Curiosity and Observation

I like this quote: “Observe with radical honesty and curiosity rather than judgment."

This could be my mantra. Too many of us judge everything and everybody before we take the time to observe honestly. I used to do that. In fact, we grew up in a home where my father and brothers were quick to make judgments on what they supposed were the facts. Someone always had to be blamed.

I hear that today from my own friends. Even in politics, people judge others not by who they are and what they do, but by who they vote for. I have been the brunt of some of those judgments and I have been the one judging. 

I am trying not to judge anyone by my standards alone or what my standards once were. I tell myself that only God has the right to judge a person. I try to see the good in everyone because no one is all good or all bad. While a person is a Christian and very religious, that same person might turn away a dirty homeless man and refuse him food. 

During the Great Depression, hoboes jumped off the trains that passed through Pelham, Georgia. 

Mother told me those men had left home up north because there was no work. The men jumped off the trains to beg for food from people like my parents who ran a store beside the railroad tracks. Mother always tried to find something left over from feeding her family to give to those weary travelers who were headed to Florida. They believed they could find jobs as fruit pickers,  fruit packers, and farm workers so they could have a roof over their heads. Like my father who spent time in Florida working for his older brother right after marrying my mother, they sent what money they made home to feed their families. 

Florida was booming during the twenties with building and farming going on. Some of those hoboes never went back to their families up north. But in the thirties when times were extremely hard, even those in Florida struggled to sustain themselves. One of my aunts had a small child and her husband lost his job. They spent their days in Florida pulling the gray moss off the old oak trees. They filled bags and sold them in town to merchants who used the moss for stuffing pillows and mattresses. Moss weighs very little so it took many bags of moss to bring in any money.

Back in the early 1960s

I think about the good people who attended the church where my Mother was a member. They were there every Sunday, sang the hymns, said the prayers, and tried to be good parents to their children. But some of those people said they would bar the doorway of the church and stop any Black person who tried to enter. 

Although I was young, I told my mother I could not go to that church. I didn't believe those people were really Christians. Just as I don't believe the men who owned slaves before the Civil War were true believers of God. No good man would own another human being and work that person unmercifully, I thought, and sell them away from their families. But it is not my place to judge why they did those things. They read the Bible and in that book, we see where slaves were mentioned all the way through.

In today's enlightened world, we all should understand that owning another human being is terribly wrong. Yet, human trafficking is a tremendous issue all over the world. Women and children are the usual victims. 

I have a shirt with words on the front; Practice Radical Empathy.

If we could just imagine what it is like to live in another's skin, another's family, in the body of someone who is disabled, who is elderly, housebound, blind, or deaf, would we be less impatient, would we be more generous or caring? 

Don't criticize until you have walked in someone else's shoes. Someone who recently had ankle surgery and can't put her foot on the floor for weeks said she is much more understanding of her mother who became disabled in her later years and of me who depends on others more and more. 

Have you ever felt anger because someone got out of a car in the Handicapped parking place, and walked into the store with no crutches or a wheelchair? We are quick to judge and feel the person had no right to a handicapped parking space. But maybe you didn't know that the person you believe has no right to a special parking place has an invisible illness that prevents him from walking more than the distance from his car to the mobile shopping buggies inside the store. The person with the invisible illness is me. I have shortness of breath and get extremely tired if I am on my feet for more than a few minutes. When I get home from the store it may take me hours to carry my groceries inside.

Try this for a while. Don't judge others unless you know for sure they are deceiving and manipulating innocent people. Give others the benefit of the doubt. Recently while visiting friends, I made a big effort to listen more and show appreciation to my hostess. She talks and talks and it might be because she is anxious. She often digs up dirt on others to make her stories even more outlandish. 

I tried for a moment to put myself in her shoes. She cooked a large dinner for us. She tried to make sure we did not need anything she couldn't get for us. She had spent hours decorating for Christmas and her house was beautiful. I and my sister made sure we complimented her on all she had done. It pleased her.

What do most people really want?

As I learned from Oprah years ago, the main thing people want is to be seen, to be recognized for what they do or who they are. And it is not a difficult thing for us to do. I wish I had known this years ago when I was learning to live with strangers, with a new husband, with fellow teachers in school, and especially with children.

As a child, I did not feel I was seen by my father or my older brothers. I spent my time trying to get my father's approval and never felt I did. Not until my brother told me when I was in my sixties and my father had died, that I knew he talked about me with pride. 

