Radical Loving Care: Journal of Sacred Work

Days 109-113 - When Water Falls

  We began life in Water's womb. Her waves, or lakes, her streams are poems. Especially when water falls. 

    The link below takes you to a brief meditation on waterfalls including a poem that I wrote & narrated in the hope it would bring some serenity to your life. 

   May you enjoy the peace that a marriage to the water can bring. 

   Click on the link below:

https://youtu.be/MJZx5eNThng

-Erie Chapman

Photograph by Erie from "When Water Falls" includes image of me with my mother.

Days 214-218 - The Shocking Evidence of Your Impact

   It begins like an ordinary thank you note. 

Days 207-211 How Leaders Never Miss an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity

   "Here's what we doctors say about administrators," a cardiologist said recently, "They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."

   The comment is painfully accurate. Most leaders squander their best power: To make life better for caregivers & patients. 

   As a trial lawyer entering hospital leadership in 1975 I asked myself a core question & got an answer that changed my life &  the lives of hundreds of thousands since.

   Who is my client?"

   I sat in the ER & watched patients come go. Untrained in anything but law, I wondered how I could help? A Code Blue was called. I took a few steps & stopped. What was I going to do, draft a will? I knew I could use the law to warn of the need for better care but I was given the chance to do more. 

   That is how it came to me. I was responsible for several departments. Maybe those caregivers were my "clients". If I took loving care of them they would take better care of patients & each other. As a side point, we would also minimize lawsuits & practices that lead to them. I had the power to impact the quality of their lives & they had the power to heal people in need!

   I did not want to "miss this opportunity."

   For the next forty-five years I led tens of thousands of caregivers in three different health care systems, a healthcare company & two charitable foundations. The simple leadership mission of "taking care of the people who take care of people" resonated through every place I led. Employee & patient satisfaction (also quality & finance) soared in every setting. That work continues in hospitals that practice Radical Loving Care^® (RLC).

   What is being squandered? Most leaders fail to practice RLC. Instead of nurturing, they threaten. Instead of removing bad leaders they tolerate mediocrity. Instead of loving their work they demean it as just a job.

   Culture determines behavior. Leaders determine culture. Leaders have a massive opportunity to create cultures of loving care. When they waste that they betray the mission of the hospitals where they lead. 

   Please share this. Ask leaders to sit in the ER & ask themselves one question: How can I impact patient care? What if I took better care of caregivers: encouraged & inspired them, made sure they had supportive leaders, had them tell me how they give loving care & thus empower them as teachers. What if I practiced a core element of Radical Loving Care: humility. 

-Erie Chapman  

Day 192-193 - Sacred Visions

Sacred visions appear in our everyday environment!

What do you see in the photo? Is it just blown bits of street sweepings or can you see a small bird in its nest?

With each new day, look for unexpected signs of God's love in common people, places, and things!

And believe in everyday miracles waiting for you to care.

-Terry Chapman, Ph.D, Guest Contributor

Days 187-191 - A Shock While Peace Fishing

 

  It is a gift to live in a peaceful neighborhood. Such a gift that I decided to head out to my back yard to fish for something we all seek. Peace. 

   Within 20 seconds I got a shock! Just click on the video & catch a good laugh.

   Why is peace so elusive, especially for caregivers? After all, it is free, always available & right inside us. Yet, it can be as hard to reel in as one of the precious trout my cousin Dr. Terry Chapman catches. But whether or not he comes home with a fish he always captures the real prize fishing can offer: Serenity. (see his prior Journal post.)  

   Monks & meditators catch Peace Fish every day. What do they understand that we do not?

-Erie Chapman

    

Days 179-184 - Portrait of Quicksilver

 For audio of this post click here:

Quicksilver portraits - audio

   If you are an intuitive you can tell a lot about the person in this singular portrait. Her performing name is Minton Sparks.   

   Like the fascinatingly changeable element, quicksilver (mercury's name & the root for the word mercurial), her persona varies like the weather. But it is anchored in her elemental soul.

   This image shows Minton's spirit soaring. Watch her perform on stage & you will see her switch from funny to heart-wrenching to your pal as the heartbeats of her stories vibrate to the music of guitarist John Jackson. 

