Martin Luther King Jr.

“I have a Dream”

         “Closure begins with telling the truth about what I see.”

 

What I did with this information:

In your hand is a slip of paper. Its edges are rough because it was torn from something bigger: a letter of rejection, perhaps. The affirmation is printed there in my neatest hand, and one day when I was hurting, I took out a basket of coloured pens and decorated it, slowly, spontaneously, letting it take its own shape. I changed pens often, not caring which colour came up in my hand. I was practicing the acceptance of whatever colour life may present to me. Sometimes we don’t get to choose.

 

How it looks:

Prominent in the forefront is a recently dug grave, a rectangle of neatly raked black cut into the verdant green of a cemetery law. A pot of flowers sits where the headstone will be. A small card flutters there, purple, the colour of mourning, but the writing is too small. I cannot read it.  Beside this new grave is an older one, granite monument in place, with clear markings carved into it. The picture has gotten wet, and just this spot is blurred out: I see an E and an F, a blur, then an H. A pot of flowers, bountiful and rich, sits at this grave’s head, too. It is neatly encased in a cement rectangle, on each side of which the professionally cut grass spreads away. A few loose clods of earth taint the grass beside the new grave with its humble three flowers the colour of mourning. A  wrought iron fence displaying pretty little curleques, rims the grave yard, curving through the picture from lower left to upper right. There, two birds, brown as earth, fly, and the leafy branch of a near by tree just manages to announce its presence where the upper right corner meets the world around it. A round, bald, orange sun hangs above the earth, seemingly close enough to the new grave so one could reach up and touch its burning surface.

            Green, manicured fields stretch away from the graveyard on all sides, ending where the sky stretches above, blue and serene on this pretty day.

            A farm fence delineates a field in the distance: this is a settled part of the world. Pretty little grasses with miniscule red flowerets grow in the crook of the “C” on the word “closure.” Like a sun-dog, a like twin C shines pale green behind it, repeating the thought of the word, the lovely thought.

 

Story:

The importance of this affirmation can’t be exaggerated.

            I don’t know about you, but I was taught “not to go by feelings.” The preachers and the parents united in that teaching, and I stepped with excruciating care across this dangerous bit of advice, following its disastrous guidance in blind faith.

            Feelings were my enemy. They were of the devil, because we are all born in sin. Feelings are a tool for evil. They can sway you from the truth, which you know, in your head and in your heart. When in doubt, the Word of God will help. The very act of reading the bible will help battle whatever pretty, sensuous little messages your “feelings” may bring you.

            The only defense against feelings, then, is faith in God, prayer and study of His word. Because our only defense against evil is this recipe. Any other is arrogance and of the underworld.

            Knowing this, my feelings presented to me a never-ending palette of temptation. I kept a careful eye on them at all times, for they seemed to accompany me with the permanence of a tail. As soon as I divined a feeling, I clenched my teeth and pretended it wasn’t there. Always, all day, every day, all of my life for thirty years of it.

            Joy, walking to school on a crisp morning, was not wallowed in. It was only a feeling. My wild heart thumped on, the beast to be tamed every waking minute, by walking, as the bible says, in the Lord.

            Fear, when the teacher asked a question about arithmetic, kept me still as stone in my seat. I hadn’t done my homework: this fear I understood and respected in the little world I presided over.

            Not being able to locate grief within myself at Grandpa Kroeker’s funeral was a relief. I had been taught that feelings, or lack of them, didn’t diminish the value of the event, or the validity of my right to be there.

           

            When I first lost my old faith, feelings arose to be dealt with. Were they, in fact, dangerous and of the devil? I had learned not to trust them, so I answered not. I trusted no one any more to tell me who God was, so I asked no one the question.

            I wrote poetry with a fury the first years after ejecting myself into the darkness of separation from my Mennonite family.

            My feelings were expressed, interpreted by words I allowed from a part of me that was not disciplined by other than my search for truth. My search for truth required from me only openness. Openness required from me the willingness to be vulnerable. Vulnerability required from me willingness to be wrong, and to be hurt.

            The other option I saw was cynicism. I’d seen it up close in people around me: Lou at CBC, and the 39-year-old supervisor one of the very few times I worked for the Federal Government as a temp. These were not happy people, nor were they interesting to talk to. They saw the negative in things so consistently, it was like a credo. To me, cynicism seemed worse than death: entrapment, and under a spell of one’s own making.

            I begged to find my way through the valley of the shadow of self-made spells, and where the little door to experience opens and closes there in the back of my brain, in a little gray cell that looks to the outsider just like every other of the billions of gray cells, I reach out a hand, turn the knob, and open it. Then, trembling, I put a stone between it and the threshold, so that no accidental force may close it to. The stone is my eye, guarding the door at all times. Its openness is all I have, as a seeker of truth.

            I don’t know how to live now, because I no longer can do what I have been taught. Doing what I have been taught is an empty pantomime, for the God I once worshiped is no longer there, at the point of prayer. For instance, I can’t go to my closet to pray, as Jesus told us to. He is not there anymore, for me to reach in the dignity of privacy. My mother’s smiling face is there, assuring me that indeed, Jesus is.

