SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

Published May 25, 2022 by Nan Mykel

Pixabay

Nineteen elementary school children and two adults in Texas were killed Tuesday by an adolescent with a gun after shooting his grandmother.

Welcome to America? Where is love, compassion, empathy, care, conscience? My journalism professor Buddy Davis at the University of Florida used to frequently refer to the milk of human kindness. It has been souring rapidly. The Age of Aquarious didn’t blossom as hoped for. A U.S. Representative has called on the “dark MAGA” to respond. to his defeat.

What went wrong is now less important than what to do about it. The Climate Change may humble us, but at what cost? What has the obscene scrambling for booty cost us?

A young boy teaches his little brother the art of lying while his parents feed the embers of distrust. It’s my understanding that we continue to be born with the same potential, although down the road our forced appearance on the scene may be increasingly resented.

I tuck away my fleeting suspicion that a great sense of masculine inadequacy feeds the attraction for guns.

The remedy is unclear. Any hopeful solutions?

Old Man Fred –flash fiction for d’Verse

Published June 15, 2019 by Nan Mykel

Although age and poverty had taken its toll, when far away an interrupted cry woke him from his sleep, he shuddered. He knew he lacked boundaries, was too easily empathic. That tendency had led him to panhandling in the evening of his life. It was getting more and more difficult to arise from his seated position on the sidewalk and retrieve his upturned hat from the pavement before him.

Someone at the Center had stolen his flute, so he had nothing left to offer passersby than the one song he could remember all the words to, Old Man River.

The children still stood round and begged their parent for a dime to drop into his hat. The children stared. The adults avoided his eyes. He thanked them all.

128 words

Clark Moustakas: Loneliness and Love

Published January 6, 2018 by Nan Mykel

Increasingly, I have become painfully aware of the terribleness of most communication: of people talking but not saying what they mean; of the contradiction between the outward words and expressions and the inner meanings and messages; of people looking as if they were listening without any real connection or contact with one another. When I am with such persons I experience deep feelings of loneliness, and I want to break through the empty words and come into touch with the feelings; I want to go beyond the icebergs on top , and into what is really happening deep down. I have become keenly aware that individuals rarely express what really matters: the tender, shy, reluctant feelings, the sensitive, fragile, intense feelings. Too often we receive the words but not the concrete, actual messages and meanings. What has happened to us as human beings that we can be so near and yet so far, that we can be so distant from each other and never know? Where are we anyway in those hours when the human spirit cries out in despair, when the hunger for sharing and for loving comes through in disguised and devious forms? What has happened when we have become so radically cut off from our own humanity that we kill the human need for compassion and understanding, when the longing for response is not even recognized or noticed?

Clark Moustakis’ Loneliness and Love (1923–2012)

Heart Connection: How I Help Myself To Calm My Moods, Reduce Anxiety, Still My Nerves, and Create Peace — A Re-blog

Published January 5, 2018 by Nan Mykel

I admire your fortitude and love. Your meditation is more thorough than mine but I would like to share mine, on my page Relief-Refresh, under the photo titled Joy. Have you had to deal with anyone over your use of painkillers? There is so much that is precious in blogland.

If you don’t wear your heart on your sleeve….

Published October 14, 2017 by Nan Mykel

What do you do with it?

Food for thought…

LARRY’S SECRET

Published October 11, 2017 by Nan Mykel

The slight, unassuming fellow

looked somehow familiar when

he first visited our poetry group.

He introduced himself as Larry,

and then it clicked. “Larry Jageman!”

I blurted. “Nan Mykel!” he replied.

In group he was confronted over and

over for his peculiar verse–all hosannas–

yet took it on the chin, calmly. Larry’s

attendance at group notwithstandng

was faithful, dogged, and devoted.

He puzzled those of us who could not fathom

the persistent style of his writing.

Were I confronted so often

and directly, I would have deserted

the group, my confidence crumbling.

I took his tears for sentimentality,

his occasional dark glasses a puzzle.

Was it his last group session that he

said next time he would share a situation

he was in. He always spoke softly, but

this time I was fortunately sitting next

to him and heard him say that he was

afraid of his wife leaving him and that

she was afraid of him leaving her.

His appreciation of friends, neighbors

and family, penned for more than a year,

seemed juvenile and rote to me, blinded

by a misunderstanding of his need.

He did take away something from the group,

and kept coming back until the end.

He was buried today, and I was there.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Upon remembering and reflecting, the image that stays with me is of Larry and Mary rejoicing in life’s grand square dance, and a reminder that there is a higher value than rules. It is called love.