It is the age of Obama and some are naive enough to join George Will in saying that his election signals the end of Racism. Although I hope to never use racism as an excuse for my shortcomings and failures, I will not ever join Mr. Will in saying that Mr Jackson(Jessie) and Mr Sharpton(Al) should go sit in a corner and be quiet. There are still too many instances of police profiling and police brutality on a world wide basis. Think of what the so called color blind therory(advanced by conservatives to suit their agenda and not the advancement of people of color) has done to the plight of Blacks in Canada and England. Blacks in Canada are routinely discharged for being disruptive when they complain to surpervisors and cowrkers about discrimination. In England, on my last transcontinental visit, Blacks both of African and West Indian origin were treated as fouth classs citizens. I noted several things. First of all the lack of inclusion of Blacks in the media(both print and screen). Secondly I noted a virtual absence of Black Men in the buisneess district of London.Thirdly I noted that their was not one bookstore owned by people of African descent in London. Finally, I was horified to see on the bilborards, in the train stations pictures of mostly Black Women under the heading of "Gone Missing". Could not wait to get back home and folks this is the so called liberal or tolerant part of Europe. Wonder what it would  be like in Germany or Russia. Well I know that Africans are routinely killed in Russia and no one has ever been brought to justice for that! Well hey yall, over here if whites want to kill Blacks without penalty, they must first put on a police or sherif's uniform. Not to mention that the current head of state in France is a known Anti-Semite who refered to rioting people of African and Arab descent as animals. We have a long devide to overcome and we won't even begin to get there by false celebrations or unrealistic conclusions about where we are as a world in matters of race. Untill we can be more tollerant, the bigots are just as  imprisoned by their additudes as those discriminated against on the basis of color are by their tormentors and opponents.

My eye surgery went well...I still am not able to focus really well.  I won't know until after the 10th if this procedure did the trick or if I need to go one more round to reduce the pressure and allow me to blink and close my eyes at night.  

Please forgive me if I am not answering all your messages or posting new ones myself...it is kind of difficult with fuzzy eyes.

Have a wonderful 4th with friends and family...do come back safe and sound after your weekend...I will be watching A Capital 4th on Friday evening and wishing a neighbor a happy 50th birthday.  Mare 

I will be off this week pretty much all the week.  

My neighbor will be driving me down to Bismarck on Wednesday for eye surgery.  I will be having surgery on both eyes on Thursday morning and we will come back to Minot after the surgery and lunch somewhere.  I have to thank my neighbor for taking the time to drive me down to Bismarck and back to Minot...gas is not cheap anymore...it is over $4.00 per gallon here.  It is hoped that it is about the same down there.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this journal entry. 

  Hello from Minot, ND

Though I am legally blind, I manage my life and to write award winning poetry and am in the process of getting a book of my poetry published.  Despite my visual problems, I manage to do some crocheting, sewing, Bible reading, reading large print books and talking books and keep up with my friends and family who are in different parts of the country and world. 

On November 21, 2006 I had gallbaldder removal and gastric by-pass surgery.  My gallbladder was not full of stones, but was terribly diseased.  I had no idea that it was diseased...neither did my doctor until he ordered a scan of the gall bladder.  Since the surgeon was going to be sutting in the same area, he offered to do the gastric by-pass too...I was so glad that he allowed me to have this surgery.  Since then I have lost a total of 190 pounds and am going to have a tummy and thigh tuck this month.  It will be so nice to have all this done and I can quit taking in all my clothes every few months.

I recently was able to see my 22 year old son for the first time in over 16 years.  What a wonderful experience...we spent auality time together and with my family for my youngest niece's wedding.  Though it has been a week since I last saw him, I already miss being with him...we will be spending more time together real soon. 

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To know ones Self, it is necessary to turn within and to learn to work with one's mind. When we expect the Mind to follow the same rules as apparently the natural world does however, we will encounter only confusion. The mind does not follow the same rules as the outside world, but we must use it to comprehend the outside world. .

