Tag Archives: Health

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Seeking HealthCare Experience

I recently have heard
from a people of growing remorse,
Perhaps we should add to Presidential prerequisites
some prior experience in public service.

While this has always been a personal requirement,
I had not thought we would need a legal restriction,
where logical and moral imperatives are so blatantly transparent
and mutually compatible.

If you need heart and brain surgery
and have a list of candidates to choose from,
And you instead choose your dentist
because you are uncertain about those distant names
but you know how your dentist smells and tastes,
then we should be alarmed
if you also propose
to lead our way on health care planning
and Earth climate therapies,
insurance,
assurance,
compassionate reassurance,
especially when early drafts specifically disinvest
of dental care,
and inside
and outside nutritional development
for public as extended family service.

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The Senior Center’s Budgeting Party

We started slow and old-growth
yet steady.

The Senior Democrats
and Republicans
and Libertarians
and Independents
hosted a Community Integrity budgeting party.

Party favors were ballots
with options for small,
medium,
large,
and extra large service sectors
beginning with agriculture and permaculture support
and ending with zoning and long-term planning expenses;
the whole A through Z list of community services
we want for and with each other,
sometimes less,
sometimes more,
yet always competing less for cooperative more.

This Community Integrity Party
looked and felt like
an Old-Growth ReForesting Party.

We began with separate caucuses
to discern these diverse quantitative options
as to their quality of cooperative root systemic investment.

Education small
would remove more holistic arts and therapies
of music and dance troupes and bands
and choreographed orchestrations,
organic and regenerative harvesting and replanting
rhythms and harmonies,
painting murals of hope
and writing sonnets of creatively
and re-creatively
healing history.

No one liked that,
although some Old-Growth Republicans began to look wistful.

Education medium
was Business As Boringly Usual.
Budgets to feed evolving minds and bodies
competing with investments in more sewer lines
feeding our rivers less toxins
yet not feeding our top reforesting soil more fertility.

Education large
began with cooperatively owned and managed pre-schools
and ended with post-doctoral studies
in synergetic community as forestry enrichment
for optimizing mutual health-wealth
ethical and aesthetic designs.

Education extra large
suggested listening and learning would become our primary mission,
non-violent service of and for our municipality,
cooperative ownership and governance
of regenerative,
annually reiterative,
Slow and Old-Growth ReEducation Parties,
plantings,
feeding symbiotic organic fertilizers
to harvest health and wealth optimizing economic
and political outcomes.

Once the three caucuses were finished,
we formed one party circle
to compare reforesting notes,
to look for harmonies
and dissonance,
to see what both could together teach us
about further listening and learning
who to nominate as Community Integrity candidates.

We started our reforesting inside and out party
slow and old-growth steady,
study,
then began raising young candidates
to manage family and community integrity,
living in and on our slow and old-growth reforesting
Cooperative NonViolent Education Planet.

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Quality Persons

“My son is a high quality person…”
POTUS

A striking presidential sentiment.
Like defending an expensive choice cut
of red meat.

This view of healthy humanity
as a valuable commodity
reminds me
of his plan for health insurance divestment:

A very, very good plan for all Americans
[who are fortunate enough to be high quality persons,
transparently free of unfortunate pre-existing
Grade B
or C
or, god forbid, Grade D
or E
or Total Fail conditions.]

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Uniting Republics of Domesticity

It took us too long,
but eventually
we noticed Republican women
and Democrats both women and men
often preferred to spend about twice as much on domestic education
and defensively proactive mutual health care assurance
as compared to international defensive co-investment,
too often reduced to the militaristic over-industrialized budget.

And, of that international relations budget,
about two-thirds for growing cultures of healthy peace warriors
and maybe up to one-third on policing criminal offense
with cooperative co-investment intent.

So,
the domestic and educational security matriarchs
formed cooperative ecopolitical networks
for governing inside these fifty States,
while the more WinWin patriarchs
tried to mutually dominate
a more Left-Right Brain and Mind and Incarnate Body
of harmonic global co-investment networks.

Both internal and external cooperatives
rooted in Lovelock and Margulis double-binding
chemistry as also synergetic microbiology
producing Gaia Hypotheses of CoRevolution,
flowering in Golden Rules Revised:

Do not not ecopolitically flex and do
as you would have your great grandchildren remember like you,
with kindness,
contentment,
grace of awesome love,
continued abundant co-investment
in regenerational strings of polypathic mutual promise,
positively imagined in our retrospective matriarchal-patriarchal future,
multicultures of health-balancing wealth.

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Maker of Rich Women

A ballad for Franz Dolp

His exercise was forestry
His initiative was art.

He painted his forest in trees,
composing four seasons of song.

He searched his right balance of trees
revising rhythms for harmony’s poem,
Mothers of Deep Rich Women.

A writer of therapeutic forests
written in trees with good roots.

Franz was a poet
rebuilding with forests,
artisan trees
forming long-healing words.

Inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s story of Franz Dolp’s 40 acre reforesting homestead with Western red cedar trees, which, if I remember correctly, have a First Nation name that translates something like “maker, or mother, or mother-maker of rich women” because of their unusual domestic commodity value when cooperatively harvested and planted.

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Climates of Descent

Energy descent
need not predict financial descent
by inviting cooperative ownership and governance instead.

Just as democratizing love descent
need not predict hate and terror and paranoid acceleration
when love could invite more polypathic
and polyphonic
and polycultural outcomes,
creolizing multicultures of omnipotent abundance
instead.