In many ways, I know now, my father needed and wanted the same thing -- to be seen and heard - especially after he retired and was no longer head of the family business. But he had to give up the leadership of the family to his sons, especially to his oldest son, Ray. And there was some jealousy, some friction, Ray tried hard to erase. 

One reason the elderly men and women who live alone become depressed and sick is because they feel invisible. This is also why some of them take their own lives. When we become irrelevant to the world around us, we don't feel we have a reason to live.

In our hot political world today, I look for good character in a leader, a person who puts the good of the country ahead of selfish needs or lust for power. I keep my eyes, ears and mind open to what the candidate has done or been in his or her past. I dig if I have to, to find out the political history of the man or woman running for office. So much depends on morality and decency, good character, and what the person plans to do for others when in office. 

Today I heard a congressman say he was leaving politics because the two major parties now only care about their party not what is best for the country. From what we see on TV, one would think it is so. I hope that is not true, but we have to be careful how we vote.

Some say we no longer have heroes, but we do. They might not be young handsome men on white horses. They might not be others like Mother Theresa, but every day we see heroes in our own neighborhoods. See how many you can find this week. Tell us about them in our comments.

What we need is Empathy

The Federal Government gives and the State Governments take away.

After reading this article in The Week, a wonderful little magazine that tells the news succinctly and with no bias, and after listening to some of the Sunday news shows, I don't think these governors should be able to cut the unemployment payments for those who are out of work. Many of those who aren't working are mothers who have had to make a decision to stay home with kids instead of going out to a job every day. They had to quit when the pandemic hit so they could become teachers as well as mothers to their children. The virus has not gone away even though we feel better since we can get vaccinated. I was in an office with a woman who said she had not had her shots and was not going to get the vaccination.  I put on my mask.

Why should people endanger their lives for employers who fired them or who are not taking all precautions to keep them safe if they do go back to work? Around my area, I am happy to see some signs asking for workers and offering $10 an hour for the job that paid around seven before the pandemic. As one person in the article in The Week says, this virus forced low-income people into a kind of union whereby they can demand a living wage if they are to go back into the workforce. 

Some of my friends who support this idea of forcing those unemployed to take any job available by cutting off their unemployment benefits, claim that the checks they receive as unemployment make it easy for them to sit home and do nothing. Those who think this way have the misguided idea that low-income workers are lazy and just don't want to go to work. I wonder who those people were who kept the grocery stores running, who were considered essential workers last year? I don't think they are lazy.

If companies pay a living wage, people will go to work if they can physically do so, and if it is work they enjoy or the company is good to their employees. Everyone knows that unemployment benefits end, so many are taking this time to look for better jobs or better opportunities. Some have gone to school to learn a new skill. Perhaps they had to turn to another method to earn during the pandemic. Many became entrepreneurs with stay-at-home businesses. Good for them, I say. Take advantage of what is available.

I did that myself. I could no longer teach in a face-to-face setting, so I had to learn another way to reach my students. In my job as Program Coordinator for NCWN-West, I could not organize and hold a writing conference as we have done in earlier years. But I could use Zoom and hold writing events online for our members. I found I reached more of our members who lived in distant counties because they could sit at home and meet online with lots of other writers. 

We have helped new authors who recently published books to find an audience in places the authors might never appear in person. I also had the opportunity to attend conferences I would not have been able to attend, but with Zoom and online sessions, I was there and learned about writers, their books, their methods of teaching, and what others want to know about the world of writing.

Those governors who have no empathy for those who have struggled with losing their home, having to use food banks for their families, and who take care of their loved ones should just try to put themselves in the shoes of the unemployed who need their benefits. For a year they had no work and no income. Some of our leaders have no empathy for others. Just walk a mile in their shoes is an old and true proverb that we can all take to heart and make this a far better world for everyone. 

When Mourning Comes

This past week has been a sad one for me because I have heard bad news from several sources.

One of my dearest friends has been diagnosed with metastasized breast cancer, stage IV. She is elderly and has had two mastectomies. It breaks my heart. She was my "Guardian Angel" when Barry died. She was never too busy to talk with me, to counsel me about losing your mate, she had gone through it, and going on with your life. She has a delightful personality and finds humor even when things are tough. We used to go out for pizza often, and we always laughed. She is a good person, a great cook who shares her wonderful dishes with anyone who needs them. She has certainly fed me many times. If I took her food I cooked, it would be like taking coals to New Castle. 

