Blind Fates

Anonymous

The social worker at the hospital found me a small warm room. Slowly, I discovered I was freed from the guilt that burned and fueled my Hell of persecutory hallucinations, and I found new comforts daily. I thought of St. John of the Cross whose long dark night was caused by the church. He was persecuted for his mystical thoughts and incarcerated in a dirt cell no larger than his prone body. He was forced to eat everything that crawled or slithered into his cell. After his awakening, he inexhaustibly helped St.Teresa of Avila, also a mystic, who was embarrassed by her uncontainable "raptures" in public, to reform the Carmelites. He wrote, outspoken, touching those whose only experience was the endless dark night with no liberation. That was his life. It took me years to rid myself of the belief that to weaken the body was to strengthen the spirit and soul.
     Now neurotic instead of psychotic, within six months I got off the drug, found a good job, rented my own home, filled the attic with homeless men and the living room with women while finishing my BA in social work with honors. For fifteen years I worked with the dispossessed while striving after the activist-contemplative life. Searching for some kind of meaning and a deeper healthier experience of the interior life, always asking why where there is no answer. Recently I moved to a small coastal town where I play, share creative potlucks, try to live the home cure, paint, write and sell my crafts.

     So I'm feelin low cuz I got no place to call home. I'm thinkin a shrink might be my best ally, when really a quiet, clean place out of the rain is all I need. I go to see about help, but I don't feel like a human cuz the shrink is writin down all this stuff I ain't sayin. I'm feelin like a dissected frog, her heart pumpin even though there ain't nothin else left of her. I know he ain't goin to help me so I start talkin about other places beyond this world of hunger, wet, cold and violence, and the shrink puts me away. I learn quick and decide to take a vow of silence till I find a home.
     The state ward I discover is more painful than bein on the streets. Nobody got no direction save tryin to get out of the pain and meaninglessness where there ain't no exit. Everybody waitin in this big room smokin roll-your-owns. 150 human unbeins in this ward waitin for visitors that don't never come, waitin for Koolaid meals, waitin to get cured. I look round and see some inmates hangin up pictures of sexy models sellin Black Velvet, others huggin their teddy bears, others huggin anybody far or near searching for some kind of warmth. I know I'm lost and sick, that this place ain't goin to help me, so I mop up the pee let go nightly from one of my half walled void bedmates, and do my yoga. Later I sit in a far off corner where I let any unbeins sit on my lap for a hug. None of the housewives and muscle men dressed in white want to touch us cuz they know there ain't no cure. They get lots of laughs makin fun of us, safe from the immensity of our sterile futility in their glass cage. The only times they touch us is the1500 times a month when they chain somebody naked to a slab with a camera watchin and all the inmates too on a screen where the white clothes hang out; or when some undone body tries to escape they stick em full of somethin that makes the body writhe and the tongue go crazy, bladder and bowels doin everythin, layin there for days too groggy to get up; or they give us all manner of pills that don't got no name.
     Every day I leave the back space of the day room and go out on the barbed wire 3 foot square cement yard and pray.

God why are you silent?
We are the lost sheep
caught in the wind and snow
so thick there are no stars.
We have no sight nor vision.
We stand on our innocence
alone in the never ending night
as the ice collects in our hearts.
We cry out from our goodness.
We strive with all of our integrity.
Still there is no answer from You
or from others You could work through.
Still there are only blank stares and chaos.

     In the big room there's this woman got all tired and confused from waitin with nothin to hold onto feelin like she's goin to evaporate like clouds dispersin and vanishin on mountain tops, so she hangs herself with a strip of sheet in the no privacy shower room. Then the Protestant and Catholic "chaplains" who couldn't keep a job anywhere else appear. They're waitin for their pensions and they're afraid of us cuz we're always askin questions like how come Yahweh cursed Saul with mental illness for nothin save boredom, and blest David, who slew Bathsheba's husband in cold blood, gave him kingship, and a personal poetic relationship with God from which he wrote the much read psalms. He and Bathsheba ate meat and gave birth to Solomon the much blest writer of the Song of Songs.
     I don't get no better but they discharge me with vile pills, no home and tell me "it's a wonderful life."
     I pray even harder when I get out cuz I know there ain't no help nowhere. I walk along the river front, and in the quiet of the silent serpentine snake where city lights float like a slow motion 4th of July, the bridges are like strong women doin back bends over the dangerous currents of all we've experienced from birth and maybe before, of all the times we've been hurt and abandoned, and even though we searched to heal, the wounds accumulated in this big reservoir where our eyes couldn't see, and I got to slay the dragon of all those forgotten memories blindin my awareness. I know I'm a warrior and I'm battlin a war of unknowns and I look up to Orion, his sword bright and sharp, and I pray.