Whereas the seeker expects to find facts in the outside world, tested theories, verified laws, inside the mind nothing can be pinned down. Inner worlds are likely to be worlds of fantasies, beliefs, opinions, and unconscious assumptions which cannot be verified but which are accepted as True by each individual because they "feel right" or "are logical." It is this irrational instrument we use to find truth in the outside world. So the reality we "see" without is likely to possess the hidden characteristics and predilections of the instrument.
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Even so, when individuals of differing points of view dispute "reality," each finds the other's points of view fantasy, illogical, confused or immoral. Both such individuals, we can see, are likely to be arguing their own subjective reality is absolute and True. Neither is able to recognize that he is unable to distinguish truth from falsehood within the mind. Neither is able to recognize that seeking clarity of understanding--conclusions about what is true or false within the mind-- is very difficult. It is virtually impossible to remove the "irrational" from the way the mind works or its values. And it is very nearly a Truth that humans cannot be mentally or emotionally well without the irrational element in their lives and thinking.
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So depth psychologists have come to speak of how the mind works in metaphorical terms rather than in the concepts of science: "the mind is like a theatre of old Greek mythic stories". Or, our minds have been shown to follow repetitive patterns of thought and emotion we each presume to be highly individualized, but which we are all having in similar circumstances; we believe that our thoughts are original to us, but actually they re-occur in every person in much the same fashion. These beliefs, thoughts, opinions, assumptions are collective in origin--not individually derived.
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Thus, the "irrational element"--like religious beliefs, ideological beliefs, relationship issues--are inseparable from the issue of defining "reality" because the perception of that reality must occur in a mind which functions using fictions as its database for making decisions throughout it "life." Oftimes these irrational elements are common within large communities, such as tribal groups, national groups, or religious groups. When everyone follows the same patterns of thought and emotion--believing they are arriving at their conclusions individually--they are said to be "unconscious."
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Buddhist teachers explain this same phenomenon by teaching "our thoughts are not our own!" Psychologist Carl Jung attributed these patterns to a level of the mind called "the collective unconscious" where patterns of living energies, metaphorically similar to our old friends the Greek Pantheon of Gods and Myths", structure our lives, thoughts and emotions without our knowledge or awareness.
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James Hillman, one prominent depth psychologist, talks about our mental processes as if they could be described by archetypal figures found in Greek myth: the so-called Olympian gods. Their stories have been written about elsewhere on this bulletin board. As a Jungian psychologist, Hillman pays a lot of attention to patient dreams, because dreams reveal much about what lies beneath the surface of our conscious minds in the subconscious, as well as in the Collective Unconscious. Most of us do not pay any attention to our dreams or remember them. But dreams are the raw material of self - knowledge, and psychiatric patients are urged to recall their dreams and write them down. Dreams are important. Here is what Hillman says about the way the mind works with dreams:
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"Dionysos has been written off, or adulated, for his hysteria. He has come to mean simply the opposite of Apollo, and has thus become in the popular, and scholarly mind too, a creature of raving maenads, communal ecstasy, lost boundaries, revolution, and theatrics. Logos (order or logic) has to be brought in from elsewhere, e.g. from the god Apollo's role in the mind. But when Jung says the dream has a dramatic structure, he is saying it has a dramatic logic [order], that there is a Dionysian logos [logic], and this is the logic of theater. the dream is not only psychic nature, it also presents psychic logic....
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I believe what Jung is suggesting is this: if psychotherapy is to understand the dreaming soul from within, it had best turn to 'theatrical logic.' The nature of mind as it presents itself most immediately has a specific form: Dionysian form. Dionysos may be the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, but this force is not dumb [or arbitrary]. It has an internal organization. In psychology this language speaks not genetically, not biochemically in the information of DNA codes, but directly in Dionysos' own art form, theatrical poetics. This means the dream is not a coded message at all, but a display, a Schau, in which the dreamer himself plays a part or is in the audience, and thus always involved. no wonder that Aristotle placed psychotherapy (catharsis) in the context of theater. Our lives are the enactment of our dreams; our case histories are from the very beginning, archetypally, dramas; we are masks through which the Gods sound. Like dreams, inner fantasy too has the compelling logic of theatre. ...
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Hillman also reminds us of "the place of Dionysian theatre in healing. The patient moves into the role of enacted one, actor. Healing begins when we move out of the audience and onto the stage of the psyche, become characters in a fiction, and as the drama intensifies, the psychotherapy occurs; we are purged from attachments to literal destinies, find freedom in playing parts, partial, dismembered, Dionysian, never being whole but participating in the whole that is a play, remembered by it as an actor of it. And the task set by the play and its God is to play a part with craft, sensitively.
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To put dreams with drama and Dionysos means not to put them with prophesy and Apollo....Jung's interpretation invalidates the entire oracular approach to the dream, an approach Jung himself often fell for, reading the dream as a prophetic message of what and how to behave: dream interpretation as counseling for daily life. Again: not messages, masks.pp. 37-38.
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In other words, our dreams tell the drama that is our life! And that drama is a myth, a fiction stemming from the collective unconscious, we are unconsciously living. By remembering our dreams, we might gain an understanding of the drama we are living, but dreams should not be understood as a message to the ego that might be used to correct what we are doing. Our entire life is drama generated by the imagination.

