streets. A health condition that knocks you out of work. Sure there's FMLA time ... but many employers don't pay you during that time. Maybe layoffs. Maybe a sick kid or spouse. Maybe the house you're renting is suddenly yanked away from you by the whim of the landlord ... and you don't have the time to scramble to put a security deposit, first and last month's rent down on a new place.

There are a lot of ways to end up on the streets. A lot.

And once you're there ... how do you pull yourself back out? If you've no phone or address, many places won't interview you for a new job. And even if you do get that far ... it's going to take a while to build up the money for that apartment. And really, once you start making some cash, wouldn't you move into a cheap motel and pay by the week? Get warm ... have a safe place to crash. Of course, those places are hotbeds of petty thievery, drug trafficking and plain violence. But at least you have four walls and a roof and you can lock the door. Better than a cardboard box under the bridge.

I wonder about the guys I see on my morning drive. Were they simply the victims of bad luck who can't see their way out? Are they completely alone, trying to fix themselves on their own?

I have that tendency, as do many people. "I can do it myself ... I don't need any help from anyone." But the fact of the matter is that we do need other people. In the most basic terms, we need the farmer to grow our food, the corporation to package it and get it out to the local store, and the local store to get the food at.

But I'm talking about something larger than that. When we cut ourselves off from other people and insist that we can do everything on our own ... the other people drift away. People like to feel as though friendships are reciprocal, a give and take, an exchange. Sure you don't want the friend who is so needy you're always at their beck and call. But we are social creatures ... even the most anti-social and introverted of us need some human contact other than ourselves. Without that contact we grow stagnant and brackish.

And when we insist that we can do everything ourselves, eventually those around us begin to either believe that ... or simply know that we won't accept the help. And when they don't feel needed ... they slip away as they befriend others who understand the reciprocal nature of friendship.

I will move furniture on my own before asking for help. It's easier and faster, I claim. Of course, if it's a large piece, I'm panting, on the verge of an asthma attack before I'm done. Why don't I ask for help? I know that I can move that piece by myself ... but why won't I share that load with someone else?

And how many of those people out on the streets are determined to do it themselves? How many of them have tried to do it themselves for so long, they can't remember what it's like to be helped?

And how many of them have hit rocks in the breakwater and are ready for help ... but the answers they hear are "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps like the rest of us." ??

The question that haunts me the most: how can I offer help and still keep safe?

Naturally, I can donate time and money and services to various organizations which help the homeless.

But what can I do about that guy I've seen pushing his cart ... not just the shelter that houses folks like him from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

We need to work together in order to stay grounded in this life. Despite the fact that I've always been rather fond of Woodrow Wilson's Isolationist theory ... it's simply not a realistic way for human beings to function.

We cannot grow and strive and flourish in isolation ... we must stay connected with others ... caring for each other ... being responsible for each other ... give and take ... back and forth. Together.

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:29 PM | Comments (3) | Struggles | Stumble

January 27, 2007

What Is the Value of Family

The beginning of this series started two days ago with Louder than Words, continued with Book Learning, which you should read before continuing with today's post. :)

What does all of the previous information about me have to do with gay adoption?

I am sick to death of this utter CRAP about "traditional family values."

My father was raised by a mother and father. His dad worked hard. His mom stayed home with the kids.

My mother was raised by a mother and father. Her dad worked hard. Her mom stayed home with the kids. They went to church every week.

My parents were raised by people with "traditional family values." My parents had "traditional family values."

That did NOT make my parents good parents.

I did not turn out well because of my parents' traditional family values.

I turned out the way I did partly because I have always had an exceedingly strong sense of self. Because I stumbled upon books which nurtured me and encouraged me in believing that there was normalcy in the world. Because I had teachers who nurtured me even though they never did seem to realize just how much I needed that nor what was wrong.

What creates a well-balanced child ... and a well-balanced adult ... is not just a mother and a father. It is not what we erroneously call "traditional family values."

What creates a well-balanced child is love and attention and boundaries and knowing that all of this comes from someone who genuinely cares for you.