   Science tells us what goes up must come down. Spirituality tells us what comes down must go up.

   The body's destination is earth. The soul's is heaven. 

   Children smile for the camera. As adults, that camera smile may turn plastic - a guard that our egos use to present its idea of our "best side." 

   In fact, our personality has far more "sides" than our face. 

   Portraiture, whether through photography, painting, sculpture, story or poem, succeeds when it opens a window to the subject's soul, not their smile. 

   Whether our expression shows it or not, we are all mercurial. A suffering patient may smile to fool us. A healthy person may fake pain to gain attention. 

   Caregivers use more than mercury to measure moods.

   Some patients are so stoic they never allow themselves to express the triumph you see on Minton's face. 

   Artists like Sparks succeed because they engage the full range of emotions. To do that, she has looked hard into the storms & thus has a deep appreciation of the shiniest mornings.  

   Which is brighter in this portrait, the sun or Minton's up-gazing smile? Married, they are a quicksilver portrait of universal joy. 

-Erie Chapman

Portrait of Minton Sparks "Caught by the Sun" by Erie, 2017

  

Days 172-176 - Sequential Tragedies

   A Shakespearean tone attends the tragedies that have unfolded before my dear friend, Sue.

   Two days before Christmas, 2020, her husband of 56 years died. Barely five months later, she went to check on her fifty-four-year old son & found him dead on the floor of his apartment.

   Long ago Shakespeare warned of such sequential tragedies in Hamlet:

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions. First, her father slain.
Next, your son gone,..."

   A single tragedy strikes. Its enormity leaves us thinking we are immune from a second one. It can be like that in hospitals also. 

   Just before 5 pm, December 30, 1983 Riverside Methodist Hospital caregiver Pat Matix was stabbed to death in the research lab fifty feet from my office. I was the second person on the scene.

   Only twenty minutes after we had begun to shift to emergency operation status a senior executive I had left in charge of the murder scene called. "Erie," he said, "brace yourself." 

  What could be worse than the murder scene I had just left? 

   "The police just found a second body," he reported. It was Pat's co-worker, Joyce McFadden. 

   Obviously, hospitals deal with a range of disasters including fires, floods & murder victims. In 1983 there was no plan to deal with a murder that happened inside the hospital. 

   Six months later another nightmare call. "Erie, a prisoner-patient in the basement clinic got hold of a gun & has hostages."  

   Impossible? Tragedy has no quota. Those who think otherwise are often unprepared & may even feel cursed when multiple disasters strike. 

   We are stronger than we think. We are more vulnerable than we imagine. That is why citizens of stricken towns say, "I never thought this could happen here!"

-Erie Chapman 

*The Riverside Incidents are described in more detail in my book Radical Loving Care. 

Days 151-155 Got Short Term Memory Loss?

   Of course, you do.  The problem is not the domain of older people. 100% of us have got it. 

   My three-year old grandson got upset recently because he forgot where he put one of his toy trucks. My thirty-year old grand nephew forgot where he parked his car twice on a recent vacation. A forty-year old doctor/golf partner friend often forgets where he put his locker room key.

   In none of these cases does anyone suggest these people have "memory problems."

   But, when I briefly forgot where I had parked my car at a wedding recently a friend in his forties quickly said, "Senior moment, Erie?"

   It is time for younger people to quit tagging older people with the "Senior Moment" thing every time a name is forgotten. And time for we seniors to default to that excuse & thus contribute to our own anxieties about dementia. 

   Have you considered how many names, dates & other information flood the memory bank of the average seventy-year-old? 

   Obviously, none of this is to make light of the genuine problem of Alzheimers. Clearly, if I forgot the names of my own children I would need to see a doctor. 

   In the meantime, take comfort in the fact that occasionally forgetting names & misplacing keys does not indicate a disease process. It means you are human.

-Erie Chapman 

Photograph: "Reed" by Jennifer Chapman

Days 137-141 The Gravity of Rain

   Naturally rain is important. Most fresh water comes from it. 

   Clouds have terrific names. The rainmakers are Nimbostratus. Lightning & thunder leap from beds of Cumulonimbus clouds. 

   But rain is cloud-bound until it becomes heavy enough for gravity to take over.

