Pat Bertram's Blog, page 20

Bringing Hope

Well, I managed to psych myself; instead of the Christmas novel I checked out of the library yesterday making me feel cooler, it made me think the Christmas season is upon us. Although I am horrified — and terrified — by all I am learning about the ramifications of the recent Supreme Court ruling, I heard myself think, “I can’t write about that because it will ruin people’s holiday season.”

Though truly, it’s better to ruin an end-of-year holiday — no matter what one celebrates — than to ruin lives.

I always think of the Addams Family cartoons when I see an issue of The New Yorker magazine, but although a recent article in the magazine was as macabre as the cartoons, there was nothing humorous about it. The author of the article, Jia Tolentino, mentioned that we’re not going back to before Roe vs. Wade, we’re going somewhere worse. Already, the ruling is affecting treatment of women in the midst of miscarriages since doctors in “ban” states fear being charged for aborting the fetus. But repercussions will go much further than that. In fact, some states want to pass “fetal personhood” laws, granting full rights to the fetus, and none, apparently, to the mother. (Under such laws, women can be arrested and detained and held hostage for doing anything that could be considered inimical to the fetus, even having a single drink or driving too fast.)

The police state is at hand — phones, internet searches, social networking sites, purchases will all be tracked to make sure that no pregnant “person” (it’s always a pregnant “person” now; you can no longer say “pregnant woman”) escapes surveillance. And if they do, the authorities will rely on information from neighbors, fellow workers, and acquaintances to fill in the record. (Some “ban” states are even planning on arresting women — oops, sorry, pregnant persons — on drug trafficking charges if they order the abortion pill from compliant states.)

The harshest thing about the ruling is that the majority of people in this country believe in a woman’s right to choose. Since it has been shown that the will of the people is seldom taken into consideration when decisions are made and laws are passed (the lobbyists see to it that their corporate clients are the beneficiaries), it makes me wonder who will be making money off all this.

Even ignoring any potential financial aspect, there are so many ways this ruling will come back to bite fertile people (even so-called pro-lifers) that . . . well, that I don’t want to think about it anymore lest it ruin my Christmas holiday even if it is almost six months away.

Luckily, I am too old to be personally involved (except in the way that any rescinding of rights affects us all).

And even luckier, I have new blooms in my garden to bring me hope.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Winter in July

I checked out a Christmas novel at the library this morning, hoping that the cool chill of winter from the story would bring relief from the summer heat, and oh, what magic! Shortly after starting to read the story, I distinctly felt cooler. I must confess that the coolness wasn’t literary magic but electrical magic — the air conditioner clicked on.

Still, I take my magic however it comes.

Most often, these days, the magic that comes my way is in the form of “yard pretties.” Right now, most of the colors in my yard are varying shades of greens, from the grass, from plants that have flowered and are taking a breath before producing more flowers, from plants that have spent their blossom-forming energy, and from seedlings that are too young to flower.

And yet, there are splashes of color wherever I look. A patch of golden zinnias,

a trio of black-eyed Susans,

a dwarf red plains coreopsis,

an especially eye-dazzling daylily,

and Johnny jump ups.

Oddly, despite their delicate looks, (like miniature pansies), Johnny jump ups are rather aggressive. The Forest Service says it’s an invasive species that has contributed to the decline of 42% of U.S. endangered and threatened species. Eek. Despite the “eek” factor, I doubt my single plant will do much damage to the environment even if it survives the winter, either the literary winter the Christmas novel will bring this July or the actual winter the spinning Earth will bring in December.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

Boom! Pow! Bang!

This is my least favorite of all USA holidays, not for any ideological or gastronomical reason but because of the firecrackers. The loud noises on the fourth have always been a problem for me, but especially now because where I live, people don’t save their fireworks until the actual holiday; they buy and use them every day from the week before to the week after the fourth.

That is a lot of booms, cracks, pops, pows, and bangs to have to contend with!

