A Paper from Another Life

As I enter the ninth month of my separation from the State Bar, while the sting of its denouement to my ego, which thought it deserved better, repeats--if I think about it--I think about it less and less. Concomitantly, I realize more and more that I have been liberated, through no action of my own, and given a splendid opportunity to let each day unfold and to savor it while my health allows.  I hope, of course, that it will be a goodly amount of time given to me. Because of a high risk of heart disease (family) and my own high blood pressure (made much better by both medication and a far less stress filled existence these days), my internist has me take stress echo cardiograms (there is at least one entry about that about a year or two ago) and today I had another, and well, "passed". I am not in good shape yet, still overweight, still not exercising


In a way, I guess, my "paring down" is spiritual as well as material.


I have begun posting some non-blog writing from pre-blog days, a kind of combination of the material and the spiritual  purgation. Re-organizing my old journals, I ran across a paper I wrote for some class I had now more than 13 years ago, when I was studying to be a psychologist. As many of you know, and some may not, I took evening and weekend classes for nearly six years, all but dissertation and final oral examinations. My reasons for stopping the pursuit and moving into management at the Bar instead may one day be the subject of another entry, but for now, I will reprint this paper. As both a client of therapy and a student of it, I needed to integrate my faith and the many variations of the "talking cure". I never liked the chasm between the two camps, those religious folk who distrusted psychology and those secular folk who distrusted and even discounted the need for religious belief. I saw them always as complements of one another, not adversaries. I wasn't original in that, but it was not a well known subject of advocacy. As a patient I did not want to be talked out of my religion. It was one reason I had delayed ever seeking a therapist. As a trainee therapist, I knew how indispensable the structure of religiosity was for a client who came with life issues for sorting out and how precious and I did not want to talk such a person out of it. It was part of our respective essences. So, in some class I presented this paper. I recall also another--on sexuality--in which I did a talk about the need for therapists to be cognizant and sympathetic and not dismissive of religious precepts that informed client function, and dysfunction in the arena of human intimacy. I don't think I wrote a formal paper there; if I did, it will turn up and I will consider posting it. But this one is present and accounted for and provided for whatever interest you might have in it.


It was called, "Points of Intersection in the Goals and Methods of Christian Mysticism and Psychotherapy".

Some months ago, I went to dinner with a long time friend who is profoundly suspicious of psychology and, what she calls its "false premises". We are both practicing Catholics. Her Catholicism is far more certain, publicly and privately, than is my own.  She is given to open reference to god, the Lord's Will, and to regular exhortations on the power of prayer.  I respect her and admire her faith. 


I am, however, more what Malcolm Muggeridge denominated the "fitful believer" (Muggeridge, 1988). I cannot, however much I might wish to do so, lay claim to belief, once and forever.

It would be comforting to be able to say, 'Now

I see!'  To recite with total satisfaction one of the

Church's venerable creeds:  'I believe in God, the

Father Almighty. . .'  To point to such a moment

of illumination when all became miraculously

clear.  To join with full identification in one

of the varieties of Christian worship. . .Comforting

but alas, it would not be true.  The one thing

above all others that You require of us, surely,

the Truth.  I have to confess, then, that I can only

fitfully believe, can believe no creed wholly,

have had no self-sufficing moment of illumination.

(Muggeridge, 1988)

My friend's words worried me, as had my own acquiescence to therapy when I sought it and found myself profoundly interested in both its theory and practice. I have harbored the incipient concern, despite an adequate academic and cognitive understanding to the contrary, that I might lose even my fitful belief as I explored the field of which Freud, considered anti-religious, is the most well known progenitor.  It has often occurred to me that I have lost that faith and may not have realized it.  I will not, however, accept or resign myself to that idea.  So, I have had something of a hero and heroine in Sts. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, and in one of their interpreters, Thomas Merton. 

It has always seemed to me that therapy is a sibling or cousin to their purgative process with several points of intersection. 

It was quite pleasing in the course that has required this paper that their method was a precursor of modern psychotherapy.  To be sure, one has a theological Divine end, relationship with God, and the other a whole human relatedness, but both effect a cure of soul.  Perhaps it is to be said they have the same end and a complementary approach. In each, the end is true identity.  In each we can lay claim to disposing of false selves.  For the Christian mystic, that is sin. For the therapist, it is those perceptions, ideas, feelings, behaviors which get in our way, which distort our relationships, which are equally "an orientation to falsity, a basic lie concerning our own deepest reality." (Finley, 1988).  What if they are the same thing and we have simply not understood it to be so?

