Stretching umbilical cords, or the joy/sorrow of letting kids go


I woke this morning thinking about how my kids, the hearts of my heart, are about as far away from me and each other that they can be, geographically. One is in Europe, one in Australia, one back in Kingston while I am in Vancouver. It reminded me of the imagery I tried to share with them (but of course they found repellent, because, kids) that I can almost feel the leftover umbilical threads tugging at times, especially when I am worrying about them, or when I know life is being challenging for them. It’s a weird thing.

I raised them to be independent, to question the status quo, to be unafraid of trying new things. This has resulted in them being all over the world. I miss them, still find such joy in their contact with me. I have fantasies of them all being together, chatting and laughing with each other again. I used to love listening to them talk amongst themselves. This is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

But that’s the thing – you’ve got to let those kids go. Let them vanish and like that old tiresome quote: If you love something, set it free. If it is yours, it will come back to you. It’s risky, though. They may never come back. One of mine hasn’t. Still have that psychic umbilical attachment, though, even if these days it is more of an ache.

In my upcoming book, Spit & Polish, my main character, Ruth, is dying to leave her small town and move to the slightly bigger city of Kingston, ON. She’s bored, the local boys are mean, and she dreads having nothing to do but wash diapers for her always increasing brood of siblings.

In that time period, the years after WW2, choices for single women were few. All the jobs that had opened up for women during the war were closed with a snap. Men needed the jobs, everyone thought. Women should get married and have babies. And endlessly support their husbands, no matter how unfulfilling that might be. Ruth, at her young age of 18, didn’t love that option. She wanted an alternative.

Cloyne in the 1930’s

But her parents wanted her nearby, of course. At least until she got married. Which is why Ruth was so surprised to find her mother supporting her to go away to nursing school. It meant a very real increase of work for her mother, and Ruth is frequently guilty about her escape. (Not so much that she wants to go home, though…)

While nursing might seem a stereotypical choice for women now (I beg to differ, having had a very varied and exciting career as a nurse myself), it certainly wasn’t then. Nursing was just becoming respectable, and nurses were continually being portrayed as being easy, loose, a bit tawdry. Nursing schools were incredibly strict to help control this image, and students were held to a very high standard for behaviour. Of course there were a few who snuck out after hours, misbehaved with patients, followed doctors like eager puppies. Ruth doesn’t dare. She knows she is there on a short leash from her father, and she is terrified of losing her route to what she hopes is a satisfying career.

It doesn’t help that challenges are thrown at her every time she steps just a wee bit out of line. Still, she keeps on, gradually becoming braver as she falls more in love with nursing. It gives her strength to stand up for her choice, even as another pregnancy makes her guilt about not being at home to help her mother. Fortunately, Mrs. Maclean is willing to do the letting go, to allow herself to accept the risk of losing Ruth forever.

I’ll be doing an interview about the book with OC Publishing, on their Author’s Journey sites : YouTube, and Facebook, on Tuesday February 27. I’m delighted to have a chance to visit with Anne O’Connell, who has been a tremendous supporter of writers and writing.

Spit & Polish officially launches February 29th. It’s on sale (the ebook) for pre-order until then on Kobo, Amazon, Apple Books and more. Why not grab a copy and see what happens to Ruth in this first in a series of books on Ruth, nursing education, medical care, and Kingston, ON in 1946.

Self-promotion, or why I’ll never succeed in politics


This meme showed up on Facebook this morning and it made me laugh out loud. I’m battling with self-promotion. When I wrote my first book, Recycled Virgin, and launched it right in the middle of the pandemic, I just couldn’t force myself to do any promotion. Life felt too grim. So my first novel sunk gently into the muck. It is still available, and I think it’s worth a read, if I do say so myself.