Is the ideal situation for a child a male and a female figure in their lives? Honestly, I don't know and I'm not sure that this is the best question to ask. The problem is that we simply do not live in an ideal world. We live in reality. And it's freaking messy and muddy and unclear down here in reality.

As for the idea that this Mom and Dad family is the Christian way to do things ... since in the U.S. and in the U.K. that seems to be the loudest voices of complaint ... let me set a few things straight.
First, it was not just Mom and Dad until perhaps the last 100 years (or less). Instead, it was most often either an extended family or something closer to a village or tribe. With multiple adults responsible for helping to love and discipline the children - not just one mother and father.
Second, Jesus was not born in the ideal situation. He was born to a mother and father, but he was not born in the rarified air of a good home. He was born, through no real fault of his parents, in the most real and common of places. In the mess and muck of a stable. Not the sanitized manger scene that we usually see.

Why bring up the manger? Because everything about Jesus in the Bible comes down to Jesus being very grounded in reality rather than intense numbers of rules.

To my mind, "family values" should simply mean that a child receives both love and discipline and knows that the person or people taking care of him care for him.

Ideally, children should probably know that they can trust all the adults around them ... that all the adults around them can administer trustworthy and valid and fair discipline.

But we don't live in that ideal world. And many of us prefer to discipline and raise our children according to our own ideas and our own beliefs.

So this old concept of "traditional family values" that is so carped on, is really something of a fallacy.

And, when we look at the reality that many children live in today: abandoned to orphanages, abused and taken from their family of birth, bounced from one foster home to another for a myriad of reasons. Children with "special needs" tend to be in a particularly grim situation. Their special needs mean they need more attention and understanding ... and often more discipline handled in a more thoughtfully fair way.

Is this the "family values" that people are carping about? Leaving these kids in the system?

If we can get children to an adult or adults who can handle the child ... who can give the child the love and discipline and let the child know how much they care about the kid ... isn't this preferable to keeping the kid in the system?

To my mind, this means no discrimination over the person's religion, their marital status, or ... if they're gay or not.

Those so-called "traditional family values" that people babble about ... what are they really?

Because to all appearances, my parents had those values. And I would not wish my childhood on anyone, much less a child. I said earlier that I would have been ecstatic to have lived in the worst inner city 'hood with a parent or parents who really loved me and cared for me. And I stand by that. I would rather have been raised by two fathers who loved me and took care of me. I would rather have lived with two moms who disciplined me and encouraged me in a rational manner.

I would have rather put up with the teasing and bullying at school for that ... than the utter isolation I went through.

And I think most children out there in orphanages, foster homes, and group homes would feel the same way.

Let's quit whining about what the absolute most ideal situation is ... let's live in the reality that these kids are living in. Get the kids adopted out to people who will care for them and not worry about if the family values of every family exactly and totally matches our own.

To borrow the words of those who seem to oppose gays adopting children the most, "please, let's think of the children."

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:31 PM | Comments (10) | Struggles | Stumble

January 26, 2007

Book Learning

The beginning of this series started yesterday with Louder than Words, which you should read before continuing with today's post. :)

This will not be an easy post for some people to read. Please be careful reading.

Imagine for just a moment, that you are with the people you love and trust most in the world. You are young. Maybe three. Maybe four. You are enjoying a shared time and hobby and things are wonderful. Then the person turns on you, does something horrific and tells you that it's not horrific. That you should be happy when you are sad, joyful when you are scared, content when you are angry.

If this happens once, it's likely stored in the brain as a traumatic memory and it probably works like any other memory.

But if this happens repeatedly, and particularly if the trusted person begins to add threats and fear and pain to the mix, how can this be a tolerable situation for a child?

For just a few minutes, put yourself in that situation. You can't tell or X bad thing will happen. You can't escape the situation. But how can you live with a monster? Not the monster under the bed who seemingly goes away some nights and comes back others ... but the parent you love and you live with who suddenly changes into this monster and you can't ever tell when that person will be your parent ... or when the monster will come out. There are no warnings. No signs to clue you in.

You can't leave and you can't live with the constant intense fear.