   Science cannot communicate rain's true gravity. Only poets, film artists & painters can suggest how rain can soothe our heart. 

   My mother loved rain. When a storm signaled she would turn the lights low & gather us in the living room for a joyful experience that defines "cozy."

   My short film series, "The Peculiarities of Water" continues. Part IV is named "The Gravity of Rain."

   This is a meditation, not a story. Take care of yourself by releasing your caregiver's worries for a few moments. Experience the relaxation of rain.

   Click on the picture & the video will appear RIGHT HERE (Below.) You do NOT need a YouTube account but if you have one & sign in you can click "like."

-Erie Chapman

You can now support our work by clicking the "Donate" button www.eriechapmanfoundation.net

Thank you!

Days 130-134 What 80 Years Taught George Will

 In the wake of Mother's Day here is an essay from the eloquent George Will that honors another increasingly large group of us: people 80 & older - including legions of caregivers that still care for others. In 15 years of writing for the Journal I have never used a column by someone else in place of my own. Even though I disagree with some of Will's political views, this writing explains my exception. 

   George Will is the kind of articulate conservative that our former President loved to ridicule. The former President loved to insult "the educated" perhaps because his own hyper-privileged education failed to lift him to a level where he could appreciate the genius of one like Will. Indeed, Will helps proves why a great education is worth it. 

   Here is column-writing at its best:

Opinion: What my 80 years have taught me
by George F. Will, Columnist, May 7, 2021 

“At eighty things do not occur; they recur.”— Alan Bennett

Not necessarily. Surrendering to repetition is optional. Among the abundant pleasures of turning 80, in addition to being well beyond the danger of dying young, is this: Having become skillful at ignoring the merely recurring things, you have more brain cells to devote to other things worth noticing and trying.

“There is,” as George Santayana said, “no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval.” So, as they approach the end of their intervals, 80-year-old martini drinkers — plucky octogenarians not intimidated by their busybody physicians — should expand their evening repertoire to include Manhattans. A ninth decade is a good time to acquire a new dog and name him Miles Davis, a tribute to the trumpeter whose magic it is never too late to discover. If 80-year-olds will make their smartphones’ ringtones the beginning of Frank Sinatra’s “Summer Wind,” even spam calls will trigger a taste of perfection.
“Age,” Montaigne wrote, “imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.” For geniuses like him, perhaps. But all 80-year-olds whose lives have given them the faces they have should select for their phones’ wallpaper two photos of America’s most eloquent face. One should be of Abraham Lincoln in 1858, the year of his debates with Stephen Douglas. The other should be the last photographic portrait of him, taken on Feb. 5, 1865. It captures what Walt Whitman called Lincoln’s “deep latent sadness.” These photos can be constant reminders, during today’s serial hysterias, of the sorrow that has accompanied the pursuit of a more perfect union.

"In 1941, life expectancy at birth in the United States was 64.8 (today, 77.8), only 6.8 percent of the population was over 65 (today, 16 percent), penicillin was on the horizon but the Salk polio vaccine was a dozen years distant, and most hospitals spent more on clean linen than medical technologies. Sixty-three percent of households did not have telephones, less than half the U.S. population age 25 and older had a high school diploma(today, 90 percent) and homosexual sex was criminalized in all 48 states. The nation has undergone a moral advancement — consider the casual callousness toward minorities of all sorts eight decades ago — as stunning as its material improvement.

"Yet the United States’ social hypochondria has deepened, and Americans’ pain thresholds have lowered during the nation’s advancement. Perhaps it is progress, of sorts, that status anxieties have displaced material deprivations in fueling the national pastime — no, not baseball: whining. But to be 80 is to have, beginning in the second half of the 20th century, lived through the emergence of today’s therapeutic culture. It saturates a large class of painfully earnest Americans — expensively schooled but negligibly educated — who, when not extravagantly indignant about Lincoln and other supposed national blemishes, are preoccupied with their malleable identities and acute sensitivities.