Some other people say so, too – one Goodreads review that warmed my heart says: “Recycled Virgin” by D.A. Brown is an intellectually stimulating and thought-provoking exploration of a fictional premise that brilliantly reimagines a cornerstone of religious history. In this intricately woven narrative, the author takes readers on a captivating journey that questions traditional narratives, challenges preconceived notions, and offers a fresh perspective on a timeless story.

Hmm. I seem to have firmly stuck my promotional hat on. Those of you who read this blog, (and cheers to all of you who do. I really appreciate you!) have been somewhat awash in messages about the upcoming launch of Spit and Polish. I’m truly sorry if you feel overwhelmed. It’s all about the search engines…

Publishing a book these days is quite a feat. It’s easy to create a book, but will anyone ever read it? There are so many DIY’d books out there, many of them only responsible for the unnecessary killing of trees, it becomes hard to make an impact. There’s a sweet spot where the behemoth Amazon actually takes notice of your humble book and starts promoting you. This makes a huge difference, lifts your book temporarily out of the mire, shines a bit of effort from them upon it. All those “Amazon Best Sellers” manage the algorithm by finessing pre-orders, sending out piles of notices to their mailing lists (obtained by offering ‘freebies’ for a name). I’m simply not good at that.

I’d like to think my prose will pull people in and my book will take off independent of advertising, but realistically, I know that just ain’t so. So I’m writing this blog, and we are offering the ebook on the cheap for pre-order – won’t make me rich, but it might just make me noticeable.

But I really hate promoting myself. I can promote you and what you do with great ease – will gladly cheer on your books (especially if I’ve edited them) (stop it! More self-promotion!) But ask me to sell myself, and somehow, I’m just not convincing. When I did run for politics many years ago, I failed utterly in the “call people and ask for money” phase. My burgeoning career failed so promptly there was barely a ripple.

So please forgive me as I thrash about promoting my book. I’m kind of proud of it. I loved writing it and researching for it. I’m working on the sequel as we speak. I’d like it if you enjoy it, too.

I have had a sweet review posted by an early reviewer on LibraryThing: I love books where I identify with the characters, and Ruth was a very sympathetic and resilient character, with all the trials she went through. The author is planning to continue Ruth’s story in a sequel, so I will look forward to that. Highly recommended!.

And on Tuesday, I’ll be doing an interview with the inimitable Anne O’Connell from OC Publishing so you can watch me struggle to self-promote, and hear more about the book. Check it out (along with many other excellent interviews) on her YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@OCPublishing

Being a nursing student, or getting by with a little help from your friends


Photo by Gustavo Fring on Pexels.com

There are lots of books and stories about the trauma of training to become a medical doctor. There are fewer about nursing education, for some reason, unless you count the romances and Cherry Ames-type books. Apparently nurses have an easier time of it.

I beg to differ.

I’ve looked at nursing education from both sides now…as a student and teacher. Anyway you slice it, it’s tough. In my character Ruth Maclean‘s time, nursing was largely a process of training young women to obey. In my time as a student, some years later, we were initially forced to obey, and then after the first couple of years, were gently allowed to think for ourselves, a bit. I still entered practice completely green, but with an expanded view of my own competence. How I pity my poor patients from back then!

In every case, the amount of knowledge needed to become a competent nurse was huge. Huge and unappreciated. Nurses had to be able both to assess their patients and to persuade doctors to take the issues they found seriously. This was more difficult than it would seem. Doctors also have their image to maintain, and often that meant putting down the nurses they counted on to keep the patient alive.

And the training was gruelling. I’ve tried to convey that a bit in Spit and Polish. Exacting expectations for everything from dress to bed-making to the medical treatments made learning nerve-wracking for the average student. Shift work and the endless demands to clean as well as care for the people in the beds could throw a student off track. Poor Ruth is less competent at physical tasks than her fellow students – largely, I think, because of having to do piles of housework at her crowded and noisy home. She had a tendency to be slap-dash, and that just was not acceptable for a nursing student. So she was called into her supervisor’s office far too often for the school’s comfort, and eventually banished to build up her skills at the Tuberculosis Sanatorium.

