Thoughts Inspired by the movie "Dallas Buyer's Club"

It has been quite a while since I have seen a movie that has been so thought provoking and inspirational. Usually, I reserve Hollywood for the times that I want to be entertained without a lot of thinking. That’s not to insult Hollywood; I have enjoyed thousands of movies over the years but usually go to books for helping me gain perspective about a situation or current political issue. This movie, however, actually penetrated my subconscious causing me to have a dream that I remembered enough to analyze this morning.

The dream and a Hindu scripture that I read in the Peace Bible this morning helped focus the deeper message of this movie aside from the obvious political issues having to do with a person’s freedom to choose the type and kind of medical treatment he wants, especially for illnesses that the current medical community is unable to treat successfully, and his/her sexual orientation. The dream does not require a particular discussion because its message was purely a personal one for me to use what I had seen to become a better person. The Hindu Scripture bears repeating though, because what it says about hate and its elimination are exactly what I saw in the movie.

Ron Woodruff, the main character is a homophobic drug addict who lives a life whose only purpose is to ride the bulls and spend the money he makes as an electrician for an oil company on alcohol, drugs and sex. That lifestyle eventually leads to contracting the AIDS virus. At this time, the disease was still very much connected to the male gay community reviving the already deeply implanted hate that Ron had for the community. His situation unites him with that group as Ron chooses to disassociate with the “guinea pig” treatment of the doctors he sees and finds help in Mexico. Bringing the “illegal” drugs consisting primarily of non-toxic vitamins, proteins and medications pulls him into an intimate relationship with the very community he so hated. His resulting love for his fellow sufferers is very apparent when his bi-sexual business partner succumbs to the disease and the community comes together to support Ron when he loses his fight with the FDA and IRS. Based on a true story, the movie documents that Ron Woodruff lived for seven years with a disease the doctors told him was going to kill him in 30 days. Who knows how long he might have lived if he had been able to give up drinking? For seven years Ron Woodruff worked alongside the gay community that he had once despised, proving the lesson I read in the following Hindu Scripture.

            Whoever sees all being in himself and himself in all beings does not, by virtue of 

             realization, hate anyone . . .When to that wise sage all beings are realized as

             existing in his own self, then what illusion, what sorrow, can afflict him,

            perceiving as he does the Unity?

Ism Upsanids

In 12 step groups there is a saying, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” In the Christian Scriptures, the prophets caution against judgment –“Judge not, lest ye be judged.”                                    

Life is a Journey Not a Guided Tour

My husband Tom wore a hat that said "Life is a Journey not a Guided Tour." Those words resonated with me after his untimely, sudden death just after we moved to Oregon on our great adventure that would end with our retirement to our home secluded in Ocean Woodlands, a half-acre filled with wild Rhododendron, salal, myrtle wood  trees, huckleberry and blackberry bushes. I had a teaching position at Camp Florence and had intended on working there until retirement while we remodeled our beach cottage and expanded Tom's business idea - Naturally Wild. Nine months after we moved to Florence, Tom was dead at age 55. I had a struggling business, a home with a lot of potential and a job which I dearly loved. Family wanted me to come back to Kentucky but I couldn't leave the job and Tom's unfulfilled dream, so I refinanced the home, surrendered the business, dedicated myself to my career and started building a life for myself in Florence based on my passions and dreams alone for the first time in my life. These were singing, dancing, teaching and writing. I bought a bike and a kayak and found a "home" here until suddenly my whole career and retirement ended when I lost a job due to becoming a whistle blower.

Robert Burns wrote "The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglee (often go astray). As I entered one of the darkest periods of my life, I kept rehashing how my plans had always crashed and burned and fell into quite a victim mode that threatened not only my financial well being, but my health as well. During a dark morning on a secluded part of my paper route around Siltcoos Lake as I listened to the natural world coming to life and greeting the sunrise, I remembered the words on Tom's hat and the following poem was the result.

                                                                

                                                               Hills of Home ©

In the summers of her youthful past,

She walked barefoot through the long bladed grass

That grew along the honey-suckled hills of

Her Old Kentucky Home.

And the perfumed air that filled her lungs

Brought a spark of life into her infant soul

Nourished by the wild berries she watched ripen and grow

Into cobblers and homemade ice cream

For summers’ eves with lightening bugs aglow.