Even worse, although in Colorado, all fireworks that explode or leave the ground are illegal, we are so close to the Kansas border that every kind of illegal firework is available. The code enforcer doesn’t bother to enforce that code (or any other that I can see), so here I am, having to deal with all that noise . . . and danger. In past years, sparks have showered down on my garage roof. Luckily, none caused a fire, but fires are possible, so I have to pay attention. And last night, the smell cordite was so strong, I’m surprised my smoke alarm didn’t go off.

I suppose I should be grateful all that noise is just for entertainment value (though why people find it enjoyable, I don’t know) and is not from nearby bombs, incoming missiles, and other weapons of war.

And I am grateful, though I can be just as grateful without all those body-jarring reminders.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Rights and Independence

I’m still a bit confused over the recent Supreme Court ruling. The rationale behind Roe vs. Wade was privacy — the Supreme Court held that the constitutional right to privacy includes a woman’s right to decide whether to have an abortion. In overturning the Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court said that “there is no inherent right to privacy or personal autonomy in various provisions of the Constitution.”

That’s spooky. No right to privacy? No right to personal autonomy? (Personal autonomy means having the right to act on our own values and interests.)

Instead of addressing that issue, most of the talk about the rationale for overturning Roe vs. Wade was about returning the power to make the decision about abortion to the individual states.

States rights has always been touchy issue because they’ve become associated with racism, but the truth is, this country was founded on the idea of a loose confederation of states —with most of the power residing in the individual states but overseen by a Congress that represented the all the states. The federal government was to ensure that there would be enough checks and balances, with enough power to operate on a national level but not so powerful that fundamental rights would be at risk. At the beginning, there was no need for a federal income tax because federal power was limited, but over the centuries, the federal government usurped the power of the states to become the most powerful governing body in the country. Because of that growth of power, the tariffs, excise taxes, and bonds that funded the original federal government no longer was enough. The first year the 1040 form was required to be filed was 1914.

But still, with all that power, the Supreme Court has decided in this one peculiar instance, to give the power back to the states, many of which are now or soon will be banning abortion, which seems such a step back into a darker time. The ban, no matter what side of the issue you are on, makes women de facto wards of the state because women have no right to choose, only the state does.

For centuries, there has been a concept called coverture, a doctrine which says that females have no legal existence. First, her existence is covered by her father’s status, and when he turns her over to her husband-to-be in the marriage ceremony, her existence is then covered by her husband’s legal status. It wasn’t until about 1870 that most states passed married women’s property acts placing married women on equal footing with their husbands when it came to contracts, earnings and ownership of property. (Single women were still out of luck.)

Although that was a big step forward, it wasn’t until 1974 that women were granted the right to sign loans and contracts without a male co-signer, and could buy a house on their own. So, basically, that was the year women became truly independent.

The year before that, women were given autonomy over their own bodies as well as the right to privacy, both of which seem to have been taken away.

There are still interpretations of the constitution saying that no one is allowed to put their life over another person’s by taking their organs or blood or marrow or whatever without written consent, but when it comes to pregnancy, the fetus now in many states has more rights than the mother.

It’s odd, too, how most people point to pictures of fetuses at nineteen weeks or even more to show the humanness of the fetus, when during the first couple of months of pregnancy, the fetus hasn’t even grown to the size of a peanut. Even odder, despite the claim that the uterus is to protect the baby, it’s true function is to protect the mother from incursions into the rest of her body by this peanut. According to Suzanne Sadedinis, an evolutionary biologist, pregnancy is a war in the womb, with the fetus demanding more and more of the mother’s resources, and the mother’s body trying to protect itself. There have been instances where the fetus eats its way through the placenta, and in fact, a fetus can pretty much live anywhere in the body (fetal cells have even been found in women’s brains). The uterus is meant to keep it in its place.

That “war” is a far cry from the lovely mother/child image that is used to grant more rights to the fetus than to the host mother. It’s also no wonder that despite so-called modern medicine, too many women lose that war. (800 women die in childbirth every day.)