The husband of another friend died quite suddenly after a diagnoses of lung cancer. He was not elderly. In fact he was running for sheriff in our county. He was a good man and well respected. I saw his wife, a former student of mine, just a couple of weeks ago, and she said his back had been hurting. She was getting him an appointment to see the doctor. I need to take his campaign sign from in front of my house. 

And the third loss was another friend and member of our writers' network. He went in the hospital for a valve replacement in his heart and was recovering from the surgery. But suddenly he suffered bleeding in his brain. A stroke. His daughter said it was due to his being given too much blood thinner. Mistakes happen, I know. But so many mistakes in hospitals take the lives of people we love. I try to avoid hospitals if I possibly can. I lost too many loved ones, including my dear husband, from mistakes by the medical world.

So, I am sorry if I can't write a cheery bright post today. You deserve better, but I have been too depressed to even get dressed to go out. 

My life has been filled with loss since 1975, losses I had to learn to deal with and had to accept and go on. That year my mother suffered a ruptured aneurysm on a carotid artery, lost her short term memory and was never the same. My sisters' husband, a man I truly loved, died from a doctor's mistake.

Since that time I lost a brother to cancer, two brothers to heart attacks, my mother and my father have died. My oldest sister, June, died from heart problems, and my own beloved died from cancer. 

Each of these seven deaths slammed me to my knees, and I had to pull myself back up and go on. The recent deaths and illness I write about above seem harder because I don't have Barry to talk to, to share with him my feelings and to be comforted by him. 

The men who recently passed away were not that close to me so why do I feel such despair? I feel for their wives, their families because I know that pain of grief that seems to never end. I am more empathetic than most, I'm told, and I feel deeply others' pain. But my feelings for my friend with breast cancer is not only for her and her family, but for me. 

I am sharing a poem I wrote a few years ago. I went to the funeral of a man whose wife I knew. 

For Whom Do I Mourn?

I never met this man who owns

the casket covered in white flowers.

They say he was a craftsman,

hand-built chairs, rivaled scholars

with his logic, his understanding,

though he never finished high school.

.

He entertained his grandchildren,

made funny faces, loved a joke,

was a VIP at church and in his home.

Beside his grave, gray-haired soldiers

fold the flag. That haunting bugle tune

lays him to rest.

Why do my eyes moisten?

Why does my throat constrict?

I cry not for the old soldier,

but for my own, who lie beneath

their stones, under still and leafy oaks

above the pond.

Posts you might want to read:

https://writingthroughcancer.com/

https://profilesandpedigrees.blogspot.com/search?q=Hospice+Doctor

What Makes Me Happy and What Makes Me Sad

Last month, this blog had 2506 page views from the United States. We also had 115 page views last month from France and people from many other countries clicked on this site.

I don't monitor the statistics on a regular basis because I don't want to get obsessed with how many people read this blog. But it makes me happy to see that it reaches far beyond our local borders.

I hope people in other countries learn something about life in this country from reading my  posts and your comments. Some of those people who view my blog are simply Spam. I discard them every day or two. But I am particularly happy when my dear cousin, in her 80s now, tells me how much she loves to read my blog posts. She prints them out and shares them with her son, she says. 

Friends tell me they read my posts but don't leave comments. They email me instead. That is fine with me. Often, I share this blog on Facebook, and that reminds non-subscribers to check out what is happening here.

As a writer, my goal is to communicate with other people. I wish to express my feelings and thoughts, tell my stories that I think entertain and enlighten, and blogging has turned out to be one of the things I most enjoy.

I have never met in person some of you, but you are my dear friends. It all started when I set up the Netwest Writers blog in 2007.  Soon I heard from a lovely woman in Morganton, NC. She has now moved back to New England to be near her family. We never met in person, but I like her and am glad we met online. We have both lost our husbands and had to travel the lonely journey of widowhood. We are both writers, only she has produced a few novels, and I have produced more poetry and short prose.

I don't use all the Social Media that is available and add Friends that I don't really know. It seems that Twitter brings out the meanness in people, but I am fortunate not to have to read that, and no one posts ugly remarks or hurtful things on my Facebook pages.

I admit that I did go in and block some of the political rhetoric on Facebook that is not directed at me, but hurts me to read because it is hateful and mean-spirited. It does nothing to bring about the good will we need in this country. I have never felt the need to criticize celebrities or political figures that I don't personally know. I think it is unfair to accuse someone or spread rumors about someone who can't defend himself. I imagine the pain it brings to them and their families when they read the garbage anonymous people write.

