You Are in My Bloodstream

*Sorry again for the white highlights in this post.

How does it happen that someone can get inside another person's bloodstream?   Can it still happen in these times of selfishness and alienation?  Is it still possible to love someone intensely and they will love you back allowing you to climb over and jump into their bloodstream?  

Lately I have been thinking a lot of the beautiful words from the Bible book of Ruth in which Ruth tells her mother-in-law Naomi:

"Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God."

These words came about after the death of Ruth's husband.  Naomi tells her to turn and go back to her own country and remarry over there.  Today some will say this is strange for a woman to tell another woman unless perhaps there are some homosexual tendencies, all in the ignorance of only being able to see life beyond how it is today especially in the West with its' empty relationships and lack of values.  In my parents' generation there were often life time friendships and marriages.  People were loyal. People did not allow their egos, their personal ideologies to rule and ruin everything.   I am sure it was certainly like that in Ruth's era.  

Today in the country where I live I am the majority, a single person alone.  It got this way because fewer and fewer people would not allow themselves to think and do more like Ruth. Ruth swallowed her pride and loved her mother-in-law I believe in a pure and respectful way, and because she did, followed Naomi to her homeland, and even worked to support herself and Naomi in Boaz's field, and because of this she found a good husband in Boaz. Naomi was in Ruth's bloodstream and it all led to a better future for her.  She did not have too much pride and reject her mother-in-law's advice when she told her to go where Boaz was sleeping, lie at his feet, and then plead her case as a poor widow.  Boaz had heard of Ruth's loyalty and had seen her working in his fields, so he married her after she came to him.  It didn't all end with Ruth's and Boaz's marriage and in their lifetime either. Centuries later Jesus/Issa was born from their lineage.  We have to find the good and lasting things somehow in this life.  We must find the right person's bloodstream to climb into, and if it is the right one he or she will also climb into our bloodstream.  It will not end since true love and loyalty never dies. 

I love Sufi poetry.  The Sufi poets talk almost always about love, a spiritual love that returns back up to Allah.  Allah is the Arabic name for God, and even Middle Eastern Christians call Him Allah, so I have started thinking more often of HIm as Allah.  There is nothing wrong with the name.  But as for love in Sufi poetry, I believe it can also apply to the human, men and women, a higher and joyful love that is rare to come by but is possible to come by. Rumi wrote, 'Dance in your blood.'   Abu Said Abil Khair wrote, 'Love came flowed like blood beneath the skin, through veins emptied me of myself filled me with the Beloved.'  This is divine love and because in this culture and society we rarely find any balance and have any divine love we cannot connect with people the right way.  People have sex first, but they never connect on a psychological and spiritual level.  We cannot find a lasting love with another person because of this.  Love today is attached too much to the material and the self.  No one wants to become transparent and selfless because they have been taught that to become so you are being weak, you are giving someone else power over you, it is far too dangerous to trust anyone. So we end up alone.  

 All this matter about love and being inside someone's bloodstream and they in return, came into my mind this morning after I fell asleep briefly following an asthma attack.  I have been an asthmatic for several years now.  The only time it faded away was when I lived in Turkey, which seemed to have a climate conducive to eradicating it.  But this summer it seems to be fading away even here.  My asthma is also tied to my emotions.  I can get upset or fearful and then an attack will come. Autumn has arrived in the air this week especially at night and in the mornings.  I slept with my window open over night to get some fresh air.  This morning I felt stressed and sad, and I had an attack, so I took my inhaler, prayed, and fell asleep. For some years I had stopped having dreams, but this year I have started to dream again. Often they are nondescript which I cannot remember, but I recalled my dream this morning.  I had lost something I loved. I will not say what.  I was panicking and suffocating in my dream.  It seemed so real, and then I woke up.  I felt so much happiness and relief that the dream was not true.  After I had fully awaken the idea of the bloodstream and love came to mind. 

I have allowed myself to love in this life and be really hurt.  I have witnessed people who do not know how to love and who take their spouses for granted. They are attached while I remained alone too prideful to admit I was lonely.  In the past I allowed someone to get into my bloodstream, but I was not in his, I believe.  Perhaps if I had been more patient and not left he might have matured and climbed into mine into my bloodstream.  He was not an American or a Westerner and was from a culture where many people are not afraid to be close and communicate.  I don't know though.  I blame myself for so much at this point in my life, but I also blame the society I was born into that was ready to place the cuffs on the day I was born.  

Now I do not know if it is a waste of time to hope that someone will ever see me as worthy enough to climb into my bloodstream.  I feel that I can make the climb, but will I be wasting my time and be devastated again? I tend to give so much, put my heart into things. 

I've gotten used to devastation and unfairness.  It does hurt to feel that my life has been cursed because I was born in the wrong place and time.  I just smile and somehow try to live the rest of what's left of my life.  I really hope the river will flow to the sea of love if there is any possibility left in this world.  You are in my bloodstream.

The Last of the Mohicans

This post is not about Uncas or Chingachgook or Hawkeye in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, it concerns my uncle's funeral last week and really when it all boils down to it, my father.  

