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Rattled

My car engine sputters with a death rattle.

I might start and I might not.

It’s her new thing.

I kill car batteries, solenoids and computers with mere proximity.

This could be on me.

A chiropractor once told me not to wear a watch as it made my electrical current run backwards. If you, like me, think that nothing is impossible, you won’t roll your eyes at that prognosis though of course I did.

A recent cardiology visit revealed a thunderous heart murmur. A cord in my heart had broken and one of my valve’s barn doors was flung open floundering in the rushing rapids of blood surging mistakenly backwards into my lungs.

My blown electrical circuits somehow don’t surprise me. It seems preordained.

Still, I refuse to grasp the implications. Don’t mess with me. I trust nothing.

My first instinct is RUN.

Not long after my Dad died two years ago the grandfather clock on the wall by my folk’s bedroom stopped.

 My mother dryly took it as an unallowable omen.

She reminded me of the old rhyme, “My Grandfather’s Clock” which someone put melody to and I know Johnny Cash sang years later.

Ninety years without slumbering tick tock tick tock

His life seconds numbering tick tock tick tock

But it stopped short never to go again when the old man died.

Wisely I had told her nothing of my hereditary plight. Bullet dodged.

I collect vintage clocks. There are never too many clocks thinks the woman who always runs behind.

My office clock stopped the week I saw the cardiologist.

Batteries couldn’t revive it.

Rattled, I wouldn’t wait for an estate sale or antique mall.

I ran to the nearest store and bought a random cheap thing from China to keep the beat going.

Tick tock tick tock.

I am not my clock.

Not the right vintage for death.

RUN from the thought.

The car radio played metal and blue grass new grass stringed whiplash music on the car ride toward stiff gurneys in freezing rooms.

They’d  check me out.

Down the throat.

Up the veins and arteries.

I’m hard wired to noisy machines.

Hear the whoosh of heart murmur, and screaming beeps.

Cold jelly probes by personality free techs are checked by overworked indifferent doctors.

I’m coming out of anesthesia number one waiting for the next one in another prep room.

This is nerve wracking.

Just put me out.

What’s taking so long!

The rattled cardiologist sticks his head in the door.

“It’s too chaotic, it’s too chaotic, you’ll have to wait. I can’t do it. The schedule is too full.

He looks Wiley Coyote insane. Smoke blowing out his ears.

The rattled patient screams back like a mental patient.

“No I can’t. I’m hungry, I’m freezing. I can’t stay here anymore. I have to go.”

He pauses, shocked.

“O.K. Get her in there now!”

The nurse sprints into action. Hurl tubes and medical crap onto my thin paper gown and well worn blanket.

It’s like an episode of E.R. and I say whoa if you don’t really have time I don’t want him doing this. It feels hysterical.

I’m told; we do this all the time. Don’t worry.

She grabs the IV pole.

The gurney rattles racing down the corridor.

The IV pole leans into the doorway on two wheels.

Feels like heavy metal medical rock and roll.

 I surrender.

Let’s dance.

They wheeled me into the chaos.

Aside~ I visited my mother where my lovely VW Beetle awaits me. The battery was dead. The clock in my bedroom had stopped. The wall clock outside my bedroom stopped the first morning I awoke.

Open heart surgery was imminent. I had to find the right surgeon. I was told I had no more than a few months to get it done before my heart was permanently damaged.

This is noted at the risk of you not believing me. This sounds to you like a gross exaggeration. Too much equals unbelievable and boring.

Unbelievable and also boring it is.  But true.

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Tyree Nichols Has Risen

Three days to die, to lay in wait

till his specter appeared in the harsh glare of the nation’s spotlight for the entire world to witness.

Tortured by the murderous blows of five “peace” officers  

Against this one slight and gentle soul

Whose crime, mistrust,

formed by scores of injustice,

told him to run.

The police assassins ravaged and raged while those hired to serve and protect stood by

as he cried out for a mother who wasn’t there.

Who will condone this, copy this, crow about it and

where will my sons be when they come again?