But the robin in spring and red bird in winter,

Chirped a call heard deep within her,

To trade her Sunday shoes that walked the straight and narrow path

For sparkling, glass slippers that yearned to roam

In search of love and adventure far from her Old Kentucky Home.

And romance blossomed among the garden paths of Versailles

And the Left Bank of Paris.

But the slippers faded into shimmering moonlight on the Seine,

So she found garden clogs to work the terrain

To build love and contentment with a home of her own

Amid the honey-suckled vines of her Old Kentucky Home.

But the robin in spring and red bird in winter

Chirped a call heard deep within her,

To follow her love to Eldorado and the Seven Cities of Gold

Promised in stories and myths of old.

When that love withered and died in the desert heat,

She donned hiking boots to retreat

With her new love to the lush, green woodlands aside ocean dunes

 Amid quiet streams filled with salmon and the call of the loon.

Left alone in Eden by death’s early knell,

She felt her paradise turning to hell.

But she found solace for her soul biking the salty sea shore

And donned dancing shoes for music and loved once more.

But the strong winds in summer and heavy rains in winter,

Drowned love once more and sent her

Back to the rooted vines that climbed high on the hills

Of her Old Kentucky Home.

Now, in the autumn of her years she roams barefoot once more,

To the song of the robin in spring and red bird in winter

That chirp the secret of unconditional love rooted deep within her

                                  And spreading wide across the hills of her Old Kentucky Home.

After writing the poem, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to sell my house and move back to Kentucky. The housing market was booming and I stood to make quite a profit but for me, the universe was not ready for the move. I still had some karma - both good and bad - to complete so I took the house off the market, refinanced once again so I could do the final work that needed to be done in order to sell and write a book. The result was "The Peacemaker." Then the housing bubble burst and when I was ready to sell again I was completely under water with my mortgage. I continued to struggle to keep the house by free lance writing to add to my retirement income which was affected by the whistle blowing activity.

 After completion of a ghost writing project and a trip to Hawaii with family in 2012, I made the difficult decision to free myself of the house so that I could move back to the "Hills of Home." While I was waiting for that to happen, I decided to write for myself again. Although free lance writing had paid the bills for me, I had more to create myself - the result was "A Squeaky Wheel Gets Oiled - The Musical" and a short story called "The Season." It is now time for me to move and I know where that will be.

 Although I will probably be in Florence through the summer because of my play, I will be spending a lot of time investigating the purchase of a small plot of land somewhere in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains so that I can put a small log cabin with a loft on it where I can retreat to continue to write and explore the hills of home when I am not traveling. I have learned to set my thoughts and visions around what "feels right" along my journey and follow my heart. As I look back on my journey, I know that everything I experienced along the way was just a building block to where I am today. I no longer feel a victim to the strong winds and currents that come my way because I have learned to "go with the flow" listen to the "call of the robin in spring and red bird in winter" and embrace them as part of what has been the rich experience of my life. As the man was heard saying while falling from a skyscraper "so far so good."   

 

 

Life is a Journey - Not a

Marianne Williamson and The Peacemaker

Malibu, CA. - Speaking at a fundraiser for Andrew Dougherty Vision Foundation (ADVF), co-hosted by Free & Equal Elections Foundation, Marianne Williamson, best-selling author, Congressional Candidate 2014 (Independent, CA-33) endorsed Christina Tobin and the Free & Equal Elections Foundation. Marianne will be a keynote speaker at Free & Equal's upcoming United We Stand Festival at UCLA, May 10th, 2014.

“I agree wholeheartedly with Christina that the chokehold the two major political parties have on our political system right now is, in fact, sucking all the oxygen out of our public discourse.  I think JFK meant it, and I think he was right, when he said, ‘Let us find not the Democratic answer or the Republican answer but the right answer.’ I think the spirit of the American people at our best is not necessarily desirous of being filtered through the dogma of a major political party. Abolition didn’t come from a major political party; women’s suffrage didn’t come from a major political party; the civil rights movement didn’t come from a major political party. There’s a course correction. There’s a yearning of the American heart right now. While the political parties have a role to play—Christina is absolutely right—they were not intended by the founders. They are not even mentioned in our Constitution. George Washington warned us against them. There is something trying to happen in American, and we shouldn’t be limited by anyone or any institution. What Christina is trying to do is pure American, in its most radical sense. Hats off to you, Christina Tobin.”


