The Aneurysm, Part IV

[photo by Mia McCullough]

Who sees inside from outside?
Who finds hundreds of mysteries
even where minds are deranged?

See through his eyes what he sees.
Who then is looking out from his eyes?

— Rumi, Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks, p. 94



This is all a lot of news to take in.

Were I on the internet I would feed my obsession that way. The internet is awesomely fertile ground for fueling obsessions, whether they be well-intentioned or not. Instead I’ve gotten the facts by speaking to live people and have put phone calls out to both Portia and Graham, two people I’ve wanted to be in contact with, because they both worked with E. and me.

In trying to reach Portia, Rob picked up the phone — early morning basketball player, master birder, out in the woods in Western Washington — and I heard his voice. A long lost voice to me yet it only feels like a month since I spoke to him.

I heard his voice, and could picture the white beard, the ever-apologetic look on his face. Could picture him in the tall pines on his land, and in his woodlot.

Haven’t heard back yet from either Portia or Graham but expect I will in the next couple of days.

The Aneurysm, Part III

Like a fresh idea in an artist's mind,
you fashion things before they come into being.
You sweep the floor like the man
who keeps the doorway.
When you brush
a form clean, it becomes
what it truly is.

— Rumi, Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks, p. 102



E.'s mom gave me the caringbridge.org information where E's husband and dad have been posting updates regularly.

I know about caringbridge. When it got out on Facebook in 2008 that an old schoolmate/acquaintance had nearly lost his triplet toddlers in a house fire, a caringbridge site offered updates and a place to post messages.

I was wondering if this was a moment to make an exception to my experiment, if this was the emergency I said in the beginning would be a reasonable exception, was I being selfish or bad by refusing to get on the internet.

No. There is no substitute for the human voice. I left E's husband a message on his cell phone yesterday, expressing my love and concern and making it perfectly clear I did not expect a call back. He asked Peter to contact me, too, so I wasn’t calling out of the blue.

But how many times have we said, or had said to us, “It’s so good to hear your voice.” There is nothing like hearing the voice, the inflection, of an old friend. It is a small substitute for being in the presence of the actual person. Internet communications cannot be replaced same as a person cannot be replaced. And internet communications cannot make up for the fabric, tenor, laughter, and idiosyncrasies of a human voice of someone who loves you.

The Aneurysm, part II

[E. & C., 2001]

Let the poor man look deep into generosity.
Let bread see a hungry man.
Let kindling behold a spark from the flint.

— Rumi, Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks, p. 141




Yesterday I was able also to reach Elizabeth’s mom at the ICU after calling Seattle 411 again. I spoke with E.'s mom for about ten minutes and got the facts straight on what is happening with her. Her mom sounded amazingly upbeat considering what has been happening, and didn't seem to mind getting a phone call.

Basically, E. was at a meeting a couple weeks ago and she came down with a bad headache, so bad it felt like a migraine. Her head felt unusually warm and she started vomiting. She told her husband something was wrong. They got her to the ER and eventually got her to Harborview where she was operated on for a deep burst aneurysm and a superficial non-burst one that was found in the brain scan.

Two weeks later she is recovering but does not always know where she is or what year it is. She has thought she was in Spain. She has reported just looking at paperwork and feeling relieved that she’s on my old company's health insurance. I don’t even know if she’s got health insurance right now.

Peter said a few days after the surgery he visited the hospital. A week or more later he visited again and she looked way better but was still confused about where she was. She is on medication to artificially raise her BP to about 180 so that the arteries in her brain will stay open. There are apparently vasospasms, which they are waiting to calm down on their own. Her mom said that her youth and health are working against her here, not having developed the hardening of the arteries that would prevent the spasms from being so severe.

[to be continued]

The Aneurysm, part 1

I was dead, then alive.
Weeping, then laughing.

— Rumi, Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks, p. 134




March 12, 2009. Thursday. Portland. 7:15 a.m. 24*F. Clear.

Tuesday eve Jeff gave me the news that Elizabeth is in the hospital in Seattle having suffered a double brain aneurysm and pursuant 8-hour surgery to repair them.