Crap shoot is our condition,

luck good or bad.

Chance translates to anxiety.

Anxiety silently kills

as sorrow becomes our national pastime.

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The Inmates Run this Institution

Mentally deficient politicians dictate the laws of this country.

Mental illness is the murder problem, say the mentally deranged who decide these things.

Three years difference in age will fix the problem of gun fueled rage is the only dared position of the opposition who know nothing can be done anyway. Few are brave enough to demand all assault weapons illegal.

Assault weapons can stay because the minority unhinged who vote or the morally bankrupt money worshipers who provide the guns will keep corrupt legislators in power.

Any person with the urge to buy an assault weapon is clearly mentally unhealthy.

In a country that doesn’t take care of its poor, homeless, elderly, one feels that job security is the thin veil between victim hood and self determination.

Rather than fix the country for all of us they will cling to their jobs. Though they could band together for justice they don’t trust each other enough to make a move. They work for themselves and no one else. They live in social isolation.

We are scared and broken and self serving. Scared and broken, self serving should replace liberty and justice for all.

Job security determines the votes in Congress; power determines the ruling from Justice.

Humanity rots under the fallen moldy canopy of a once bright American sky.

Mental illness is not a singular problem but the general condition of a people with no hope, no power and no pride.

Lady Liberty’s statement of independence no longer describes independence from oppression but anarchy.

Huddled masses of bloody children yearning to be free.

Freedom is for the killers and opportunists.

The rest are managed. Mange our bodies, our education, our marriage, our vote.

The United States is now the shit hole country that Trump declared the less advantaged.

The would-be autocrat and his coven of craven cowards have advanced the darkness within us all.

Sorrow and hate rise quickly to surface at the least provocation.

Mental sickness is our status.

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Buried Alive

February 2021

We lie but do not rest in peace beneath a white shroud. Sea to shining sea, there is no footing in this block of ice though human footprints soften in drowning snow.

The sound of my own thoughts is the only sound I hear.

Snow is a quiet that’s not the absence of sound but a sound itself.

Different than the hush that keeps spiraling in a year of tornadoes, floods, fires and quarantine.

Perhaps it’s the lone balance for the chatter of political dissent that roared ceaselessly across the airwaves, on twitter, the internet, our conversations, that kept us in touch.

Eleven months after global quarantine, we shelter in place once more.

Nature’s shots keep pace with shots in arms. Her power is a fury.

Blessed be the tired earth as it slays its inhabitants again.

The virus persists but the people weary of worry laid down their guard and rushed to work and habit.

Lack of discipline or protection sent us back to life marked at dawn ringing alarms.

Alarm. What is that? How is that a word to wake up to?

Alarm is the ringing bell of my awakening.

How long must I hide out because others will not?

Their habits prolong my prison sentence as they excuse themselves from the table.

How will I get to my ailing parents?

What use am I to anyone here in the confines of my home asylum.

Every day the same day. Every thought the same thought.

Buried alive.

But now the snow melts and rain moves toward us on the scent of spring.

The nature of man is undeniable.

Even as we ready for floods, warned again,

We rise from the burial ground like ghostly shadows

And reach for the light.

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Light Peeks Through the Cracks of Our Broken Home

The Inauguration of Joe Biden 2021

Spring air teases the forsythia and bluebirds forward. The white cold light of winter still shines slantingly through my Southern facing windows this early dawn. It will soon shift to the northern side of this house and morning will be less of a call to attention as the days drift on for hours, eventually bleeding into night.

On this day that Donald Trump departs he will take despair with him. He will carry the crushing weight of hate away on the country’s helicopter. His departure will unclog the suffocating sludge of contention that has sucked the oxygen from our people.

It will feel that way for some of us. Some of us will follow the fumes kicked up by his dust, hoping to stay in his reality star story. Some will choose lies but most will roll over with exhaustion hoping for an unbroken rest now that he’s been replaced by a human being whether it be in defeat of their vote or victory.