So you forget. Sort of. Those traumatic memories do get stored, but they get split apart. The neural pathways which connect the event with the narrative with the emotion with the feeling shatter. So you're left with a memory of the emotion, a memory of the feeling, and the memories of the narrative and the event (the movie, or pictures, if you will - and if you're a visual thinker) are all there ... scattered and disconnected.

You become, in some odd ways, two people. One who deals with the monster and one who deals with everyday life. And you wear a mask most of the time, and much earlier than most people (because let's face it, most adults wear various masks at various times). And I'm not talking about multiple personalities here, although I do believe that kind of personality split can happen given the exact wrong circumstances and the right child. Far more common, however, is something even more subtle.

By the third grade, I was one child at home, another "in public."

The public self who handled all the day-to-day living suspected that something was wrong and went to go look at child abuse books. The home-self knew what was wrong and tried to keep it further hidden.

It was a war that continued until long after I had moved out of my parent's house.

And while my father was sometimes a monster, and someone that, by the age of eight, I tried to avoid spending time with (you see how the public-self and the home-self gave each other ideas ... just no "concrete evidence" behind the shared ideas), there were other issues at home as well.

Not too surprisingly, my father was also cruel to our mother as well. And the battered spouse syndrome (regardless of whether there are physical beatings or not) is remarkably similar to that of the child. We never saw him violent with her. But whatever he did before we came along ... and whatever he did when we were not around, she was scared of him. And since most people cannot cope with this dichotomy of constant fear ... and yet love and trust of your chosen partner ... denial set in for her just as firmly as it had for me.

But it came out in subtle ways with Mom just as it did with me. She pushed my sister and I to excel in some area so that we would not be trapped. So that we would be independent when we were adults. For me, that meant pushing school so hard to the point that I was not really allowed to have hobbies. They distracted from schoolwork. In the course of a year, I was forced to quit one recreational activity after another: first my D&D group, then the magic club, then guitar lessons, last and hardest was basketball.

There was a constant and very subtle tension between her intellectually knowing that she should encourage us to do whatever we wanted ... and her very real fear that we could not do "this" or "that" for fear that we would not become independent in our own right.

Today I can see that her many fears of simpler things (the opossum in the trash can, for example) was simply a manifestation of her fear of my father ... and her feeling trapped with him. As a child, with the simplicity of thought in children, I simply thought she was stupid, and I dismissed her.

But there was another dimension to that dismissal as well. It was also self-preservation.

Despite Mom's occasional protestations that she loved us very much and didn't I know that ... I really didn't feel that from her. As I said yesterday, I felt the sting of being told I didn't do things right far more than I ever felt the comfort of a hug.

I dismissed her largely because I felt that I had been dismissed by her. And why keep going back to someone for love and comfort when that rarely seems to be forthcoming? When a request for comfort instead results in more pain, doubled pain because it was unexpected and came from the person was was "supposed to" love you unconditionally?

And so, I turned to books. I got what nurturing I could out of reading stories about families who did love each other instead of simply saying they did. I learned about human interactions more from books than I did from my parents or even socialization with my peers. That saved me. It gave me some semblance of normality whilst I grew up, and thank goodness for that.

Again, what the heck does all of this have to do with gay adoption?
I'll get into that in the next post. :)
(Which will be the last in this little series.)

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:26 PM | Comments (2) | Struggles | Stumble

January 25, 2007

Louder Than Words

I write this post with some trepidation for many reasons. One, I know that my little sister reads my blog (not that she's little any more) and I haven't discussed this in quite this way with her before. Two, because I started this blog with the intentions of discussing my adventures in teaching ... it never did quite pan out that way, but I made a decision early on for this not to be "one of those blogs. Blogs wailing about poor pitiful li'l ole me and my "horrible" life. And three, because the day that my mom discovers this blog, the shit will hit the proverbial fan.

And yet, this hypocritical brouhaha over whether or not gays should adopt, leaves me, personally, with little choice. I find that I have to write a few serious posts which will go into my childhood and talk about my family. There will be serious moments and funny moments. Because that's just how I am.

And here's why:

By the time I began the third grade, I knew that something was terribly wrong in my family. We had lived in seven homes in six towns by the time I started kindergarten. And despite the fact that we had not moved between kindergarten and the beginning of third grade, I'd already gone to two elementary schools. (The Catholic school experiment of second grade was simply an utter disaster ... go figure.)