She worked for me at the publishing company I ran in Seattle for a number of years. She was my right arm there. Gifted writer. She babysat my oldest when he was very small. She is in her late thirties.

I was standing in our bathroom here in Maine when he told me. Shortly thereafter headed out to meet with the coop moms at Whole Foods. Peter Spence had emailed me & Jeff to give us the news — P. got my auto message saying I was off the internet, but had gotten through to Jeff. E’s husband had asked Peter to get in touch with me.

I left a message for Peter Tuesday night and spoke to him yesterday for about a half hour. Peter had been to visit Elizabeth a couple of times. Tuesday night I’d also tried to reach her family at the ICU at Swedish, where I thought she was.

They had no record of her there. When I spoke to Peter Tuesday he corrected it to say she was at Harborview ICU which made more sense.

It was good to talk to Peter — I so vividly remember him, working with him, his golden retrievers lying around the 19th century pioneer cabins that had become our office space on old Ballard Ave in Seattle.

Peter told me about the caringbridge.org site that’s been set up for updates. I didn’t get into saying I can’t read those right now. He said her wit was intact in her lucid moments and it was a relief to hear that she is still in there.

[to be continued]

Electromagnetic overload & the immune system

The power of love came into me,
and I became fierce like a lion,
then tender like the evening star.

— Rumi, Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks, p. 134







Electromagnetic overload: what role does this play in stress, and illness?

Over the last year I’ve noticed that the phone I use sometimes even makes my left ear hurt when I use it right next to my head. I had chronic congestion in that ear last summer.

It also makes me think about the mystery of the cancer epidemic. We are constantly bombarded with sublethal doses of many toxic chemicals, in our air, water, food, in plastics, carpets, paint. These may have the effect of undermining the immune system such that other stressors — pathogens, psychological, or physical stressors — can get through. There is evidence that viruses play a role in the development of cancer.

Are we that different from the bees?

I like the term ‘toxic stress’— but it is taking on new meaning tonight. ‘Toxin stress’ is part of the picture, too.

More on stress

"People can become obsessed with their own theories and miss the point of everything."

— Sogyal Rinpoche, Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, p. 55




March 2009

on stress:

from the MOFGA newspaper, Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener, March-May 2009 issue, p. 38, in a review of a book on Colony Collapse Disorder:

“Jacobsen cites several studies showing that although neonicotinoids may not kill bees outright, so-called sublethal doses cause breakdown of the immune system, making bees vulnerable to disease and other stressors.”

Stressors. Sublethal doses eroding the immune system. The immune system as including that which protects us against toxic levels of stress and its effects.

I had never thought about the immune system as protecting us against stress. That would mean that the mind, the way we think, and in particular our attitudes toward life are part of our immune system.

We all know that stress can lead to illness, that it undermines our immune system. But do I live with the understanding that part of our immune system’s job is to protect us from toxic levels of stress (not the strengthening kind — as in the bushes and trees after the snowstorm)?

Emerging, Solitude

Totally conscious, and apropos of nothing, you come to see me.
Is someone here? I ask.
The moon. The full moon is inside your house.
...
Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.
— Rumi, Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks, p. 13

March 8, 2009
Sunday
Portland, Maine

Both Jeff & I are emerging as writers. I’m totally OK being an emerging writer at 40, nearly 41. At 25, I thought it was lame to get labeled 'emerging writer'. Now, I'm completely fine with it. Fine to be 'emerging' for the next fifty years or so.

Writing poetry requires solitude — a rare commodity these days — but something I actually have right now, for the first time in a long time.
*
Ego: Suit? Or straight jacket?

If truth is truth, then sit in it.

Jesus said one word, and a dead man sat up,
but creation usually unfolds,
like calm breakers.

— Rumi, Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks, p. 258





March 2009

Wednesday the boys are scheduled to visit a local private school from 8:30 to 12:30. I think sending them there would be a huge mistake.

There is a part of me that really wants to passively sabotage this…as in, not prepare the kids for their visit, not get them to bed on time, not wake them up on time, feed them the wrong kind of breakfast, etc. Then I realized — don’t bend over backward trying to make it perfect, don’t bribe, and don’t passively sabotage.