Fortunately for Ruth, and my story, she took this admonition in good spirit and vowed to do better. But key to her progress were the friends she made along the way, the supportive other students, the senior nurses who took her under their wings, the friendly physicians who helped her learn new skills.

And that’s the key point about nursing education — the only way to survive it is with friends and colleagues who can prop you up when things get bad. I was fortunate to have a roommate and friend, Paula, who was by my side as we trudged through our degree. We studied for the RN exams together, sitting on a sunbaked roof in Kingston, ON, then removed the gains through some fairly serious celebration afterwards. (We both passed.)

Before that, we saw each other through disastrous relationships, unfriendly profs, bad placements, annoying exams. We fought off the “nurses are easy” teasing, became professionals. When we got our first jobs, we rallied to support each other after bad shifts where patients died or head nurses snarled or doctors were nasty. Her friendship was invaluable.

It’s for that reason I decided Ruth should go to the Kingston General Hospital School of Nursing, a place whose alumni are still close friends after more than 60 years. They still look after one another, still meet regularly. It’s pretty impressive — but it also speaks of the shared experiences they had, the support they gave one another all along.

I hope you enjoy reading about Ruth and her nursing classmates and their trials and tribulations. If you act now and pre-order Spit and Polish before it launches on February 29, you can get a discounted price. And keep an eye out for the sequel, expected soon.

Medical progress, quackery, and the profit motive


The last couple of days I’ve been disabled with back pain. This is new for me as my multiple sclerosis means most of the time I rarely feel any pain. Anywhere. Which can make for missing some essential things going on in my body. Right now I am wondering if it is a kidney stone or a bulging disc or I’m just generally falling apart but I have places to go and things to do and I haven’t got time for this.

Onto YouTube I go, for helpful (?) advice about self-diagnosis. It wasn’t helpful. I don’t have a doc to go see so the only alternative to self-diagnosis is sitting in the ER for hours which would likely aggravate everything with not much reward. SO YouTube it is.

After listening to a relatively sane doc tell me how to relieve things, the other videos cued up. The first one was about faecal impaction (it must sense my age and state of decrepitude). According to the handsome charlatan, drinking water or eating fibre or even exercise won’t help this – you have to pay for this doc’s special advice. (She was “once on a prestigious medical faculty” – I’d be interested in knowing where she is now, as fraudsters regularly assign names of people that don’t exist to their miracle cures. I’d look it up but sitting is painful.) He went on about how bits of stool linger in your bowel for years – that old chestnut. It just ain’t true. I do wish some of these people would look inside a bowel now and again. Or prep for a colonoscopy.

It all reminded me of the tuberculosis treatments back in the time of my upcoming book, Spit and Polish. Back in 1946, tuberculosis was common. Overcrowding, traveling to places where it was epidemic during the war, poverty, poor diet — all of these created a happy environment for mycobacterium tuberculosis. The bacterium that causes TB is a nasty wee thing, designed to defeat elimination. The cells have a waxy coating, which makes them resistant to drying out and to attack by antibiotics. Fortunately, it reproduces relatively slowly, so it isn’t as wildly infective as say, Covid, but once you have it, it is the devil to get rid of. Our usual immune system has a very hard time digesting the cells. And it can lay latent for years. My father had TB in 1946. He survived with no long term effects, but when he was going through chemotherapy in the 1980’s, those rotten little cells started coming alive again.

TB is often in the lungs, but as you will read in my novel, it can infect any part of the body, including the kidney, spine and brain. Back in 1946, there weren’t any antibiotics widely available that effectively treated it, so TB patients were put through all sorts of torment as their docs tried to keep ahead of the disease.

The chief therapy was bedrest and better nutrition, sunbathing and moderate exercise. That could go on for years, and did, in sanatoria all over the world. This was expensive and money was needed, so more interventions were invented to apply for grants. Things like inhalants like mercury and paraffin were tried, to ease coughing. They often eased patients into the next world.