Just as climates of ecopolitical pathology descent
need not predict 0-sum
Win To Lose Later
Industrial Capitalization Game-Over
when positive energy invites more diastatic flowing landscapes,
cultures of regenerative health
watering flowers
and not so much our weeds.

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Songs of Resistance

Songs of resistance
are love songs.

Anthems sung together from churches
and temples
to town squares
and capital sold-out markets.

Sounds of acquiescence
are cowering silence
suffered alone
through long and lonely nights
of fear and anger.

Great lovers
prefer to sing
in full harmonies
and resonant octaves
of sound
and loving light,
whether resisting
persisting
or assisting
escorting
affirming love’s compassioned notes.

We sing
when climbing up jacob’s ladder
together.
When climbing down
we feel alone,
are silent
and live in sorrow
for love life’s absence.

Silent majorities and minorities
reassure bullies
and defenders of plutocracy.
Resistance songs
are love medicine
fear-mongerers fear,
yet need the most.

 

 

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Aging in a Deeper Place

As I age
the formerly wide chasm between ecstasy and despair
grows narrower,
deeper.

I had not thought this an attribute of maturation,
quite the contrary,
but perhaps an aging crevice,
a thinning fracture
between played-out manic bliss, over-extended harvest,
and depression
nondually faces two extremes
of positive major chords and keys
with negative minor tensions
searching for each other out and in,
become too vocal, focal
looking for tacit evidence
apposition yet lives
on another side
of this darkening
enlightening
divide.

Dr. Jeckyll’s confluence
redeeming Mr. Hyde’s dissonance
double-binding midway balance
now become a treacherously tight rope
tensioned for resonance and buoyant bounty,
just short of snapping side against side.

Perhaps wisdom is learning how to equitably co-invest
in both wonder and shock,
without becoming paralyzed in-between these boundless awes,
deep wavering yes and please not yet,
not yet,
carving a gorge
deep echoing sacred reverence
and secular irrelevance,
ecstasy with ridiculing despair,
boundless sufficiency without endless satisfaction,
reiterating eternal integrity
not yet surely promised
beyond potential disintegration.

If solitude portends sublime co-operation,
what remains for aching loneliness?

Who and what could become redeemed
through double-binding isolations
within voiceless awe
for wonder indwelling silent shock
of ego loss
deep shadowing eco-gain?

To win to lose,
to lose to win,
co-arising deceptions again.

Deeply resonant depressions;
subliminal,
suboptimizing ego dominations.

Two delineations
with hairline fracturing co-definition?

What would be blissful contentment’s promise
without any dissonant content
for comparison?

What are omnipotent spirits
without ego vacuuming materials,
evidence of necessary,
hopefully sufficient,
deep double-binding awe
that we,
even I within we,
have been something,
someone,
someone’s,
rather than the far more statistically likely
nothing at all
evermore.

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The Senior Center

The Senior Center was a beehive of active waiting
to die.

Bingo
but not ballroom dancing.

Knitting
but not garden expansions.

Physical therapy
but not yoga
and not chi gong,
much less mindful meditations
sung in four part harmony.

The new guy,
just growing into sixty-five,
asked them
How would we like to be remembered
one hundred years from now?

That doesn’t seem likely,
I know,
but perhaps more likely together
than playing Solitaire
side by side.

I would like to be remembered
as healers of The River
said a somber SeptemberGenerian woman
surrounded by ancient lady friends.

No one needed to ask why.
We all knew
what was coming downriver
for future regenerations
of thirsty toxined minds
with biodiverse bodies.

And so we found younger allies
who owned property along The River,
beginning with the railroad company,
and the Mohegans
and the Pequots,
where a Senior knew a Senior
with a well-placed daughter,
and sometimes a son
of unusual cooperative and long-term focus.

Together we planted firs
and cedars along polluted and denuded banks,
for future generations to manage,
harvest for housing
and furniture
and fiber
and possibly even coffins
waiting for memories of polluted rivers
to die.

That was one hundred years ago
we started
in this regenerative Senior Center,
and still going strong
as each year
a new incoming class
of those who finally reached sixty-five
joined our river healing project,
more recently also producing fruit trees
and berries,
flax
and hemp,
mushrooms
and nuts
and sweetgrass baskets
woven by SeptemberGenerians.

Women and a few surviving men
and some more in-between
smiling together
at the round cedar table in the back,
remembering Elder healers
of our barren land
and naked River.

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Saturday Night

It’s another Saturday night
ending this week
as started
alone again.

I came here
almost two years ago
to my retirement hermitage
but oddly,
and often uncomfortably,
shared with my hurt kids,
mental and physical illness
adopted and then adapted;
an asylum for the perpetually incontinent.

Cars pass by.
Sometimes a loud motorcycle
or two or three or four
or even more
here on the southern boundary
of a county seat
in a State
where rural counties
have been disenfranchised
of political purpose.

Our largest employers
are two tribally owned casinos.
One across the Thames River
flowing past our backyard retreat.

Our second largest income producer
may be the County Courthouse
where attorneys and police
collude to extort voluntary donations
from poor young adults
red and yellow,
black and white,
guilty of speeding
and texting
and smoking medicine
without a license
in Great White Father’s sight.

I have been listening and watching
for what this half acre is.
We are not as rural as I had hoped,
with State highway 12 too near my front yard,
but this place is also not urban
or suburban.

What it is not,
whom we are not,
seems more clearly articulated
than any positive definition,
refining our becoming quiet place,
alone together,
shunned by healthier neighbors.

It’s another lonely ending
anticipating yet another not new beginning
tomorrows stretching out alone
long retiring shadows
on this southern edge
of a Connecticut County Seat
without apparent purpose
or co-defining meaning.

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