Both have methods which are at once detached and passionate.  The way of St. John and St. Theresa is one of detachment "from possessiveness in natural things."  (Kavanaugh and Larkin, 1987) And yet, St. John wrote what can only be described as sensual poetry about an unfettered, intimate relationship with God by removing layers of distraction and the inauthentic parts of our natures.  For example,

How gently and lovingly

You wake in my heart

Where in secret you dwell alone

And in your sweet breathing,

filled with good and glory.

How tenderly you swell in my heart with

love.

(Kavanaugh and Larkin, 1987)

In relationship is the cure and the restoration of the true self. The therapist has an odd human mystery. God has His cosmic Mystery. Relationship with God may not be so unlike relationship with a therapist.  Both peel away the distracting, the unnecessary, the wounding, the obstructive.

The mystic in progress reaches the top of the mountain by the road of "todo y nada"--"all and nothing." 

To reach satisfaction in all

desire its possession in nothing

To come to possess all

desire in the possession of nothing.

To arrive at being all

desire to be nothing.

To come to the knowledge of all

desire the knowledge of nothing.

To come to the pleasure you have not

you must go by the way in which you enjoy not.

To come to the knowledge you have not

you must go by a way in which you know not.

(John of the Cross, quoted by Kavanaugh and Larkin 1988)

It is a tumultuous process. At first there is fervor and a sense of relief, even power. But then, something nearly unmanageable settles into the soul.  A darkness, but more than that, for it includes futility, even a desire to move no further.  It is desolation. Utter absence.  But then, I am reminded that it is in absence that we understand presence, the presence of other, or the Other.

God brings these people into the way of

life by depriving them of the light and

the consolation which they seek, by impeding

their own efforts, by confusing and

depriving them of the satisfactions which

their own wishes, their self-esteem, their

presumption, their aggressivity and so on are

systematically humiliated.  What is

worse, they cannot understand how this

comes about!  They do not know what is

happening to them.  It is here that they

must decide whether to go on in the way

of prayer under the secret guidance

of grace in the night of pure faith or whether

they will go back to a form of existence

in which they can enjoy familiar routines

and retain an illusory sense of their perfect

autonomy in perfectly familiar realms, without

having to remain subject to the obedience of

faith in these trying and baffling circumstances

proper to the 'dark night'. (Finley 1988)

It is a tumultuous process as well in modern psychology. The therapist is exhorted by Bion to let go of memory, desire and understanding when approaching a session (Seinfeld, 1996). 

The client goes down a dangerous, unknown, not pleasurable road.  Failed for example, by a mother who was not 'good enough' the client develops a mask of compliance, creates a false sense of relationships, which might even appear to be real, abut are not. (Davis and Wallbridge, 1981).  It is familiar and preferable even if all relationships are rendered null by this way of being.  To unmask, and to examine the mask requires a period of darkness, of aridity, parallel to the 'dark night of the soul'. The client may experience at first a sense of relief and well being, often considered the 'transference' cure.  But then, it becomes more difficult as the client proceeds through the different levels of self and relationship. Some may leave the process, for it is too difficult, too painful, too long. The therapist will remind the patient, "I know of no other way".  Those who can endure the unknown will continue. Those who cannot, flee.  The desire to run is compelling. Therapy is not for the faint of heart.

While, as I have said, I admire my friend's faith, I cannot agree with her that psychology has false premises.  There are points of divergence to be sure from religion, from the truly mystical.  But in significant ways, there are the substantially similar goals and approaches. It can be no accident that the heroes and heroines of psychology have had as part of their psychic structures the religions of their youths and even, adulthood. Perhaps religionists would call them heretics.  Gassner. Jung. Even Freud, despite his protestations was a creature of the Judaic tradition which cultivated him.  It was compelling enough that he analyzed Moses himself.  For my part, I will not accept that therapy and the religious 'dark night of the soul' are other than kindred spirits.