Not that any of this helps matters in any way; these are just some of the things I am thinking about on the day before the 246th birthday of the USA.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Holiday Destination

The American Automobile Association predicted a record number of road trippers this weekend. Despite the high gas prices, more than 42 million people in the USA will drive to a destination more than 50 miles from home to celebrate the holidays. There are nebulous reasons stated for all that travel — nebulous because with all the rhetoric being spouted, no one really knows why people are heading out. I tend to think people just want to run away for a bit, to pretend that life is back to normal (or more probably back to a normal they wish existed) where there were no wars, no babies going hungry for lack of formula, no deadly disease ready to spawn a new variant, no political polarization dividing families and turning friends into foes.

I’m lucky — I don’t need to contend with all that miserable traffic to get to my holiday destination because I’m already at my destination. There is no place I would rather be than right here, in my own house or outside enjoying my own private backyard park.

A local friend who knows the true state of my yard — that the pictures of flowers I post are pretty much the only flowers that are growing on that given day — teases me (in a friendly way) about my knowing every flower, every butterfly, every blade of grass in my yard, and that’s pretty much the case. She also thinks people should take life the way I do, by celebrating every little thing that comes along. Although I would never say “should” when it comes to other people, she’s right that I do celebrate each new development in my yard. Although I enjoyed my trips — from ocean to ocean and border to border — and loved seeing new things, it’s a privilege being able to experience the constantly changing environment of my own backyard.

It would be nice if the flowers in my yard bloomed constantly, but they come and go. The tulips were supplanted by larkspur and golden poppies, which in turn were supplanted by wildflowers, echinacea, and almost-ready-to-bloom lilies and daylilies. These will be supplanted by other flowers later in the season — marigolds, mums, and purple asters. At any one time, there are at least a few beautiful blossoms, a few spent flowers, and a lot of greenery.

The lawn, too, goes through cycles. Since it’s a cool weather grass that doesn’t like the heat of summer, I seem to be always coaxing brown spots back to life. In another two or three months, though, when the worst of the heat is gone, my grass will perk up again and stay green until the worst of winter.

But for now, I am glad I don’t have to be on the road with millions of others, and I am especially glad for whatever joys this “holiday destination” throws my way.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

Believing Impossible Things

A commenter on yesterday’s post “Practicing the Tarot,” mentioned that he liked the notion of believing six impossible things before breakfast. His suggestion was to use the tarot to challenge three of these thoughts (only three because for the next twelve months I will be doing a three-card reading rather than the two-card layout I’ve been doing for the past year). That captured my imagination, and I responded, “What a great idea. I also like the idea of believing six impossible things before breakfast. Or at least one. I might add that to my morning routine.”

I was wondering how getting in the habit of believing even a single impossible thing every morning might change one’s life, then I realized it wouldn’t change mine at all because believing impossible things is already part of my life. Not that I believe them before breakfast, exactly, nor do I do what the white queen did and practice for half-an-hour a day. It’s just that a belief in certain impossible things runs concurrently with the truth that impossible things are impossible, and no amount of positive thinking or changing one’s habits can make the impossible possible because if the impossible became possible, then it wasn’t impossible.

Some of my impossible beliefs are that I will grow younger, taller, thinner, more muscular, prettier, stronger, smarter, quicker, sharper, able to run long distances and backpack for days at a time, write a book thousands of people will love, become radiant enough I can dispel my atoms and become light itself (actually, I haven’t thought of that last one in a long time; it was an impossible belief for a much, much younger me). And those are just the impossible things I can think of at the moment.

Some of those things might not actually be impossible. Although I have never been able to lose weight, chances are that as I get older, I will also get smaller, and as a result, I will weigh less, but I will also lose muscle (which is why it’s not a good idea for otherwise healthy older folks to lose weight), so one possible belief becomes an impossible belief when coupled with another such belief.

