Sunday, May 29, 2011

Beauty









The word 'beauty' is a funny and sometimes misleading word. Sometimes, we are entrapped by it with ads on TV, billboards, sides of buses, fliers on our doors. Almost all of it has some sexual edge to it to attract us to it, get us to pick it up, and at least touch it with our eyes.


Sometimes beauty is a mountain or a climate, even a culture. As I sit and write this piece, I am on the island of St. Lucia. It sits towards the southern end of the Lesser Antilles island chain way down towards South America. It is a British Commonwealth, formerly owned by Spain, France, Britain, the Ameri-Indians, the Carib cannibal Indians (who still have relatives in the heart of the rain forest on the island) and now, for the most part, they own themselves.


This is the second time we have been deep into the Caribbean. I think the farther you are away from the U.S., the better taste you get for the life these people truly live, how they look at life, what it is that makes them go about their day-their beauty.


I think its hard to see beauty when you plan for it. I guess you have to ask 'why is that beautiful to me?' You can watch the Miss USA contest and see physical beauty although the contestants do sing and tap dance and occasionally they twirl a baton but all anyone is interested in is hoping beyond hope that she drops the baton or trips on the dance floor, kinda like NASCAR. We really don't care about that kind of beauty-its just a show.


I think beauty, true beauty, changes people when it shows itself when you least expect it-like during a funeral when the lights streak in the windows and land on the casket at just the right time, or during a storm when the power and largeness of the event is awesomely incredible, or in a poverty soaked country where the environment is striking but its people, even living in the squallier they do, somehow have the ability to put a crease in the white uniform shirts of their children in order to send them to school. I mean a crease you can cut a loaf of bread with.


I have only been among these people for a few days and only have a few days more. But there is a beauty walking here among them, a quiet, dignified beauty that I want to learn from. No matter what you ask them, tell them, talk to them about, they almost always finish the sentence with no problem. To them it is, whatever it is, not a problem.


At this resort we are staying, there was a shift change about five in the afternoon. The women were leaving. They took their purses and their bags and began the long walk up the hill to the bus stop, about a mile away. there, the buses (vans really) would pick them up and take them home, maybe about an hour away. They smiled and laughed and some did a little dance as they walked up the hill. They had good jobs, making about the national average of $350---a month.


They would do this six days a week. There is no minimum wage here, no overtime, no social security, no food stamps. If you didn't make it or grow it, you don't eat. Yet, these people, as you drive along, waive to you-


-and then they smile.


I think as I get older, I learn about stuff that has value, real value. I want to hang on to that stuff and dump the other stuff. The stuff that takes too much energy and work and try to melt things down to what really counts. I am closer to the end than to the beginning and I want to finish well, although the finish line is decades away-maybe. I don't want to finish and have some say-'who died?' Not that I need some icon or statue of my image somewhere so pigeons can crap on it.



Nope, I just want my life to count, even if it is just for one person. Here is a group of people who live on a month's salary what we can spend on a meal at home and yet they have found beauty in their lives. Their lives impact and change people who come in contact with them. I want to take what these people are showing me and bring it back and pour it on others I come in contact with. Sure, there is always a need to be able to do well in a gun fight, but those moments are rare. It is much more important to do well in every day living; to share your life and give hope among the hopeless.



These people are experts at finding beauty in life when life itself is not beautiful.



I want to be an expert too.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Day and Night



I have had an incredible experience this last week.



I got to watch a man die.



It was a very sad and terrible thing, don't get me wrong, but if you have to do something like this, to get the opportunity to be a part of this was nothing short of inspiring.



Randy was my brother-in-law. He had lived in a group home for almost forty of his fifty-one years. He was diagnosed as a mosaic Downes, a unique chromosome pattern that turns normally docile Downes patients into a different, unpredictable individual.



By many beliefs, it was a tragic life. People would look at his situation and just shake their heads and then avert their eyes. But they didn't know. They didn't have an opportunity to look at this life close up.


Randy had a great life. He lived in a group home and had a room he shared with another resident for decades. He had a big screen TV, his own special recliner, bongos. He went to work making something with his hands that I am sure, somewhere in our house, we have at least one of. On days when his sister would come and see him, he would wear a tie, not necessarily a tie that matched the shirt, except maybe in Italy or parts of Uzbekistan, and it wasn't necessarily tied, but he got dressed up for her. She was never disappointed.


With all his health issues, he wasn't suppose to live this long, but he did.


He choked on a peanut butter sandwich.



Really? A peanut butter sandwich?


The staff worked so hard trying to save their friend, but the sandwich was so far down that only the paramedics could extract it. He had gone too long without air.



But then the magic began to show. The world doesn't expect to see people like Randy making a difference in the world. That's why the world created the group home. Make them comfortable is the official version and we do. We try to give them a life that is normal whatever that means. Then God steps in and makes it perfect.



This guy, impacted lives like I wish I did. In my life, I hope I have people who love me so unconditionally like this man had standing by his bed. The rules in cases like this are to wait 72 hours to see if his condition changed, righted itself, or ended. At the end of that time, the doctors gathered us together and the decision was made to let nature take its course.



He lasted another twenty four hours.


In that entire time, this man had a standing vigil by his bed. The group home workers took turns with Randy round the clock, sitting by his bed, talking to him, touching his arm, rubbing his legs, washing his hair, shaving him, trimming his toe nails. I could have done all of those things-if I had too. Here's the thing, they didn't have to-they wanted to. It shamed me.



They loved him. He changed their lives. He loved them back-purely; in a way that took away all the crap the rest of us deal with and use. This was his family. Even the residents, who had some knowledge of a change in things, wanted to come to the hospital and were granted and escorted by the care workers. I met them all, shook their hands, received their hugs. Yep, I was shamed.



I want to love like that.



I can-I have, but it is never consistent. I want to be like these people. I want to love so purely that conditions or issues are never even questioned, there is just love.


There is a letter, written a long time ago, that talks about faith and revealing things. It talks about the revelation of love, not to the wise, but to the children. Randy couldn't drive, have a family, do his own taxes, or fly a plane, well, maybe he could, but you definitely wouldn't want to be around him when he was doing it. He couldn't do the vast majority of things we all take for granted.


Frankly, none of those things are important. ANYONE can do those things. Randy, was a lover. He gave it and, in the end, he received everything he sowed. He changed lives, healed hearts, motivated the lives around him to be better and to continue to love like they had for so long.


If we find comfort in a spiritual life involving God, then we need to know something about that. Randy doesn't want to come back from where he is now. He has the wisdom of the Universe and as I write these words and as, I am sure he sees them form on the page, he is nodding his head. "You tell them for me they don't understand where I am. Tell them they don't understand-they will, but no way do I want to leave this place! No pain, no suffering, laughter all the time, fresh pie, and purple ponies. Tell them there is pure joy, pure happiness, pure love."


"...and the greatest of these is love."


Now its over-or so we think. I guess that's up to each of us.


Yep, I got to watch a man die-or did he?