Frequently patients with bone involvement were placed in traction or casted to keep the bones in place while a hoped for reconstruction could take place. Patients could remain casted for months, which led to other problems.

Surgical approaches were used, aimed at letting the lung “rest” and cure itself-and, as the mycobacterium tuberculosis are aerobes, so removing oxygen from the area would help slow its growth. Surgical treatments could be temporary, like a created pneumothorax, or permanent, like a Semb’s strip, phrenic nerve crushing, rib removal, lung collapses and resections and the like. Needless to say, patients who experienced these treatments were forever deformed and visible. This made it difficult for them to live in a tuberculosis-afraid society.

Add the prejudice that some types of people (I’ll leave you to imagine who, but hint hint, they are assumed to cause every bad thing that happens to them) were predisposed to TB, and no one even wanted the affected to deliver the paper. It was a bit like the early stages of AIDS.

Fortunately for the surgically maimed and those awaiting maiming, streptomycin came on the scene, with initial miraculous results. Other antibiotics followed, and combinations of antibiotics that worked well against the tiny foe.

Unfortunately, antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis is now on the rise, so the future surgically maimed may yet be waiting in the wings.

Want to know more? See my upcoming novel, available February 29, 2024.

Beautiful Kingston, Ontario: Antiquitate Civilitate Humanitate


(A Civil and Creative Community with a Proud Past)

Photo by Rasheeque Ahnaf (Piash) on Pexels.com

That slogan in English reads a bit like something from Winnie the Pooh, with all the capitals, but I’ve got to admit it does sound like Kingston.

Kingston was the first capital of the United Province of Canada. It is filled with limestone buildings, hospitals, universities, military structures, and prisons. We used to have a statue of local boy Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s First Prime Minister, but his history is at best mixed, so he’s been moved to think over his crimes in the local Cemetery. We still have his house from the 1840’s and you can go tour it and marvel at how the elegant of that time lived.

The area has been settled for hundreds of centuries, acting first as a home for Iroquois, and then for the “five nations” formed of Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and Wyandot peoples. These residents traded furs with the French – beavers were everywhere and their fur much prized. Following this, the French and English traded ownership for years.

Kingston is ideally suited as a defence spot, situated on the shores of Lake Ontario, the end of the Rideau Canal, and near the end of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Various armies and navies have resided here, and there are leftovers. We have Fort Henry and Martello towers, and the military university, Royal Military College. Many of these places have been in use since the War of 1812, where Kingston played a significant role.

So Kingston was a friendly place for the military for decades. After WW2, Kingston’s Queen’s University opened up so many spaces for returning soldiers to get upgraded education, they had to be put up in tents all over the place. The population of the city increased madly, and I can only imagine the trials and tribulations that the local government went through.

In my book, Spit and Polish, I deliberately focused on the immediate post-war period. So many books talk about the war, but it’s often like those stories where the prince and princess marry and live happily ever after. I wanted to see the city coming back to life after losing so many of its population to the war effort.

Ruth has just dipped her toe into Kingston life. She’s coming from the tiny town of Cloyne, about an hour and a half north of the city. She’s so tasked with her nursing school work she barely sees everything else (except stores that sell new stockings!), but she already knows she loves the place. She does go to local eateries and shops, and you’ll see their names in the pages of the book. She also rides the beleaguered Wolfe Island Ferry, which was actually running at the time.

Cloyne overlook

In the current time, Kingston has a vibrant arts community, several colleges and universities, innovative research departments and businesses, and a wonderful climate. I can understand why Ruth loved it.

See Spit and Polish, launching February 29, 2024, for more about this enchanting city and the time.

