34 The Hours - Interlude Poem

(while consciousness gathers)

The Hours

Waiting at the station, waiting for my train.

When will life come, and what will they serve?

Listening to the music, helps to explain

Thought about life, and what was deserved

Still haunts me, was life a silly drain?

If I can imagine anything at all

 in the last of my hours

Sense will be made just short of enthrall

We are all family mine always ours

Boarding the train I carry y’all’s shawl

Suggested listening:  The Hours by Philip Glass

33 The Consciousness of Compassion

by Katt Morris

  I am very grateful that a last minute contribution to our blog came from Katt Morris. Katt’s story about her mom is very dear to me. It’s quite a few years since I’ve seen her but in the interim I have seen much evidence on Facebook that she has become an expert at ‘grandmaing’

       
        I was born in South Texas, the youngest, my parents & 4 siblings were from a small town in Georgia, near Savannah. Racism was a part of life in my Mom’s family, I had older cousins that were proud holders of their KKK membership, the “N” word was as popular as the word hello.
        Every Summer we went to GA to spend 2 weeks with my mom’s sisters & brothers. When I was around 8, my cousin asked me why I never said nigger & I told him that I wasn’t allowed to curse, he laughed his ass off & couldn’t wait to tell my cousins what I said. From that point on, I was called a “N” lover, all Summer long, it was the joke of the Summer. My Mother taught us, more like drilled it into our heads, that we were NOT better than anyone else. In a family of southern-born racists, she stepped out of the cycle & taught us that “we are all God’s children.” She told stories of how they would sneak down to the black church on Sundays & hide outside under the windows to listen to the singing. They were dirt poor growing up because my grandfather was an alcoholic who spent half his paycheck before he got home from the bar on Friday nights.
         That & 7 kids to feed kept them in the poor-house. Everybody always said that my Mom was the most like her Mother, who I never knew. The first Liberal that I ever knew, LOL, now the family says I’m the most like my Mom. The house I grew up in was a few miles from the Mexican border & right down the street from the rail-road tracks.
         One weekend a young couple with 2 small children came up to our back door wanting a drink of water from the hose out back. My mom went inside & made them sandwiches and jars of ice tea. The next weekend another family stopped by, Momma made sandwiches & gave their little girl some clothes that we had grown out of. During that summer, we could always count on several families stopping by, Momma would have several lunch bags packed.
        We had a visitor from Immigration stop by one day to warn my Mom to stop feeding the “wet-backs.” She was so sad when she had to shut the back door & not answer it when they knocked. Soon they stopped coming. “But by the Grace of God, U aren’t one of those children” I can still hear her say.
        When I asked her why my cousins hated black people she told me that some people were taught to hate & judge others to elevate their own worth. What a thing for her to say, after all, it was her own beloved family she was talking about. “They just don’t know no better” she would say as a lame excuse. It’s all so stupid, this judgement over the color of someone’s skin. There are good people & their are monsters out there, skin color has nothing to do with it, “Some people are just taught to hate,” and I think she was spot on.

32 Surrender Interlude IV

       I was born in Biloxi Mississippi in 1933 and moved with my parents to Englewood Florida at age three and have since lived in Homestead, Stuart, Jackson and Natchez Mississippi, Gainesville, and now Ormond Beach for the past year and a half with my son Saint Michael[1].

       Although I am 36 years sober, I am not serene every day. So, I go to meetings daily.  I was active in Gainesville AA but only entered Alcoholics Anonymous because I was told to go to daily meetings or else. My mentor, Roger Goetz, told me to go to daily meetings. He was the head of Physicians Recovery Network for Florida. He died shortly thereafter after, so I was never given permission to stop going to daily meetings.

         I did not think of myself as a low-bottom alcoholic and therefore, through faulty reasoning remained on the sidelines for far too many years. To this day I firmly believe that the average man in the street understands alcoholism far better than the average psychiatrist. Most psychiatrists avoid the issue of personality, but AA directly recognizes character defects and sets out to remedy our core self through reaching to a Higher Power.

         The turning point in my life was a combination of a colleague, Doug Gamble and several patients who entered our psychiatric practice in Gainesville who came to therapy groups with deep understanding of person to person spiritual relationship. They had a deep feeling for a higher power and they came to us from Alcoholics Anonymous. Doug held fast to AA even through unsuccessful treatment for lung cancer.

         I began to wake up.

         The person who had the most profound effect on my spiritual path was Dorothy who had many years sobriety. Because of dementia and COPD members of the Gainesville Group would visit her, because she was homebound, often over a period of several years. She was brought to a final meeting at the Eyeopener Group, and talked about her spiritual state and the peace she felt.