I can't bring myself to call our U.S. President, of either party, liar, stupid, and worse. He has the worst job in this world, I think.  All I ask is that he keep us out of war if at all possible.

I try to remember the rule Barry lived by. "If you can't say anything good about someone, then don't say anything at all." I have not always been that understanding and caring. But I realize now that when I judged or gossiped about someone, I felt awful later. I also have learned that one of the reasons I spoke negatively about another was because I was feeling insecure. I was jealous or afraid for some reason. If I have been hurt, I have spoken in anger and said unkind things. And later regretted I said them. I don't hold grudges forever but some people do. I don't forget, but I can forgive.

I also know that I have abundant empathy for those in need. My father was empathetic for the underdog. He had to struggle much of his life, and he felt the pain of those who were always at the bottom trying to rise. I have been told that I did all the feeling for my family. I experienced painful emotions, suffered for others, more than I should. I guess I still do. I wear the badge of sensitive proudly. If I didn't have that sensitive nature, I'd not  write poetry. I'd not write anything.

A year or two ago, I was deeply hurt by a few people I thought of as friends. It has taken a long time to recover from the betrayal and the downright physical pain I suffered at the time. I didn't understand why I was targeted with this malice. I probably will never understand, but I know I was not at fault. Perhaps those who sought to hurt me have their own feelings of inadequacy, and I am sorry for them. Those who know me and love me never falter in that love, and I try to always show my love for them.

My life is good, and I am doing what I most enjoy. I look forward to the spring and summer. In May our family will hold another reunion in south Georgia. We will laugh and tell family stories, and remember our loved ones who have departed. I will see some that I never or seldom see now that I live in North Carolina, older and very young family members. What more could I ask for?

This is my some of my family and friends at Lake Blackshear in Cordele,GA a couple of years ago. My brother said it was the best reunion he had ever been to. That made me proud as I organized it and brought them all together.
 I never hear the word reunion that I don't think about the time some of us attended a family gathering thinking we were at my mother's family reunion.
I wrote a story about that day and submitted it to Reunions Magazine. They published it in two parts.

Where is the Love?

I am not a fan of television evangelists usually  but tonight while I was working on something Joel Osteen came on  my screen. I have heard some church-going Christians scoff and call him "the feel-good preacher." The times I've listened to him, I enjoyed his inspirational sermons that left me feeling uplifted instead of down on myself, accusing myself of being a bad, sinful person as the preachers of my youth often made me feel.

Tonight his subject was love for those who are different from us. He asks that we not judge people by their appearances or the mistakes they have made. He says we should love everybody. He said that Jesus made it simple. "Don't judge and you won't be judged."

I perked up when I heard his talk tonight. He was speaking my mind, my thoughts, about how our culture today has become so judgmental. If you are on Facebook and read the comments there, you know how mean-spirited people are. If you don 't believe as they do, they post hate-filled comments. Some people I know have had death threats against them because they voiced their political beliefs.

It is easy to judge people but it is not so easy to love those who are different, the poor, the unfortunate and often sick people who are homeless, those who are not like us, have different ways to worship or who do not worship our God. I found it amazing that this preacher tonight said that his God loves every person no matter whether they are Christian or Muslim. 

It seems to me that the very people who should love the poor, help the poor, and want to do what is right, are often the ones who want Medicaid cut, are against the idea of equal insurance for all, don't want their tax money to go toward helping people who are down on their luck or who have lost jobs and can't keep a roof over the heads of their children. In our  local newspaper there is a  page devoted to churches. We probably have more different churches in our little county than any other in North Carolina. The  opinion of most who write on that page each week speak more of hatred and judgement than they do of love. 

I come from a family that worked hard on a farm in south Georgia. Empathy for those who struggled in this life was instilled in us by our parents. Mother gave food to hobos who got off the freight trains near the house my family lived in during the depression, yet my father had no job and their little store and filling station went broke. That was before I was born, but I grew up hearing those stories and I have never forgotten the lessons they taught me. No matter how little we have, we can always find something to share with others. 

I  like the quote, "Let your life be a lesson to others." That was how my mother lived. When my father had more vegetables in his garden than we could eat, she took them to her relatives and friends. When someone helped at our house, she went home with a couple of  bags of something she could use for her family as well as her cash payment. I have no idea of how much my mother sent to charities through the mail even though she never had money to spend on herself. My father was always fair with his workers, paying the most he could for their work. 

