No one disputes that our fallen are heroes. But war itself is not heroic. This memorial day I have chosen to write and post this poem.

A Rumor of Uranium

Out on the lush delta of the Mekong River,
what grows the Mangroves
and feeds the cattails, the rice?

Merely
a people’s bones,
with their narratives of fire,

how the Black Hawk squadron came in,
in heavy-bellied flamingos spewing
hot shells,

a clattering of rotors from far away,
a storm of dark birds over the sun,
then a hurricane of flames, bonfire, ignition
of the villages.

ii

Child as cinder.
Blackened bodies in the mud.

Kids, ours, helmets off,  legs off,
biting down on sticks,
on a good day o.d.’d on morphine,
left to die with the fallen.

The girl still in her mother’s arms,
all that is left of her mother, these arms
with their small and bloated cache
washed up on the delta shoreline.

Long sayonara of war, long night
of war,
specks running over the earth
loading, reloading,

firing at nothing,
at everything.

iii

Take this infamy
to the thousandth power
and multiply it again—

that they told us Saddam
had uranium, yellow wampum
traded from Africa;

that is what the Intel said but did not
mean.
Intel drunk on a lie,
Intel in camo,
Iraqui feet to the fire for oil.

This is why we occupied Iraq,
bivouacked in Afghanistan:
to cut off the snake’s head
unable to find the snake,

pissed on Normandy, shamed
the Harbor’s sleepless ghosts.

iv

Wilson writes in the NYT,
no uranium cake from Africa
has fallen into Saddam’s hands.

No listeners,
only the faint sound
of the truth succumbing
to euthanasia.

The Bush war room
and the green light.
The darkening faces
of the yellow
placing the order for war.

Iraq torn to shreds.
250,000 Iraqis
killed.
over 5,000 American troops
killed.
Thousands maimed.

Eighteen vet suicides per diem—
gun-barrels down the gullet
at reveille.

v

What is my country,
but its own self-anointed
angel of death,
to roll into Baghdad
with shock and awe,

to plunder Afghanistan
to desecrate the dead.

What is my country
but ruthless, so immoral
as to take out civilians
with eyeless demonic planes.

vi

In the beginning
was the gun, genesis
of war’s implacable night,

rumor of uranium,
napalm lust,
warfare compulsion:

we, aggressor homus erectus,
horns forever locked,
boy-men amped up on testosterone,
hooked on lies,

setting the earth on fire,
burning down the barn
with the horse still inside,
our humanity a callous fiction.
.
.
.
.

copyright Jenne’ R. Andrews Memorial Day 2012

I felt for her. I’ve been there, and all too recently; reading her post triggered mine as follows.

At one point in time we had twelve goats, four horses and a kennel of Golden Retrievers. It wasn’t all bad, it’s just that it nearly killed me. Needless to say I got no writing done, and tubed my career. And the price in heartbreak remains off the scale.

So, here’s my question– what does it take to call it a day regarding owning, breeding/raising animals? Many Americans do it and have done it, and will identify with this short version of my story.

At the peak of my immersion in loving animals as a way of life, I had a parvo outbreak in three litters of puppies– after they had been vaccinated. I was up every night for days plugging them up and keeping them hydrated. For the record, I pulled each affected puppy through, but at immense cost to me. Even then I kept going and then lost one more stud dog (a gorgeous male I had been showing succumbed to sepsis several years earlier) to an intestinal blockage even missed by the vet.

Next up: a beautiful Arab mare “colicked” on her due date; her prepubic tendon ruptured so that induction of labor was appropriate; ultimately, however, the foal could not be extricated without putting down the mare and  we lost both of them with a $3,000  emergency vet bill to pay.

Some time later, I couldn’t take being horseless and got myself an older beautiful mare. On my first ride and when I was dismounting, the saddle slipped and I blew my tibial plateau and was in a nursing home for six months. I can only ambulate with a walker to go anywhere, and the rest of the time have to either use a wheel chair or a cane. Losing your mobility is an enormous price to pay for not listening to your gut when it tells you that you’re too worn down to ride a horse and in fact should give up horses altogether.

Two years ago that same beautiful  mare went down with either cancer or colic; I decided to spare her any triage and had her euthanized, and finally– finally– I came to the conclusion that it was over for me.

Heartbreak, trauma — these things were the results of decisions I made that had terrible consequences not only for me, but the animals in question. When people try to do too much, bad things happen. When history repeats itself and people refuse to change, disaster will return and return some more.

I adored my pregnant mare.  She was a rescue, i.e. the person who sold her to me and discovered her at the livestock auction could tell she was a purebred Arabian.  Knowing nothing about her background, this young and overly ambitious Arabian lover put her in foal and she was due a few weeks after I got her.  When I lost her in the very traumatic series of events in which I did my level best to save her, including that she was shoved, punched and knocked down by the aforementioned vet, who lost his cool because she couldn’t push due to the rupture of the abdominal tendon,   I didn’t think I would survive the pain.

I now live alone in a manageable apartment with one dog, but my companion, whom I love and to whom I have entrusted the animals I couldn’t take care of post-accident, has yet to surrender to his inability to deal with four litters of cats and that the kittens fall ill and die, or  that five cat boxes are impossible to keep up with. His house, that used to be our house, that I loved and made beautiful for us, reeks of cat urine; he has young cats in the house that hide from him and that he can’t catch.

In fact, cats have lived and died under the house for years and although there are several ways to pay cheap labor around here to  clean it all out and reinforce the skirting so nothing can get back int, he is seemingly unable or unwilling to take that step. I’ve discussed and discussed this with him, pointing out that he has an insulated shed where they could be housed, with a cat door: ideal.  Nature takes its course in the country and attrition and stabilization of the “barn cat” population, just as with the foxes, raccoons, and skunks on the place, would take over.