Seems there has been a lot of funerals in my family for the last nine years.  The older generation is dying out, my parent's siblings and one of my grandmothers.  All my grandparents are gone now, may they rest in peace.  Of my uncles and aunts who are left, my father is the last of his brothers and he has only two sisters left; my  mother has one younger brother left and two sisters; mom is the eldest.  In the last nine years I attended some of the funerals and others I could not.  Some relatives died near here and others far away.  My father has lost three brothers and one sister in the last two years.  His eldest brother who was 90 died in January, and week before last another of his brothers died after battling prostate cancer for many years.  He had been scheduled to receive rigorous chemotherapy at Emory in Atlanta because nothing else could be done for him in the hospitals here.  One of my aunts called one evening week before last to tell my father that my uncle was passing way, "waiting on God"  to use her exact words.  He had stopped speaking or doing anything.  We missed her call until later that night at about 1 AM.  I happened to spot the light blinking on the phone for the voice mail and got her message. The next day my uncle died at his home.  

My father did not have a good relationship with his family. Jealousy and malicious gossip destroyed any sense of love.  Dad never tried hard enough to make peace with most of his family.  Being essentially a person who will never admit that he is wrong until it is far far too late, his pride did not allow him to go to some of them and say that he was sometimes wrong as well.  He so much wanted praise from his family for his successes and often did not receive it, even from his own father.  

My father and his family were extremely poor growing up like most black people in the South and all over America.  His mother had fourteen children to survive out of eighteen pregnancies.  My father had a twin that died right after birth.  Under such circumstances and with a father who was cold and could become violent when he drank, many people would have become discouraged and beaten down early in life, but my father did not.  He was highly ambitious.  Many of the black people in his generation were like that unlike today. Poverty and oppression could be smelled in every aspect of their lives, but they were determined, and some did go to college and became successful.  

Dad had to give up his dream of going to Morehouse College and studying to become a physician, but he become a business man instead, first starting an upholstery business in our home and having a job during the day.  He took a correspondence course training himself to be an upholsterer.  After putting up a sign in our front yard, he began to get customers.  He did all of his work in our car garage until he decided it was time to take the plunge, quit his job, and open his business in town.  He always expected his family to praise and be proud of him, but only two brothers and one sister ever really did to his liking.  They had all come out of such poverty that he expected them to be happy for him, but dad does not understand human nature very well and still does not.  He still believes that reality ought to be the way he wants it to be.  That is not real life.  In the past I also felt that if I was good, decent, and kind, happiness and what I wanted would come into my life.  The things I've wanted the most have not, and for many years I gave up and felt that if I could not have what I wanted, there was no need to try very hard.  I am happy that I have finally learned to pretty much accept life as it is.  But for my dad, being 75 and still not willing to accept reality, I never expect any change.  

These days my father has built a shrine on his desk to all of his dead immediate family members.  He has framed photos of them lined up along with the funeral programs of two of his brothers.  Every night at about the same time he  goes to his desk and sits there silently gazing at all of them.  Then he drops his head and stares at the floor a long time.  I really feel sorry for him because he must have a great deal of guilt that he did not get along with most of them.   My mother says that he can deal with them better now that they're mostly all gone.  I don't know about that.  I believe he is experiencing extreme regret that he will have to live with for the rest of his life.  He did not even bother to go to most of their funerals including my grandfather's.  He cannot deal with the idea of death and getting old.  Also at the time he had so much rage against most of them including his own dad.  

Last week mom and I went to my uncles' funeral.  We try to go to the ones we can because we know dad will not.  In the last two years before his eldest brother who lived in Detroit died, they often called each other.  Dad had plenty of respect for his oldest brother because he often encouraged my father and said nice things to him.  This uncle of mine used to come down here on the bus from Detroit and stay with us for several days when I was a little girl. My father respects anyone who is old because he believes that with age comes wisdom. Well, sometimes, and it should, but last week a certain famous old woman died here in America who was an indicator that wisdom does not not always arrive with age. Wisdom is a gift from God, so there are some young people who are old souls who are actually quite wise.  Remember King Solomon in the Bible who asked for and acquired his wisdom through prayer to God?  I've met some older people who aren't very wise because they won't allow themselves to be.  They cling to the past and dream of being young because American society honors youth and ignores or scorns the aged.  

So my uncle was buried last week.  I saw relatives I know and did not know.  One of my social studies teachers from middle school was there and I went up to him and asked if he remembered me.  He told me he remembered my face and that he often recalled his former students faces, but not their names.  It turns out that he and my uncle had been childhood friends and had maintained their friendship throughout their lives. He is a little older than my uncle who was 80.  I think it is very difficult for today's people to hold on to friendships for so long.  Mobility and selfishness often get in the way.  The old people got so much right that we now get so wrong. 

One of dad's old childhood friends called this week.  He hadn't heard about my uncle's death until after the funeral, so he called to express his condolences and to chat a bit.  My father told him that he was "The Last of the Mohicans" because all of his brothers are now deceased.  He tried to attach a little laugh to it, but I am sure he is hurting.  I doubt he will ever admit to his hurt, but when I see him go and sit every night before the shrine he has made of his family I know it must be a terrible feeling to never have the chance again to reconcile with some of those he was biologically the closest to.