I wish that some of these thoughts had come to mind that night in a Westside restaurant with my friend. Apolgia for faith in both religion and therapy. Here I am, Lord, devotee of John and Teresa and Freud and his psychoanalytic progeny.  





The Fine Print of Deception

Last Saturday, my uncle Steve, just about 87 years old, recovering surely but slowly from a stroke, looked at an advertisement distributed by K-Mart for a reclining chair. He has been in search of a reclining chair for a reasonable price, for some time.. Apropos of this tale, we live in an area where there is a large proportion of elderly residents receiving circulars like this one. The chair was advertised at $199.99, regularly nearly $300.00. 

Now none of the text with these sales are generally very large, except the price--as intended to catch the eye of the unwary consumer unschooled in the psychology of advertising, "make 'em want it and then change the game."  

I got a call from my aunt as my uncle, stronger but yet tenuous on his cane, was insisting on walking to K-Mart, some half a mile or more away to see the chair.  This would have been worrisome enough, except that it was also a day in which it had rained and was threatening rain again.

It would not likely be possible to dissuade my uncle from the destination, (he is my father's brother and stubbornness is a family trait), but I offered to drive.

And there it was, the chair advertised for $199.99. My uncle had the ad in his hands. "I'll take it; that's a great price."  And then. . .

"I'm sorry sir, this price does not go into effect until tomorrow, Sunday."  It is rare that I invoke my lawyerly background. When it comes to my own business, I prefer the non-confrontational approach, and I simply would slither away, annoyed but chairless.  But after all this, I was not about to allow what appeared to me to be a basic "bait and switch". You advertise a price and then, there is some reason it does not apply. In the case of someone who has come a distance or has his or her heart set on the item, or cannot come back the next day, this is a gimmick to lure the soul into making the purchase at the original price. 

I went to see a manager. The first one was a woman, who alas, I could barely understand who did point out to me some fine fine print at the bottom of the advertisement. Get your magnifying glasses out, it's under the 99.99 twin and 269.99 queen. It says that the sale doesn't actually begin until March 18, which was the next day.  A few pages in, in blue, also at the bottom in slightly larger print, it says the same thing.

The upshot was, "so you see, stupid lawyer person" (she did not say this but it was the clear message), it's there, we tell you, so that's it, that's the deal."  Uh-huh.

About a year or so before my job parted its way with me, and although managers did not generally try cases, I stepped in at the last minute on a case of a lawyer whose efforts to solicit inmates to hire him result in his putting things like "legal mail" or "attorney-client correspondence" or mixed variations thereof on the envelopes. If something is legal mail, this means it comes from your lawyer and the guards must bring it to the prisoner, without looking at it, for them to open. But when it is an advertisement, of which they receive a surfeit, they simply discard it. This lawyer claimed he was "trying" to be clear, but in fact, he was trying to get the correspondence by the guards. There were also issues with the size of his disclosures, to the extent that there were any, which came, in the correspondence after you had to read everything else. His solicitations or communications were considered by the Bar to be deceptive and in violation of the rules--even though he protested again, and accused the Bar of being vile and obstructive, he was "trying" to comply with the rules with his contorted language.  It was very simple. Put the word ADVERTISEMENT on the front where it could be seen. But that would not have served his purposes.  

In this K-Mart situation, I pointed out to the manager that no one, let alone an old person, could possibly see that "disclosure" of the timing of the sale. The fact that it is there, buried, may mean it is not out rightly fraudulent, but it was surely deceptive. If you really want people to know when the sale begins, then that should be in larger letters, like, at the top, so they don't show up to be shown the minuscule print that sends them away. Otherwise, the smaller the print, the more that you are obviously hiding, but being "technically" in accord with the law, which you were forced to do in the first place. 

 

"You do not understand, ma'am."  Oh, yes, I understand. Another place where people are being shall we say, fastened to insanity by a verbal screw.  I asked for another manager. And then a third.. I got Edgardo (I think that's the spelling) as I was returning to my uncle downstairs, with my point being, "I don't care about the darn chair, but this is simply another form of a bait and switch." . Edguardo was very nice, and had been consumer training school, using all the buzzwords of how much they wanted to satisfy the customer, and we'll listen to everything you have to say, and then say our usual line. 