At his request, I posted on Craig’s List for barn  homes for these cats and their kittens,  and then he blew the plan off and didn’t return calls or set up appointments for people to come to meet the cats and scoop them up and take them away so that they can have a life in a less cat-intensive environment.

As a type A and animal-loving person who puts suffering animals down rather than prolong their suffering for my own ends, I do not understand this kind of inaction; I only know that it isn’t working to tolerate it and protect him from the truth at my own expense and that of the creatures involved. I would never discuss the situation on my blog unless I were at the end of my rope and hoping that seeing the truth in black and white may result in a solution.

Back to the farm I mentioned earlier. I’ve read post after post on that blog indicating that the owner is buried in caretaking to her own detriment and exhaustion. We all love our animals. It just isn’t fair to them or to ourselves to have a ton of them.

There are a number of people in my acquaintance who, like me, seem to need to teach themselves hard lessons. There is an Arabian ranch in Colorado, Wadi al Nasmat, where there is annual over-breeding and high disease and mortality. But they make themselves look great online.

Their perpetual state of crisis supports an unethical repro vet named Richard Wheeler, who is the person who caused my mare’s tendon to rupture by knocking her around and tormenting her right in front of me. As long as he’s making so much money taking care of her horses, the place won’t be shut down.

And I know of a field of paint horses down the way from me owned by an old man who lets the stallion run with them, who sells off the foals every year for dog food.  There is a Golden Retriever breeder in Weld County,  Flyway Goldens, I believe, rife with over-crowding and over-breeding for profit.

There are River Kennels in Loveland,  Fly’n Hi in Windsor and Crystal Glen in Fort Collins, putting out many litters a year ever justified by the fact that the owners campaign their dogs. In these cases, it’s really about being a big deal; the dogs are an extension of the breeder’s ego and people look the other way. Fancy dogs do end up in humane societies, more often than one might think.

It’s scarcely bearable to think about Willy’s Kennels in Elizabeth, Colorado– a set up of around a hundred dogs all used for breeding and housed in a converted dairy barn– that place needs to be shut down, together with High Ridge Ranches and Growers (and puppy millers) in Elizabeth. The former breeder in particular routinely loses a third of every litter to parvo, strep, and coccydia, a protozoic  infection.

At the end of the day we can’t on the one hand say we love animals and are their stewards, and on the other, put them at risk, house loving dogs in fancy kennels to make ourselves feel better when dogs are meant to be part of the family and languish in their runs for years,  turn out fancy foals every year only to have them stock up and become depressed on small dry lots, or have so many goats they can’t be kept track of, so that kids are lost to predation and adults lost to preventable disease.

I was most distressed, in reading the blog in question, over the description of a doe left alone to labor for hours and then acquire mastitis. How does a goat develop mastitis after kidding. anyway?  Quite easily, and everyone who  has ever actually raised farm animals and goats in particular knows that time is of the essence.  An observant, attentive owner gives a prophylaxis of antibiotics after kidding and often, a clean-out shot of oxytocin.  And palpates and washes down the udder. Presto– no mastitis. Sure things happen.  But when “things happening” keep happening, and to multiple animals, isn’t the universe trying to tell us something?

When somebody is in the trenches night and day for hours at a time dealing with sick animals, it’s time to look in the mirror.  There is in fact a very fine line between “breeding” and “hoarding.”  It is beyond easy to cross that line.

It isn’t true that Obama hates free enterprise.  It’s not true that his foreign policy doctrine is one of appeasement.  It’s not true that he’s not “one of us.”  Whatever that means.  He is not a socialist and a closet Muslim just because his middle name is Hussein. It’s not true that he hasn’t reached out to Republicans in Congress and knocked himself out to get something done. Many times.

The Barack Obama invented by the conservatives is a demonized projection of the real person.

And what an imagination the Conservatives have.  It’s hard to believe that anyone clothed and able to speak still raises the issue of the birth certificate.

It is time and past time for two things to happen: first,  Obama needs to get down and dirty and mean and stop being so nice.  His people need to stand up to the lies.  And, reporters conveying news to the public need to recommit to the truth and when they know that a candidate or his surrogate is lying, call him on it.  Tell the truth about everything– that things are looking up, that Obama has ended one war and is drawing down another, taken out thirty or so terrorists, insured that health care is available to millions of American.  Tell the truth:  the bullshit the conservatives keep cooking up to put Obama out of business is all lies.

The biggest lie spread around by the right is that government spending is out of control and that Obama is the culprit. Many people believe that one because they’ve heard it from what they perceive to be reliable sources.

Here is an interesting article making its way around on Facebook and that Chris Matthews also referenced on Hardball last night– evidently, spending has slowed down under Obama.

Marketwatch is a reputable source and you can cross-check that report by using the link to the CBO.

Regarding putting the other falsehoods to rest, I cannot wait for the debates between Obama and Romney.  The fur will fly.  Obama will finally have a chance to have a face off with his hardly-a-nemesis, this Mormon shoe salesman who denies that he is a corporate raider.

But in case telling the truth is ineffective, perhaps we should fight fire with fire and generate some creative lies of our own:

Mitt Romney had an affair with an eighteen year old former cheerleader who worked in the Massachusett’s governor’s office.  Find someone young and hot to say that on a video and get it to go viral.

Mitt Romney is a polygamist– Ann is only one among a flock of wives. Rig a news article and link it around.

Mitt Romney hires illegals to work in his mansion.  Yes, I think he did!  What happened to that little gem?

Mitt Romney is only running for president to hand out cabinet jobs to his investor pals. Worth repeating like the beat of the drum.

Mitt Romney is a corporate raider who made millions off Bain Capital while costing those employed in Bain’s enterprises their jobs.

Oh wait.  That last one happens to be true.  Let’s go with that one first.  But the sand is trickling through the glass; send your lies about Mitt Romney to me and I’ll promote them.

