Written in writing group on Monday, October 17:
Met Gwen & Sandra near the stairs — said I was having a hard time. They both hugged me, asked if I felt loved. I said yes.
Won’t you look down upon me Jesus
Won’t you help me take a stand
You just gotta see me through another day
My body’s achin’ and my time is at hand
I can’t make it any other way…
These lines are from James Taylor’s Fire & Rain
Song in my head. Won’t stop. But I feel so totally helpless to make any kind of difference. I’m so tired, I just have no energy at all. Can barely do the things I have to do to take care of myself. Seems like I spent the morning writing checks and getting them into envelopes. Then I tried to help the people who are writing activist postcards, but I couldn’t find the room. Pushing my cart so I could pick up my groceries, down to the health center and back.
I keep trying to return to metta: May all beings be held in lovingkindness, may the Israelis be held in lovingkindness, may the Palestinians be held in lovingkindness, may Netanyahu be held in lovingkindness, may Trump be held …. won’t you help me take a stand, you just gotta see me through another day.
Reading about the life of St. Francis. What an amazing human being! But how hard it was for people to get what he was doing. The writer, Richard Rohr, is a Franciscan, but he learned all the wrong things. I don’t know how he found his way through. He talks about the importance of learning how to be with silence and solitude, and how you can learn about god and non-duality. But people can also value being alone because they feel superior, or want to look superior. I haven’t got the words right, but what struck me is that my difficulty with silence and solitude is due to early trauma, not some kind of pride. I wish I could make friends, talk to people more easily, I just never learned how. Lately I’ve been feeling horribly alone and completely useless, unable to do anything good for the world I love. Francis talks about not being important, about living on the margins — how did he do so much good? Because he obviously inspired people, not by what he said but by who he was, by how he moved through the world, what he did. At the time of the Crusades, he went to talk to the leader of the Muslims, spent 3 weeks with him, but was never able to convince the Crusaders that what they were doing was wrong and was bound to fail. Was that when it all began?
I’ve been reading Eager to Love, the book about St. Francis by Richard Rohr. For information about Francis’ visit to the Sultan of Egypt at the time of the Crusades, see Chapter 10: Entering the World of Another: Francis and the Sultan of Egypt.
After I read my writing to my friends in writing group, Judith said she wanted to read the poem St. Francis and the Sow, by Galway Kinnell. It’s a poem I know from a reading by David Whyte, tho the only words I could remember were “to reteach a thing its loveliness…” This is only the first part:
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.
My heart was warmed by her gift.