"This culture has had one inadvertent benefit: It provoked Peter De Vries (1910-1993), who relegated Mark Twain to the rank of America’s second-wittiest novelist. “Rapid-fire means of communication,” De Vries mordantly observed, “have brought psychic dilapidation within the reach of the most provincial backwaters, so that large metropolitan centers and educated circles need no longer consider it their exclusive property, nor preen themselves on their special malaises.” And: “Once terms like identity doubts and midlife crisis become current,” De Vries observed, “the reported cases of them increase by leaps and bounds.” What fun De Vries could have had with “white fragility.”

"As Damon Runyon said, “All of life is 6 to 5 against.” So, it is a momentous social achievement that those who turn 80 this month — they are only 18 months older than the president, who is only eight months older than Mick Jagger — must wait five more years to get the satisfaction of joining a decreasingly exclusive club: By percentage, this nation’s most rapidly growing age cohort consists of those 85 and older.

"To be 80 years old in this republic is to have lived through almost exactly one-third of its life. And to have seen so many ephemeral excitements come and go that one knows how few events are memorable beyond their day. (Try to remember the things that had you in a lather during, say, the George H.W. Bush administration.) This makes an American 80-year-old’s finishing sprint especially fun, because it can be focused on this fact: To live a long life braided with the life of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to an imperishable proposition is simply delightful."

Thank you, George Will,

-Erie

Photo of Will from Wikipedia

Days 123-127 - The Finest of Fine Arts

   Most doctors enter medicine for good reasons. Yet, some hope to become rich.

   No one enters nursing to become wealthy. No one succeeds in any of the caregiving professions if money is their primary goal.

   Part of the reason is found in the quote Liz Wessel shared this weekend from Florence Nightingale: "[Nursing] is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts." 

   To treat one's calling as a "fine art" is to elevate it. The power of referring to caregiving this way highlights something crucial: Art succeeds when it integrates deep compassion with high competence.

   This is the essence of Radical Loving Care^®. The "passion" in compassion means one's whole being is engaged. 

   What a gift for the sick to find themselves cared for by an angel! That is what every RLC caregiver embodies. Angels heal when they let God's Love flow through them. That is what Liz, as a caring being, has done all of her life. 

   As we celebrate nursing this month, Liz Wessel, R.N, M.S.N., tops the list of Radical Loving caregivers. Any patient touched by her as felt this. Any co-worker open to her presence experiences healing. Every leader performs better when they use her as a model.

   Across half a century I have known hundreds of nurses & have been responsible for tens of thousands of caregivers. The late Marian Hamm (pictured), the Chief Nursing Officer I worked with longest; Tracy Wimberly, a public health nurse who became a Senior Vice President for Patient Care in Columbus & Nashville, & Liz Wessel, are the bright stars in a constellation flooded with beauty, grace & profound love.

   Nightingale was known as "The Lady with the Lamp." Her light illuminates the path for every nurse. 

   With all the tributes that flow this month none can be adequate to the real gift that nursing offers. 

   Thank you, nurses everywhere. You hold in your hands the Golden Thread of healing. We are grateful. We love you. May God's face smile upon you each day & night of every year. 

   Caregiving is, in fact, the finest of Fine Arts. 

-Erie Chapman

Portrait of Marian Hamm by Barb Schwartz

 

Days 116-120 - Women, Men & God

   "Girls are better than boys," Jill said. "No! Boys are better," I replied.

   The argument took place when I was the same age the picture, suited up (left) in war gear with my older pal Stuart.

   With Jill, I delivered my coups de gras: "Jesus was a man."

   But Jill, being Jewish, was unfazed by my silly argument. 

   Seven decades & many wars later what has changed is my support for Jill. Girls are better. The fact that the Old & New Testaments were written by men raises questions about the content of both. 

   One line of argument conquers all others. Violence. Wanna guess the percent of mass shooting committed by males versus females?

   The answer is 98%! And the majority of killers are white males. 

   We can blame it on testosterone, of course. But that belies the question of personal responsibility.

   If physical strength matters, maybe men win. If spiritual strength counts, especially in a religious context, women triumph. 

   Rev.Dr. Clay Stauffer writes, "...women are much more open to faith, church and tending to spiritual matters. Men find church boring and can't pay attention because they are thinking of what's coming up later that day."

   Typical of males, I am engaging competitive argument. The wiser path is to recognize the teaching of all the major faiths. Peace comes through surrender. Men, including me, find that teaching excruciatingly difficult to practice, especially if I think of surrender as losing. 