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He continues, "Authenticity is the perpetual dismemberment of being and not-being a self, a being that is always in many parts, like a dream with a full cast. We all have identity crises because a single identity is a delusion of the monotheistic mind."p. 39. We are not a unified "whole" identity that has any permanence to it, but a stage full of players. Our consciousness is divided up into many subconscious actors.

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For that reason, Hillman prefers to see the structure of the mind in terms of a pantheon of players, including archetypal gods and humans, much as related in Homer's myths of old Greece. Neuroses, Hillman notes, are 'wounded gods' or archetypes, which become sickened when the soul loses itself in superficial materialistic living. (Buddhists would describe this condition as "grasping" at material issues--not remaining "detached." All our inner actors play their roles not only in our dreams, but in our conscious lives. It is just that we are hardly ever conscious of switching identities or roles in our daily lives. We play one role for awhile, reach a crisis that dismembers that identity, and then start playing another of the identities in our drama. But they are all continuously present, waiting their turns to play their roles on the stage of your life. Each time we change our role/identity in our cosmic play, we change our perspective and therefore our view of reality.
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These identities, when wounded, are neurotic. Monitoring ones dreams may help us uncover our neurotic and wounded tendencies and heal them by backing out of our superficiality or 'lostness' in materialistic living. The realities we "perceive" are fictions; stories out of time, and distorted, wounded ones at that! As we change our roles, or "identities" to play different roles, we see the play from another perspective.
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How then might we heal ourselves? Life, Hillman maintains, is more a poem than a script. The awesome fact of being alive and on the earth is not appreciated by many. A person who does not recognise that everything--including us--is a miracle is lost in matter and lives a superficial, meaningless life, even while unconsciously living his great story! He lacks gratitude. He lacks an appreciation for his role on the stage of life!
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Unable to accept life as it is and find beauty in it, too many of us seach endlessly to solutions to material problems which make us wallow in despair, depression, loss, fear and neediness. Hillman claims the soul sickens when we lose sight of Beauty and Wonder, when we are not grateful to God for being human and alive, and when we do not see that this Earth is a perfect school for us to learn how to be just ourselves!
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Healing requires we live our myths or made-up story, or at least learn to take responsibility for ourselves as responsible adults. Healing requires that we play our roles impeccably, even knowing our fates have been determined in our stories and knowing that death waits for us at the end.

I don’t write much poetry. I love to read good poetry, but the work of selecting just the right word in meter still eludes me. Occasionally I am tempted to try, but am seldom satisfied with my work.

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 I believe the soul speaks and writes in poetry, for it has been in poetry that my own soul has spoken at those times in my life I most needed to hear from Her. At those times, the words took on a life of their own and something came out on the page that cut through my blindness and struck straight into my heart. It would be as though I didn’t know what my fingers were writing until I saw them with my own eyes. 

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Sometimes it was only later that the words took on meaning. Only in time would the images and metaphors hidden in the verse make sense and the message hit home. Of course, its message was for me, so it hardly mattered whether others "got it" or not.

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I like to imagine that each one of us has "out there" a poem waiting to be read or written--something just for me or for you that may turn the direction of our life in a new direction.

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A poem has a soul of its own.