Will we emerge from the bunker rolls of toilet paper and paper towels to wonder at our prison walls? Will we stare in confusion at the storehouse of swabs, sanitizers, soaps and wipes stuffed into corners?

Will we ever look at a communal bowl of food without horror? Will we find the old friends waiting and pick up the pieces as if they’d never broken?

What do our jobs that were lost mean now? Were we necessary and is there a place for us? What do the jobs we’ve done from home feel like when we take them back to the circle of others? Are we glad for the company of others or too tender from our quiet time in solitary?

Who do we trust?

I know yoga but yoga has not saved me this year. Love has been buried beneath fury, joy subjugated beneath fear.

It took most of the year but on insurrection day January 6th, that news overriding the daily death toll that remains consistent, it seemed hopeless and forever that I’d live in a wasteland after so many wonderful years in this beautiful country.

Trying to put myself into the shoes of those I disagreed with sent shivers through my soul. Spending time in their skin sickened me though I did try to sympathize or make excuses for them. From this, this yoga teachers’ circuits are fried but not irreparable.

The mother board is undergoing a systems analysis. The memory will be rebooted, the dust blown away, old programs discarded, the hardware upgraded.

Could this moment seem so potent if not for the last four years plus of trauma?

Perhaps the breakdown, the degradation and shame of our collective national consciousness is for a moment, the pathway to equity, community, and yes, love.

Let’s stay here in this moment. Draw it out with feathery breaths. Soak in the possibilities, breath out the past.

Love, Hilary

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Post Capitol Hill Combat, Corporate America Replaces a Republican Conscience 2021

Corporate America is fleeing the corpse of the Republican party on the heels of international horror as American democracy unraveled at the hands of the empowered, entitled and greedy.

Donald Trump, his family, followers advisors and sycophants hammered home the message they shoved in our faces for four years plus. Morality is what they say it is, truth is what they say it is, ownership of the government is what they say it is and they finally declared it was theirs with a war cry to their red hatted army to seize it.

It might have gone by as quietly as every other injury visited on America but for the public display of destruction it wrought on January 6th at the Capitol.

Finally this was too much to dismiss as it’s just Trump, he doesn’t mean it.

Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard, famously declared in the run for presidency 2016 that corporations were people. That’s because they have to answer to their investors.

Corporations fund political campaigns. Corporations bank on who will fill their coffers. Politicians bank on who will fund them.

Corporations are pulling financial support from Republicans who stood with Trump against the 2021 elections results. World opinion matters to business. World opinion is that America is a shit hole country. Still one worth investing in for now but big money is hedging its bets.

Republicans are pivoting as fast as they can to denounce the support they gave publicly days before in order to save their political skin. Without corporate money they have no chance of keeping their seats.

The public outcry for campaign finance reform has been loud and ongoing though no inroads are made because they would have to be made by politicians who don’t want them.

Corporate political sponsors are on the right side of history now for a minute when almost half the country doesn’t know truth from fiction. Nearly half the country is complicit in the ongoing domestic terrorism that Trump fomented with his first public statement that Obama wasn’t a citizen culminating in the cry for a violent overthrow of the government as his reign of terror comes to an end.

What does it say that the next onslaught of news: revolution, corruption, violence, unmasked Covid spreading Republican congressmen is a relief from near a year of killer virus facts and fiction?

What does it say that this man told the bloodthirsty murderous mob that they were “very special” people who “we love..” and people who voted for him just weeks before have no remorse that this was their choice as they tsk tsk he went off the rails.

Somehow they didn’t mind the bullet train he was steadily driving into the heart of America from the first campaign stop. Until now, when things started looking really bad for them.

Money worship is the obscene idolatry that fomented this moment. The Republican party continues to fall in line.

Welcome to the Civil War.

Hilary

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Your Emotional Response is Not Your Response

Trump, his family, his lawyer, his Chief of Staff, his Senate and House coat tail political aspirants, enabled by a complicit Republican party incited his base to surge the Capitol in protest against the 2021 election results.

