How Did We Get to Heaven’s Gate?

Wednesday the 11th

Yesterday evening after leaving the hospital I bought some socks and shorts for PQ and some summer tops for myself at an outrageously huge Walmart up the road from the hospital. Some part of me anticipated that we wouldn’t be going home tomorrow, and I had one outfit and no pajamas. Nevertheless, I hoped preparing for a longer stay would mean I was preparing for something that wouldn’t happen. In no way was I prepared when I drove south to Rio Rancho. That entire drive is now erased from memory. The Espanola hospital was going to send my husband to Santa Fe. I waited for the ambulance to arrive in a few minutes, as predicted. They even had his new room number. Time went by, and the ambulance never came. Finally, I drove home to feed the cat and get ready for a trip to Santa Fe the next morning.

Then I got word that the ambulance had been called to an emergency, the hospital room was now taken, and they were sending PQ to Presbyterian Rust hospital in Rio Rancho. My heart dropped. I couldn’t drive daily to Rio Rancho. Then I called our Friend Carol who lives in Albuquerque and asked if I could stay with her.  Everything happened so fast, there was only reaction, not much thinking beyond finding the hospital in an unfamiliar city and then finding my friend Carol’s new home which I’d only visited once before.

I notice time is suspended. I’m not in the same world of two weeks ago, or is it only a week? When PQ was transported to Rio Rancho he was knocked out on morphine. The doctor in Espanola sent him to Presbyterian Rust because they had a specialist nephrologist.  His kidneys were not filtering out the morphine and he had been psychedelically tripping for two days. Finally,  he woke up in Rio Rancho, looked out the window and thought he might be on another planet. Everything was foreign. When I arrived at the hospital the next morning, both he and the staff were glad to see me. He was terrified and thought something very creepy was going on.

Thursday the 12th

This morning when I arrived, his face seemed a bit larger. Then I noticed the left side of his chest was abnormally swollen where the drainage tube had been. What’s happening? The nurse sent for the pulmonologist. She came in later and told us that PQ was experiencing Subcutaneous Emphysema. She wasn’t alarmed and said that when the delicate lung lining, and his is very vulnerable, is penetrated due to a heavy cough or some other pressure it creates a small hole where oxygen can escape into the body. The oxygen moves unrestricted into the tissue below the skin and causes the skin to swell like a balloon. She said that it’s better to monitor it and that when the hole in the lung tissue heals, the body will absorb the excess oxygen. Later in the day, the swelling increased until his eyes were closed.

He was scheduled to go home that day and was hugely disappointed. I was grateful it didn’t happen after we got him home. It would have terrified him, (me too) since we’d never heard of such a thing. I’ve since learned that it is not uncommon.

Friday the 14^th

Third day in Rio Rancho: The swelling is beginning go down. If he tries hard, he can open his eyes. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Time has slowed down, perhaps because we are in a new lifetime. Yet there is a routine in this new life. I spend each day from 10:30 AM to 6-6:30 PM in his room. Because of COVID, the hospital only allows two visitors per day. The people at the hospital entrance know me and ask how Standing Deer is doing. They did some research on the internet and discovered he was in a couple of films and has his art on Facebook, now they think he is a star and treat me like an old friend when I come in the morning.

I still can’t find my way to and from my friend Carol’s house where I’m staying or the hospital without Seri’s help. Yesterday on my way to Carol’s house, I told Seri Montano instead of Montano Plaza Drive and had a scenic drive through sagebrush and cedar.  Eventually, pulled off and tried again. Every road here has many snakelike winding curves—probably good Fung Shuai.

When I arrived at the hospital this morning, the nurse on duty informed me that they had talked to PQ about a Final Directive and he told them he wanted the full measures to maintain life. Although I don’t think he understands how brutal that can be, I didn’t bring the topic up today because I believe it indicates how much he wants to live. He has unfinished business, and not just the unfinished painting on our dining room table. That table has become his favorite workplace and his colored pens, pencils and measuring tools are waiting for him. He also needs to finish his life story. What will he carry to the other side? This should be the most important final directive. The shadowy veil between daily life and the truly mysterious world we live in has been torn for me as well.

It’s so easy to be hypnotized into semi consciousness by our everyday routines and earthly plans. We all know that life habits and routines we have become comfortable with are temporary and subject to sudden changes as much as the weather is, yet its always a shock when there is messenger from the other side at the door. Decisions must be made. Why am I here, what do I want to leave, what will I take with me. Can I finish the job I started.