Someone has lasered my eyes
So that today I see the eons-long
and willful daily suicide of the sun
its gilded rapier claws
scarring the edge of the world,

the resolute march of the telephone poles
into infinity
and the ribbon of the road
promising destination;

and more, the mirage of home
where an adobe was, a ruin
in the far shadows of the desert.

Take a closer look.
Someone who was painting
a river, dusty golden trees,
turns away from her easel,
repudiates her tubes of pigment,
rends her charcoal figure drawings,

goes now into the night of the kitchen
to hold the chalice of Cointreau
to her mouth.

Molten honey travels over
the circuitry of her brain,
the kitchen knives blurring;

the child reading a story
over and over
of a child who is happy,
may now be rocked to sleep.

ii

Even so did the night mother
ascend
from the wraith in the chair
in her shroud of grief,

to break the moon of the egg into
a dark clay bowl
summoning the girl:

Beat this for 100 strokes
stop sucking your thumb.

And all of this, the house
crumbling around us,
the cracks in the tear-shaped
Mexican glass in the dusk window,

the cat running into the traffic
I couldn’t stop,
nor her then dragging herself
toward me on two legs,

the little brother sobbing
and running, left behind,
scooping him up in my arms;

the mother in her soporific nod,
incontinent in her overstuffed chair
in stale rag doll light,

the father hooked up to an air supply
the long umbilicus,
sputum like tar in the sink.

iii

To see it all now
again and forever,
my comings home across
Wyoming

the hero-rescuer in her tiny red
Volkswagen, on I-80
and the great invisible
aguilar waiting for me,
that which obliterates, eviscerates,
carries away.

The risible sun with its silent cry
dying even as it burns on.

What it is to love those
perpetually leaving the world,
to be someone bearing witness
to all of this flaying in quicksand,
to see them go under,

to be unable to leave them
or stop fitting my own being
to their white and blinding bones.

c
copyright Jenne’ R. Andrews 2012

But as good as defense attorney Mark O’Mara was in catching one of the investigators with his pants down at the bond hearing a few weeks ago,  it’s my belief that not only will the judge deny Zimmerman immunity under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, but  that there will be a jury trial on the 2nd degree murder charge resulting in a conviction.  The 51% provision in the law– that only a slim preponderance of evidence is required for immunity from prosecution under Stand Your Ground, seems shy of a slam dunk.

Various pundits have been weighing in on all of this for several days.  Everyone agrees that it is still unclear as to who started the alleged slug fest in the rain and in the dark in which Martin was shot to death and Zimmerman ended up with a broken nose and surface wounds on the back of the head..

However, as many have noted, Zimmerman’s own words to the 911 operator on the night of the incident indicate that he not only pursued Martin, but refused to stand down and wait for the police as he had been instructed to do.  There’s no refuting the 911 call nearly everyone has heard. You hear Zimmerman running on the tape, stating that Martin had disappeared around a corner.

These are facts that will not disappear simply because Mark O’Mara is a good lawyer.  There is absolutely no way that Zimmerman’s actions do not constitute the initiation of a confrontation.

Martin’s girlfriend’s statements further support the court’s denial of immunity to Zimmerman.  Here is an AP summary of her account of the phone conversation she was having with him in the minutes leading up to his death:

“The cell connection was bad, and the couple were repeatedly disconnected. But at one point, Martin told her he noticed a white man sitting in a car, watching him.

“He was telling me, like, that man watching him, he going to start walking and then the phone hung up and I called him back again,” the girl said. “And I said, ‘What you doing? And he said he walking and he said this man still following him.”

It was drizzling, and the girl said Martin told her he was putting up his hood.

“I told him go to his dad’s house,” she said.

Martin told her that he was going to run. She could hear the wind blowing in the phone’s speaker.

“He was breathing hard,” she said. “(his) voice kinda changed. I know he was scared. (his) voice was getting kinda low.”

Suddenly, she heard Martin say, “Why you following me for?”

The girl said she could hear another voice, one she described as deep and belonging to an “old man.”

“The old man say, ‘What you doing around here?’”

She asked Martin repeatedly what was going on, but he didn’t respond. She said she heard someone say, “Get off,” though she thought it was her boyfriend.”

Given this account, it isn’t hard to imagine that Zimmerman had caught up to Martin, that there was a brief stand-off and, according to other witnesses who saw Martin on top of Zimmerman, the kid had gotten the upper hand and was letting him have it, in full fight or flight mode.

It is also telling that the police summary included in the evidence released this week states that if Zimmerman hadn’t gotten out of his vehicle and followed Martin,  the incident would never have taken place. That lends gravitas to the indictment. And it belies Zimmerman’s statement that he was returning to his car when he was attacked by Martin.

It’s also of interest to me that according to Zimmerman he was pinned to the grass and sidewalk being punched by Martin, with the two in full bore physical contact, and yet managed somehow to get his gun out of its holster and fire it.  How would  you do that?

And the screams for help, sounding increasingly guttural and desperate, appear to me to be more consistent with Zimmerman having broken free and put Martin at gunpoint and then firing the weapon.  According to the medical examiner, the fatal wound was indicative of there being between 6 and 18 inches between Zimmerman and Martin when the gun was fired.

Finally, some of us have had the thought that it is quite strange Zimmerman didn’t go to the hospital for his alleged injuries that night.  To me it is hardly out of the question that Zimmerman, who aspires to be a cop, was studying criminal justice, and taking himself seriously enough to be carrying a handgun, might have broken his own nose and somehow gashed his own head to make it look like his killing of Martin was justified.

All over America armchair sleuths like me are pondering and blogging this case.  It’s the middle of the night , with a long, long way to go on this one.

My opinion that Jose Baez is a great lawyer was strengthened tonight in watching his hour-long appearance on Dr. Drew on HLN.