I am excited to join with Marianne Williamson and promote this event in Los Angeles on May 10, 2014. This summary of what Marianne stands for can be validated by reading the historical accounts of abolition and women's suffrage and the peace movement chronicled in "The Peacemaker" available at http://kentuckywoman.net. Mark your calendars for this event so those of us who are like minded can come together and make a stand against the "choke hold the two major political parties have on our political system right now."

Why this "Mama Made up Her Mind" to write "The Peacemaker

My roommate gave me a book entitled “Mama Makes up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living” by Bailey White for Christmas. I was excited to delve into a book that I assumed would be full of local color and bring back lots of images about a life I could relate to having been brought up in Kentucky.

This book did indeed provide images of growing up in small backwoods southern towns in the latter part of the 20^th Century. Indeed, the writer had been a child in the postwar era of the 1950’s and reached middle age near the end of the 20^th Century just as I did. I had a lot in common with her because southerners from rural areas live simple lives and don’t travel much or very far from home. They are not affected by the trends of fashion and cosmopolitan living so the southern people develop differently from their urban counterparts.

Southerners develop unique qualities that don’t bear a rubber stamp counterpart of their peers. Each section of the book contains vignettes about individuals with eccentricities the sophisticated world would find unappealing to say the least. But for those in South Georgia, these individuals were part of that southern landscape that no one questioned.

There was, however, a degree of sophistication about Ms. White that came from her training as a school teacher. Because she taught school, she was responsible for opening up the larger world to her students through exploration of the natural world where they lived to exploring history and ideas through the world of books.

Ms. White has many stories about lessons she taught throughout her teaching years but the one relating the story of Jeanne d’Arc which led to her own Aha experience describes perfectly my “Aha” experience after ten years of teaching American history to 8^th grade students in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My Aha experience led to writing “The Peacemaker.” It takes me a lot more time to relate my story than this brief vignette Ms. Bailey has in her book. With her permission, I now retell the story in her own words. The message should be clear.

“I have in my possession an old children’s book, the story of Joan of Arc, movingly written and wonderfully illustrated by a Frenchman name Boutet de Monvel. He has a way of using color and texture and a delicacy of line that makes you want to sink into his pictures.

I took the book to school one day to read to my first-graders. I had to change the French to English, but I tried to keep the high drama and charged emotion of de Monvel’s old-fashioned, rhetorical style. I showed them the pictures: hazy summer days and misty moonshiny nights, the archangel Saint Michael glowing gold, and the costumes of the royal court, painted so that the children couldn’t help reaching up to touch the page to feel the damasks and brocades of those robes.

The most glorious pictures are the battle scenes. There is Joan of Arc, leading the charge, with the head of her great horse bursting out of the frame and onto the next page, and the forward-thrusting lances, and the gleaming silver armor. And best of all, de Monvel has draped over Joan a filmy garment that billows out behind in the fury of the fray and unfurls itself in graceful tatters over the heads of her faithful soldiers.

The book was even more successful than I had thought it would be. Not a single child stirred, and when we got to those battle scenes, I could almost feel their eyes sucking the images off the page. At the end, I read de Monvel’s personal note to the reader: To be victorious, you must believe in victory. So remember, my children, this story of Joan of Arc, against the day when your country will call on you to give her all your courage.

Thirty pairs of hands reached out to take the book, and there was a chorus of voices, Read it again!

After school that day I looked through my Joan of Arc book before I packed it up to take home. I found some new smudges on top of the old smudges left on those pages by French children almost a hundred years ago. Then I thought of something, I turned to the title page and checked the copyright date. It was 1898.

Little French children six years old, reading that book when it was new, would have been just military age in 1914. And here am I, who should know better, in another country, with that very book in my hands, telling other children the same old lie:

Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori

From: “Mama Makes up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living” by Bailey White.  First Vintage Book Edition May, 1994.

That was my same Aha experience about teaching white man’s political history and the glorification of war for over 15 years in Albuquerque, NM in 1986. I decided to start telling a different story.

Preview: The Path of Positive Resistance | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

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