   Once again, the issues of male dominance of religion appears. Islam, Christianity & Judaism are so male-controlled that "God" is cast as male. If there is one "being" I have trouble surrendering to it is another male.

   Obviously, this male-female dichotomy is false. The core issues is energy, not gender. Female energy, whether in a male or female body, is nurturing. 

   That is why making God female loosens my opposition. After all. Women are kind, comforting, compassionate. As Jill said, "Girls are better than boys."

Reverend Erie Chapman   

Days 102-106 Beauty Unexpected

No one can see that the two children decorated by the gorgeous strips of light are profoundly poor. My daughter photographed them as part of a story on poverty in The Hartford Courant. 

Amid all the suffering on our earth, & sometimes even in the middle of it, Beauty’s face shines.

Beauty resided in the eyes of your mother as she labored to birth you, in the heart of Joan of Arc as the fires rose around her, in the sigh from your coworker who continued giving loving care to a patient who shouted at her, in the arthritic hands of Monet as he fought to make one last painting of those lilies floating on the ponds at Giverny.

Beauty rises not just from looking at the baby born but in noticing the skills of the caregiver who has seen all this before & is still thrilled to show an anxious new mother how to nurse her newborn.

Beauty glowed not only in the face of a dying Joan of Arc but in the eyes of onlookers who recognized God’s presence in the girl engulfed in flames.

At this moment, Beauty gleams from the sweat of a child who manages to laugh while laboring in diamond mines for riches he will never enjoy.

She is heard in the song hummed by a housekeeper mopping the operating room after the nurses & doctors have finished their work.

It lives in the sighs of the home care social worker in Anaheim who has departed the house of a patient whose memory was stolen by dementia & will not recall the caregiver who brought her moments of joy before heading home to care for her own disabled mother.

Beauty resides everywhere & often shines most powerfully in the places least noticed & most unexpected.

Beauty, although evanescent, is the gift Love gives all who pause to see her face & allow their souls to smile back in gratitude.

-Erie Chapman

Photograph by Tia Ann Chapman

Days 95-99 - A Near-Death Experience

   Drowning reached for me at four. My father's muscle was no match for the Pacific wave that tore me from his grasp.

   I thrashed, gasped & struggled until suddenly, as if realizing the power of the sea against a child, I surrendered. In that moment, a preternatural Peace overcame me.

   Approaching unconsciousness my dad's hand, God in the Sistine Chapel painting, reached down & returned me to life.

   "You're okay," he reassured. "Yes," I sputtered.

   But, I was better than okay. I had not yet seen the white light that near-death survivors describe but came close enough to sense this truth: We find peace by letting go. We only experience God through surrender. 

  Naturally, I forget that wisdom repeatedly during struggles for success. 

  As my body moves from near-death to actual, that childhood experience looms. Click on the link for a meditation created to suggest those moments & to bring you peace. (1946 footage of dad & me by my mother.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnIHcNufeLI

-Erie Chapman

Photoart: "Peaceful Sea" by erie 2016

Days 88-92 Describe Yourself In One Sentence

 My best friend of sixty years, Bill Banta, is a great lawyer & fine tennis player. I asked him to describe me.

   He said, "Remember when we played tennis? You never play. I play all the time. Yet, you went after every shot whether you could return it or not? That's who you are."   

   He is right.

   We are labeled. Someone asks another who we are. People use brands. "She's nice." or "He's a jerk."

   Otherwise, we are often described by what we do rather than who we are. With the famous it is easier. Who was Martin Luther King, Jr? He led the integration of the south. Florence Nightingale? Founder of modern nursing. Emily Dickinson? The greatest American poet of the 19th century.

   Only headlines. But better than the banalities lazily used at funerals. "He was a good dad & husband & hard worker. " Or, "She was so sweet."

   Do we care? I did until I realized that it is how we describe ourselves to ourself that matters. Not the obituary.

   Once before I did the one sentence exercise & offered this: "I went after too much and got it." It summarizes what Bill implied years ago.  

   The sentence is confounding, confusing & accurate. Good or bad? Both. Successful or not? Both. Did I have a good life or not? Both. Did I follow my own motto: live love not fear? Yes & no. 