In essence, by the time I was nine, I had "moved," in terms of any kind of socialization with others, a total of eight times. This helped to shape me into something of a loner. It might have made another child more outgoing and honed their social skills to a fine point ... for me, I drew inward. Why work hard to make friends when I would simply be moved away from them again in a short time?

I did make friends, just not quickly nor easily.

My best friends, and, in fact, my true "parents," were found in the library. I said in an earlier post that distancing myself from my parents had saved my life. And I ended the post by adding, "Well, that and the bookmobile." And the truth of the matter was that I learned far more about families and love from the books that I read than I did from my parents. (Note to my sister: and you and the extended family ... just not from Mom and Dad.)

So as I realized that something was terribly wrong in our family, I did what any little third grade TOTAL geek-child would do: I went to the library.

Heart banging in my chest, trying very hard NOT to look about furtively as I approached the 300s, I passed books of statistics on various countries, passed books on civil rights, on slavery, politics, economics ... and I was sure that by the time I got to the 360s that every person not just in the library, but the entire school, and possibly all of Austin, knew that I was pulling out the first book on child abuse that I saw.

I went to one of the little desks, sat down, began with the table of contents. Began paging through the book, heart still racing, watching the clock, trying not to panic when my teacher or the librarian walked past me. To this day, I can clearly recall the first chapter of the book describing cases of neglect, primarily in the inner city. There was a heavy implication that child neglect was obviously an inner city issue ... probably something inherent in "the blacks."

I was inclined to distrust the book already.

I was also horrified to read what some children had gone through. Having to fend completely for themselves, find their own food, water, even shelter.

We are shopping. I am talking to the artist about his work. Mom, bored, not finding what she was interested in, moves on to the next stall. I continue talking to the artist, babbling as only a three-year-old can. Question after question after - we are interrupted by my mother, voice high-pitched and tight. "THERE you are! Don't ever wander away from me again!" I protest that I never did wander away, I've been right here this whole time. I learn quickly that I have to watch for Mom or she will wander off without me and never realize it.

This child-neglect was not what I had come to find out about.

The next chapter or two covered physical abuse. Again, I was horrified to read about ... and in some cases, see ... the horrific things that some adults had done to infants, toddlers ... kids like me.

This was not what I had come to find out about either.

I am running through the apartment in Carmel, Indiana. I am running for my life, terrified beyond belief. I am literally flying up the stairs, if I can just get far enough ahead, he won't know where I hide. I'm really good at hiding. I fly into their room. Into their closet; I've got a plan. But he's too close behind me. The closet door opens ... there's a silhouette of a man, belt raised above his head.

Mommy is cooking dinner. Daddy is getting a beer from the fridge. I want to see dinner. Little hands struggle high over my head, grasping at the top of the stove, for what I don't know. "Don't you know that's hot? I'll show you how hot it is." And he removes the pot from the gas flame and holds my hand there ... not long enough to blister, but long enough to learn fire is bad.

Sure, my parents spanked me once in a while, but they never did the horrible things described in that book. Neglect was not what was wrong in my family. Physical abuse was not what was wrong with my family.

The next chapter or two dealt with sexual abuse.

I turned to the next chapter as quickly as possible without calling attention to myself. THAT was CERTAINLY NOT what was wrong with our family.

Evenings with Daddy, watching Planet of the Apes together up in their room. ... the little Red Riding Hood mask which terrified me before Daddy even showed it to me ... Jeannie's house ... the sickest feeling in the pit of my stomach, worse even than before I throw up. No, no, no, this could not be what was wrong with our family.

I leafed idly through the rest of the book. A chapter on alcoholism caught my attention for a while, but it didn't really seem like just drinking alone really counted enough to be abuse. Dejected, I replaced the book. Obviously Mom and Dad were right: I just didn't appreciate what I had.

After all, Mom told me over and over how lucky we were: we had two parents who loved us.

