Doctortayria's Blog

I’ve been working on my new website until my eyes are square for the last couple of days. When my web guy imported my address list from the e-mail account onto my site, the software automatically sent out something to everyone on my address list, something I didn’t compose, ask for or approve. Ouch. The web world is an imperative these days, but the rules of it are so far beyond even the people we hire to be on top of it. Ah well.

Much of the focus of my work is regarding recovery of the indigenous mind, the original and inherent aspects of psyche that modernization have marginalized and suppressed. It is a strong challenge for me to stay true to what I care about in these ways, while learning to work with the new methods for dissemination of ideas and information. The computer and web conversations demand more and more hours of the day. The best I can do some days is take the work outside onto the porch so the wind and birds and mountains can feed me while I work on it. I so appreciate the connections the web creates, but also need very much to understand how to create a balance with it. Our forebears in every field of inquiry – political, philosophical, artistic, poetic, scriptural and spiritual – did not leave a map for us on this one. We are on our own.

Treatment is often simple once a diagnosis is made. Getting an accurate diagnosis when something internally has gone awry can be the most illusive part of maintaining health.

Well into this just-passed winter, having been housebound for weeks, I spoke to my daughter Josi who lives in Ithaca, New York. She was taking in my tenuous mental state and said, “Mom, I know you have cabin fever, but…” Cabin Fever!! There is a name for this condition! My fingernail claw marks on the wall notwithstanding, I thought “Yippee, I’m not irreversibly insane. I have Cabin Fever!” It really helps to have a name for what you suffer. I hadn’t heard the term used up here on the mountain ever, but I mentioned my condition to some of my friends. By the end of the winter everyone seemed to be using the term to explain themselves. It was the standard diagnosis for our general state of anxiety and insanity. Go Josi.

Today I was talking to her about my excitement over spring, my garden and mountain life – ignoring the subject of real problems over creating a viable livelihood from here that the harsh winter had caused me to confront. I know Josi well enough to ask when there is a short silence, as there is usually precious wisdom to be mined from the questioning that might not be freely offered otherwise. I said, “What do you think?” She said, “You sound like an amnesiac in bliss.” She went on to explain her years of observation after living in Chicago, and now Ithaca. The winters will make even the brightest person turn dull, depressed and sometimes suicidal but just one whiff of spring and everything is instantly forgotten. She explains that the only reason anyone can STAY in those towns is the sudden onset of amnesia in spring. Before spring no one can gather themselves up to leave because they are too depressed, and after spring hits memory is erased.

Josi regularly makes me laugh the kind of laughter that happens when a deep nerve of truth has been hit and the only response is to explode with delight at the revelation. She is working on her doctorate in Art History at Cornell, but I told her that she could have a side career providing diagnoses for psychologists. Maybe she and I can team up. I’m actually pretty good at helping people work with their demons and disturbances; with a gifted diagnostician to call upon this could become a family practice.

To put love at the heart of every consideration is the simplest thing and often the hardest thing to remember, but I believe it is the only way forward. Love is the only signpost on any path worth following. It’s the answer to every question. Every decision can be made more easily if I try to feel which one will serve what I love most. Nothing is worth doing if it isn’t in the service of what is loved. When everything else falls apart, love is the only thing left standing. It’s only thing that is real.

The road I live on is a gravel road that, after a harsh winter of more precipitation than has fallen for 20 years in this area, has been pock marked for months with deep ridges, very difficult to navigate. Tonight as I drove home the road was evened out, with a thick layer of new gravel on it. I really felt the love in that. It seemed like everything that leads to this happening is, at the root, made of love.

I have really been thinking about this, and feeling it. It is hard to write about it without it sounding cliché, and it is cliché, but this simple idea may be the distillation of everything I have learned in my 58, almost 59 years. And I want to keep the realizations of it at the center of my next 58 or 59 years.

I haven’t worn a cross in years due to inner conflicts about how the story of Jesus gets turned into judgement of others, separation among people, self-righteousness and condemnations. But yesterday, Good Friday morning, I had a sudden impulse to dig into storage and pull out a sweet little cross my ex-husband once gave me and put it on.

I thought about the crucifixion all through the day. To me, and to many, Jesus is the incarnation of love itself. Why must it be that love is crucified? It happens all of the time. Love gets destroyed constantly, probably most often by people who believe themselves to be doing the right thing.

The only prayer I can think of in response to this reflection is to ask to learn every day how to love better, and to love more and to never hurt love. And to learn to forgive ourselves and each other for “not knowing what we do,” as Jesus did even as he died such a horrible death.