Life in a Sanatorium


In my upcoming book, Spit and Polish, Ruth Maclean, a nursing student, is reprimanded for her slowness and clumsiness. The nursing school sends her to practice her basic nursing skills at the local veteran’s hospital and sanatorium which, coincidentally, has been flooded with patients and needs more staff. Hmm.

When she first arrives, she is given the patient rules, which were lengthy. Rest periods every couple of hours were mandatory, during which the patients couldn’t even read to pass the time, and nurses weren’t allowed to speak any louder than a whisper. Patients were propped outside in the fresh air, even in winter. The rules around spitting were very intensive, as TB bacteria were present in sputum. It was collected in little pots or bottles that then the nurses had to clean out (ick). Sterilizing and cleaning were major duties every day, often using vile solutions of oil and iodine. It’s a miracle nurses’ uniforms remained white. It’s a miracle nurses remained!

Patients were grouped into several categories: absolute bedrest, basins (where they can wash themselves in their room and go to the bathroom), OTW (out to wash), and then up and about, gradually increasing their amount of time out of bed hour by hour. Any of these steps could be revoked if the patient’s temperature went up. It was a long, long healing time – it’s a wonder patients didn’t go mad (more often). Still the food was often good, since the hospital had to try to reverse the extreme weight loss caused by the disease. That’s assuming the patients could eat. TB often creeps away from the lungs, and patients could have throat abscesses, spinal infection, kidney involvement, and more.

Punishment for not obeying the rules was pretty severe, too: “It is expected that any patient that cannot adapt herself to these necessary restrictions will inform the Medical Superintendent and make immediate arrangements for transfer to an institution more suited to her tastes’, and that ‘she will not endeavour to make herself more comfortable by lack of discipline which can hinder the staff and make matters more difficult for fellow patients’.” (Raymond Hurt, Tuberculosis sanatorium regimen in the 1940s: a patient’s personal diary) Needless to say, nurses disobeying the rules would also be severely reprimanded. Nursing students, even more so.

It was a fascinating period to research for the book, and I was specially interested since my father had been hospitalized for TB in the very sanatorium Ruth is sent to. I also did part of my nursing training there, though by that time it had changed to a hospital for severely disabled children. Still, the building remained pretty much as it was back in Ruth’s day, almost falling apart. It had been thrown up during the war to house women workers at the ALCAN factory, and been unloved surplus ever since. It’s been taken down since I was there, and when I went looking for pictures you could see Kingston was embarrassed by it, as there were almost no photographs available.

There are many books detailing life (and death) in various sanatoria world-wide. Thomas Mann’s classic novel, The Magic Mountain, covers both the physical and psychological aspects of a long stay in a sanatorium in the Alps. It is a good read for a long winter…

Spit and Polish , which does have more action in it than The Magic Mountain, is available February 29, 2024.

Florence Nightingale


Dear old Flo (as she would have hated to be called) wasn’t necessarily someone you would want to sit beside at a formal dinner. You’d be trapped forever next to her as she waxed poetic or fierce about the need for nursing to be valued, for health care to be less custodial and more caring. I don’t think she had much of a sense of humour about it, either. Of course, it was the 1800’s, and maybe with the wars and all, there wasn’t much to laugh about.

Back in her time, the only requirements for a nurse were “a loving heart, the want of an object, and a general disgust or incapacity for other things”. In other words, if you were lazy and unloved, here’s your career. Her response was “This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was sent to be schoolmaster because he was past keeping the pigs.” She wasn’t going to accept this sort of thing, and set about creating a nursing corps of women who based their care on science and intelligence.

She was all about cleanliness, which was key at the time. Sanitation and fresh air and quiet were all deemed vitally important in getting people well. Of course, in her time, they were pretty dirty places, the hospital and home.

In our time, it’s getting that way. Contracting out cleaners and sealing hospital windows means the cleanliness aspect is suspect. The noise of modern hospitals, where (from my recent experience) quiet is an unknown commodity isn’t a help either. We seem to be heading backwards.