Still, you never know, right? That’s the whole point of believing impossible things because perhaps, just perhaps, they’re not impossible after all. But even more than that, I think we need to entertain such impossible beliefs. Seeing — and believing — only what is probable, is bleak. Who wants to believe, deep down, that they are getting weaker, slower, older, losing brain cells, shriveling up, losing muscle mass, being unable to run ever again, and that it’s all downhill from here? Not me, for sure, which is odd considering that I am one who professes to need the truth. And I do accept the truth of my aging and what has become impossible for me, and yet . . . there they are, all those impossible things I find myself believing.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Practicing the Tarot

Tomorrow starts a new month, which means I need to pick out a different tarot deck to use. I still haven’t found one that I have any special affinity for, so I am still in the habit of rotating decks to give me an opportunity to learn each of them. (Each of them in my collection, that is.)

Tomorrow also starts a new year. The first year of doing a daily tarot reading for myself, I picked one card. The second year, I picked two. Starting tomorrow, I’ll pick three, which means that not only do I have to choose a different deck, I have to decide what sort of reading I am going to do since there are an unlimited number of possibilities for a three-card reading.

A few examples:

Past, present, future
Situation, Obstacle, Advice
Opportunities, Challenges, Outcome
Your strengths, your weaknesses, how you can progress
Current situation, action to take, outcome
What will help me, what will hinder me, what is my unrealized potential
How to accept a change, how to care for yourself during the change, how to center yourself,
This happened, this was the result, this is what I need to do now

Lots of choices. Come to think of it, I should have done a reading today to figure out what my next reading should be!

The most common three-card reading is past, present, and future. The past can be anything in the far or near past that happened to affect you, either for good or bad. (If you’re doing a weekly reading, the past is the week since the previous reading, so if I am doing a daily reading, the past could be yesterday.) The present can be the current situation or current challenges. The future can indicate the outcome of the present situation or the direction things are moving. Another way of looking at the past, present, future reading is the final item on my example list: this happened, this was the result, this is what I need to do. That’s the one I am leaning toward, though it’s my game, so I can change the focus of the reading every month if I want so I can learn various three-card spreads.

That’s not the end of the choices. Next I have to decide how to pull the cards for the layout. Up until now, I’ve shuffled the deck, fanned out the cards, and picked the cards — one card the first year, two cards the second year.

I could continue fanning the deck and pulling random cards, or I could cut the deck then deal out the top three cards, or I could split the deck into three piles and then turn over the top card of each pile. I’m leaning toward the final way, though knowing me, I’ll end up just pulling random cards. That’s what I did when I started my two-card reading: split the deck into two piles and then turned over the top card. I don’t remember why I reverted to pulling cards, but that’s how I ended the year.

I’m not really sure why I’m continuing with the daily readings since they don’t seem to be telling me anything about myself or even about the cards overall. (I still don’t know the meaning of the cards individually without looking them up — I’d hoped that the daily use of the cards would help me memorize them, but it hasn’t happened, and I don’t know if it matters.) The main reason I’m starting a three-card reading is that I’m following through on a long-term plan. I’d probably get just as much out of the tarot if I went back to a one-card reading and spent more time figuring out what that card has to do with my life, but I should learn how to fit the cards together. (That’s why I’m leaning toward the final item on my example list — it lends itself easily to telling a story.)

Still, you never know — it’s possible something will come of my daily tarot exercise no matter how many cards I use. And if not, well, I have all those decks and plenty of time, so I might as well keep on practicing the tarot.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

A Welcome Visitor

This was another of those days where I wore myself out, not that it’s hard to do since I am still not totally acclimated to the new season. Or maybe it’s the allergies the new season has brought that are aggravating me. Either way, I begin the day worn out, and it only gets worse from there.

I suppose if I took it easy, I wouldn’t get worn out as fast, but then, when I do take it easy, I still feel weary, and nothing is accomplished. At least this way — spending two or three hours outside weeding, cleaning spring flower beds, and watering newly sprouted seeds — I get to enjoy the order I’ve pulled from the chaos.