Night is thick to my marrow.
Light brings only shadows.
If salvation is free then
why have I been swallowed
into these barren bowels?
Scent of the whitest of liles,
crust of bread, tincture of wine.
Yet I am the warrior
waitin in soup lines
where the city moon flashes neon blue.
Through the drizzlin wetness I cry,
are Salvation and warmth the same thing?

     I don't know, but the night is cold and I got to find a cure cuz I'm all alone, a silhouette of a young woman doin Ashtanga Yoga in the shadows of the dangerous drug tradin river front park. I'm still not sayin nothin, and I know it's up to me and the Gods cuz the drugs ain't workin, so I decide to take a vow to eat only the Eucharist in hopes that Christ will finally hear me, cuz I know I can't do it on my own. I'm thinkin I got to die to save my life, I got to lose myself to gain myself. I don't know how so I start cleanin rooms for old men dyin. The only things these guys got is their whiskey and smokes. They don't get out of bed for nothin. They don't eat nothin save when someone comes to feed them. I got to change their sheets, mop the floor and throw away all the rotten Loaves and Fishes food somebody dropped off outside their door. I don't feel no love from these guys, but some people in the lobby tell me God loves me. I'm thinkin these old guys never got no chance even though some were late in findin this dried up pizza nub end cuz all their lives they worked and fought against the unnameable, unknowable, unutterable sworlin whorlin suckin fickle fist of fate with everythin written, counseled, pharmaceutical, dietary, athletic, meditated, visualized and intuited. I don't know who ever said you never get more than you can handle, but me and some of these old men,we know better. In their searchin some of these guys tried the church, but their prayers were so intense that their unstoppable sweat and tears messed up the service and they were physically thrown out. I guess the congregation thought cleanliness was close to godliness, but the church closed down the clean-up center and turned it into a place for foreign youths to stay. I decide these guys got thrown out of church, so I ain't goin neither and I give up the Eucharist. I pray.

Christ you knew well the heavy heart
where like these old men, Your
sweat beaded up into blood.
You are the God for us
lashed in this inescapable maze
of poverty and "sickness unto death."
Give us the strength to choose simplicity,
and the ascetic life,
rather than the death of thrashin blindly,
the soul gettin meaner and nihilistic,
gettin pleasures from rapin and murderin.
You knew well the hearty laughter
of lovin and bein loved in return.
These men have known nothin but sufferin.
May they finally find your promises
restin, healed and whole, held close
to the bosom of Mary Magdalene
never to return here again.

     After cleaning well into the night, I walk across town to my sacred island of grass, surrounded by rhododendrons, protecting me from the endless concrete desert, and I pray.

Am I to You
as the man
skin hanging from his bones,
gaspin and drownin
in the muddy stool-brown waters
where even the Goddess Psyche
was counseled by the Gods
to turn her head and continue
on her heroine's journey to
reunite with her lover Eros.

     I find a blanket under one of the bushes and take a rest. I'm thinkin there's got to be some hope, and I don't know how long the dark night is supposed to last, but bein as I know the cross, then somehow someday I should know the promises of Easter. At dawn I walk on the tracks long side the river where lots of children and pets live in homeless homes made by their parents or parent. Further on, towards the bird sanctuary, I stop to watch a Heron take flight and I pray.

La Santa Señora
les enseña
el verdad de se mismo.

Why do we suffer so?
Is our barrenness purely the
work of humans, our souls
minds and bodies victims
of the endless military budget
and tax breaks for the rich?
There is no help,
no touch but my own
in these frigid winds.
Steel gray tombstones my only bed.
My only friends ghosts.
My hands are my only warmth
and I'm lost without my faith in
Your strength to overcome.