It was only after my family became more financially secure that I saw some members change their attitude. Isn't that strange? The poor want to help the poor, but the wealthy who have security and have enough money become stingy and hoard their wealth. I hear these affluent people expound on the laziness of those who are poor and declare they think the government should stop all aid to indigent people. "I don't want my tax money going to those deadbeats."

Sadly we have what  is called " the working poor" and many of them just can't get ahead no matter how hard they try. I know good  people who work hard and still barely get by. Some become ill and need assistance. One woman has fought cancer for a number of years with  surgery after surgery but she still works as much as she can. Her husband is disabled and she is the sole bread winner in that family. Without some government assistance they would be homeless. But there are people who would say, "just let them die." My friend told me today that a member of  her church said those words when they were out for dinner one day. Those are the Christians that Joel Osteen was speaking to tonight on his program; those who go to church every time the doors are open,  but have no love in their heart for anyone but themselves. 

Recently I was touched when  a single mother who makes minimum wage at best told me she tries to help some of the charities that send her requests. "I tell them I can't send but a couple of dollars, and I hope it helps." 

My other concern is that churches are constantly taking in donations to send overseas - mission work - but often their members don't want to help people in their own state or community. Maybe it is easier to send money than to look around and see those who are right in front of you.

"There but for the grace of God go I." Could it be that we don't want to think about  that? Is that why we write a check to a faceless entity to ease our conscious?

After hurricane Katrina decimated an entire city and thousands of  people, I heard condemnation of those who lost their homes and everything they had. How on earth could those people be blamed for what happened? 

I have never been more proud than I was of my sister, Gay, who took one family under her wing and helped turn around their lives. The family of five took refuge in Atlanta and ended up at Gay's church which gave them some assistance. My loving, non-judgmental sister, spent weeks helping this family find an apartment, get furniture for it and did what she could to counsel the distraught mother of three children who were now homeless. 

My sister didn't think, "Oh well, I'm just one person.  I can't do much."
Read my interview with that Katrina survivor here.

Age is a learning experience that can’t be gained in the best college or university. With age comes wisdom and mature thinking. It is not our number of birthdays that make us wise however, it is the hurts, the losses, the tragedies we face and overcome. It is also the celebrations large and small of successes and how we accept them.


With every loss of someone we love, our lives change in some way. For months I’ve had my brother and his wife on my mind. He died suddenly on a Sunday morning in August and she passed away three months later.

How can my life ever be the same? We die a little bit with the death of our loved ones. But we learn something each time we face the pain. Hopefully we learn something that helps us with the time we have left. In talking with my brother’s daughter, I felt the raw edges of her grief. For months that family watched their mother fighting for her life, tortured with surgeries, and finally she passed away quietly under Hospice care.

The  cremains of this couple, married back in the fifties, are commingled in one urn and  buried in an ancient cemetery near the grave of our great-grandfather under massive oaks gray with moss.

Christmas is coming, but how do the daughters and grandchildren celebrate the holidays with joy when the home their tradition-loving mother filled with light, with delicious family meals, exquisite Christmas trees, and gifts lovingly bought or made, is no longer there. It hits them. You can't go home now because home with Mom and Dad is gone. That unconditional love from their parents is only a memory now.

Wisdom comes with this realization. Once we face the pain ourselves, we don’t judge how others handle grief. Once humbled we realize we have no right to judge. We have had our legs cut out from under us and we barely survived, we feel fortunate to still be here, so how could we judge anyone who is dealing with that pain. Empathy grows in places it never thrived before.

Once I was ignorant about this kind of loss. But I learned as I experienced losses of loved ones. Everyone deals with loss, with mourning, in their own way. No one can tell us how we should behave. No rules apply. No limits apply. We don’t get over it. We go on with our lives, and if we are lucky, we finally have days when we no longer feel that stabbing pain when we think of our loved one. We finally are able to talk about our loss without crying, but that doesn’t mean the hurt is gone. We just bury it deeper inside so we can continue to live in the real world.

Finding a way to reach out and help others seems to work best for healing. Starting a ministry for helping children, using our talents to teach others what we know, supporting Hospice or doing something for others in the name of our loved one gives us peace and comfort. Most of us have a need to keep the name of our loved one alive. “As long as we are remembered by even one person we continue to live.”

As my nieces and their children face life without the guiding light of their strong father and mother, my hope is for healing, and my prayers for peace in their lives are foremost on my mind.