From the beginning of the Casey Anthony case, Drew Pinsky has been among the quickest to diagnose and convict Anthony although she has never been his patient.  Throughout the trial he referred to her as a sociopath and compulsive liar, standing in judgement of her to an extent that for me undermines any credibility any of us assign to the profession of psychiatry.

Baez was on tonight to talk about his new book , Presumed Guilty.  It hasn’t been released yet but he states that he obtained a release from attorney-client privilege from Casey Anthony to give his account of her defense and acquittal.

Despite the belittling stance of those calling in to the show, calling everything from Baez’s opening statements at trial “unethical” to questioning whether she was appropriately charged, Baez was as cool as a cucumber, again and again reiterating that a defense attorney’s job is “only” to  raise reasonable doubt and not to prove the innocence of his client per se.  He smoothly deflected and neutralized Dr. Drew and it’s about time.

Pinsky is cut of the addiction-treatment cloth, meaning that he has bought, hook line and sinker, the paradigm of the addict as diseased, powerless to help himself or herself and needing to be managed by “treatment” and “spiritual recovery.”  He absolutely has a closed mind to the possibility that anything is other than he sees it in his hermetic, tunnel-visioned world. In opining as one of HLN’s media whores,  he has inflicted harsh judgements upon Casey Anthony that would make a weaker woman cave in.

But back to Baez.  The show took me back five years to my own arrest in 2007 for something I did not do and for which I was  charged with kidnapping and  assault  under Colorado’s ramped up Domestic Violence laws.

The term Domestic Violence has taken hold in municipal and county systems across the country.  In Colorado it is an umbrella moniker applied to any suspect incident between two intimate or formerly intimate partners and it stays on your record for all time whether or not you take a plea to a lesser charge. You can be charged with domestic violence  for raising your voice or knocking over a chair.

One evening in 07 my companion and I had an argument about a kitten trapped under the house.  He didn’t want to crawl under the house to get it and I needed for him to.  Our argument escalated, we both became angry; he went for his keys and cell phone and I tried to stop him from leaving our home by blocking the door.  He shoved me out of his way and as he left, I tossed an empty plastic water jug at him, which bounced off his back in the dark. It wasn’t a heavy jug, and I wasn’t proud of myself for throwing it.

Half an hour later two deputies paid me a visit.  They badgered and interrogated me and one of them saw our two picnic coolers on the deck– these hadn’t been moved in years and were full of rain water, weighing about thirty pounds each.  One deputy picked one up and said, “This is it. There’s water under it and it isn’t from me.” My partner, in anger, had contended I had thrown a picnic cooler at him, later realizing that this would have been impossible.

They wouldn’t listen to me and said they had probable cause for an arrest.I was handcuffed, taken to jail, booked and arraigned; I bonded out the next day on personal signature.  I had been overcharged to force my hand in agreeing to a plea bargain and it worked.

My public defender did a good job and I was fine with fulfilling my disposition.  I had been granted representation and due process and like everyone ever in this situation, just wanted to get it over with.

Not so fast.  One of the many negatives about the committee appointed by the Colorado legislature to oversee DV treatment  is that in recent years, they’ve been given the discretion, via the trifecta of the probation officer, the DA, and the treatment counselor,  to  modify the disposition after the fact.

In other words, despite the fact that my right to due process is  iron-clad and inviolable, and that I took a deal in which I exchanged a guilty plea for a misdemeanor conviction and a 36 session course of treatment, what I agreed to could be–and was– arbitrarily changed.

This trend, in which the DA and Probation Department play therapist and essentially re-adjudicate your case,  has defense attorneys in Colorado riled up, and with good reason. I am only one person among those whose sentences have been tampered with after the fact with attempts to ambush us into tougher, longer treatment for the waste basket diagnosis du jour.

I was very lucky in that I was able to have the rest of my case handled by an extremely talented public defender, committed to me and very angry about what had been attempted with me, who chastized the DA and probation officer in Court for depriving me of my due process rights.  The Judge agreed.  I ended up having a short course of therapy with someone I found on Craig’s list for thirty-five dollars a session and “the System” left me alone to get it done. It’s too bad for me, and for the State of Colorado and their professed concern for “recidivism” that they didn’t let me complete my original sentence– the thirty-six session class.

A back-story too involved, complicated and still-painful to relate is what I went through as a disabled woman attempting to find someone to work with me after the DA started playing games. I was forced to self-advocate for mobility accommodations; whenever I invoked the ADA and tried to explain it the provider would get pissed off and find some way to deny me access to treatment.  It was a nightmare and I’m thrilled that it’s over with.

As I said, there’s no price tag on a good defense attorney.  In my coverage on this blog of the Casey Anthony trial I was extremely angered by the machinations of the talking heads and the outright hatred toward Anthony displayed by the public.  I  did identify with her and how everything she did was scrutinized and interpreted in the most negative possible way by the the white trash in this country with nothing better to do than sit around bad-mouthing people. I have blogged that I believe her to be innocent of the murder of her daughter.  I have never said, nor have those others who believe in her and in the defense team, that she doesn’t have issues up the wazoo, that her child could not have died as a result of her negligence, or that she wasn’t a liar, and neither has her lawyer.

According to  Jose Baez, there were many things, including hours of depositions from examining psychologists and testimony excluded from being entered into evidence that the public does not know and will not know until his book launches.  While he says that he needs, for himself, as a catharsis, to tell his story of being her attorney, I have no doubt that in the process he wants to put some of the rumors and pit-bull style attacks on Casey Anthony the person to rest. It was immensely interesting to me that he said that the Orlando deputies missed an opportunity to discern there being some things up with Anthony when she took them to Universal studios and then seemed to realize that she didn’t work there anymore.

One thing Drew Pinsky did, night after night, was to lament the fact that Casey Anthony never displayed any grief and that in the tapes hacked and published online that she made, i.e. her personal video diary, she never expressed regret for having killed her child.