And they did. The scenes on television were horrific. People were terrified and so shaken that at the last moment of a four year assault on truth and fellowship, a purposeful fracturing of a country for personal gains and before that a methodical discrediting of the Black president and then the cruel dismembering of every one of his political opponents in the race for the Presidency, so shaken that for almost a day they ditched support for the creature they co-created.

And then they started spinning stories, about themselves, and this man who went off the rails as if he was on any rail from the moment he grabbed the political spotlight.

Why be so arrogant that you can’t admit you turned your head against his racism, audacious lies, thievery because you liked what he could do for you? Because it was easy and it didn’t directly affect you? Why feign shock at the culmination of what was the only possible outcome of this sociopath turned psycho?

Why defend the political party that two days after the siege shows only a 27% rate of concern that this was a huge deal.

The fringe splintered and seems to be dragging the Conservatives with them.

Look how Mitch McConnell has rushed to recess the Senate until the day before Biden’s inauguration so they can’t vote to impeach or remove him. Listen to the spin to blame left wing conspirators. I’m sure they would have blamed Black Lives Matter as well but it was hard to find a black or brown face in the crowd.

The RNC quietly renominated the puffy powdered Trump smitten chairwoman in a cozy meeting that worried not about the events of days before.

Why defend yourself as a member of a soul sacrificing fractured group that Trump’s advisor and son in law bragged openly is no longer the Republican party but the Trump party! You have not platform, no party, no ideology now. You have spent any good will years ago as the party of fiscal moderation or independence.

Maybe you don’t care. Maybe you aren’t capable of admitting you got it wrong. Maybe you like these protesters carrying your secret fury for you. Maybe you are them.

Maybe it’s convenient to ignore or dismiss your indifference. Like the outrage after every mass murder shooting shown on television after a few days you realize it’s not your problem at your door and easier to forget about it than do something about it.

Everyone knows what a nice person you are. Good parent, provider, neighbor, friend. You’d do anything for the people in your circle.

And that’s where it stops.

Kids in cages stolen from their parents, foreigners seeking asylum stopped at borders,abused animals, starving children, workers doing three jobs to keep their homes, wildlife sacrificed for deregulation, health care costs insurmountable, it’s not your problem.

Smug, you think, I did what I have to do to take care of my own. Keep your hands off and get yours like I did.

No nuance for you.

I wrote about the feral morons who stormed the Capitol but that wasn’t all of them. Yes the visual was Duck Dynasty but millionaires flew in private planes for the event. Middle and upper class educated people attended the insurrection, Duck Dynasty beneath their discount designer labels.

They were radicalized by the internet.

Shame on educated people to be so gullible. A villain with mind control just had to stoke the flames. His followers kept them burning.

Shame on you. I am particularly offended by descendants of Holocaust victims who shrink from the idea of asylum seekers or people who want a better life from entering this country. Trump surrounded himself with the most corrupted of them. More opportunity for Jew haters to find scapegoats as the tide turns and the mob turns its bloodshot eyes toward Mike Pence with cries of “Hang Mike Pence” for not doing Trump’s bidding as his term of bag-man comes to an end.

Trump will slink away from Twitter’s locked doors and take his place in the underworld on the dirty web.

You’ll pay no attention until your television explodes again.

And you’ll blame someone or something else.

But never yourselves.

Hilary

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The Miserables 2021~Our National Disgrace

Chromosome cracked lead chewing drooling hags and blood thirsty Trump thugs breached the Capitol.

Trump finished off four years discrediting the free press with a final desperate blow to democracy as he urged forward the cretins he unearthed unmasked by tweet and lie to keep the throne.

Democratic elections are fake news for the base. He did that.

Bravo to the reality star.

He’s not what he projects but what he creates in concert with believers.

What an award worthy show! Present him with the steaming pile of shit he created on a gold platter. He loves gold. He knows shit.

Clap for him Tinkerbells. Clap or he fades away. Didn’t you hear him demand your applause? Didn’t you hear him beg you to love him?

The bottomless pit of human fury frustration and ignorance swallowed us whole on the day of Joe Biden’s entrance.

