CABIN FEVER

quanyin in the snow

For my news anymore I hear the 5 minute cliff notes version at the beginning of the hour on NPR. Headlines. A lot of noise and bluff and posturing over health care concerns. I don't attach myself to a hope of any sort where politics is concerned. I was glad Obama won the race, but didn't entertain any hope before the election. Getting the most votes doesn't count any more. It's what the Fortune 50 want, not what I or anybody else wants. The Supreme Court stuck a sharp stick in the eye of anyone who wants to believe we live in a democracy.

I hear a lot of talk about health care this and that on NPR daytime interview shows. I don't pay it any mind. I'm aware something is going on. I'm so used to our government taking from the working people and giving to the rich that I don't dare hope for anything other than that in the future. For each generation there's a different style of how it's done. After the people who work for a living pay taxes to keep defense contractors in production, munitions factories going, people working at fairly well paid government jobs. To keep the economy going, we need wars to get rid of the bombs and helicopters to keep the factories going.

They say Obama is now lying to us about the wars and escalating them after promising to withdraw in the campaign. In the campaign, he didn't know what was on the other side of the line of winning. Surely, he knew better than you or I do. That's his world. When he became president of the USA, the vast empire that polices the entire earth, he got his briefings informing him the ship he's become captain of has its own momentum. It seemed to me like the Obama I peripherally saw in photographs had a kind of far-away look like he'd been spending his days being told everything ultra top secret the President needs to know. On Bush it would be an Xtreme video game, but Obama looked to me like he got it. It's like he got the message he's the signer, not the decider. Now the media harpies are pecking at him for electioneering promises he's not keeping.

I'm taking the long way around to saying I would like to see a good healthcare package go through, but don't dare hook strings of my heart to it. I have to stop listening to the news, because it makes me think like this, and I really don't like political thinking. There's nothing I can do about any of it. And if I could do something about "it" and "they," I wouldn't know what to do. Peace on earth. Good will toward humanity. Christmas is over. Be specific.

I find I do better focusing inward to my own world, Whitehead, Air Bellows. But it's all covered with ice. The winter of 96-97 we had 2 inches of ice one day. It was 2 weeks before the weather warmed up enough to melt it. A feral cat took up under my house. I fed her, befriended her, took her water every day. A month went by before she let me see her. I could see her eyes, but that was all. Eventually, she let me touch her. One day I picked her up and felt something interesting in her belly.

I fixed up a cardboard box with hay inside and hole for mama cat to go in and out, and put it in a little shed that was built for a chicken shed and now holds scraps of wood. I started feeding her in the shed. It was a few more weeks in the shed before she'd let me see her. She gave birth to my 3 cats. The day their eyes opened she ran under a car and left her babies to me. By the time they were of an age to find homes, I couldn't take a chance on somebody mistreating any of my babies. The only way I could guarantee they would never be mistreated was to keep them.

I'm feeling like it's time to turn even further inward. Inward to the heart, to the soul. Focus there more than on the world of lies. The funny part about the dots I connect for my world view is all the dots are false concerns created by lies. How many times do I have to remind myself that nothing in DC concerns me? People on power trips jostling with people on power trips, establishing hierarchies among themselves, are not interested in me. They don't want me to be interested in them either.

And having some idea of what's good for me, I don't want them focusing their attention on me. It wouldn't be a nurturing gaze.

Enough's enough.