This is rampant bullshit out of the mouth of a licensed psychiatrist who in saying such things, is giving his profession an even worse name than it already  has.  If Anthony is trying to live with an accident, why should she apologize? I’d say that her literal and figurative crucifixion by the American public and that she still has to live in fear for life, are punishment enough. I’d bet my hide on her having grieved, wept, and otherwise mourned her baby.

Meanwhile, anybody else out there ever  had a bad argument?  Let she who has never thrown anything–anything at all, in a moment of anger– cast the first stone.

I took myself to Walmart today and brought home some longed-for red geraniums and miniature rose bushes for my south-facing kitchen window.  I bought a basil plant and a tomato plant too.  But I am fearing and dreading something I am powerless over– my landlord may be in a pinch and not inclined to renew my lease.

I’ve lived in my apartment coming up on three years, and I love it.  I stubbornly put down roots wherever I am, attach deeply to whomever I’m close to and neither uprooting nor detaching come easily for me.  I drafted a note to my landlord and I’m hoping he’ll let me stay, as this is the one apartment out of all eight– two one-level four-plexes, each with a back door and a parking space, and ordinary but well maintained ranch-style build– as he hasn’t yet renovated mine with pergo floors, fresh paint, window “treatments” and sliding glass doors.  I pay him $700 a month for rent and utilities combined and now the market is creeping upward again…

Meanwhile.  I mentioned this to Jack, my companion, who lives on out at “our” old place, the modular on six acres.  We would have to be crazy to give sharing the place in the country another go, but certain things have changed and perhaps in a pinch, it could be done.  I now have qualified for a nursing home diversion program,  meaning that I have housekeeping help once a week.  Our arguments have been over the stress of the upkeep of the place and if I knew I wouldn’t have to take it all back on, or be compelled to, it might help reduce conflict.

It would be also make more sense to consider if we really cheaply divided the house and lived as we have been with me in town and Jack on the place.  We have two and a half miles between us and I’ve managed to stop telling him what to do all the time regarding our animals.  But in truth, I desperately need a “room of my own,” a writing and daydreaming nook for me, my Golden, and my baby dolls– and my own, very own, kitchen.  Have I talked myself back from the edge of the cliff of repeating the same thing expecting new results??.

Segue to Mother’s Day, the recent Time magazine photo of buffed mother nursing three-year old.  I have longed to be a mother, so much so that in my series of common law marriages/mirages I’ve nurtured about six girls and a few boys.  I’ve sublimated in raising 25 litters of Golden Retrievers in as many years, in delivering and hand-feeding goats, lambs, Arabian foals.

Not long ago I was in a routine of driving out to the place every night to touch base with Jack and be with our cats and the two Jack Russells that are now his good friends i.e. that he has agreed to take on.  Then, I put my rocking chair in my bedroom and suddenly I came home to myself– I began to feel that I really do live here.  I have several beautiful dolls I’ve made from kits, the lifelike kind that give some people the creeps.  But it is immensely comforting to sit and rock one; it relieves my stress and I have the chance to feel the weight of something against my chest.

If I had known, when I terminated a pregnancy in the 70′s, that I would never be able to carry to term, I might have made a different choice.  But that’s a second guess.  For years I dreamed, literally, vivid dreams of giving birth, the joy of holding my baby in my arms.  I didn’t think the hunger would ever go away.

I do think it’s quite extreme to nurse a toddler.  I say this because I was in a body cast during that period and utterly dependent upon my mother and other caregivers.  When I was freed of the cast, I was far behind other kids in my ability to trust my body.  I was afraid to do handstands in ballet, afraid to canter a horse, afraid to ride a bike, although I learned.  I didn’t have the opportunity, at a critical phase, to become a person independent of my mother.

Therefore, keeping a child bound to you at the age when he or she wants to explore and find out he’s his own person is not, in my view, a very good idea.  Do we want to raise confident or dependent children?    I watched Don Lemon interview the mother whose photos was on the Time cover and he pointedly and astutely asked, “Is this business of nursing a three year old something  you like, or is it good for your kid?”  She bristled at that question.

But I ask the same one.  We have to teach our children to deal with themselves– especially, how to self-soothe, how to cope with spates of loneliness or feeling left out.  It seems to me these are fundamental to the well-being of a given child.

Believe me, finding out that I’m strong and o.k. on my own at 63 is not a blessing– it’s a curse.  The fear of incapacitation and losing my freedom and becoming dependent again is based in lots of living at this point.    Please, young mothers, don’t go overboard.  Set some sane limits i.e., weaning by the age of two, and help your kids internalize that they don’t have to grow into insecure, needy people, and model your own independence of self and being to them, stat.

I’ve  been thinking again this morning about the evolution of personal belief,  and as this topic is in the air around Obama’s statement that he believes same-sex couples should have all of the rights of heterosexuals.

Many of us have spent years within a faith tradition, reinforcing our beliefs with ritual and repetition.  We have reiterated to each other how wonderful and powerful God is, how miraculous one and another event, that everything that happens is meant to happen and so on. So programmed, we condemn those different from ourselves and those who believe differently or not at all.

Enter science, and the argument for evolution.  Only recently, within a matter of months, has it begun to sink in for me that we susceptible humans for whom the universe is so mysterious have the ability to brainwash ourselves, to indoctrinate ourselves, even to imagine what we need for the sake of our own survival.

What problematic territory!  For God becomes a cosmic umbrella for the rainy day of existence and we hide under that umbrella afraid to step out from under it, afraid of what we might see, endure, or learn. We are also afraid, in buying into the imaginative hierarchy that has God as the crown jewel and humanity as having debased God’s will,   to trust the self and intellect.

So it is within the patriarchal priesthood and those who stand in for Jesus in “feeding” the people consecrated delusion. Inside theological doctrine, the bubble of ritual, with the euphoria that comes with communal praise and singing, it is indeed possible to attain a state in which it feels as though one is experiencing a living God.