Trump’s bottomless pit of desire married to the base’s bottomless pit of anger bore deplorable actions.

Yesterday the roaches who had built his dirty castle, filled the moat with man eating reptiles scuttled to microphones to disassociate themselves as the curtain came down.

Don’t you dare praise these Trump water-boys trying to save their political skin!

While their colleagues equivocate Black Lives Matter protests with the insurrection they are silent.

Had one black face stormed that building it would have faced a SWAT team and probably been shot without a second thought.

This is no contrition, just a different dance.

Maintaining imbalance in the populace is like shooting fish in a barrel and they know it. A barrel of human chum they toss for the cameras at the rallies and on the tweet chain so the clueless fish keep taking the hook.

So busy are we wondering at the failure of law enforcement to stop the insurgence we haven’t even begun to note the event as another in the long year of Trump “super spreader” events.

Mutating virus is just a metaphor for Trump poison as the world looks on in horror.

Bitchin Yoga mic drop. I’m out.

Hilary

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Non-Attachment in Binary Times

October 2020

Non-attachment in yoga recognizes the nature of impermanence. It does not imply that one doesn’t have opinions or desire a final result. It does mean that things have a beginning and an end and if you don’t see that then what you’re holding on to will hold on to you.

Is it possible to not be attached to the outcome of the 2020 election when a win by Trump feels like a plunge into a bottomless cesspool in the dark? Is it possible to not be attached to the outcome of one who will tip the balance of the Supreme Court to deny human rights in a country reputed to be a beacon for freedom?

When Trump was elected in 2016 I was fairly calm. I thought I understood that people voted for him because this government needed a shake down. Things were not that great here and the time was ripe for ripping the status quo a new one. But with each aberration of Trump and his support team and supporters growing exponentially worse I no longer understand.

And acceptance is out of the question as he and his coven of Stockholm syndrome sycophants place a young cult follower into the Supreme Court declaring that no one should be judged on their religious beliefs. This opens a door to a Q-Anon appointee or a maybe someone whose religion is cannibalism. In a country where you can declare anything you want to be your religion this is an unacceptable non-qualifier. And that appointment is permanent unless you want to bank on death which is just a lousy karma way to think..

Non-attachment seems like a cop out though who wouldn’t want to claim it? How does living under a despotic regime not claim you even though you turn inward! It does. But at least there are elections unlike the permanence barring death in the Supreme Court.

“It is what it is” is now a death mantra of a broken down accidental President whose “it is what it is” referring to 200,000 dead citizens happened because he was more attached to the stock market than the welfare of the people he was supposed to protect.

Man! I am not a fan of it is what it is. Such a cop out. Derisive detachment.

The destroyer in chief is Shiva opening the gates of awareness. Scum is rising as he’s encouraged it to surface. We are a country ridden with racists, morons self serving money hoarders and sexual deviants. Thank you. Now we know. Now get out of here.

With such a boldly villainous outreach from the Republican party, any backlash by the opposition seems by contrast that much nobler than perhaps would be the case in more moderate times. They are by default the good guys. Even more, the heroes of the people. Or that would be how one side sees them.

The title here is binary and binary is because things at the top are black or white. Like prison stripes. That is the prison of our choices made this narrow by this extremism by one party. Yes, I said one party because they are responsible. Not good people on both sides anymore. The other side may seem holy by default because it is the only position left in this dual but they are the humanitarians now.

Non-attached is delusion. What happens in your country does own you whether you like it or not. You are attached. There are no free woods to camp or farm, no free water, you have to pay the price that someone demands, you have to live by the rules that someone sets for you. Maybe you think you can live in prison like some do and find God or whatever peace you call it within those confines. Maybe you can bank on it’s not forever although it’s your forever if you are older or your kids forever if the impact will last for decades.

And what of sifting the real from the unreal? The moment from the potential? What of the veil of illusion we yogis consider to be the detriment of reason? This time of stark differences, this battle for the soul of a country has mounted a war on emotional balance as well. One has to manage the mind to keep hysterics at bay. The assault against the weakest has frightened most of us.