In my upcoming book, Spit and Polish, nursing student Ruth Maclean reads a bit of Florence’s Notes on Nursing every day. It’s a good thing, too, because a lot of her training at that time was based on Florence’s edicts. And her instructors required the absolute obedience to instruction that Florence Nightingale demanded.

My book takes place in 1946, just after World War II. It was an exciting, if slightly gruesome, period for medical advances. During her time at the tuberculosis sanatorium, she is witness to the changing protocols of TB treatment, the surgeries and inhalants, the introduction of antibiotics. As her skill levels grow, she becomes even more excited about the detective work of nursing, the assessment of patients, the thrill of making them comfortable. But she still must keep the focus on Florence’s approach to patient care:

“I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper choosing and giving of diet–all at the least expense of vital power to the patient.”

Becoming a nurse is an honour and a privilege, but with responsibility to match. Ruth learns about this as she travels along her first year of working as an aide, battling challenges and challengers all the way.

Catch the release of Spit and Polish, this February 29th, 2014. It will be available (so my publisher assures me) on all platforms and through bookstores (you may have to ask them to order some in) or through somewhatgrumpypress. I so hope you’ll enjoy it!

Job or mission?


Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

As I wait eagerly for the official release date of my book, Spit & Polish on February 29th, I find myself thinking about the education it requires to become a nurse. And about the saying “once a nurse, always a nurse’, which seems to crop up whenever a nurse is in the room. But is it so?

Nursing education gets nowhere near the accolades that medical education does, but I would argue it can be just as rigorous and demanding. Our anatomy classes were the same as those the medical students took, though we were kept separate from them in case we got ideas above our station. We learned about ALL the body parts and the ickier parts of them, and that stays with us. It can make us interesting (and slightly shocking) dinner companions, and helpful friends. Our learning of the nursing process impacts us for the rest of our lives, often making us woefully eager to seek solutions to every issue. The knowledge also makes everyone think we are “easy” – that we don’t have boundaries with regard to personal behaviour. The sexy nurse image persists. It’s annoying. And belittling.

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

There’s another process that happens in nursing education, or used to, and it’s one I try to describe in my book. Students are forced to obey everyone, from their instructors to the aforesaid medical students. Deviation from the norm of behaviour is strictly forbidden. Being forced into a certain shape means that even after we are finished with training, we often hold that form.

My character Ruth gets in all sorts of trouble for speaking her mind or not being quick or assertive enough to get her work done. She gets demoted and sent to the TB sanatorium to “build up her skills” so she can perhaps handle the curriculum, but really to learn her place. (Spoiler alert: I don’t think she does)

Spit & Polish is the start of a series, seeing the young Ruth through her nursing education and eventual graduation. It’s set in the Kingston General Hospital School of Nursing, which unfortunately no longer exists. It’s also set in the post-World War Two era, when advances were racing along in health care. But nursing school remained a place of indoctrination, as well as education.

“Once a nurse, always a nurse”? I think it gets stamped into our DNA.

I hope you will join me in this story February 29! Click the cover to go to my publisher’s website and get more information.

On being seen, or sending out advance reading copies of my latest book…


My lovely publisher at Somewhat Grumpy Press has assembled my book and we are creeping closer to the actual official publication date. I’m at the point of sending out “advance reading copies”, which for me is a very scary thing. (PS: this is not the final version of the cover – we all know the back looks cut off…)

See, when we write, we’re alone. We wrestle with words, shape them up, get them edited and sent to Beta readers – but that’s all while the book is still in its malleable state. We can change things, big things, and always do. Now, though, I’m hoping readers will be captured by the finished story, enjoy it, perhaps even like it enough to write me a sweet review (or a bad one, after all, all press is good press, really). But what if they finish it and go…”meh?”

Suddenly we are seen, our toils are judged, and as we are gearing up for the release of the book, we have to remain enthusiastic about it – happy to market it and speak kindly of it and more. That’s hard to do when the response is lukewarm or missing.