I was deeply entrenched in High Church Anglicanism when in the course of reflecting on all of the aforementioned things, my psyche turned a corner.

There are many comforting and beautiful things about faith, but for many of us, operating within a faith tradition comes with a huge price-tag; to invest in dogma and become its mouthpiece  requires the selling out of the soul, the forfeiture and diminishment of intellect, true creativity and celebration of being–and giving oneself permission to be an individual, all that one is.

Therein lies the problem.  Conservatives participating in Christianity appear to me now to be operating within and from illusion and delusion insofar as they reject individuality and freedom of thought and to find it heretical for anyone to suggest that it is evolution that explains our existence but not God’s.

Am I still suggestible?  Absolutely.  I surround myself with the great works such as the Bach Mass in B Minor, which puts me on a transcendent high. And, regarding the texts, oh,  those patriarchs and how mellifluous their words.  How beautiful the Book of Luke, the nativity story.  How salient  the commentary attributed to Jesus.  How utterly seductive, compelling, persuading one to drop to one knee in humility,  to imagine and then to believe the ancient testimony: that God died for human kind and rose again from the dead.

But how safe is it really to give our intellects over to the paradigms of religion, and buy the notion shopped by theists that God is supreme?  Unfortunately,  the world over and since the beginning, so much incarnate evil  has arisen from dogma and a static faith.  We get high on religion and wave our arms in the air believing we who profess are saved, but perhaps we need a reality check!   For, from within that fervor we believe we take God’s part in condemning abortion and same-sex partnership/marriage.  We are in the haz-mat suit, we think, God has our backs…and there is then no question that we are right and have a corner on the truth.

We are, in fact,  the most fully programmed when we begin thinking we need to convert others to our view point and when we believe we know what God wants from us and from everyone else.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the Catholic Church’s stance on life beginning at conception and therefore being sacred.  I saw a quote that was somewhat shocking but rang true to me; “It’s about time we got over this love affair with the fetus and concentrated on children.”

Yes and no. Obama has claimed the right to  have his position on gay marriage evolve and it certainly appears that our beliefs do evolve and change. Replacing the faith of my upbringing, seeming now to hold and refine ideas that subvert my own religious indoctrination, is the belief that we have everything we need within us to deal with life and that if we are to believe in scientific explanations for things, there is in fact nothing “out there” to save us from ourselves or our mortality, or our vulnerability to be struck down like a blade of grass at any moment.

This position, fitting into the mindset of secular humanism,  demands a different commitment and a very challenging one completely opposite to the concept of spritual “surrender”; it requires finding meaning in the sheer fact of being alive as all living things are alive, in the cycle of coming into being, living out a life span, and dying back, to draw ourselves up to our full stature and to make of one’s life a celebration of being.

I love the photos posted by Amo L’Natura on Facebook– Nature herself is an immense, powerful and beautiful mystery, infinitely diverse, everything evolving even as it appears and disappears.

What further purpose to we need for our lives than to love one another and ourselves, living out our allotment of minutes as the feats of nature and masterpieces of evolution that we are,  to resolve the afflictions of the universe, to be that which is in our genes– a pianist, a carpenter, a poet.  I disagree vehemently with the brand of atheism that says that life is inherently meaningless.  But I believe that we live the great drama of existence, here, on terra firma, looking up at the heavens, looking out at the sea.

I fear losing my  home more than any further health issues.  I can live with my bad knees, one leg shorter than the other, a hip loose in its socket, the necessary ridding my mouth of teeth that aren’t going to go the distance, the ringing in my ears now chronic when tired and the tiredness itself;  I can live with the myopia of relying on progressively more intense reading glasses.  I can endure my insomnia, my isolation, my ups and downs and that I now have white hair at the temples.

But home!  Losing my home– no.  And the only reason I’m worried is that the lease is due for renewal and the landlord last year raised the rent to the top of my housing allowance from the local housing authority. If he raises it again, I’m screwed.

Every time I’ve had to move I’ve gotten through it, trying to overcome years of getting in over my head, wanting what I can’t afford, and so on.  But I make a huge emotional investment in a given place and I nest as if I’m going to be in one spot forever.

It wasn’t so bad to be nomadic in the late sixties and seventies and in 73 I was able to let go of a gorgeous little studio in St. Paul in order to accept a friend’s invitation to take a trip to Europe.  I loved the freedom of living out of my duffel bag and wandering around Europe in a VW bus. I loved taking a train alone down the Italian coast to Reggio Calabria at the toe of the boot– a very dangerous thing to do back then. And need I say I loved having an attentive, kind lover whose language I had to master in a few days to survive.

I’ve lived in this community for nearly fifty years and I know every road and every intersection.  I know where the vintage rentals are, and all the alley houses and holes in the wall I can beautify with my shabby chique things.

But I’m madly in love with my Golden Retriever Munch, and the only way I can manage her is to be able to let her outside and back in.  And I love my apartment.  I sometimes go a week without going for a drive or to the store, although my Ford Ranger sits near the door with gas and insurance and current plates.  I live here with a vengeance, now–

I have asked myself from every direction,  where home is, what home is to me.  I don’t have the question answered.  I think it’s linked to, “Where would I thrive?  What, if I could design my life at this moment, would it look like?”

It’s all over the blog and my poems that I’m crazy about southern Italy.  Not long ago I watched a segment on the Home and Garden show of a couple moving to a tiny town in the middle of Calabria and buying a small three-hundred year old villa for $40,000.00.  It needed work…but what a find.  I  interact daily with several new Calabrian friends on Facebook, and I have a window into their daily lives in similar spaces.

