I dread Fridays in rural Nevada and I am trying not to. I try to tell myself I am doing some good in the world but I don't believe myself. Somehow, all my calm, zen-like feelings around generating goodwill and cultivating generosity evaporate when I am worried about covering my basic expenses. I should trust the goddesses more, but I keep falling off that wagon too. I meditate each morning, but on this morning,even as I chant RAMMMMM calling upon this ancient God to center me, I keep wandering away worrying about whether I am crazy for trying to actualize health care reform in my own way since I am seeing damn little evidence that it's happening anywhere else. Example 1: My son (now 22) has a rotting tooth that is causing him great pain. He doesn't make enough to pay for dental care, his employer does not offer insurance benefits, and dhe oes not qualify for state or county assistance. No dentist in town is willing to take payments. I wonder if they know that people aged 16-25 are the most underserved population in this country when it comes to health care? These are young adults who, unless they are in college or in the military, most often go without health insurance or access to healthcare. Yet these young adults are our future. Example 2: I am a 52 year-old professional woman who should be making tons more money with healthcare benefits.Instead, I choose to light my own path which means I will not be able to afford health insurance because I don't make enough money. God help me if I have a terrible accident right now because I am not eligible for any state funded insurance and I can't afford regular insurance. What I can afford carries with it a $5,000.00 deductible so what's the point?
Anyway, on the journey out into the desert, I listen to Pema Chodron talking about awakening Bodhichitta. In the path of the Bodhisattva (warrior for the way of the peaceful heart)one must practice awakening all the time. I chose this path of giving myself to those most in need and I chose to offer healing therapeutic service to people according to the Buddhist Paramita of generosity. But I don't feel very generous today. I feel stingy. Like Ebenezer Scrooge. I feel scared that I won't be able to pay my rent and other living expenses. In between steering my galloping brain back to center, I curse myself for not being more practical and smart like my half-sister Joan who at 67, worked like a Trojan for thirty years, carefully squirreling away her savings and now has a well-earned healthy retirement. I will probably be more like our dad who was an idiot with money and worked until he was 80performing medical procedures with antiquated skill and questionable cognition.
I travel into the desert to see families who request therapy or who are told they have to have it by some other agency (usually Child Protective Services)and I am paid only for the time I actually see clients; I am not paid for travel time (except mileage)or time for completing paperwork. If I show up to see a client for whom I have driven 70 miles and they choose to blow me off, I don't get paid. The Paramita of generosity is really only a Paramita when it stretches you and awakens you into the spirit of giving without strings attached. Strings like hoping you might get some kind of reward for being a really good girl, or hoping that maybe someone will want to give something back. It's just giving because that's what the world needs most. Okay....deep breath...let's try this again.
Today, I drive out into the desert and the temperature soars almost to 100 degrees. I am not looking forward to seeing Mae's daughter. First of all, some psychiatrist has given this child a diagnosis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder AND AD/HD. She is medicated with Lithium and Abilify and a few other drugs. I didn't think schizophrenia could be diagnosed until a person was at least 18 because it seems to manifest right around that age. But the mother is adamant. She seems to need her daughter to be mentally ill. "She hears voices. Has since she was real little." I gently introduce the possibility of a very active imagination. Mae takes a deep breath and looks at the dragon statues she has lined up on her bookshelf.
"Well I see my dead mother a lot. She lives in that desk over there." Her ashes are kept in the desk in the living room. It seems that Mae's Cherokee roots might possibly be shining through the wall of medicalization. She adjusts her position on the stained, sagging sofa and brightens up. "Yep, all of us women in this family hear voices and see things that ain't there. I know stuff before it happens and my oldest daughter is the same way. I have conversations with my mother all the time."
There is a loud clap of thunder outside. Mae whoops with delight and smiles. "Oh man I love thunder and lightening!" She notices my necklace of Tourmaline crystal. "You like crystals? You know how to re-charge 'em?". I tell her no. "Well you put 'em in a shell like maybe an Abalone or somethin.' You gotta do it in the new moon an' then you let em sit there for thirty days until the moon is new again. And don't let nobody touch 'em!"
Mae's youngest daughter puts on her bathing suit and goes out to dance in the rain. Mae leads me into a cluttered spare bedroom filled with dusty china dolls and collections of what appear to be rocks. She carefully opens a little cabinet on the wall, and takes out beautifully polished crystals of amethyst, jade, tourmaline, rose quartz and opal. She understands the healing power of all which makes me wonder why she relies on Western medicine to treat her for gout. Her 12 year old daughter, the one who allegedly has schizophrenia, is fascinated and asks question after question, one in particular about the crystal ball which sits in Mae's shelf covered in two inches of desert dust. Mae answers irritably. "You wanna have yer fortune told? Well ask yer Aunt Maude!Now quit interruptin'!"
She blows dust off stone after stone revealing the pearlescence of each one and then works her way over to her cluttered closet where she pulls out a deerskin dress with a fur-lined hem. "This was grandma's dress. And I got the moccasins too...right here" She digs out a pair of curled leather moccasins from her crowded closet.
She has pictures and statues of wolves all over her walls and shelves coated with duts intermingled with the crystals and other artifacts of her Cherokee heritage. "The wolf is my spirit animal," she says fingering a dusty photo of a wolf pup she raised.
"What is my spirit animal mommy?" her daughter asks, desperate to engage in something that gives her a sense of belonging. "Oh hell I dunno. You gotta go through a whole ceremony to find that out. Like this here eagle feather was presented to me by a medicine man when I went through ceremony." She carefully lifted an eagle feather down from its dusty place on her shelf. "I always knew it was wolf though."
Was I doing "therapy?" It didn't seem like it. I was the learner and Mae was the knower.
I took her daughter out into the rain. Blessed rain which cooled the earth and brought the smell of sage and grass so fully into my senses. Blessed rain that reminded me that the desert has beauty. We just have to look a little harder, like Mae when she made all those tirps out to the old Rawhide mines and the old abandoned mines outside of Fallon and looked for treasure in rocks that appeared to be so dead on the surface. Undderneath the graying, pocked crusts, were treasures of unfathomable beauty, with more aspects that the human eye could ascertain. Ancient and pulsating with the energy of millions of years of extreme heat and cold, they radiate beauty from behind such plain and simple exteriors.
Blessed rain that kisses the parched earth and liberates the scent of life in the sage and grasses. Blessed rocks that hold the energy of life itself. Nature teaches me today that nothing can be ascertained and appreciated without the patience to liberate potential.
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