I heard things about the customer being right, except it was clear that no one working there thought I was right. I was being "handled." Being "handled" infuriates me. We'll "give" you the chair for the sale price. I am glad my uncle got the chair (and the coffee he said was also in another part of the circular), but they were still missing the point. But, as they say, we were not going to have a meeting of the minds, and I had burdened Edguardo more than enough with my laments, and I thanked him for his patience as he was only the messenger of the deception, not it's progenitor. 

If you WANT people to know the facts then you'll state them clearly; if you don't and here placement is so obviously to deceive, then you'll do this kind of chicken ---- stuff and skewer the public, who apparently is getting so used to it, they will ultimately lose all freedoms. But if you are not yet willing to give up your soul, read the fine print and wait till the next day,. Better, don't buy it at all, and talk with your wallet. A barren cash register is more persuasive than any education in ethics or morality.

This is not just K-Mart. This is the world. The world (as human beings are managing it) stinks.

At least my uncle will have a nice chair when the apocalypse comes. We both think it will be very soon.     

"Bee" Brave

So, I had left my disrupted apartments (both of them) to attend to my duties as a reader for "Learning Ally"
(formerly known as "Reading for the Blind and Dyslexic). Today, after a rare California rain, it was still crisp (in our parlance around 55 degrees) during the day and sunny, the hills glinting pristine as I drove down Fountain Avenue.


I had decided to forego the radio in favor of a distracted recitation of the rosary, which only got more distracted when a bee half flew and half dropped onto my windshield and onto my wipers. I know insects have a very short life span, and my first thought was that this bee was on my car to take its last wing flicks.


I became fascinated with the creature, who was a bit of a more compressed version of the picture here. But his eyes looked pretty much the same and my real visual alternated with the one in my head, the bee from the Nasonex commercial. If this bee talked, he probably would sound like Antonio Banderas, cum lamentations at the soon and untimely end of his buzzing life.


"Hail Mary, Full of Grace" alternated with "I wonder if the bee is dead already" and feeling like I should do something to make his passing less ignominious.


"Ok, Djinn, this is silly. I mean creatures like this die every moment. You will be feasting on some turkey tonight and won't have a thought about his former life, sacrificed for your meal." 'Tis true enough.


However, this bee had taken on a personal relationship with me by landing on my beaten up RAV 4, and I kept hoping as I peered at him intently during red lights that maybe there was a little bit of bee life left.


Nothing.  Nothing. Then oooh, his little wing moved. Did I see a spark in that beady eye?  Then he seemed to be trying to shake free of something. It occurred to me that when he thumped onto my wipers, something, some one of his thready tentacles, or two, got caught and he wasn't dying, yet, but was looking to get away from a poor choice of firmament that as it was moving, wasn't very firm.


Now, I knew what I must do. I must carefully lift the windshield wiper on my side without ripping something off the beastie and maybe he'd fly away.  Except this wasn't easily done requiring more time than a stoplight maneuver.  Besides I was a little embarrassed at what my gyrations would appear to be--crazy.


I decided to wait until I got to my destination, the studios of Learning Ally maybe a mile or two more away.
He wasn't moving again. Likely, too late.


And then I got there. Parked my car out of the immediate sight of two older men engaged in an animated conversation in Russian, I think, so they wouldn't see what I was doing. I raised the windshield wiper, carefully. The bee, that poor brave bee, did not move, well whatever it is that they have to move.

.
Well, whether it were scared, or dead, I had to go, and I went about my two or so hours of volunteering with nary a thought of this most inconspicuous of creatures on my car, one wiper propped up.


I had almost forgotten the bee and my bother when I came back out, until I saw the still poised wiper.

The bee was gone.  I have chosen to think he has survived the night and will go about his bee business tomorrow. 


I never did get his name.  Only kidding.

Being Thirty, A Preface

This many years later, I think "being thirty" is a postscript, and one I can barely remember.


I ran across the above titled journal entry, which was intended initially as a letter to a friend of the same approximate age, that I never actually sent. 


If there was personal history behind me then, there is much more now. It took many more years after this for me to have the vaguest idea who I was, and I am hoping I have a few more in which to create some kind of meaningful coalescence. Anyway, here were my thoughts just before turning 30, before gray hair, when I was fairly thin and thought I was fat, when I was not unattractive, but had no idea, when I was just starting out in California for all practical purposes afraid to take the road to the creative and played it safe with the "law", at least two years before my 25 year "career" at the State Bar which ended in minutes as if it had never been.  If I live as long going forward as I have since I wrote this, I will probably been in a home telling people that my skin still looks young as I have no wrinkles. . .