I pine for a small villa built into the coast, neighbors who care about me and who I love– a daily life in which I get up to the warmth of a small rustic kitchen, some opera on the stereo,  opening my laptop in a window that overlooks the sea.  I would write, and rest and go out in late afternoon to the beach and then to the cafe, to companions and laughter.  I hope I wouldn’t succumb to my love of wine after all these years getting alcohol out of my life– but if that dream came true, I don’t think I’d beat myself up if I were to cautiously and optimistically toast the evening with a little Valpolicella.

I love it that it is Saturday night jazz on the radio, a bread pudding in the oven and that I’ve just been communicating with people who live on the other side of the world. To a great extent, your home is where you are living…in the present.

But what would it take for the dream to come true?

God help me if I don’t know who I am at 63.  I just read a statement from someone who says we only have a sense of who we are through the “gazes” of other people.

If that’s true, we’re all screwed.  At any rate, I’ve spent a lifetime fighting for the right to be a self– someone whole, distinct from others, i.e. an individual in my own right.

Traditional family systems with traditional mothers in them try to cut their daughters from the cloth of convention and expectation.  Girl children are damned by the time they exit the womb, learning nearly immediately that it is most feminine and safe to suppress oneself, make oneself small to fit within the small spaces available to us in the Valhalla of patriarchal culture with its multiple Gods per square foot.

Girls who internalize criticism, spinning it into self-doubt, are ripe for the disempowerment of labeling and the immense wound of rejection. And few things can be as disempowering and destructive to self-confidence as paradigms and  institutions that involve the hierarchy of power. When we think we should see a therapist, for example, most of the time we become instant lab rats, subjected to the scrutiny of someone who claims the power and right to assign a label to us.  Where that label used to be neurosis and occasionally, some degree or another of psychosis, these days it’s typically one of the myriad personality disorders laid out in the DSMIV.  Fortunately there are still some therapists around who see themselves as midwives to the identity, whose mission is to assist a client in becoming all she can, not making her believe that she can never trust herself because, by virtue of her individuality, she is perceived to be nuts.

I follow some writers who define themselves partly in terms of one or another label and I wish they wouldn’t. I am on a one woman mission to reject labels and diagnoses and claim the measure of personal power heredity and circumstance have given me.  I have first-hand experience with what happens when you let people tell  you who and what you are:  it can kill you.

I used to wear my heart on my sleeve and confess my fears to everyone.  I put myself at the mercy of others’ insanity when I poorly chose certain friends; I tied myself up with needy men who needed a weak woman to take care of in order to feel strong. Therapists whose agenda was immoral. I saw myself as weak, I experienced myself as less than and as a result, I despised me.

All of that is changing.  In the aftermath of a lifetime of negative self-definition and experience of self, unable to trust that I have within me not only the birthright of self-determination but the power to redefine myself, I see that I bought into the very myths of self  that could have done me in.

In keeping with claiming and redefining myself, just now I weighed in on a discussion of poetry on Facebook. I said that I believed in the power and beauty of language, its transcendent qualities, that the poem could benefit from some ambiguity but that I believed poetry should be accessible.

I was jumped on and made to feel like the naif in the crowd.  I objected. And thankfully, I have re-defined myself as the writer I have always been.

I have been writing poetry, studying my craft and literary tradition for over forty years.  I have received an NEA Fellowship in Literature– a very high honor that doesn’t go to Hallmark “poets.”  I have had three collections published.  Every time I put up a poem I get a host of comments from writers whose judgement matters to me.  I am not the one who first called myself a poet– Robert Bly did.  James Moore and Patricia Hampl did. Tom Wayman, one of Canada’s major writers, did.  The faculty at Sarah Lawrence in the 80′s– then comprised of Thomas Lux and Jean Valentine and other very noteworthy, prominent writers, who moved heaven and earth to try to find money to bring me to Sarah Lawrence to take the M.F.A.  Before I ever finished a B.A. I had won the Endowment Grant, Bly had published my first collection and my work had appeared in over fifty publications.

I didn’t call myself a poet.  Other people did, and these days, after much debate with myself, so do I.  Say to the mirror, “Good morning, beautiful human being and poet.”

At the end of the day, no one has anyone to validate her and tell her she is worthy and good and worth taking care of, getting to know, nurturing, feeding, entertaining– than herself.

In my experience the relationship with the Self is everything.  I hope to Christ I don’t see who I am through others’ eyes when it comes down to it.    Validation is important but we are the ones who must develop the wisdom to eject toxic people from our lives with a shoe horn if necessary, and to sing and celebrate Self– Whitman style, candles blazing.

Questa post a Italiano:

Che Dio mi aiuti se non so chi sono a 63. Ho appena letto un comunicato da qualcuno che dice che abbiamo solo un senso di chi siamo attraverso gli “sguardi” di altre persone.

Se questo è vero, siamo tutti fregati. Ad ogni modo, ho passato una vita lotta per il diritto di essere mi stesso – qualcuno intero, distinto dagli altri, ossia una persona fisica nel mio diritto. Sistemi tradizionali della famiglia con le madri tradizionali in loro cercano di tagliare le loro figlie dal panno di convenzione e di attesa. Le bambine sono dannati dal momento in cui esce dal grembo materno, imparando quasi subito che è più femminile e sicura di sopprimere se stessi, farsi piccolo per adattarsi all’interno di piccoli spazi a nostra disposizione nel Valhalla della cultura.

Le ragazze che interiorizzano le parole critice, la filatura in dubbio su di sé, sono maturi per il depotenziamento di etichettatura e la ferita immensa di rigetto. E poche cose può essere debilitante e distruttiva di fiducia in se stessi come terapia. Quando pensiamo dovremmo vedere un terapeuta, la maggior parte del tempo siamo diventati topi da laboratorio istantanei, soggette al controllo di qualcuno che rivendica il potere e il diritto di assegnare una etichetta a noi. Se tale etichetta utilizzata per essere nevrosi e di tanto in tanto, un certo grado di psicosi o di un altro, in questi giorni è in genere uno dei disturbi di personalità miriade di cui nel DSMIV. Per fortuna ci sono ancora alcuni terapisti oggi che si vedono come levatrici per l’identità, la cui missione è di aiutare un cliente a diventare tutto ciò che non può, che lei non potrà mai fidarsi di se stessa perché in virtù della sua individualità che è percepito come noci.