        So, in her final meeting, three weeks before she passed, she gave comfort and faith to us.  Few atheist, I suppose, could have done that. God was within her, and we could feel it even though she had no idea of what day it was.

        In the usual psychiatric practice, the very ill are separated from those who are less so. But in AA the most severely ill are brought close to the group and healing happens through God’s grace and the spiritual presence of each other.

       While the nation has floundered and spent billions with its war on drugs, during my years AA has quietly absorbed those with drug problems because AA, through countless group conscience meetings, realized that drug addicts weave in and out of alcohol throughout their lifetime.

        Though I have spent countless hours in church including Catholic, Presbyterian, and Unitarian I have felt renewed spiritually in AA much more than in most churches. I know of priests and ministers who have found AA and usually they are not awarded the princely congregations.

Perhaps, everything is working out.  As we meet today there are many small churches that are kept alive through money from AA rentals. What a curious blessing.

       During the ten year period that I was working in crisis stabilization in Florida State Prison and Union Correctional Institution (Raiford), my Gainesville AA group continued to minister physically to Dorothy as she spiritually ministered to them. Shortly after I began work at FSP, I had a heart attack and was dealt a triple bypass.                  

        When I returned to work, the inmates I was supposed to be treating would offer me spiritual comfort. So these black guys who had been in solitary confinement for years and years, brought me out of self-pity without wanting any credit or special favor. Why?  In my humble opinion, there is an unseen and sacred force among most black folks. They lead into a conversation with their heart, in contrast to most white folks who lead into a conversation with their mind

                In the classroom in the sixth grade I followed the leader. Jimmy was bright, confident and I looked to him for courage. But I identified with the kids in the back of the class who were just hiding out. Today I identify with newcomers and those who are struggling with relapse feelings.  My choice is to remain sober and feel the strength of the circle here in this room and out there in the circle of life.

         In this morning’s AA meeting there was another birthday celebration. I will have to digress a bit with a story. I believed that I had to leave general practice in Mississippi even though my wife and children were deeply rooted in Natchez. It was a struggle to pry them loose from the friendly ground of Mississippi, but we finally came to Gainesville. I could not even mention my own loss to the family because it was my idea to come to Hotel Florida where no one seemed loving. Since the tenth grade I had wanted to become a psychiatrist and could no longer hold the urge back. We finally all found friends and became Floridians. To this day I miss Mississippi.

         I was never really certain of what I missed about Mississippi and Natchez. Even though I was born in Biloxi I did not miss that town. When I came to Ormond Beach about a year and a half ago I would usually get a hug from a black woman who was not even from Mississippi. But the hug had the warmth of love. I was raised by a black woman as my mother returned to work when I was two weeks old. My children were raised by a black woman who lived-in five nights a week. My medical practice was organized by a black woman on a minute by minute basis for 10 years. We were not always kissed by our black nannies, but we were always given a strong hug of love; and I felt it deeply.

           Only love makes prejudice go way. 

       

        

       

---

[1] My son, Michael, has saved me from my mistakes more than once.

31 The Quilt of Consciousness

         Each time I think that I have nailed the frog of consciousness to the board; the frog has slipped again from my grasp. The answer to the puzzle is too easy to be true. How did I miss it, arriving this month, in my 85th year of life? Certainly, it would have been useful to have the answer by now. Consciousness is a bit too much like pain. It is not easily remembered or remembered at all in its true exactness of the moment. We live in the NOW and can never have it again and cannot see what is to come next. The past can be too shameful and the future too fearful; so the Now is best for my feeble mind with enlarged brain can bear.  When I find music that I like, I play it over and over as if I can linger in the NOW of it. But the music can never be felt the same way as the first time.

        Our guest blogger, Tom, has solved the puzzle for himself by emerging as a spiritual being which is no doubt unencumbered by time and circumstance. Beauty is simple and direct.    

        The first guest blogger, if you remember, was Robert who said, “consciousness is the spark of life in is purest form and it can’t be described as anything but divine.”

    The three bloggers (myself included) are in sync to the position.  Spark of life, spiritual being, and the NOW are certainly difficult, if not impossible, to measure. If you can’t measure it, it is not scientific. For these three bloggers, at least, consciousness is an intangible mystery.

        Well here is my question to my writing group and my friends out there.  What is your short take on consciousness? 

        I am asking because I have sought for years to find someone to disciple to in addition to Jesus but to no avail. There are no giant men or women to look to for guidance.

        But at last there is a hope for the future. By collecting and sorting and gathering in all the patches of wisdom that have come my way, there is a quilt to be made and a fabric to be woven into an invisible blanket holding up the planet Earth. If you are still holding any patches send them my way now.

Send your patches to:  pkat80@gmail.com