First, the diary may not have been a diary; we’ll get to that later.
Second; I started this post with a bunch of videos; like the War on Poverty speech of President Johnson or a Tupac music video about mourning with Nate Dogg or other moments connected through the progression of a sentence. But then I started reading through my Poetry Magazine collection starting with March 2021. The first poem by Naomi Shihab Nye has a stanza in the first segment:
Look through a word
swing that sentence
wide open
Then the second segment has a set of lines:
What else did we give each other
from such distances?
Breath of syllables,
sing to me from your balcony
please! Befriend me
in the deep space.
When you paused for a poem
it could reshape the day
you had just been living.
That, I realized was the goal of this post; words are different than video in one realm, you can’t see a surface until you read and link letters to words and then link the words to a structure, but if you read fast you’ll miss the gorillas. Sure, a judgement surfaces after a passage is read. But, you’re reading. Remember R—E—A—D S—L—O—W—L—Y like a slow exhale—
Here’s a poem I wrote some time ago—did you catch the gorillas—in a different pace:
A Societal—
few have floated up through as—
wrestle a few demons and tears of our ghosts
memories are pneumonic like a pandemic
while wind wrestles a sheepish cloud that colludes with torn desire.
scattered into a ricing moon—self fear—a torn diary
an opaque darkness sweeps devious doubts
Moon disappears without a slightest sneer, landscape fades
dissipate darkness as heart gives fear melody
simplistic pains merge a veneer of perception
but I only speak of I
were you seen by you in the passage
were you just a passenger of passage
through a flow of experience
yours not mine
where do we meet
within this dance?
-JP
breathe in twice short; exhale one long, the Morse code goes to slow an anxious heart.
Don’t worry about the diary, we’ll get to that:
To Miss Vic
I stand at the portal and knock,
And tearfully, prayerfully wait.
O! who will unfasten the lock,
And open the beautiful gate?
Forever and ever and ever,
Must I linger and suffer alone?
Are there none that are able to sever,
The fetters that keep me from home?
My spirit is lonely and weary,
I long for the beautiful streets.
The world is so chilly and dreary,
And bleeding and torn are my feet.
-Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation (John Gunter Lipe 1844-1864 killed in battle fighting for the Confederate Army) from page 366 When The Light Of The World Was Subdued
I once transported a gentleman from out on Highway 26 in Oregon who walked to his Father’s funeral in Warm Springs, OR from Portland and was attempting his walk back to Portland; his feet were torn and bleeding. He had covered 60+ miles of the return trip before someone called our ambulance for him.
The state of the world
an old couple got stuck
between the hallway, a doorway and
my Orthopedic Office
waited for my appointment
took a moment, but I got up
no one else rose
to help this pair of
people struggling
presumably the wife pushing her— husband in a wheelchair
it wasn’t easy for me to help
wish someone else stood
arrived to the challenge
help me, my hip is unhappy
sorted it out alone
but the help changed
mending frustration to gratitude
for this old lady’s heart
there I suppose; if none rise
for an old lady
is there hope
for the gangster and the addict
-JP 2023
Helping others feel seen, loved and knowing others are grateful they are here even as they work through their anger and frustration.
The only film in this post remains below sandwiched between two podcasts; feel the fractured duality:
The Bible; has one major thematic element with the representation of humanity; the idea we are born with sin is inaccurate. We are born into a traumatized world where the knowledge and skills of how to properly rebuild the self and the world as a vibrant community of healed selves is mostly vacant. We are not born with sin, we are born into trauma where the sin is the failure to adequately address the trauma that leads to the survival mechanisms of addiction and violence and disconnection from the self and the world through the simplest forms of neglect.
And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
Genesis 1:24-25 ESV
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
Genesis 1:26 ESV
That all living things according to the above passage are made from the Earth, then it says let “us” make us in our image, in the beginning following the previous passage than we are made in the image of the Earth with God; but now, the us as a whole in a disconnected traumatized environment is making a traumatized us. The challenge is to see through or around the traumatized “us” to see all of us and the self, the whole self. When some that claim Christianity define a sense of otherness through the traumatized lens to define this or that as an either or, you become Pilot attempting to wash your hands of the killing of Jesus, us. There is no them.
If you are a traumatized self reaching out with externalization of the pain you create an “us” that is traumatized without the knowledge to grow beyond the trauma. The war, must be internal. Jesus died and never killed anyone.
But then again that is I speaking through my eye; where do you reside:
meet me at my surface
-$uicideboy$
We can’t meet anyone at their surface when we don’t know how to meet ourselves at our surface.
We are all of Gichi-manidoo (Great Spirit-Ojibwe) and the Earth.
Ojibwe oral history tells that their migration from the Atlantic coast to Minnesota was prophesied in 900 C.E. when seven prophets emerged from the ocean. One said that the Ojibwe must move west or perish, and that they would know they had reached their destination when they found food that grew on water, referring to manoomin, or wild rice, their traditional staple and sacred food. The other prophets foresaw conflict with European settlers and times of great loss, the loss of their lands, children, language, spirituality, and culture. The final prophet said that after all this suffering would come a period of revival and healing, which characterizes the present. The story reminds Ojibwe of their purpose, history, struggles, and triumphs, and of the importance of environmental stewardship and their spirituality.
- source
The Ojibwe foresaw a traumatized Christian invasion, that is only feasible with one Great Spirit. Too many meet violence with violence, too many get lost hardening their shell with addiction; addiction to any number of fractured forms of existence. This is how a diary gets eaten without butter, without sweetness of a candy cane.
How did that occur, eating a diary? Was reading to the kids:
I was thoroughly confused as I read the above; I read that they put butter on a diary!! Impossible, how does one eat a diary? Ah, but then as I went through this writing; you prevent the connection and the diary is scrapped and washed away as was performed by early Christian Monks since the writing parchment was worth more than the ideas written.
Curious indeed, a diary can be eaten.
I will eat my own page on January 19 as my eyes, ears and mind go dark for my hip replacement. The surgeon will turn me off—