We are living in a what if time. Binary feeling like will I live or die? Will I thrive or falter? So much shift to the unknown that was always so but now marked in real time by real problems. Masked, sanitized and hunkered down not knowing who or what will be the ax or anvil.

I’m off to have a hip replaced. I have ignored the pain and limping for as many years as I can remember to avoid putting this body in the hands of anyone, to avoid the risk of a foreign body in this body.

On my surgery day the Supreme Court will be decided, Biden and Trump will battle at Belmont University for the presidency, a stranger will dislocate me and put me back together. I will ,whatever happens in all this, have to shift, find peace in the space within the seeming solidity of chance and all its what ifs.

Is there non-attachment to personal outcome? Can one protect the integrity of “I” apart from outcomes beyond our control?

In a world where the surface is home it is not easy to imagine that. Yes, we live on the surface. The surface matters.

There is a biblical reckoning happening here. The truth of mortality seems realer than ever. Things some of us could not fathom are forming. We are called to resist harmful outcomes. We are called to stay sane and calm despite them. We are called to ease attachment to that which we can’t control. But only once we’ve given all to control it.

Good luck.

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Simply Complicated

I can’t remember where I read this mother’s account of her son’s last words: “It was all so simple. “ He was referring to life.

 

I stopped reading though her account had just begun. For the profundity of his finding in that moment took me aback where in another time it might have just seemed another hackneyed observation. And also, because I am a mother of sons.

 

But that statement indicates that there is no reason to worry. It disrobes the drama that is worry. It implies that everything is O.K. while these days it definitely feels like everything is certainly not going to be O.K.

 

It’s simple, eh? We are here to love and be loved. That is simple and beautiful enough. But I have rarely heard of a human life unfolding seamlessly.

Cheekwood optic fiber cotton candy Bruce Monroe by Rob Lindsay

Despite a desire to love and be loved or because of it, when someone doesn’t treat us well a worm of doubt assures us we are not worthy and the bad feelings get paid forward in future relationships.

 

Evolution as actualization begins at birth. In spite of the immense beauty that surrounds and buoys us, it is discomfort by way of desire or avoidance that keeps us moving.

 

Beyond that, we do not live to love only. We live to survive and survival comes first. In a system that demands we compete to survive love can get lost in the shuffle. And the shuffle has gone beyond our inside circle. Our connectivity is both support and pain.

 

Memory says that things are not O.K. We wrestle the future. We enter the news and become part of the stories that shock us. Acts unspeakable and not understandable are committed by people who are like us in most ways. Mutation happens within our tribes. We are tribal. In small ways and large, people act badly. Equilibrium abides because in small ways and large, we also act kindly.

 

We extend a helping hand to nations beyond ours but our service is a form of dominance and the seeds that spawn the grain are tainted. Our produce is a reflection of corporate power. If we enjoy the agricultural that created a Honeycrisp apple we can’t be surprised that technology also brought forth monster seeds. It comes at once. A revolution of technology followed a revolution of industry and fostered worldwide revolutions of disgruntled reactionaries who keep our hair raised and our fear at code red.

 

Nothing is simple. Or is it?

 

Spirit guides point me to a commonplace hearkening I’d become deaf to. Turn the other cheek is not so different from love your enemy or even love no matter what. No matter the circumstances, the human is urged to act alone as an act of rebellion. Defy fear. Do not hate. Love despite all. The act of loving oneself and one’s testy neighbor is revolutionary. That is the telling of non-reacting that is yoga washed in Buddhism.

 

In this midnight awakening it seems true and possibly simple. If we only loved from the first consciousness there would be no fear. Without harm or threat of harm things would be less complicated. But we messy human beings came wired for fear. We come with internal landmines that might or might not be active.

 

 

The wrestle with demons is the fable of heroism, the story of good v. evil we crave. If it is not in our own lives we seek it in stories of others. Perhaps that is what was and is so simple; To know our own nature and abide calmly in it.

 

 

 

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