But the thing is, the real truth of the matter, is that Mom's favourite phrase would come back to haunt her. "Actions speak louder than words." And as often as she said that to us, I very rarely actually felt it. We had the "perfect" family. Mom, Dad, two kids. Mom stayed home with us. Dad had a great job, even if we did seem to have to move around a lot. But what I saw and felt were the constant complaints about having to clean up after us, about having to make us Kool-Aid all the time, about the trouble that i got in constantly (I didn't except for in her head), about driving us to school.

And, apparently, I didn't "play" right. So any time that I, or my sister and I together, convinced Mom to play a game with us, it didn't last long. I was too rough, rambunctious or loud. When we were colouring, and I proudly showed Mom how great I was colouring, she told me I was doing it wrong. Apparently five year olds should be able to do more than stay within the lines ... I should have been colouring in small circles so that diagonal patterns didn't appear in my picture.

So, I spent time with my Fisher Price Little People ... played with the kids a couple of doors down when I could, and tried to keep mostly to myself when at home.

What does any of this have to do with gay adoptions?

The reasoning takes a little more set-up. I'll get there, hang in with me.

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:59 PM | Comments (7) | Struggles | Stumble

January 21, 2007

Scared but Free

What is it that causes us to close our minds? To see only in black and white, right and wrong? What is it in us which seems to scream, "It's my way or the highway - if you don't like it leave"?

I read excerpts from Hrant Dink's final article today ... and intend to see if I can track down the full text later. But at the very least, this edit was not just poignant, but leads me to questions that I have asked for most of my life.

As a selective follower of the news, I offer this brief bit of context about Hrant Dink: he was a journalist living in Turkey, working for the Agos newspaper, his newspaper. He had written about how in the last days of the Ottoman Empire ... in 1915 ... the Turks slaughtered Armenians in what he claimed amounted to a genocide. (Please, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with him! I've not done the research and I'm just giving a brief synopsis.) A lawsuit was brought against him for defaming Turkey in his writing. Despite losing the initial lawsuit, Mr. Dink stood his ground ... tried to convince people he was not anti-Turkey at all. He was shot and killed by a 16 or 17 year old Turkish boy, Friday, 19 January 2007.

This is a series of excerpts from his final article ... longer excerpts can be found on the BBC: Hrant Dink's final article (Original text from Agos is here ... but I don't know how long this link will remain directed to this article.)

What is truly threatening and unbearable for me is the psychological torture I place myself in. The question that really gets to me, is: 'What are these people thinking about me?'

Unfortunately I am now better-known than before and I feel people looking at me, thinking: 'Oh, look, isn't he that Armenian guy?'

I am just like a pigeon, equally obsessed by what goes-on on my left and right, front and back. My head is just as mobile and fast. ...

Do you ... know the price of making someone as scared as a pigeon?

What my family and I have been through has not been easy. I have considered leaving this country at times ...

But leaving a 'boiling hell' to run to a 'heaven' is not for me. I wanted to turn this hell into heaven.

We stayed in Turkey because that was what we wanted - and out of respect for the thousands of people here who supported me in my fight for democracy ...

2007 will probably be an even harder year for me. The court cases will continue, new ones will be initiated and God knows what kind of additional injustices I will have to face.

I may see myself as frightened as a pigeon, but I know that in this country people do not touch pigeons.

Pigeons can live in cities, even in crowds. A little scared perhaps, but free.

What is it in us which makes us so sure that we are right that we feel the need to utterly crush those who disagree with us? Why is it so hard for us to live side by side with those with whom we disagree?

What is it which causes us to sneak into the night, erect a cross in a yard and light it afire? What is it which causes us to so hate what we think another culture represents that we feel secure in an attempt to annihilate them?

I think, in most situations, it is that which we try to spread ... what we use to attempt to intimidate: fear.

We fear that which is different from us.

What I don't think I will ever understand is why? Why are we so damn scared of something different? of different ideas and concepts and ways of living?

I'm not talking about those in power who do encourage and insist upon genocide. We can search out the reasons for individuals like Hitler and those of his ilk.

I'm talking about both the smaller and larger scales here. I define smaller as those pockets of violence (physical or threats/words) which are isolated from other such pockets. And I define larger as: as a species, why do we seem so prone to this?