A snapshot of the 29 year old Djinn on the cusp of 30 with the context of me from my law school yearbook, a few years before that, prior to my move to California, at age 25.  But I looked pretty much the same at 29 and I kinda like my law school yearbook picture. 

Being Thirty, A Preface:

An entirely subjective evaluation.
A fragmented evaluation.
Incomplete, like life.
I realize I have a history.
A personal history. A history of relationships, some ended, some still evolving.
And a history in conjunction with the rest of nameless mankind.

I realize, rather, I acknowledge, that I am progressing, and at the same time, moving toward the not so pleasant prospect of death.  But, though I joke about it, I really don't believe yet it will happen to me, or to my friends. I simply cannot avoid thinking about it more frequently than I would like, or more frequently than was necessary when I was a child--now since so many of my parents' generation are dead.

With their deaths, a chapter closes, making the chapter of being thirty more of a demarcation, than, say twenty.

When I was twenty my whole family was still alive. My mother was sick, but there was still a child-like hope of miracles. There was college, a myopic, but pleasant fantasy.

There were conclusive expressions about the future. Some of us knew exactly what we'd be doing at thirty.

Marriage and children. A possibility. Not much thought of.  And certainly, it would be done very differently from the parents.

I find myself longing now for a child.

I see from the many pregnancies in the die hard 'not me'ers' that I have not been the only one.

There is a certain predestination that our ardent intellectualizations cannot compete with.

I cannot certainly speak for my male counterparts, but I think there is a certain parallel. .

There's a lot of "who would have thought she/he would have done that" in my conversations these days.

And yet, all the things happening to us have been repeated in one fashion or another since. . .

Unique on one hand we are, very mundane,and predictable on the other.

I couldn't imagine thirty.  I cannot imagine forty.

We never learn. No reason to imagine. Or predict. It does no good. And interferes with living.

There's a feeling of a need to resolve things.  Only I don't know precisely what.  That is probably something that persists into old age--if we make it there.

And what we wanted to resolve vaguely at twenty is different, and still I don't know how, from what  we want to resolve at twenty.  I think. But who the hell knows.

The complications are different, but the sense is the same.

I think I'm more scared of seeing aging in others, than in aging myself.

Watching people I care about, or admire, even afar, lose that essence.  The soul fading with the body.

Hard to believe almost being thirty makes me think of such things.

Sometimes I ache with the feeling of something more.

I am continuing this pot pourri of thoughts after my last phone call with you.  And I'm nearly finished.

In a peculiar way I'm looking forward to this interim period between young and middle age.  Only now am I coming to know who I am. 

I've never been ready to share myself with people, that is, it was always an effort.  Now it begins to feel right. I begin to have a physical and a psychological sense of me.  Slow learner.

Maybe that's best.

So, while being thirty frightens me because I feel how fast time is going and while old memories are still so fresh, there is that cliche sense of embarking on something new.

So, here's to something (perhaps not everything) we have in common, being thirty, and having known each other through our twenties.

It was fun.  And now for a new chapter.

I enclose a picture featuring my name on an office door.  Close as I've gotten to a credit, thus far, in Hollywoodland.

Love, DMG, Esq.

Dancing Down (45) Memory Lane

Paring down has become a more manic affair.


Aside from my own reasons to simplify, my landlord, a good and lovely couple decided that my apartment was the next one for renovation of the kitchen. This is a great thing--but, with all the stuff I have, emptying the kitchen and the back porch (which is having tile put in) has become a herculean effort! The thing is happening in a bit of haste for a variety of reasons, and while it is terribly inconvenient, the result will inure to my benefit and so, this weekend is relocating what I am going to keep to the living room, closets and outdoors and culling out what I don't need anymore. 


In the porch in an old bookcase, I found my old 45 case. And a bunch of 45's circa the 1960s and somewhat thereafter.

Here it is!