And I get to dream of the new flowers that I’ll see in another few weeks.

If I stayed inside, I’d also have missed the sublime satisfaction of sitting in my gazebo, gazing out (because isn’t that what a gazebo is, a place to sit and gaze?) on my park-like yard while I rest my weary bones. I can enjoy the gazebo any time, of course, and I frequently do if only for a short time, but it’s even more enjoyable when the rest is well earned.

More importantly, if I stayed inside, I would have missed the visitation of this beautiful creature that seemed particularly taken with my hanging basket of flowers:

Bees, birds, and feral cats all seem to enjoy my garden, but this is the first time this year that I’ve seen a butterfly, and the first time in a couple of years that I’ve seen a swallowtail butterfly.

I’m hoping it won’t be the last.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

What’s Right in Front of Me

Late yesterday afternoon, I was watching the news with the woman I help care for, when I found myself with tears in my eyes. Normally, I don’t let the news affect me, but yesterday it was just too much — too much war and starvation and horror and all the other stories that are trotted out for our dubious entertainment. Thinking about it, I tend to think it was the juxtaposition of people’s fears about what will happen after the recent Supreme Court decision with babies starving to death in Sudan that got under my defenses. Just . . . too much.

People who are involved in any those news stories have no recourse but to deal with their trauma. Since I neither have to deal with it nor can do anything about it, today I steeped myself in localized, life-affirming actions — tended to my flowers. Though is it actually life affirming if I am pulling weeds? In my own small way, I am deciding what gets to live and what has to die, so perhaps . . .

I don’t know. Perhaps I should stop thinking and just enjoy the color that pops up in my yard.

Surprisingly, despite the onslaught of weeds and the gone-to-seed spring flowers, there is still plenty of color, and with any luck, there will be a lot more as the summer progresses and the seeds I recently planted decide to come up.

I’m sure more of the flowers I planted in May will flower when I get around to weeding and clearing the grass from around the greenery. It’s simply a matter of taking the time to do it. Best of all, when I do such hard work, I’m not thinking of anything but what’s right in front of me.

And that’s as it should be.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Making Sense of Little Mysteries

This must be a particularly hard area for meteorologists to predict the weather. Yesterday morning, there was an 80% chance of rain, but only a few meager drops fell from the clouds, not enough even to color the sidewalk. When I went to bed last night, the chance of rain forecast for this morning was 10%, dropping to 0% after 10:00am. Well, this morning, around 10:00am, the rain started, and it’s been coming down ever since. At first, they said there was a 65% chance of rain, even though it was 100% raining. The forecast changed to 100% a few minutes ago. Now they say it will rain until 1:30, but that might mean it will continue raining until whenever, or it might actually mean it will stop raining soon. Who knows? Obviously, no one.

If I had known that it was going to rain so much today, I wouldn’t have watered yesterday, but I have a hunch it’s my rain dance (me standing outside with a hose) that brought forth all this moisture. If I hadn’t watered, today would have simply been another dry day.

I’m being facetious, of course. Although it sometimes feels as if my doing such things as watering my lawn under the right conditions will cause it to rain, I am simply not that powerful. Like everyone else, I do the best I can with what I am given and create mythologies to help me make sense of little mysteries.

One mystery — not weather related — has been solved. The other day I mentioned getting a letter from a bank I’d never heard of telling me that a cyber breach had impacted my personal and private information, and they referred me to an identity monitoring company to keep track of any use of that information. It turns out that the bank mentioned in the letter had bought out my father’s bank, and although I’d long forgotten (no wonder, since he’s been gone for eight years), I’d been a signatory on his account. Although I decided not to worry about why the breached bank had my information, it’s still good to know that it wasn’t anywhere near as mysterious as it seemed.

Another mystery, one that is weather-related and one I have not yet solved, is how, if it continues raining, am I going to manage to ford all the flooded gutters and get to work later today, but I’ll worry about that when the time comes.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.