            Turning the other cheek is useless, too. But I keep on doing it, because I always have. I can’t seem to catch myself in time, on those occasions, to think about what is really being done to me by the slapper. Or to think about how I really would like to react. A slap is quick, shocking and passes just as quickly into the past. The dance is: slap to the cheek, turn the other cheek, slap to the other cheek. Thank you, from God and me.

            No, there’s no time. So like the old dog, young even as I am, my behaviour remains that which it’s been all my life. Except, the divine love demonstrated by turning of the other cheek exists no more for me. The slap is now mere punishment, and the proffered other cheek mere habit. The slapper, of course, can’t be expected to realize the sacrifice of the second proffered cheek: they’re on the dark side, the ignorant side. They’re slapping you for something you’re innocent of. But like a lamb to the slaughter, you let Christ take the blame, and you let His Blood wash the sins into their true perspectives. Who am I to judge?

            Smarting, hurt, punished, I exit the experience of turning the other cheek, time after time, more confused and degraded than before. This is a long, many-stepped downward spiral, which stopped only after thirty or so years of it.

            Not knowing what to do, I do nothing. I take the smart, hurt and confusion to the empty page and write poetry. It gushes out from a hidden spring inside me. I can only hope it serves me well, trusting it comes from the only place in me I can live with: the Phyllis who is searching for the truth, and must find God this way.

            “Be in this world, but not of it,” I was warned. It was a wonderful challenge to progress through my youth knowing it was okay not to engage in the world around me. I was of the Lord, and would one day go Home to be with Him in Heaven. Until that day, like a nun, I dutifully walked the stony paths of earth with my eyes on Him alone. Joy and completion were mine, and mother’s admiring, loving smile when she witnessed the glow of me from heavenly love, affirmed my wholeness.

            The children on the playground at Prince Philip School called me “Fish.” Each time the epithet clawed toward me like a pinch from a grinning face, I said a little prayer to the Lord, “Please forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Each time, then I waited for the strength of my faith to ameliorate the trifling pain that mankind could administer. I would transcend, each and every time, to the knees of God where I was his little lamb and held, forever loved and understood.

            “You are either for me, or against me,” said Jesus. I walked my path for Jesus.

            When that Jesus passed away from my life, my silly feet kept picking their way carefully through the sins of this world, just as though He were still there to be a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. It was so scary, and eerie, to sit in my attic room on Foxbar Road, older and separated from all of that now. I would see the verse, just as I always had, from the day I first memorized it. There is the dangerous, narrow path. There are my feet, judiciously picking their way along, with a lamp held close to the ground so that I could see my way. But the image was a memory, for now I was without the lamp. I knew not anymore how dangerous the path was, or in which ways, and how its narrowness might be a threat.

            What light could I hold now to my feet and my path? Only the sad second choice, so inadequate, my little, secret quest, forgiving only in the fact it was a quest, for truth, where I must find God.

            I cried so hard, not knowing what else to do. What was dangerous? What was safe? I refused to abandon myself to fun, where enslavement lurks like a kidnapper at the fair, even if I was free now from all I had been taught. I was looking at bringing myself up again, making my own rules, deciding my own standards.

            I did have some fun, but abandonment to it was a steely anti-determination. So for many years, anything called “fun” was called “watchful exploration”, and I became incorrigible, not only to the family whose faith I had abandoned, but to my friends, who couldn’t understand why getting me out to a party was like pulling teeth.

 

By Phyllis Kroeker Fajersson

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Mar 2008 News: This video wll be on display at the opening of a brand new Danish library which has galleries set aside, one for each sense.

An intense sobering investigation into the important tragedy of our time drawn from established sources and based on verifiable facts. The Reflecting Pool is a thought-provoking study of a search for truth and the profound consequences of not looking for it any further than the nightly news.

Where: The Topping Room, Foster Library, 651 E. Main St., Ventura, California

When: Saturday, February 9, 2008

Times: Speakers Peter Thottam 3 PM/ Filmmakers Jarek Kupsc and Jodie Baltazar 3 PM -7 PM

Times: The Reflecting Pool showings at11:00 A.M.; 1:15 P.M., 4:30 P.M., with final showing at 7 P.M.

Suggested donation of $5.00 per person, No One turned away for lack of funds.

Contact: HopeDance – Cindy Piester 805-895-4026 workforpeace@wavecable.com

Please join us in welcoming Peter Thottam, an attorney and holds degrees from Yale, Berkeley and U.C.L.A. Under his leadership L.A.N.I.C. has established a solid foothold for the issue of impeachment, helping to garner Diane Watson’s co-sponsorship of House Resolution 799 to impeach V.P.Dick Cheney. Peter is now running for a seat on the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors and intends to include impeachment as an issue in his campaign. Additionallly, Peter has issued a statement regarding the film, The Reflecting Pool, saying, “See the film, Spread the word, and……..plan accordingly.”

Frank Dorrell, author of Addicted to War, says: “This brilliant new film played last night to a standing room only crowd of over 400 at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. It received one of the longest standing ovations I can ever remember.

Don’t miss seeing this most important new film that questions the events of 911.

 

…click above for a free Conflict Resolution Kit. Handling emtions and using dialogue for a win/win outcome are two links there that shed light for me. I personally think war is stupid. Surely we can learn to use words better. Here is a beginning. Willingness to learn is the prerequisite. Are you willing?

 

Signs of Love

Loving someone means each person:

• Listens to the other person’s ideas;
• Considers the other’s needs;
• Exchanges physical affection consistent with the relationship;
• Lets the other be first sometimes;
• Takes care of themselves;
• Feels comfortable;
• Wishes to be with the other person;
• Feels valued when with the other;
• Values the differences between them.

- From the Calgary Herald, 1997

MINIATURE ROSES $3.49

 

I shine pale

In the pale light

Sheltered near the plant with a purpose:

On the table,

Loved.

She kisses my flowers

And once touched my thin stalk, worrying over it.

In the greenhouse,

Before,

Capable fingers clasped my leaves

And prodded me to stand up straight.

My first morning with her,

The first time she kissed me,

Her gentle lips made wounds on

My virgin petals and then she left for work.

She’d hardly left, and she was back.

The door opened, letting in a rain breeze.

The door closed. Shedding everything

She came to me.

She touched my little thin stalk

And I asked for more room

So I could breathe.

She lay down and slept for days.

Then she moved me

And I breathe better now

Here on the table near the geranium.

She doesn’t go to work any more.

She clears her throat, drinks coffee,

Watches TV, listens to music,

And holds her head in her hands.

 

She said to Janice, who visited,

"They let me go. They said,

"I was listening and it wasn’t

what I wanted to hear."

"Car Dan calls them the Times-Commnist,"

said Janice comfortingly.

It was all Janice could think of to say,

To comfort her.

It wasn’t right, what she said.

Janice went away, and when the phone rang

She didn’t answer.

"It was the perfect job," she said once.

She looks at me all the time.

She whimpers a bit sometimes.

I’m singing as loud as I can

But she doesn’t hear me.

By Miniature Roses $3.49, Feb.11/07

Once there was a trapeze artist. All her life she had worked in her father’s circus, cleaning the elephant and tiger cages, and painting the props for the dancing horses. Willingly, she swept up candy wrappers and wiped fingerprints from door posts. Whenever she had the chance, she would watch the trapeze artists rehearse. She noticed how their knuckles whitened with the tight grips they held on the trapeze bar, and how quickly they could open to let go. And when they let go, the artist would fly through the air like a bird to land at its nesting place. The girl felt the ropes hanging under the tent dome: they were slim but strong. She wanted to know what it was like to swing on them; to wrap her knuckles around the trapeze bar, and to let go at just the right moment. One day, she thought, she would be up there. She would let go, and feel what it was like to fly, too. Perhaps, she thought, I will be so good that father would let me perform without a safety net. The audience will gasp!

   Years went by. She practised hanging on the rope, learning its strength, and learning the strength of her hands as they carried her weight on the ropes. She swung on a trapeze, and then one day she felt ready to let go. That was the day she began serious study of the trapeze.

   The day came when she stood, high above the audience, waiting to perform the ultimate: daring to perform without a safety net. She wore a little coronet on her head, with her hair hanging down her back in a beautiful, glossy plait. Glitter and rhinestones on her tights caught the lights, sparkling like fireworks. The drums rolled, she tightened her fingers around the trapeze bar, and launched her supple body into the air.

 

   Time went by, and the famous  trapeze artist became known far and wide. Never had she fallen! She began to teach younger ones how to hold the bar with just the right amount of tension, ready to let go in a flash when the swing was pointing her toward the next trapeze.

 

   One day she was offered a job at the biggest, most famous circus in the world.

(to be continued)

At first, his garden seems non-descript. He’s a neighbour, and tends it lovingly behind a haggard if decent corner store. The man’s name is Victor. The view from his garden is spectacular: on top of a hill and looking out across West Bay and on to the ocean and the American mountains. We got talking when I passed by on my way to Tim Horton’s for a coffee.  He talked to me about China in a way that helps me see how important it is to be open, and listening, rather than judging. At the end of our conversation, he gave me a big hug and a resounding kiss on the cheek, very brotherly. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on such a conversation for anything! This makes me think of others in my life who converse in a similar way, and bless me too. Next time I walked by, I admired the symmetry of each plant, growing luxuriously but disciplined from ground smattered with a kleenex, a chocolalte bar wrapper, a taco wrapper, and an empty paper cup. Early little flowers peeped up the shelter of small rocks. Shoots and swollen buds hung humbly from their parents. I noticed them this time.

———————–

      People are having lots of fun with the news of my acquisition: I bought an anchor! I’m so proud of it, it’s big and heavy, much better quality than I’d dared hope to be able to afford. AND I bought it on the basis: "I’ll sell it back to you for the price I paid."

ME: (to lady in Marina office) I bought an anchor!

MAN: (in office for no apparent reason) How old is he? hahahahaha

 

cute.