Seguo alcuni scrittori che si definiscono in parte in termini di una o un’altra etichetta e mi auguro che non lo farei. Sono in missione una donna di rifiutare le etichette e le diagnosi e rivendicare la misura di eredità potere personale e le circostanze mi hanno dato. Ho un’esperienza di prima mano con quello che succede quando si lascia che le persone ti dicono chi e cosa sei: ti può uccidere.

La cosa più difficile da combattere: come sono visti da molte persone, uomini e donne, che ho usato per fidarsi così tanto che ho versato le mie budella a loro e li diede l’opportunità di vedere me come qualcuno a pietà, stare lontano da, paura, rifiutare e sussurrano circa negli angoli della parrocchia di sale e sale caffè universitari. Il pozzo senza fondo di necessità, il disordine, la persona che è malata di mente e quindi, politicamente esigente o no, da evitare di tutto.

Sono sicuro che ultima affermazione mi fa sembrare paranoica. Ma è la verità. Ho usato per indossare il mio cuore sulla mia manica e confessare le mie paure a tutti. Mi metto in balia della follia altrui quando ho scelto male alcuni amici, mi sono legata a uomini bisognosi che necessitavano di una donna debole di prendersi cura di per sentirsi forte. Ho visto me stesso come debole, mi sono sentita come meno e, di conseguenza, io mi disprezzava.

Tutto questo sta cambiando. A seguito di una vita di definizione negativa di sé e l’esperienza di sé, incapace di credere che ho dentro di me non solo il diritto di primogenitura di autodeterminazione, ma il potere di ridefinire me stesso, vedo che ho comprato negli stessi miti di auto che avrebbe potuto uccidermi.

Poteva uccidermi a credere quei sacerdoti impegnati nella cosiddetta pastorale che ha pronunciato me come carente “in modi che altri non lo sono.” Come osano. E ‘quasi ucciso me a comprare in idee che io sono un impotente, alcolizzato pietosa che sta andando a fare se stessa, senza diretto intervento divino, che, come un alcolista che non posso permettermi fiducia in se stessi, perché deriva da Satana stesso: l’Io. E ‘quasi ucciso me girare su me stesso agli psichiatri, di trattamento “Professionisti” stessi “guarite” ubriachi con un sacco di viti allentate.

Le organizzazioni che dipendono dalla perdita degli altri di sé e rispetto di sé per la loro sopravvivenza deve essere condannato. !!!!!

Proprio ora ho pesato in una discussione di poesie su Facebook. Ho detto che ho creduto nel potere e la bellezza del linguaggio, le sue qualità trascendenti, che il poema potrebbe trarre vantaggio da una certa ambiguità, ma che credevo la poesia deve essere accessibile.

Sono stato saltato su e fatti sentire come il naif tra la folla. Io mi opposi. E per fortuna, mi sono ri-definito come lo scrittore sono sempre stato.

Ho scritto poesie, studiare il mio mestiere e la tradizione letteraria per oltre quaranta anni. Ho ricevuto un NEA Fellowship in letteratura – un altissimo onore che non va a marchio “poeti”. Ho avuto tre libri di poesia pubblicate. Ogni volta che ho messo su una poesia che ho ottenere una miriade di commenti di scrittori il cui giudizio conta per me. Io non sono colui che per primo ha chiamato me un poeta – Robert Bly ha fatto. James Moore e Patricia Hampl fatto. Tom Wayman, uno degli scrittori più importanti del Canada, fatto. La facoltà al Sarah Lawrence nel 80′s – allora composta da Thomas Lux e Jean Valentine e altri molto degni di nota, scrittori importanti, mosso cielo e terra per cercare di trovare i soldi per portarmi a Sarah Lawrence a prendere il degree avanza.  Prima che io abbia mai finito un dottore in lettere avevo vinto Grant Endowment, Bly aveva pubblicato la mia prima collezione e il mio lavoro era apparso in più di 50 pubblicazioni.

Io non mi definisco un poeta. Hanno fatto gli altri, e in questi giorni, dopo un dibattito molto con me stesso, anche a me dire allo specchio, “Buongiorno, bellissimo essere umano e poeta.” Ma ora..ecco, lo credo.

Ho perso la pazienza con il cosiddetto processo editoriale in cui riviste di prendere un anno e un giorno per tornare a voi su una presentazione – che è generalmente letta da poeti in erba studenti in primo luogo – o inviarla immediatamente indietro. Trovo offensivo entrambi gli estremi. Non ho pazienza con la condiscendenza di alcuni editori e la fantasia nevrotica di alcuni editori. Inserisco il mio lavoro sul mio blog bello e vedremo cosa succede con il mio ultimo sogno per ottenere più visibilità con un libretto o due prima di cercare di ottenere un opus magnum pubblicata, vale a dire un altro piccolo libro stampa.

Alla fine della giornata, nessuno ha a chiunque di convalidare lei e dirle che è degno e buono e vale la pena prendersi cura di, conoscere, coltivare, alimentazione, divertente – di lei.

Nella mia esperienza il rapporto con il Sé è tutto. Spero di Cristo, non vedo chi sono attraverso gli occhi degli altri quando si scende ad esso. Ho finito di opzioni per definire me stessa come madre di qualcuno, moglie, amante, insegnante, membro del coro, docente, ecc, molto tempo fa, sotto il post circostanze dolorose possibili. La convalida è importante, ma noi siamo quelli che devono sviluppare la saggezza per espellere le persone tossici dalle nostre vite con un calzascarpe, se necessario, e per cantare e celebrare auto in stile Whitman, candele ardenti.