IN THE HOSPITAL

Standing Deer went for a checkup with his pulmonologist on Monday. He was breathing irregularly and by the time we reached the doctor’s office, he was near to fainting. Doctor Narayanon sent him immediately to the ER, where they discovered his left lung was deflated. They inserted a tube to remove fluid and air that had escaped the lung. It had filled the surrounding tissue and deflated the lung. 

This has been building up for some time. It explains our uncomfortable trip to Denver last month and his increasing shortness of breath. I’m disappointed with the huge, efficient University of Colorado Pulmonary center for not suspecting there was more going on than normal IPF symptoms. He lived for a month with a collapsing lung.  After the Denver visit, he was so discouraged that he wanted me to cancel this last visit to his pulmonologist because, “what’s the use, they can’t do anything for me.” He believed he just had to live with rapidly decreasing oxygen intake until he couldn’t anymore.

Like riding a hair-raising roller coaster, it seems like we’ve been here much longer than we have.  Twice they’ve had to reinsert the tube that drains excess fluid out of the lung cavity. He is in surgery again as I write, this time they will insert a larger tube. I come to Presbyterian Hospital in Espanola every morning as if its an old habit, even though it’s been less than a week.

I used to be a really good driver, but since we’ve been together, Standing Deer does most of the driving and I found my self confidence on the road waning. I never minded letting him drive because it’s a physical thing he can still do well, and he loves to drive. Now, after five trips through the canyon my body and coordinated mind have reconnected with space, time and the rhythm of curves and hills. The drive has become a meditative experience. Besides, the weather has been fantastic.

Two days ago, I walked out of the hospital in a state of sadness knowing this could be the beginning of the end of our time together. The gravity of his disease was no longer looming in the background to be dealt with someday. What a contrast with the beauty of the full on spring afternoon. The air and light reminded me of the best time of our life together in Cottonwood and Sedona Arizona. Memories came in with such force that I almost suffocated in them. We will never be able to hike those beautiful red-dust trails again. How grateful I am that the memories are as clear as if they are right now superimposed on the equal beauty of this Northern New Mexican spring.

Monday, before we ended up here, our week's calendar was full of meetings and appointments, then suddenly the calendar crashed. Its like being suddenly dropped in a foreign country. I wonder if that’s what death is like or could be like. Yesterday they moved him to ICU. That worried me. In his new room, he started hearing and seeing shadow people moving around the room, some were trying to talk. He said there was a man behind him who kept saying a word he didn’t understand. Out of curiosity and some concern, PQ had me call the nurse on duty. He asked her if anyone had died in this room. She said “yes, many have.” 

They just brought him back from the third attempt to insert a tube below his lung to drain the fluid. Now all the tubes and wires have been changed out and he is going back and forth between sleep and semi-consciousness. He is seeing people walking and flying through the room again. This time he is tripping, moving his arm and fingers like he was playing an instrument.

I know he is taking the fight to a new level and I wonder if he will make peace with the reality of  his situation. We aren't young anyway but in many ways we are happier than we were when young. That is the paradox. Each round is a revelation if we are willing to let go of the way things were before.  

I’ve left the painting he started on the dining room table, along with all his watercolor pens, compass, eraser and ruler. I’m counting on him coming back to finish it. I know he will and I hope it will happen in this this body in this lifetime.

ALCHEMY 101

This month I’ve been confronted with an inventory of lives lived on the journey to now. They cover an awfully long time. It seems like centuries. Memories are like pearls on a string; each pearl has a time and theme of its own and I was a different person for each. Perhaps the cord holding these episodes in a row is what I think of as the Higher Mind, and Carl Jung termed the SELF, and it secretly strings these pears as if they were episodes of a NETFLIX series. An invisible producer is probably winging the outcome with a brilliant script writer. That is what I choose to hope. It is a strange experience to go with unintended clarity to a place where I once lived or at least frequented often and to experience the sensations concerns and emotions again of who I was then. This is beyond lucid memory. If 3D double exposure film existed, one could be at any place and time. But these beads of time seem to pull my spirit down as if they were made of lead. I long to put time in its proper order.

Chamisa Moon

On the other hand, perhaps my Higher Mind is cleaning up personal history for whatever lies ahead by revisiting all unhealed remnants of my past. The process is somewhat like remodeling an old house by fixing structural flaws that are not likely to sustain the challenges of the future.