   I like a compliment another friend offered after looking at my photographs. "Eyes were not wasted on you, Erie," she said. Life was not wasted on me either because of one trait that remains: a persistent passion to help others. 

  A wish lantern was released at your birth. What came true? How would you describe yourself? Remember. Just one sentence. 

-Erie Chapman

"Wish Lantern" - by Erie Chapman, 2011

Days 81-85 Resident Beauty

"Let the beauty we love be what we do." -Rumi 

   While hiking in Nashville's Radnor woods my friend Minton Sparks snapped a picture & sent it. We share a joint fascination with Beauty's many voices. 

   Obvious Beauty can be noticed with a glance. Like love, the real experience of her requires conscious presence & the education of our souls so that all our senses can dance with this grand energy.

    Minton's eye catches Beauty in the crosshairs of a shaft of sunset bisecting not only the slender oak in the foreground but the triplet of adult trees, thick & somber overseers of their slender child.

    Symbolists see more: the strength of trees, the wreckage of the departed, the audience of society in the background, the suggestion of Jesus on the cross & whatever else appears as you live with this image.    

    What is "resident beauty"? Beauty as a "tenant" requires reconsidering this essential friend of our existence. Beauty takes up residence in us, in objects, in nature. But, as Shelley wrote, "It visits with inconstant glance..."

   How frustrating. Why cannot she always inhabit us instead of sometimes vanishing so that Shelley asked, "Spirit of Beauty...where art though gone?" 

   She departs when we admit intruders: Fear appears in endless forms. Distrust, Revenge, Greed are among the powerful enemies that drive Beauty from the house of our heart.

   Indifference is among Beauty's most dangerous opponents because it is not recognized as such. Beauty can gain no purchase in the heart unless we actively honor her. This requires vulnerability - a choice that sometimes brings pain & thus requires courage.

   When we serve Beauty we live Love. When we live Love we live our best selves. That is why tending Beauty's garden is a gift beyond measure.

-Erie Chapman

Photograph: Minton Sparks, March, 2021

 

Days 74-77 One Swing

   Oddsmakers calculate that the chance of an amateur golfer making a hole-in-one are 12,500 to 1. Thus, when one happens the lucky golfer feels she or he has touched the edge of the sport's Holy Grail.

   Many avid golfers (including my three partners) go their whole lives & never make one. In fact, it has taken my whole life to arrive at the moment in the picture. 

   After decades of trying & countless swings I finally scored an ace. Yes, I know it does not really matter - especially when compared to the life-and-death struggles caregivers face each day. 

   The reason for the reference here is that one swing generated one of life's most elusive feelings: pure elation. As you know, those feelings do not last long & thus are to be savored, even when it involves playing a game many think is (like all games) silly. 

   Everyone knows that this has been a nightmare year. Celebrations of all kinds have been shadowed by fears of disease (each of us in picture has been vaccinated), so many caregivers have been over-taxed & millions have lost loved ones & jobs. 

   A pall has hung over not just America but the world. Maybe this explains why so many offered such unusually exuberant congratulations over this simple event.

   For a moment, the subject was not the pandemic or politics or war. It was that something happy happened to somebody, anybody. Something they could celebrate as well. 

 -Erie Chapman 

Days 67-71 - Deep Comfort

   "Everyone has a hidden agenda," a friend told me years ago. Her tone suggested she was cynical toward those agendas. Spiritual comfort would be unachievable since she could never trust anyone.

   "Deep" comfort is a phrase that brings relief simply by connecting the words. What it means to you is personal.

    Is comfort falling into an easy chair after a hard day? Yes. But, that kind of comfort temporary.

   Peace is not available at the local furniture store. 

   Some yoga practitioners find more lasting serenity. The same is true for nuns, artists, lovers. Yet, inherent in the human condition is pain that seems inconsistent with peace.

   Those that find true peace have learned to accept pain. Caregivers see this in those rare patients who have know pain is part of life. 

    Faith, Beauty, Love, Hope - which of these brings deepest "comfort" to you?

    The answer may be simple for some. The path to reach it is forever elusive for others. How do we discover Serenity's subterranean location? 