So as I wait for feedback, I find myself wanting to hear back if the story touched people at all, if they liked the main character, if the nursing stuff rings true. I wouldn’t mind if they say the book is a waste of paper and severely damaging the planet by killing trees for no known reason (well, yeah, I would mind but I’m trying to be a grown-up here). A reaction is always something.

Imposter syndrome is rife in authors – I imagine even Margaret Atwood feels nervous when she sends her babies out into the wild, and she has piles of accolades behind her. It’s something about creating things out of your head…hard to put out your creative soul for the world to judge.

So readers, of my book and others, be kind to your authors. Write them a review. Let them know they’ve been seen, even if you don’t love what they’ve written. Maybe it’s written well? Maybe the spelling is correct? Writing is lonely enough without an utter silence when a book is released…

I’ll be publishing excerpts on this blog from time to time – I hope they intrigue you. Let me know!

(I released my first book, Recycled Virgin, at the start of the pandemic. No book launch, no reading events. Hard to market. Reviews crept in, slowly slowly. Check out its page to read them. Heartening. Still proud of it. You might enjoy it, too.)

rv-cover-amazon3

Ho Ho Ho, and all that stuff


Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

And here we are again, in the festive season, the one filled with songs like “Silent Night/War is over,” “Do they know it’s Christmas after all,” and others filled with arias of hope and lightness and desire for togetherness – while all around us, the world is rumbling.

It is physically rumbling, as with the earthquakes in China and the Philippines and Iceland, and with volcanoes in similar locations…and it is politically rumbling, with fascism on the rise and the increasing lack of cooperative functioning. And wars, everywhere wars.

It all seems a bit harsh to celebrate the coming of the light when so many people have been denied electricity or food or safety. We shuffle off to Christmas, Hanukkah or Solstice services, feeling all warm and cozy in our middle class “I gave to the Red Cross” smugness, then come home and see on the news intolerable hardship, poverty, and violence. Or step over it on our way home…

Hey, I’m one of those smug safe ones, having donated where I could afford to. I understand the utter feeling of helplessness when looking at the larger problems we are facing. But I am feeling a growing sense of rage, as one after another, our politicians are shown to be corrupt (and yet, get reelected?), as corporations take over the world to enrich one at the expense of millions (and never get stopped), as the environment gets toastier and toastier and yet we don’t want to let those people who will be burned out by our greed move to someplace where they might be able to survive.

There’s got to be a way to stop some of this, slow it down, turn some of the madness back, I shout. Think about the future…or even the present, for vast numbers of us.

I’ve tried, over my life, to protest, write letters, get involved in causes that matter to me, but I always feel as if I am pushing the line only a tiny bit. I don’t have enough money to push things far enough to make a difference in the big scale of things. Violent attacks are frowned upon, and besides I’m too small and unfit to make an impact that way. And it’s not the example I want to make.

So instead I try to focus on the small, good, things. Try to help one or two people, offer my volunteer services where I can, donate to causes in my small way. Use less. Smile more. Be pleasant. Stay out of things that I don’t know enough about to converse intelligently. I do have opinions, increasingly crotchety ones as I get older, but I hope I am learning that I don’t need to share ALL of them with everyone. And hey, I might be wrong about some of them. I can always learn.

I’m trying to err on the side of adding grace to the world.

It’s the only thing that gives me hope, in this rumbling world we are all living in. And we need hope and grace. They are both pretty thin on the ground these days.

So ho, ho, ho, everyone. Light those candles and shut out the night. Bring joy. Laugh. In amongst it all, pray to whoever/whatever you believe in that we will smarten up as a species and stop killing one another, stop trying to crush one another, open our hearts. And then, get to work. We have a lot to do, even if our contribution is only a small flicker. It’s still progress, and together…

Photo by Mohammad reza Fathian on Pexels.com