I don't think this has been cracked open, even for a look see, in about 10 years. And until today, I hadn't played any of the records in probably 40 or more years. A couple of years ago, I got a digital record player that allows you to convert vinyl to memory stick. I have been very slowly moving LPs belonging to both me and my father to the stick. It is time consuming and so, when I was working regularly, I had little time to do it.  In the last few weeks I have probably converted about 25 albums, from Gordon Lightfoot to the Mambo with Tito Puente and such to the stick. It is a motley crew of music. I have enjoyed listening to music that used to waft around my original apartment with my mother and father back near Mt. Eden Avenue. I have badly down the cha-cha as the music played now in my Los Angeles venue.

But today, in my now fully messed up apartment, with towels, containers all around me, as I have begun to convert the 45's I removed from its dusty case, with its blue and green and white, square graphic, I was 12, 13, and 14 again. Lady Madonna, (the Beatles),  Lady Willpower (Union Gap) and Alice Long (Boyce and Hart) oh, and Valerie (The Monkees), I played these over and over and sang along and danced in my room, door closed against the prying eyes of my parents who had tried to shield me from the music of my day (ultimately without success) and here I was in this living room, nearly an upper middle aged spinster feeling precisely as the pubescent kid I used to be.

Those were some happy moments singing along to those songs. It was a time when I had no idea where I'd be long down the road, and certainly never did I think I'd end up in Southern California in those days--people tended to stay in their neighborhoods from birth to death back then--but something about the music always intimated possibility. I was on stage of course performing, what kid wasn't. The roar of the crowd would follow and I knew where I belonged, I would be making my way in the world that seemed so daunting. 

I don't worry much about my future any longer. Much of my future, well, it's my past now. I am learning to take each day as it unfolds, quietly, or as has been the case in the last couple of months, with lots of craziness and more agitation than I would like--with the confluence of all sorts of things that I might find easier to field singly.

I am about to take an old lap top and find a recycling place I found online. I'd prefer to toss it in the trash, but this would be inappropriate given the dangers of these old batteries. And then I have to pick up some prescriptions that remind me I am no longer a lithe (I was lithe until just about 15 and then the hormones seemed to have rendered me susceptible to well, the opposite of lithe). Later, or tomorrow, while I am still trying to organize the mess I have made to empty the kitchen, I will resume this pleasant walk down memory lane.

The people passing my window walking their pooches will no doubt wonder what is going on with the overweight definitely not a teenager belting out "I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition was In! (Oh, that's the First Edition).

Paring Down--Gulp!

Have you ever watched Hoarders on TV?


Well, good news. I am not as bad as that. Better news, I don't think I am close.


But I do like to control my universe by keeping things, things I never use, but there they are, on a shelf, just in case, there is a need for it.. Ever pick up something that you know you probably should get rid of? Here's what happens to me, bet it happens to you, too.


You have this poster, this great poster you got 20 years ago, but at the time you got it, you really did not have a place to hang it. But surely one day, you would! (How I don't know unless you gave up one of the things already on the wall!). You had to have it. It almost felt like a matter of life and death. So you got it! You admired it for quite a while at home but then put it in one of those holders for posters, rolled up neatly and safe, and placed it in your closet. Every time you open the closet, you see it. Every day, now, for 20 years.


"I think I'll have a garage sale" you say. And you go through all these things, things you haven't paid any attention to for ages, including that poster. You take the container into your hand. "Yes, I need to get rid of this, I'm never going to do anything with it."  But then, "I loved it then, I love it now." You take it out of the container. "Ohhh, no wonder I bought it, it is lovely. If I give it up, and I think of it one day I KNOW I'll regret selling it."  So back in the closet it goes. And every thing, big or small, the episode is repeated.


You should see me with books. I pull a few that I am simply sure that I have no further need of--one of my psychology books say-I have long since ceased the study of psychology. Then I start to rifle through it, and a paragraph catches my eye. Oh, this might come up. When?  No matter. It just might. The book goes back to its recesses to be forgotten for another few years.