When I taught first-year writing, I would see this over and over and over again. Any idea or concept that was outside most of my students' personal experience was stupid and to be ridiculed. Anyone adhering to those suspect ideas was usually told "well, this is the way things are here ... if you don't like it, leave." We did have good debates ... if I intervened and opened this up for discussion. If I did not (for example, if I simply overheard students discussing an issue in the school newspaper before class), then generally speaking "my way or the highway" seemed to rule the day.

Not all of my students were like this ... and I don't think all people are either. But it does seem to be a terribly pervasive response in humans, regardless of culture.

I can understand suspicion of that which is different. But why the violence? And why does it seem to be hard-wired into the biology of so many people?

As a child I did not understand the saying "Violence never solved anything." Of course it did. If you killed or obliterated the person responsible for whatever, the problem was over, right?

Today, I see that the saying, while not really literally true, is far more complex than I thought as a child. Violence is a short term solution. It doesn't solve the problem, and it quite often makes the whole, larger issue much worse.

If you execute Hitler, but do nothing to address the ideas which he espoused, you have not solved the problem. You have made a martyr. You have ensured that his ideas will spread and grow.

If you assassinate Martin Luther King you do not solve the "problem" of racial separation.

(Thank goodness Germany did attempt to address the ideas and have worked with varying degrees of success to deal with those issues. ... And I do think that racial separation is a terrible problem - the inequitable treatment of people for race or sex or nationality or gender or sexuality ... or 9 million other fabricated reasons - is always abhorrent to me.)

Are we so afraid of discussion? of having our ideas changed and challenged that we can't see that we are all far more similar than different? Isn't the person who bombs an abortion clinic the same as the suicide bomber who thinks capitalism is evil? They're both striking out with violence at an idea which is abhorrent to them. They're attempting to create terror around those who ascribe to those ideas.

I may see myself as frightened as a pigeon, but I know that in this country people do not touch pigeons. Pigeons can live in cities, even in crowds. A little scared perhaps, but free.

We are all scared pigeons for some reason or another. Some of us are honest about it ... admit that we fear. Others of us have convinced ourselves that we are fearless. And with that conviction inevitably comes righteousness in our decisions ... that we are correct and that we own the one true path that everyone else should follow. Further down that road it becomes not the joking "Oh, if I ran the world, it would be so much better!" ... but a serious thought: "If people would just do things my way." And then: "People should do things my way."

And that conviction leads to scaring others ... and if we continue down that road ... it leads to "final solutions" which are no solutions at all, but simply methods of propagating both the ideas we claim to find so wrong ... and more people who are so very scared that they react with a desperate and wounded soul, attempting to defend themselves from violence with violence.

Abandon the path to Koyaanisqatsi.
Find Hozho.

(Yes, I purposely mixed two cultural concepts.)

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:34 AM | Comments (0) | Struggles | Stumble

January 1, 2007

Happy New Year

"Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain.”

I have never seen a statement more true than that. And I'm not referring to myself, don't worry.

But a very dear friend just found himself in that situation. Where he was trying so hard to avoid the coping mechanisms that he'd developed over the years which weren't so great, that he found himself in the position where he was simply out of coping mechanisms and didn't know where to turn or what to do.

In a similar situation? Try here.

I know the holidays -- whichever ones you celebrate -- can be hard for everyone. Please ... if you are having a difficult time, there are people who are ready to listen ... to be with you.

If you are prone to bad times, reach out. As difficult as that can be ... and dear gods above, below and in between, I do know how hard that can be ... but please, as difficult as it can be ... reach out. There are people who will listen. There are people who do care (and I know you know that and likely don't need the extra guilt).

For me, before I even knew the whole story yesterday morning, just hearing that a friend was hurt and in hospital, I went walking in the state park for two hours over the advanced rugged trail, as fast as I could go.

For you, hopefully, it is talking to someone. Reaching out. Not letting yourself be isolated.

Because no matter what we think, we are ALL interconnected. No matter the culture, the country, the life ... we are far more connected than we think.

Reach out. Talk.

Please.

Interact.

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:37 AM | Comments (9) | Struggles | TrackBack | Stumble