Ohhh, I want to put some small attempt at art work on my blog, but I have essential tremor, which makes me shake like parkinsons but not have the other symptoms. I can try and color a photo I already have, I guess:
No, I guess I can’t. Bummer. If I try to draw this is what happens: (See opening).
Don’t eat chocolate.
Get organized.
Pick up after myself.
Routinely wade through all my saved phone messages.
Wash dishes right after their use.
Go through “Reader” every single day.
Take off makeup before I go to bed rather than the next morning.
SO, WHAT ARE YOURS NOT TO MAKE?
And what’s
it to
ya?
dog: Nancy Romans Not Quite Old
cat selfie felis cattus British Shorthair
After a lonely Christmas, a series of repetitive dreams reminded me what I miss most: the content missing from Longfellow’s lines on ships passing in the night. My graduate school days in clinical psychology were the happiest and most alive of my life. Everyone was either real or trying to be so. “Thank you for the gift of your anger” was a common response to a heated exchange, as well as my more frequent “I know, and I’m working on it.”
How do other retired therapists cope with the everyday prattle? I seem to have turned avoidant from fellow humans who avoid their depths. The well-bred don’t cry at funerals; the “strong” avoid their own depths.
It’s been said that the layperson is leery of shrinks for fear they are psychoanalyzing them on sight. A smidgen of that is true. After years of training and observation of body language, it’s difficult not to pick up on a stranger’s stress, concerns or ambivalences. And there’s no “I know, and I’m working on it” in sight. Often there’s empathy for the struggles a stranger appears to be going through, but no way to comfortably acknowledge it.
I first noticed him at a free church lunch, due to some leaves caught in his dark knit cap. After the luncheon I saw him seated in the damp grass, smoking. I’ve been wishing he had a pad to sit on, to protect him from the cold damp. Maybe that’s just a problem of my loose boundaries. (That’s something else I’m “working on.”)
I’ve learned one must be extra specially careful to phrase it just right when attempting to reach out. I tried ineptly with a fellow blogger and received a rather intense bite. Served me right for attempting to go where angels fear to stray (glad I can be free with my cliches here).
On top of it all is my slipping into senescence, and making errors in judgment. I still cannot absorb nourishment from prattle, however.
OH, ABOUT THE DREAMS in my heading? I’ve had a slew of them in the brief time since Christmas in which I’m attracting others to a group support session. The room in my house is overflowing with people–some I know and others strangers. In my past I not only participated as a member of a greatly therapeutic group, but also formed a women’s consciousness raising group in graduate school and another with staff wives at the mental health center where I worked. In the therapy group we always began with each person describing how he/she was feeling at the beginning of group–remember, one usually feels different ways at the same moment. And in reality I did lead many groups with regularly troubled individuals plus the groups with sex offenders.
Working for years at the nearby prison has isolated me from most of the psychologists in my small town, and I do wonder how other longterm retired psychotherapists maintain.
Maybe it was just the magic of my graduate school milieu that developed my thirst for the depths.
Why do I keep puffing away? Partly so I don’t have to keep the originals. Today I am toying with the idea of starting another page–my trip abroad in 1960. I found it interesting, but possibly because it revived memories, which blog readers wouldn’t have. I still don’t understand how followers know when something is added to secondary pages, but maybe I will learn. I review the names of my pages to see if one can cover the rendition of my trip–oh yes, by a stretch of the imagination the page on JOURNALLING should be able to accommodate it. So on this Christmas Day of 2018 I’m starting a new entry. I was still married at the time–ergo the occasional “we.” IF YOU’RE HERE, GO TO JOURNALING FOR THE BEGINNING.
What’s it like? Like nothing else.
I’m liquid, and by the way I am we, not me.
Not gotten use to it yet.
It’s kinda like I’m my own blood stream
–or, I mean we are. Life is everywhere,
and alive. We were like bumps, sticking
out of the stew. Now we are
interchangeable, if that makes any sense.
Shut your eyes and feel the force field?
We are it.
This isn’t a reblog, but it’s not mine, either. Go to Poetry Foundation for a real experience. Couldn’t resist trying to share it: Jennifer Michael Hecht.
Just pointing the way…
To day is the day (December 20, 2018) that the republican President Donald Trump blew up the Washington D.C. ‘inside the beltway’ political establishment due to his pique over not being granted the funding for his southern US wall.
He has refused at the last minute to sign off on a continuing resolution (C.R.) budget agreement voted on by the US congress. He’s refusing to sign off on it unless he gets the $5 billion dollar funding for his wall. Meanwhile, he managed to fire the one reliable stalwart, Defense Secretary General James Mattis to the consternation of Wall Street, as the stock market took a nose dive. This is just for starters….
Magic Needles Knitting
Yarns.. Comforters
of Living
Needling
Mothers
Loving the
Art of Warmth..:)
That’s me. (I mean start writing without finishing it). Bad habit. Do it all the time. Just came across this in my papers: The author is a cat.
MOTHER
My adoptive parents took me in when I was only two weeks old. My dear mother was struck by a car that didn’t stop, and she left me and my sister all alone in an abandoned barn. No one knew we were there, since Mom was a free spirit and didn’t put much trust in people. Of course she was proved right, given what one did to her. My sister and I cried and cried. At two weeks old we couldn’t do much more, but finally I set out for the open door where what turned out to be birdsong lured me. You’ll have trouble believing what happened next: a big old tom cat heard me and picked me up in his mouth. I thought I was sure a goner, but he was just carrying me to his adoptive parents, who responded with a dropper full of warm milk. Though temporarily safe, I couldn’t abandon my sister, so I tried to return to the almost empty barn. My attempts and cries resulted in the humans becoming curious and, exploring from whence I came, with the tom cat’s help, they found my little sister, lonely and feeling twice abandoned, I guess. Anyway, she got her share of warm milk and we were so exhausted and traumatized that we snoozed right off, without even looking over the family that we hoped would adopt us. There was discussion whether a 3-feline house made sense. Two young humans begged for us to be adopted, and when we dozed off for several hours the matter had not been resolved. My reference to my sister as little is because, although I forget which order we were born in, she is literally littler than me. Although I have affection for her, I was afraid they would adopt her and toss me out. As it turned out, it seemed the two young humans each wanted one of us, so I was spared the difficult choice of surviving versus being a loving big brother. You may wonder why my little sister doesn’t know English. She’s only a cat and always has been, pure cat down the line, whereas I have a tad of Old Joe in my genes.
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