I’ve been on a strange memory trip for the past two months but this week it became so intense that I could feel cold wind on my cheeks, hear birds, cars passing, and naked branches rustling in the breeze from times and places of despair and longing that I thought long ago disintegrated into memory dust. It caused me to realize that there is good reason the past normally fades into soft focus. This backward descent caught me by surprise. I was finally living free of most of my old demons and psychic bullies. Now I recognize why genuinely participating in past life memories would seriously interfere with the present life. This recognition answers to my satisfaction the question: “why don’t we remember more about our previous lives?” However, there are assumptions, reactions and ingrained thoughts and reactive patterns that must be dissolved at the source before we can safely move forward without self-sabotaging from some unconscious reaction to a hidden trigger. To some degree, most of us have PTSD. This keeps our world in constant peril.  

Life as we know it truly is a dream full of unresolved issues flecked with occasional particles of new insight like those first bits of sleet before a storm. While I believe this, I suspect that any past life memories are as symbolic and enigmatic as a sleeping dream. The emotional intensity reveals the significance of the events. Then, imagine if those core concerns are keys to unlocking the treasures of creative power and higher knowledge? Paradoxically, our nighttime dreams are often a wakeup call.

It isn’t all bad. In fact, much of the pain is filtered out of old memories. However, the experience of oneself in so many places and circumstances bring up the question; “who am I,” and how many previous selves sneak into this lifetime for another chance at solving an old problem or answering a troubling existential question. I don’t want to come back here again, although I doubt that I’ve passed this grade with high enough marks to graduate, yet I hope at least to qualify for graduate school. I’m also concerned that the human species is barreling toward the catastrophic results of the unbalanced myopic perception of a big brain with a shriveled soul. If I come back, in say, 200 years, what kind of mess might I find myself in? If you don’t believe in reincarnation, you can still imagine what your grandchildren and great grandchildren are facing. The melting icecaps, increasingly intense weather, unhinged political behavior and COVID-19 pandemic are a taste of where we are headed.

Most humans are fumbling around in a world that is moving so fast on the physical time/space level that few have time to contemplate what might lay beyond the rapidly shifting surface. Just minding the traffic keeps the lower mind so busy that until we are faced with a sudden vacuum there is no reflection or evaluation of what lies beneath the precipitous changes. But does this frantic action take us anywhere? I loved playing with a kaleidoscope as a child. One turn and a different reality appears. Our modern world has become a large kaleidoscope and however interesting the scenes might be there is no base point, or end point. Just continuous rearranging of the same elements.

In esoteric teachings, our ego is under the purview and guidance of a Higher Self, or at least it should be if we are to get off the merry-go-round of life after life, after life on the same wheel. Spiritual teacher, George Gurdjieff, when asked what became of humans at death, would say, “humans are food for the moon.” This is a typically enigmatic way of saying that like the moon we get some light from the sun but can’t get beyond our satellite ties to a lower earth existence. We are emotional beings, and our position in life is concealed in the cloud of our personal experience. It takes a kick up to get through that cloud.

It’s very hard to see beyond the moon’s secondary sun-glow to the greater cosmos with only our accustomed ego sight and just as challenging to transcend our accumulated emotional issues to take guidance from our higher self. We are now many millennia into our human tribe, country, family, class and personal coping mechanisms and most of these influences are based on unconscious habitual assumptions. The moon watches over us, and effects our weather and tides. We take her for granted and find her mysterious and yet familiar. We feel her inside as well as in the sky above. Yet she can be a step to launch ourselves into the cosmos or we can stay put and be lunatics.

 

 

 

 

THE UN-UNITED STATES

I began writing this piece before the first presidential debate on September 30, which I watched and sorry to say it turned out exactly as expected, although I was hoping for a surprise, something with substance. Trump was combative and primarily defensive, but I was disappointed that Biden allowed himself to be derailed by the emotional attacks. I won’t watch another one. There is nothing comparable in my memory.

The upcoming Presidential election is the strangest that I have experienced in the many elections that I have lived through. However, I do not think this situation came out of the blue, so to speak. Our United States has been less than united for some time. The turmoil in the country now may be more extreme but is not unexplainable.

For one thing our political ideology and our economic reality are at odds. We can hear, read, and see on YouTube that there is a secret cabal (it seems that fearful imaginations have created many versions) that runs the economy and controls the government. Whether or not there is a hidden cabal, someone is exploiting the people and they don’t know where this threat hides. This automatically generates suspicion and fear. This unknown exploiter takes the form of a dark god hidden behind a cloud of conspiracy theories. Certainly, it does not exist within the ideally transparent framework of democracy. There are many citizens that are disillusioned, frightened about the direction of the future and on the edge of a free-fall into poverty. Fear generates projected monsters of all kinds and our current political climate has these monsters popping up faster than we can remember their slogans.

