I’ve been trying to be immortal.
Now I can’t pee right,
and my foot is swollen.
Friends have died recently. Others are facing it first hand. My younger siblings have already experienced the death of a spouse or a stroke or life-threatening
…Tag: mortality
There is a grave error in the penitential notion of “mortifying the body.”
It replicates the false dualism of “spirit versus matter ” that crept into and overwhelmed the Jewish faith and practice of Jesus as his followers spread out through the Greco-Roman world.
A truer practice is to “affirm the body,” to affirm it as a mortal yet sacred part of the divine whole.
When I allow myself to suffer the large or small sufferings of my body,
When Dad died
I could
let him go
because
we had gone to McDonald’s
together.
Double cheeseburger,
shake, and fries.
Watching him
climb on the exercise bike
as soon as we
got back
to the nursing home,
I saw him at peace
with
Our notion of insect life cycles
is upside-down.
We watch the adult stage
and mourn.
Such a short life.
But nymphs live for
years. Then
one brief moment for sex
and egg laying.
!["Noisy Cicada, Male," by LadyDragonflyCC - >;< on flicker (8/30/2011) [Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)]](https://emptypath.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Cicada_1024px-150x150.jpg)
… 
care (v.)
Old English carian, cearian “be anxious or solicitous; grieve; feel concern or interest,” from Proto-Germanic *karo- “lament,” hence “grief, care” (source also of Old Saxon karon “to lament, to care, to sorrow, complain,” Old High German charon “complain, lament,” Gothic karon “be anxious”), said to be from PIE root *gar- “cry out, call, scream.” —Online Etymology Dictionary
Our hyper-connected media world forces us all to wrestle with an extra layer of emotional suffering: that
…
Occasionally people wonder where I got the totem name Bright Crow that I use in my email address. Here’s the story I wrote to explain it in the voice of Walhydra’s amanuensis in 2008.
Walhydra likes to tease her amanuensis about a typo he makes occasionally with his totem name, Bright Crow.
Since he’s been typing for forty years, often to earn a living, he just shrugs and laughs. Nonetheless, she thinks the question
…Introductions: Mom died with Alzheimer’s in 2011. In Fall of 2009, we had moved her from assisted living to skilled nursing due to fall risk and escape seeking. “Howling,” from my blog Walhydra’s Porch on 11/9/2009, tells of our last coherent conversation about death.
Walhydra is one of my storytelling alter-egos: a grouchy old witch unhappily reincarnated as a gay male would-be writer.
When things with Mom
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For several months I have felt as if I were slipping back into clinical depression again.
The outward signs are here. The fogged thinking, lack of enthusiasm, fussiness, longing to sleep. The undertone of despair. All too generalized to ascribe to any one or cluster of causes.
Yet somehow the subtle bodily symptoms I’ve come to recognize over the decades are not really present. As a scientist in the medieval sense—someone who seeks to know—I’ve looked inwardly for years at
…אֵלִ֣י אֵ֖לִי לָמָ֣ה עֲזַבְתָּ֑נִי
When Jesus utters the cry
“Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”
It is the cry
Of Job, that is,
the cry of every sentient being,
“Why am I dying?”
The only answer that comes back
from the universe is,
“Because you are mortal.”
… Many of us are chronically distressed by the suffering we see around us. It confronts us in the 24/7 news cycle, in social media, in what we pass on the street every day. We live with a longing to be rid of the pain and guilt that we experience in witnessing all of this suffering.
That longing drives us to cast about for things to do that would “fix the problem.” We try and we urge others to try political
…