   The simplicity of falling into an easy chair confuses the search for deep comfort. But "falling" is actually an answer to spiritual peace. Love's arms are open to surrender. To put aside doubt & distrust. To choose to accept the pain if they fall the wrong way.  

   The difference between skeptics & cynics holds a clue. 

   The skeptic is a child clothed in adult logic & open to hope. Questions are natural. Positive answers are possible & reachable.

   The cynic is a child that wears a permanent cloak of suspicion. The cynic is certain that no one is trustworthy & so chronically afraid of being tricked that he is incapable of trust.

   The cynics deserve not contempt but compassion. Their lives are shadowed with fear & forever blocked from true comfort because they are sure God is a lie.

   True healers help sufferers to trust what they cannot see, to see Beauty that is right before their eyes, to hope for miracles because life itself is a miracle & to find God's Love by surrendering to it. 

-Rev. Erie Chapman

 

   
    

Days 60-64 "Love After Love"

   How can there be Love after Love?

   Poetry is meant to say so much in so few words. Derek Wolcott (1930-2017) accomplishes that brilliantly while answering the big question implied in his title. In so doing, he gives us a gift beyond measure. 

   In addition, I created & narrated a 60 second cinema poem of images & supporting music to offer another way to experience Wolcott's genius. First, here is the text of his poem:

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Click on this YoutTube link for the 60 second cinema poem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLAiXIiRNMY&feature=youtu.be

-Erie Chapman

Image: "Self-Portrait with Angel" by erie 1977 & 2019

Days 53-57 - Quandaries

   One memory you may have in your youth is when you suddenly could not recall the name of someone you knew well. That panic that sets in when you know you should know it, but you draw a blank - until you think about something else & your relaxed mind delivers the answer.

   It is a funny in your twenties. In your seventies, when the same thing happens, it brings a different kind of panic. "Am I getting Alzheimers? Is age attacking my brain?"

   Chances are, you are fine. But, bias against aging can make it hard to accept that truth - especially when younger people look at you & you know they are thinking: "Uh oh. Erie is getting old & his memory is failing."

   My theory is that a one reason healthy older people have memory problems is the huge volume of information we have collected - like a sky jammed with starling's murmuration. How many people you have met, medical words learned, books read, movies seen?

   No wonder that it becomes difficult to withdraw the right information you "know so well" from your brain's packed computer.

   Still it is a quandary. What to do?

Quandaries

We are not meant
to escape them,

not
for very long.

They are the songs
where, midway,
you forget the words & hum,

you & the band hoping
you will remember them.

If you do recall
you have a moment
to sit in the chair
that adjoins all quandaries,

rest from your quest
for a few moments at best
before the band strikes up
a tune you know
but cannot recall the words.

At least at first.

-Erie Chapman

Photograph: "Murmuration" by Erie

Days 46-50 Agathokakological: The Only Word Describing Human Nature

   Until my cousin, Dr. Terry Chapman, sent me this word I had never seen it. No wonder. It is a mouthful to say & remember. But, its meaning could not be more important.

    Agathokakological means, "composed of both good and evil." Could there be any better description of human beings? Like the photo-painting, we have dual natures with countless shades in between.

   Most, but not all, of us spend our lives trying to be good. Many become geniuses at trying to justify their "evil" actions to fit "good's" ever metamorphosing definition. 

   Our former President became a self-described expert at this game by never admitting any wrong so he could claim to be the "goodest" person ever.

   Millions have trouble admitting bad behavior because of an ultimate punishment: Forfeiting their ticket to heaven. Catholics can dodge this through confession & absolution. But ya gotta join to win. 

  Because the consequence of mistakes may mean life or death committed caregivers are tougher on themselves than anyone.  

   Yes. We must sustain our quest. Can we make our campaign for goodness reasonable & reachable? 

   Shame (versus guilt) undermines Radical Loving Care™.

   Here's one great word usage online, "When any project dominates your life for a sizeable length of time...you have to accept the agathokakological nature of the beast." 

   Since caregiving can dominate our whole life it is wise to accept that no one (not even doctors) is perfect.

-Erie Chapman

Photoart: "Good & Evil" - Erie Chapman, 2021

Want to impress your friends? Here is a pronunciation guide: