Doctortayria's Blog

During life’s moments of shift, when new windows open, there is a need for taking serious stock; taking charge of what will contribute to the future, and what belongs to the past. And then dig a grave and bury the dead of the past. So many old patterns and energies are like barnacles on our boat, clinging on and trying to stowaway under the surface. There is serious work to do to make these conscious, bring up the boat and clean them off. Psychological housekeeping is the most important there is.

I keep processing various things that I learned while in Kenya. On an evening in the Masai Mara a Masai man made himself available to several of us to tell us about their lives and answer questions. One woman asked him, “Do you ever watch TV?” He smiled, as if puzzled for a minute, and then replied, “No, in the night we feel we need to be looking into the world with our natural eyes.” As he said this he made a gesture with the first two fingers of his hand pointing toward his eyes and then out toward the world.

Now I am home and thinking about this. How do I look into the night with my natural eyes? The world offers a multitude of virtual distractions. Just as I am writing this my dog went out on my front porch to bark into the night – this dog who is now deaf and blind. He is sensing something, not with his eyes, and not with his ears, something he feels the need to bark at into the night. The natural eyes surely have nothing to do with physical sight, and are beyond physical hearing. They are a sense of another kind.

I’m going outside right now to sleep on my porch and dream into the world, hopefully with my natural eyes. The concept the Masai warrior named intrigues me and seems necessary.

I’m not sure this title is actually a word, but I wanted a verb. “Bene”, meaning “good”. “Fact”, like making it real, or physical. “Or”, the suffix indicating the person who does, in this case making good real. “Ing”, doing it. Sometimes I read about artists and poets who had benefactors, such as Rilke, and have thought that I wish I had a benefactor. There is so much “bene” that I want to do, and finances are a weird “fact” and I’m the only “-or” to find the way to pay the bills, so I try to bring both “bene” and “factor” into my “ing.” But it is hard. We all know that.

I have loved to be generous when I felt able, to be benefactor, some small source in the lives of artist friends and others who simply need it, in my own modest way. Now I give away time more than money for necessary reasons.

 This afternoon I talked with Agnes Musau, the woman who founded the Drug Fighters School that we just worked at, benefactoring, in Kibera, Kenya. She is raising 6 babies in her own little home, 5 of them rescued – meaning if you find a baby someone abandoned in the rain in a ditch and nobody wants it, what are you going to do? Only one of hers is a biological child. She has 6 children at home and 260 at the school in Kibera, all of whom she is comitted to feeding, protecting and educating and no one is paying her. She needs bene-fact-or-ing. She might get kicked out of her home, she and the 6 children, since rent is overdue. She is behind on paying employees, who have families and need to be paid for similar reasons, she has been sick for a week. I just talked with her, and she said it made her feel so much better just that someone called. She said the babies are jumping around playing, they are “angels” she says, they know nothing.  They are just happy.

So now I, who feels like I need a benefactor, want to figure out how to benefact; be the -or and do the -ing. Need inspiration.

I remember hearing Joseph Campbell in a taped lecture commenting upon a story he had read in the newspaper about a man who had grabbed the hand of another man as he began to fall from a bridge or high building, I can’t remember which. The man who was holding the hand might have fallen himself and they both would have died, but he would not let go. Interviewers asked him about this afterward, why he was willing to give up his life when it looked like he would be pulled in if he didn’t. The fellow could only say that at that moment the connection was the only thing to focus upon, it was more important than anything. He couldn’t let go.

Agnes is surely feeling this. And I’m feeling it now. Need inspiration.

Coco, my dog, is aging too early. He’s only 13, and his breed can generally be healthy for a lot longer than that. He’s gone deaf, now he’s blind, and since he wasn’t here while I travelled for the last month and he is having a very difficult time readjusting to his home. He’s still so smart, that is obvious, but he’s afraid. He has fallen down stairs, off of porches, run (and I mean run) straight into walls, he’s becoming almost paralyzed with fear now. It is hard to express his spirit without injury.

When my daughter Josi was very young, just 7 or 8, she read a biography of Helen Keller. After that she would pretend to be blind in various situations, even in a hotel lobby and elevator I remember, really wanting to understand what Helen’s life might have been like. She would even dream about her.

Now I find myself trying to do this with Coco, but it isn’t easy. What would it be like?

I had finally planted a large vegetable garden here on my mountain property. The last two summers I was to be away for 5-6 weeks so decided not to plant. This was to be my garden summer. I put in a lot of  herbs, a large variety of vegetables and flowers, and was so excited about all of it. Then an invitation to Africa was extended as a last-minute plan, and off I went. I was gone more than a month and just returned last night. Today I visited all of the overgrown, untended plants. Very, very sad. As I worked to prune, weed and apologize, feeling guilty and insufficient, I talked to the plants about where I had been and what I had been doing. 

