Day: February 13, 2018

 

It would be great if Valentine’s Day became a day to celebrate the meaning of love in our lives. Perhaps our media and political system could take a day off from fighting and dividing and practice love, compassion and empathy.

On this day, I ask if there is love in my life, I hope there is love in yours.

Sometimes I’ve bought Maria some funky thing for Valentine’s Day, but we aren’t giving one another gifts this year.

We decided we don’t really need Valentine’s Day, we love one another all of the time. We don’t need to be reminded. Love is a good thing to celebrate, the country could use some love, might one day pause to honor love and practice it.

Love has fled  Washington, but it has not left my life, or the hearts of so many people I know and have come to know.

The day is about love, but the story of the man who inspired the holiday is neither pretty or loving.

Tomorrow, the Round House Cafe will deliver a special Valentine’s Day lunch to the Mansion at 11:30. The event is sponsored by the Army Of Good.

I will be there to  help serve, I much enjoy doing that, I get to know the residents in a particular way. The menu is Lasagna, along with cakes and cookies. I’m going to tell the residents about the legend of St. Valentine, and also read them some poems I plucked out off the Internet today.

I wondered about St. Valentine tonight, I decided to check him out. I was a bit surprised. Christian historians say he was real, that he was a Roman priest during the reign of the Emperor Claudius, who is notorious for his bloody persecutions of Christians and the church around 200 A.D.

Claudius has prohibited the marriage of young people based on his belief that unmarried soldiers fought better and harder than married soldiers because married soldiers might be afraid of what might happen to their families if they died. Claudius also permitted polygamy and forbid the church and its priests to promote a monogamous marriage.

The idea of encouraging Romans to marry within the Christian Church was Valentine’s mission. He was caught, tortured and imprisoned for performing marriage ceremonies against Claudius’s orders. One of the men who judged him was called Asterius, says the legend who had a daughter who was blind. St. Valentine prayed with the girl and her eyesight returned. Asterius converted to Christianity as a result.

In the year 269, Valentine was sentenced to a three-part execution of a beating, stoning, and decapitation because of his commitment to Christian marriage.

What Valentine – now “St. Valentine” means to the church, said one Catholic historian, “is that there comes a time where you have to lay your life upon the line for what  you believe.” In his own belief, he did stand for human love and sexuality.

It’s interesting to me that on Valentine’s Day, as on Christmas, we celebrate the holiday but most of us forgot or never knew its real meaning. Here, we think of flowers and cards and expensive dinners out.

I think I’ll share this story with the Mansion residents, I suspect they will like it. I found some poems about friendship they will like, I think, and also family.

I will tell them they are love, and remembered, and known. I will tell them they are not forgotten or left behind. I will point to all of the banners and cards and gifts and cakes and decorations sent by the Army Of Good, and remind them that there are so many people out there care about them.

I will wish them a Happy Valentine’s Day and perhaps pause for a moment or two to honor St. Valentine, who died for an idea he believed in.

Love lives.

The fish tank turned out to be a sweet birthday gift for Maria, she loves it. We lost our Pleko last week, but the two goldfish which she named Frida an Diego, are thriving. I think we will end up upgrading to a 20 gallon tank down the road.

In the meantime, we are moving the landscape in the tank to natural plants, we will get rid of almost all of the plastic. Big landscape design meeting tonight, she is the artist, I’m just the guy with the shovel. We both find the tank pleasing and calming. It’s nice having a little kingdom one can control.

I’m thinking it might be a good way to mediate during my afternoon solitude sessions, when I am in the silence, alone and still. More later.

For a very small dog, the amount of liquids, fluids, bile and food that comes out of Gus in the course of his life can be astounding. Megaesophagus is a messy disease, it requires vigilance, patience, tolerance and lots of Nature’s Miracle and disinfectant.

We are  holding the line and then some.

For five days, no significant regurgitation or vomiting, the longest streak in month.

The new diet – three kinds of canned dog food plus some raw pumpkin and yoghurt is doing well, it seems to be passing through the esophagus. Gus’s weight is good, his energy is staggering, his spirits seem quite high.

He does spit up small amounts of fluid  occasionally, and I can see him swallowing some reflux through the day.

One side effect of the new diet is that Gus is urinating a lot. He doesn’t seem able to control his urinating outside in the latter part of the day or evening. He’ll go outside, urinate in a very long stream, then come inside and have a sudden accident.

We had a urine sample tested at the vet, and it was negative. It looked fine. The vet suggests he might be drinking a lot of water – we do heat the house with wood stoves, so we’re pulling the water up in the evenings.

We are pleased that the most serious symptoms of megaesophagus – the regurgitation and vomiting – are very much under control. His stool – healthy and appropriate – tells us that his food is passing through the esophagus and into the digestive system.

I mix up his special diet in the morning and feed him small meals throughout the day.

This is nothing but good news and we will keep at it. I suspect this will all be he norm for a good long while. I hope so.

If you watch the news, you might well be forgiven for believing our world is disintegrating, we are a nation of haters, vengeance-seekers and cold-blooded ideologues and extremists. That is false testimony, a great lie.

My post office box is its own media, a daily drumbeat of empathy, compassion, charity and good will. It is my news, and it is a beacon of light and decency and heart.

I got the kind of letter yesterday – just about every day –  that makes me feel good about my life and where it is going, and about the world beyond me. I am hopeful and uplifted, despite what their news reports every day. Theirs is the fake news to me.

It is a special gift to drive down to the town post office, to see Wendy or Nancy, and get beautiful messages from people in every part of the country. Older people, younger people, red states, blue states, left and right.

People are so good, given the chance, i have my faith in them, not the people shouting on Facebook.. The letter was from Tammy, who lives in a small town in Michigan. Inside the envelope was a short slip of green lined paper with $10 neatly folded inside – a $5 dollar bill and five one  dollar bills.

“Thank you for your blog…,” Tammy wrote. It makes me have hope and smile…I wish I could do more!. I have triplets in their first year of college!”

Epictetus, the great Greek philosopher, had a Tammy in mind when he wrote “do not want for clappings of hands ands shouts of praise to be induced to do good, but be a doer of good voluntarily and you will be beloved as much as the sun.”

It is this kind of note that melts the heart. The Army Of Good is not a  wealthy army. The donations come in small denominations’, much like Tammy’s.  Small checks of $5, $10, $20 dollars and envelopes with $10, even $5 dollars. The small donations add up, and we perform small acts of great kindness. There are larger donations as well, up to $500, even $1,000, they are precious, they are rare.

When I think of the trouble poor people go through to stuff a few dollars in an envelope and send them to me, I do want to bow my head in thanks. They really hit home and keep me going. It is my faith to do good.

Tammy’s letter has much poignance and humility. She takes the trouble to send $10, and then apologizes for not sending more. Triplets in college at the same time?

Good lord, it is a miracle she can send anything at all. Over this past year, I have received tens of thousands of dollars, mostly in small amounts. We have done an incalculable amount of good, for the Mansion residents, for the refugee and immigrant families.

I treasure Tammy’s $10, it went right to the special bank account the Mansion/Refugee account where all of the donations go, and from which I draw to buy clothes, books, shoes, groceries. This is new work for me, it is wonderful work, nothing has made me happier.

Thanks Tammy, I wish I had enough money to send some to you. I shudder to think of your bills, and am humbled you would reach into your heart and help people who are vulnerable. We are just getting going, here at World Headquarters of the Army Of Good, Bedlam Farm. Good news every day, you will never see it on CNN or Fox News.

You are an inspiration to me, you could easily complain and squawk about the pressures in your life, as so many people with smaller burdens do. Instead, you write me a note on a small piece of paper and carefully fold $10 inside of it with a note apologizing for not sending more.

You possess genuine empathy, blessed are the humble and the poor who can step outside of themselves and think of others.

Thanks Tammy. If anyone wishes to donate to the varied work of the Army Of Good, to the refugees and immigrants in need and peril,  or the residents of the Mansion who remind us to love and care for our elders, you can donate in any amount to the Refugee Fund, c/o Jon Katz, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected].

You can support my work and also donate to support the blog by clicking the donation button at the bottom of every Farm Journal post. Thanks much.