And then, there are the things that people bought FOR you. Oh, boy. That's a really hard one, whether you like the item or not. Or know what to do with it. So, let's say you don't like the thing that was given to you at your 40th birthday (and for me that is quite a long time ago). What happens if you put it in the garage sale and then off the cuff, she asks you about it?  She never has, but sure as you are ready to get rid of it or do get rid of it. "Do you ever use the blah blah that I gave you?"   If you have "used" it, you can hedge, but if you haven't, the lie is ripe. It is a philosophical question whether one would call this lie spontaneous, or calculated, but either way. Never mind. I better not give it away. I have one thing like that, from my 50th, and it isn't exactlly that I don't like it, but I am not sure what to do with it. I think it may actually be rather valuable, a Villroy and Boch rabbit carrying a dove keepsake box? I think that's what it is. If you are reading this and you gave it to me, please know that I still have it, sitting on my jewelry box, but every so often I do think it is time to give it up. Well, looking at it, I am not sure I do like it. The rabbit is oddly posed and I cannot really understand why the dove is on his hand and another bird is in his breast pocket. Here is the photo. I have to admit that now that I took it, I kind of like him and am not sure I could give him up!

But you have no idea how much stuff like this, beloved, liked, and in a category of its own, that I have! 

I went through a phase of buying "Beanie Babies" in the 1990s.  Somewhere in the bowels of my mind I thought I might become a "collector", except I have no space to be a real "collector" and the twenty or more of them, each bought because it was cute, the polar bear, the several dogs of many different colors, the dragon, the bear eating a leaf, at least I think it's a bear, but bears are carnivores, oh well.  I had them in a plastic bag in the garage for a while and then I felt guilty, they looked so abandoned. And they are back in here again, interspersed among my book shelves in the little closet out of which I made a library of sorts.  I have other stuffed animals. Occasionally over the years I have given one of these ordinary stuffed animals to the children of friends of mine. And I can tell you that it has been hard for me to part with each one. Talk about needing a transitional object!  I apparently need a surfeit of them. Ok, I am not crazy about the vampire bear beanie baby so maybe he'll get the boot. But then, I think, what if I am throwing away money by selling it for like 2 dollars at a garage sale. Practical Djinn, such as she is, arises and remonstrates with me. "Go away, practical Djinn", I say. (ok, not really). 


For a lot of reasons, not the least of which is I sense a sea change in my emotional way of being, I need to pare it all down. Simplify. Oh, I have said this here before, I am sure, but I MEAN it, this time!


I have heard that the psychology of hoarding is that the person is trying to create a safe controlled space (even if it is to the third party eye a mess) in a world in which he or she feels otherwise out of control. I may not be a hoarder in the clinical sense, but I understand. These things I have always had around me, it feels safe, secure, as if the world will not change or devour me if they are here surrounding me and the memories they represent.

Silly girl. So, I shall push through my resistance and get rid of that which means more than it should. Really.

Job, and Me: Circa 1998

I have been attempting once again, to "de-clutter" my apartment, and my life.

This means--I have been going through lots of personal stuff, collected or created over many years in California. I ran across a couple of pre-blog pieces related to chapter, in my life that were so urgent then, but now, seven or more months into a new and very different one, almost seem to have involved someone other than me.


This one I titled, originally, "Job  Vs. Me", a tad of a grandiose title. Ah, well, I was young, under 50. It was all so long ago. I wonder if I imagined the fear I felt. It was a hard period. But then, we all have them, I have finally come to realize. And the difficulties comes in cycles. They came again this year. I still struggle with my faith, but I hope now, I am listening more closely. Time will tell.  Anyway, here it is, my rather morose musings of 1998, with nominal editing.

Even at my most optimistic, I have been a "glass half empty' kind of person. I think it is likely a form of superstition, genetic in part, but also the result of my particular religious and secular nature. Even in a moment of rare, seemingly unadulterated joy, I watch for the big foot of the gods, or God Himself, since I am a fifful Catholic Christian believer (borrowing from Malcolm Muggeridge) to step on me and remind me of my smallness and the extent of my powerlessness. 


I am afraid that my faith is conditional and with this perspective of God, to the extent I believe, I seem to subscribe in fact, though not in theory, to the angry God of the Old Testament rather than the saving and forgiving God of the New.  I have always been entranced, though not comforted by, that stern Protestant Jonathan Edwards" view. We are sinners in the hand of an angry God.  The picture:  humans held by the Hand of God by string over the fiery pit.  I hope Edwards is wrong and Mother Mary Ursula, my first grade teacher, was right, but I am not taking any bets.