I have been doing work around the house the rest of the day and have had the Animal Planet channel playing. First there was an extraordinary documentary about a woman who has dedicated her life to saving Manatees; next people in Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve working to save the elephants; next a man who almost lost his life trying to help preserve the spotted dogs, a species in the wilds of Zimbabwe.

There are a lot of gardens to tend in this world. I am very moved and grateful to each person who finds a calling and commits to it. There are “Mother Teresa’s”  in every imaginable concern, from trees, plants, insects, animals, ecosystems,  and every human issue – spiritual, emotional, physical and psychological, economic, sociological.

Which garden am I called to tend? It’s a completely basic human question. It’s the reason for vision quests, rites of passage, pilgrimages, years of walking to reach and consult the oracle, every method of questing and questioning life. Indigenous people used to talk to the gods while the child was in the womb and name the baby based upon guidance about the calling for that soul. Those who know their particular calling from early on are especially blessed.

I have A.D.D. I think I have maybe been trying to tend to too many gardens. Must work to focus now. Asking help from the gods for vision and focus.

In a conversation with my sister a couple of nights ago I was telling her that I think I am 50/50. 50% calmly and completely trusting of the universe and 50% terrified and uncertain of it. I was telling her this in more personal detail, but that is the gist. Sometimes, actually often, I think I am bi-polar. I adore the gift of life; I want out – each feeling is enormous, and each in equal measure. I dare not elaborate.

The yin/yang symbol is maybe the most true, powerful, telling, strong image we have of the universe. I was thinking of it strongly as I drove home toward the glorious blue ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains, lit by the light of dusk. The mountains, like the lilies, “toil not, neither do they spin” or want. Here I come; toiling, spinning, wanting. Having looked squarely into the eye of the deepest poverty imaginable in Kenya, I come home, with everything I need at arm’s length, and am worried about the next stages of survival.

I feel bi-polar, swinging between poles.  But, in this world of opposites, isn’t that true of the universe? If I am bi-polar am I one with the universe?

On the one hand, this is a ridiculous and rhetorical reflection on the symbol, on the other hand…

Halfway home on a 14-hour drive and I headed straight into an enormous lightning storm. Lightning cracking the sky over and over and over again right in front of our eyes, those of us driving East on 74 in Illinois. Hunkering down here in a roadside motel I’m thinking it might be perfectly symbolic. The world is loudly rumbling out there as I type, something feels split wide open, a C-section from the belly of the whale.

Tomorrow I head back to my mountain home in North Carolina, post Africa and a family visit. Now the real work of integration begins. I feel the future inviting me into it. What a delicious call. Here I come.

I saw a very well done, older movie tonight with Meryl Streep called First Do No Harm. It is a true story about a family whose youngest member developed epilepsy and then became almost a prisoner of the medical system, with the Mother being made into a criminal when she tried to do what she thought was best for her child. For me, having had a daughter who was diagnosed at the age of 11 with a so-far incurable illness, Type I Diabetes, watching what happened to that family felt very personal to me. Such a diagnosis breaks down every formerly held assumption about life, no matter how much you think conceptually you might understand such realities. It hits in a place you didn’t know was even there inside. It can break down a family if its members aren’t each strong enough to deal with the trauma.

The movie brought up memories and still unprocessed experience. The medical establishment saves my daughter’s life every single day and is good to us in ways impossible to acknowledge with enough appreciation and gratitude. But I learned intimately and can say without reservation that the instincts of the parent and the patient – and I am talking about instincts that come from the deepest place inside, not learned fears, prejudices or phobias which should be sorted out from the others by definition – should be held in the highest esteem above any other authority. This should be on the books, in the laws and ethics, in my opinion.

My daughter and I knew where to draw the line between what we gained from the medical establishment, and what took our own authority, sense of power and optimism away, and we both instinctively found a way through the harsh course of unknowing and learning, in and out of hospitals, parent-child meetings and workshops until we forged our own way forward. Arlene is not defined by her disease or confined by it, and, as a weightlifter who is 5th in the nation in her category, is the picture of health and balance physically. I tell this to affirm with all of my heart the importance of trusting instincts in such cases and of not giving over thinking and authority to an establishment driven by a wild array of motives that obfuscate much of the thinking that goes on in them.

There is not always a lot of support for this in the world. Arrogance in medicine and in personalities that offer opinions can confuse you when you’re most afraid and vulnerable. No matter what, listen within. I hope we can support and remind each other of this when the needs arise.

I am in a liminal space here in Iowa after the trip to Kenya and before I get back to North Carolina. My psyche is absorbing the experiences and readjusting. One thing I cannot stop thinking about is that in working with the young girls in Kibera who are traumatized at every level, from starvation, poverty and unfathomable abuse, when they spoke with me one thing they wanted me to know is that they want panties. Underwear. Young women growing into adulthood who do not have the simple undergarments that we take for granted. I have been musing on how I am going to get a large supply of panties to about 2oo young women in a slum in Kibera. It haunts me. I’m going to figure it out. Soon, right away. Any ideas or contributions are welcome.