Whoop-Whoop
Some battles I face, purposefully leaving my shield behind, sans any sword.
Marching into the lair of the dragon, empty-handed, bare-fisted, void of self-protective implements and mindful of my exposure, I anticipate injury. I prepare to bleed, as expected. When assuming my role as pin cushion, these self-sacrificial periods while not so pleasant, are mostly intentional.
If my tears could create personal growth, I might not choke them back so often.
If my pain, suffering, and scars could be transformed into strength, openness, and resolve, I may have become a superhero by now.
My heart, I do not feel she is mine to keep. I began giving her away long ago, possibly obsessing to rise above the residual pain and void from my formative years.
Beyond wanting, my need to offer my hand to others got me up off my seat, helping those who could not help themselves.
While busy helping others, maybe my subconscious is skillfully attempting to save myself.
I seek to temper my efforts, trying not to give too much, but often I fail miserably. Coming to mind, the thought, “This too, shall not end me, at least not today…”, but I teeter that razor’s edge.
My spirituality, my personal values, and my rules for living, aka my Opus, help guide me, but duh, the task always defers to me alone and hangs in balance, clinging to my willingness and tenacity to stay on path despite the incessant rain pounding upon my head.
Back to my here and now, no surprises, I bleed pints, as expected, but not quarts. Through this too, I shall survive.
MAYO CHOPPERS
At the end of the second week in Rochester
I started to go out
Uncle Ralph had gone to bed
Although I was dead tired
And felt utterly defeated
I just had to get outside
It was still chilly, 30s, 40s
Sometimes I’d only go out for a few minutes
And sometimes I would walk about a mile and a half
Up past the Mayo Clinic St. Mary’s Hospital
But then I discovered that
The MedFlight choppers came in pretty often
So sometimes I’d just sit there and lean against a tree
And cry
Just cry.
The whoop-whoop of the MedFlight chopper blades generate an almost unexplainable anxiety within me and have done so for about a decade and a half.
The pilots approach their landing pads atop the hospitals, like birds coming into nest, slowing a few blocks away, with the pulsating whoop-whoop shockwave blanketing over the streets below.
Maybe I am hypersensitive to the sound and presence of the inflight medical teams inside their high-tech birds. Mostly, it’s just the damn sound, the one singular mechanical sound that bleeds my ears.
Sometimes, foolishly, I try to brush off these sure-to-come feelings, thinking I can fight them, then quickly becoming enthralled, emotionally overwhelmed, heart sinking, tasting those wounds of the injured person almost hovering, a few thousand feet overhead, right now. This poor injured soul, probably harmed permanently, likely much closer to death than the hour before, possibly holding on by a thread, and maybe their life already tragically lost, in flight. These feelings, painfully vivid for me, as a previous passenger in these life-meets-death birds, twice.
Ironically, one of my two medically critical flight plans had Mayo Clinic Rochester as my final destination, but my condition had taken a grave turn on the way, and circumstances eventually sent me elsewhere.
Possibly this, a mild case of PTSD, the whoop-whoop of the MedFlight choppers. But to me here and now, leaning against the trees under the nighttime rooftop of St. Mary’s, with the comfortably cool crispness in the air, I run it mindfully through my truth filter and I think I’ll just call it my extreme exhaustion down here on the ground, and my supreme empathy for those overhead.
Please take care of each other, mind your health with all your might, and go do good shit today.
Love you all.