I have been in therapy for some time and discussion of God or religion hasn't come up as often as I might have anticipated given my predilection to think about it and journal about it. But today, it did come up, when my therapist, raised a Catholic but struggling against its organized form, compared the events of my life in the last six months to the "trials of Job."


My Job was a little rusty. But I recalled that he was a good man who was the subject of a bet between God and Satan.  God pointed out just how good Job was. Satan said, something like, "Well sure, but it's easy to be good when you are protected and safe, living fat and happy off the land with your family and resources."  God said, "Hey, look it, i know that Job would still be faithful even if he lost everything."  Satan said, "Ok, God, put your money where your mouth is" and God let the worst be thrown at Job. Job argued and lamented, and others argued around him, and insisted that he MUST have done something to cause it, but Job kept faith with God. At the end of the torment, he did ask for an explanation, to which God said, "My Ways are not your ways".  Job accepted that. After all God is Omniscient. God is, well, God. 


The proud part of me would like to think that I have something in common with Job, but that proves the point that I don't, because the one thing Job was not, was proud. He was humble as heck. Secondly, I have since taken a look at the Book of Job and Chapter I says he was a "blameless and upright man who feared God and avoided evil."  I surely fear God (though I think the Biblical meaning of "fear" is different from mine--the respect of HIS power and yielding to it--mine is outright terror), but I am neither blamless nor upright. To the extent I avoid evil it is less likely because of purity of heart than fear of punishment.  Then there are the trials themselves. Job lost his land. His house fell on his wife and children and killed them when a strong wind blew. He was beset by physically tormenting boils and still, he did not blaspheme or lose faith. He always trusted in God. 


Me and my "trials" of six months?  I had been a volunteer trainee therapist at a clinic as part of my psychology studies, when, in April, I declined what I thought was an improper request of the administration in a fit of what I also thought was morally sound justification. In June, the clinic decided that they no longer required my services as a trainee with added remonstrations the gist of which were that I was reprehensible. So much for my perception of principle. Between May and June, before the unilateral parting of the ways between me and the clinic, I was assigned a client who was severely depressed and posed a real danger of suicide. Though I had some supervision throughout from a senior licensed therapist, I felt and was well over my head with a life on the precipice. He returned to a former therapist, physically intact. I will probably never know if he stayed that way. In June, 500 of my lawyer and non-lawyer colleagues were laid off from the State Bar where I work as a prosecutor, leaving in my department a total staff of 20, including me, to blow on the embers, and we are still in danger of termination in a few months. On October 30, a man backed into my less than a month old car while I was at a complete standstill and claimed that I ran into him. Naturally, he also claimed that he, and his car, were damaged. That same day I received a call from the police that one of the lawyers I was prosecuting wanted "something done" to me. During the last week I was told that he "wants me dead." Real termination. 


These trials may not be commensurate with the ones of Job, but they are sufficient for me.  I know I am no Job.


Job came to know that God was testing him.  I have been vouchsafed no such explicit knowledge. Since, from my grammar school days at the Mount I was taught that God does ask things of us, I suppose, implicitly there is evidence that He might be testing me. Still, I cannot imagine why in that surely He knows that I am marginal in faith and that a test is something I shall surely fail.  And prideful ego centric "glass half empty" girl that I am, I am not likely to view the whole affair as a test, but as punishment. Punishment for what? for not valuing what I have, talent, education, health, for starters. For daring to feel suicidal these last months, though coward that I am, fearful of anything that would be painful and of God's wrath, I would likely never act on such a feeling however deep.


I hear God saying, "Hey, girl, you think you know pain, but you don't, so I want to give you a small taste, to remind you of your hubris, and exhort you to be grateful for how little has beset you."  Unfortunately, Lord, I am very very weak, and though I know how blessed I am I still feel forsaken more often than not.


So, you see, Job and I ultimately have little in common.  He went back to his life trusting in God. I fight trust in God and everyone else all the way.  And thus, I am alone.


These events, these tests, they are prods to life or they are reasons to stop living. I have been standing on my own precipice for a long time. Will I retreat into some hermetic existence? Or will I venture forth in spite of the seeming warnings against it?  Here's the thing. I don't know.


I just looked.  After his trials, God blessed Job's later life more than He had his earlier one. Job died full of years.  It sounds as though he was very happy.  I hope that in this, at least, I somehow manage to be like Job. But, I am not sure.