I could ruin this entirely by bribing or getting punitive about it. Tell them what’s going on, set them up for success and see what comes.

The inclination tonight is instead of fearful silence, to sit down in what I feel is right, like sitting deep in the saddle. Nonviolent protest. Allowing this weight to speak the viewpoint, and that is to be more deeply involved in the other school we're already involved in and to allow the kids to remain there a couple more years.

We can do more structured academic work to help the writing along, to accelerate the math. But to seize them out of this world we've been cultivating and put them in that totally different world: a mistake. At least at present.

Here are a few of the things I want to protect: C’s happiness (hard-won!), B’s endless reverie about airplanes, B’s obsession with drawing — these things speak deeply and resonantly: Do not touch.

We need community. We need to deepen community, to broaden our opportunities as a family to interact with other families.

I need to sit down deeper in what I can feel -- not just know, but feel — to be the truth.

I will prepare my children but not force them. I will let the right answers come, allow my own desires to surface and allow them to filter away and let the answers that are most appropriate for all concerned to come to light.

When I got the image of sitting deeper into the truth, as if on horseback, and I yielded to it, the fear left.

If truth is truth, then sit in it.

No e-mail? I'll just yell out the front door.

Spring, and everything outside is growing,
even the tall cypress tree.
We must not leave this place.
Around the lip of the cup we share, these words,
My life is not mine.

— Rumi, Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks, p. 41


March 9, 2009

Well, being off the internet is making communications with our Monday homeschooling coop a living hell.

Fortunately, no one has voted me off the island yet, but it is causing difficulties in staying in touch with everyone. While we are together we are coordinating activities, setting up snack, cleaning up snack, assisting with conflict, pasting up the newspaper, etc.

It is difficult to finish a conversation. So we would finish conversations by email. But then I went and got off the internet. This is making communications difficult.

OK, well I guess M. has never been a big e-mailer. We would always have to call her last year. In particular, A. seems stressed — whether this is caused in part or in full by more challenging coop communications, I don’t know. I like to think everything’s about me, anyway.

I’m officially a flaky homeschooler.

The good news: we finally laid out the first issue of The Blue Eagle newspaper together today at coop. C. was super-grumpy and needed to play alone, but the rest of the older kids and I did that.

Technology fails again

How can anyone say what happens, even if each of us
dips a pen a hundred million times into ink?

— Rumi, Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks, p. 39



Technology fails again.

I have one client with whom my PDA has melted down repeatedly. Unfortunately she is also someone with whom I’ve had to reschedule repeatedly in the last year, and she is also a gifted practitioner with whom I’ve done a few sessions and to whom I was getting closer.

In December the PDA said I had appointments with her on Sunday afternoons from now until kingdom come. Today, on Entourage, it’s saying I have a polarity appointment with her every Sunday and a massage appointment every Wednesday until hell freezes over.

And day before yesterday, she showed up for a 7:15 pm appointment at the same time as someone else. After thinking it over, I realized that in wiping out the Wednesday “till kingdom come” appointments a few weeks ago, I also wiped out a legitimate appointment. I’m about ready to throw my PDA phone into Casco Bay.

I left her a message apologizing profusely and inviting her along for the PDA farewell ceremony.

The bug is in the Palm software on my phone — a buggy scheduling glitch that reflects a lack of understanding of how people like me might use this kind of software — and it completely sucks that overall it may end up costing me a friend.

Psycho-spiritual distortion

Light again, and the one who brings light!
Change the way you live!

— Rumi, Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks p. 38



psycho-spiritual distortion

spiritual distortion >>> psychological distortion >>> physical distortion

example:
spiritual distortion: I’m in charge of everything
leads to
psychological distortion: therefore I have to take care of and control everything
leads to
physical distortion: sloped, tight shoulders “weight of the world on my shoulders”, possibly leading to digestive problems (lower ribs continually leaning into upper digestive tract)

OR

spiritual distortion: I’m in charge of everything
leads to
psychological distortion: therefore I have to take care of and control everything
leads to
physical distortion: chest out, fists tight, low-back problems

We all suffer from some form of psycho-spiritual distortion; how does the internet feed this, capitalize on this?