 Just one example of invisible but immense power in the money world is Big Pharma. It bullies natural medicines into a corner because health insurance doesn’t cover natural medicines. The big pharmaceutical corporations operate in tandem with the health insurers. Our health, or more to the point, medicine itself is fixated on a technology and chemistry that needs our sickness to feed its great economic generator. Thus, many isolated malfunctions of the body are necessary in this system. We are living with little acknowledgment of the humanity or the wholeness of the individual patient. People don’t want to be machines whose lives are captive to impersonal corporations conveniently feeding on their suffering. Nor, do they want to be seduced into giving their power to those who promise to cure problems they didn’t know they had.

The unbridled competition that was supposed to make capitalism a self-correcting system because competition encourages invention and excellence has turned out to encourage deception and addiction even more. Furthermore, when growth becomes unhinged there is a race to a disastrous collision with reality. We are dependent on a planet with its own system of checks and balances that our economy wantonly ignores in the effort to make more, sell more, and encourage us to consume more. Mental health is more tenuous, crime rises while mood altering substance addictions continue to surge. Even crime and disease have become monetized as prisons and hospitals are now largely run by corporations.

People want to be represented as important to their government representatives and they have been left out of the know for a long time. Even a trapped mouse can be surprisingly fierce, and the people have been deceived with the big talk of empty promises, black suits, and white shirts. For many, Trump with his completely undignified street talk, disdain for rules, laws and even truth is the bad boy they wish they could be. He thumbs his nose at the system, declares bankruptcy, cheats on his taxes, and keeps on keeping on. He knows that lies told so often they numb the mind combined with the magic of getting away with anything he does gives him an aura of invincibility. Of course, that is exactly what he counts on. He has been flying by the seat of his pants and so far, it has worked. In short, he is a trickster.

He is an empty vessel with nothing tangible to give who changes shapes and colors like an octopus.  Like other dictators he speaks to the fears and resentments of people to get their support. Trump’s rough style lures his followers into believing he isn’t part of the system that is exploiting them and that he understands them. His Republican coalition in Washington know who he is but want to ride on his appeal to low income struggling people, farmers disenfranchised by corporations, and people whose jobs and investments are disappearing.  He takes attention away from the real culprits.

Trump’s people want to give hell to the leaders of a system that exploits them and keeps them futilely treading harder to stay above the deepening murky waters. This was the swamp that Trump promised to drain, but he doesn’t have the authority or ability to drain it and functionally deflects attention from the real culprits. His need for attention and admiration is a convenient distraction obscuring the real issues.   

The growing animosity between political parties is yet another time bomb. We have wandered a long way from a real democracy. When the political system and the economic system operate under opposite values.  The top down structure and confusing dissonance is deceiving. Corporations are not democratic. Employees are often almost slaves, with the difference they can quit, and they can be fired. Unless they are in one of the higher positions, they can’t afford to quit, and a real change requires either a leap of faith or just a fall off the edge.

Real democracy requires respect for people who are given equal value despite different backgrounds and different points of view. An attitude of respect and genuine interest in how to make our shared life work would be a good goal for respectful exchange. No one has the final truth. We are all in the school of life and of history. Defending one’s point of view as if one’s life depended on it has made real discourse and the possibility of seeing issues through someone else’s lens psychologically impossible. In Trump’s presidency winning an argument in any way conceivable is the only way. Unfortunately, this makes all the “losers” enemies. Thus, the divisive nature of Trump’s presidency. If one acts like everyone with a different point of view is an enemy, they will indeed become an enemy. It’s a self-fulfilling behavior.

We are becoming negative shadow images of each other. Opposites are not necessarily enemies; they are each other’s mirror. How did we create a Trump presidency? He was much happier as a reality TV performer. His supporters don’t seem to notice that he became the victim of a role he isn’t equipped for. He may be a user by background and habit but in this role, he is also being used. It may be that something has been unleashed with his presidency that will be uncontrollable by the very one’s who intended to use him as a cover and distraction.

I hope that Joe Biden wins the upcoming election, but I don’t think that will return us to peace and order and I don’t think that he can change the social tsunami heading our way. I fear that a number of recently uncaged monsters are now running away from it. They are bigger than Trump, and nobody will be able to put them back in their cages. This may be a necessary part of growing up as a nation going through an adolescent crisis, but I hope I’m wrong.