     After my prayer I get raped by two hoodlums and pass out cuz I don't got no body left and I got a bad case of hypothermia to boot. A runner finds me and I get taken to a private hospital this time. I keep my vows of silence and fastin, so they stick a long hard plastic tube down my nose, blood spurtin everywhere, to feed me sugar food. They take away my clothes and leave the danglin tube which don't get in the way of my yoga and prayers.
     Soon, I discover this excommunicated nun who got depressed after teachin geography in the parish school for 15 years and then moved on to a cloistered order for another 10 years, where nobody spoke, searchin for meanin and the cure. After years of workin and meditation her hours of silence were empty of everythin save countin her breaths and tryin to hold back the gut-held sorrow her mind couldn't put words to. So the "good" sisters kicked her out and sent her here with a suitcase full of second-hand clothes. All the while I'm thinkin about all those priest pedophiles the church kept hiddin and sendin off to New Mexico or maybe to hospitals. I write and she talks for the first time in ten years, all the while she thinks the Carmelites will welcome her back, but she worries cause she's seen this happen before and she ain't got the trainin to do nothin in this Nike world cuz she took her vows so young.
     I get this doctor specialist cuz she knows lots about drugs. She decides I should be given shock treatments forever and be incarcerated in a lock-up, corn meal mush nursing home for the poor. But before she can get me, God finally hears me. I'm up before dawn and I make up this prayer.

Salvation may or may not be earned,
yet it took his faith, the criminal
taut, vinegar sun
death breathing across his lips
before You said
"Today thou shalt be with me in paradise."

     I feel the presence of a giant serpent full of all colors that could be enter my room. The base of my spine is flooded my cup overflows into this ascetic room with tangerine wild rose. Crimson waves undulate up my spine with a pressure so intense that the door to my sorrowful tender no belly opens into a vibrant violet, quakin with a soulful laughter for the first time in 6 or more years. I'm wonderin if She is the Serpent, Sirius that guided the old ones to create new ways out of nothin that changed evolution, culivatin their garden in the Tigris Euphrates flood plain. She was consulted by woman came before the oracle Pythia at Delphi. She wraps my solar plexus and heart in prussian verdant burdock leaves as a poltice drawin out some of my brokenness. She makes me laugh for the first time in six or more years since lightnen struck me mad.
     I am drawn up to sit. I open my eyes and there upon the plastic wrapped mattress and stiff sheets sits a Christ ever so peaceful, movin His head from side to side as His, mine and our grief driven sorrows cascade from his eyes as dark as a hidden lake in the inner chambers of a blue black cave. I gaze for what seems an eternity wonderin just what all this means, while wishin that I could just sit, lookin out the window while the train just keeps on goin, passin by all my varied landscapes of tumultuous memories, undaunted while doin all the things that got to be done. This vision of uprootin grief pourin out while remainin calm speaks to me.
     He, She, and I are separate yet they enter me and my forehead clears, no longer blind and willess, I wonder, against the degradin delf-destructive voices indelibly etched in my psyche. I feel a profound, redemptive healin necklace of summer's leaves ripplin their shapes on apple green grass. My heart bursts asunder from all this lovin. I cry enough to fill enough ancient Anatolian glass tear vessels for a sacred burial site. I cry for the first time since lighten struck me mad. I cry from bein all alone against the Blind Fates, touched only by hoodlums and needles full of huge doses of their drugs that never stopped the never endin no rest never nightmare. As I'm watchin and cryin I'm feelin loved cuz outside all the confusion inside, they wrap my head in a golden wheat turban and I'm wonderin if my bein will ever know the sound of the charged vibratin northern lights seen and heard after the first fallen snow in the far off regions of a silent mind. Don't know.
     I go to see my friend the Sister and I talk for the first time since my first visit to a shrink. She's always up at 4:30 after all those years of Lauds. I talk about Christ and call the Serpent Mary Mer Mar born of Seagrapes Mother of God. She doesn't talk of her own interior experiences from all her years of cultivatin and livin for her and others souls, but she hugs me, and laughs with gratitude even though in her last years, her mind became noisy with (drive anyone crazy) radio ads she heard when young. She reminds me of St. Theresa of Lisieux who even though she had her long periods of complete loss of faith, belly full of beliefs that the church was all wrong, her entire life and efforts a lie, she fought the death grip of nihilism comin from too much pain too much loss, with vigilant prayer, community support and grace. She was able to finish her autobiography from a place of serenity and joy while her heart was bein eatin dead, full of holes. I know my friend is strong, yet I worry about her future. She likes to eat sweets and offers me some cookies and fruit juice.
     I've been hungry and thirsty for a very long time and I don't like the way I look like a holocaust victim, so I start to eat. I still refuse to speak to the staff, but the ex-nun and I hold long talks into the night. Soon after I'm released, but before I leave, my Sister and I pray.

Why all the blood?
And remember that you
were no stranger to sufferin,
that even you were abandoned by God.
We were struck down with a disease
of the unknowable and like the man
in the graveyard, we pray that we will both be set free.

"Thy will be done."

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