OPENING PARAGRAPHS

I huddled in the cold dark while the boom of guns and trucks and men yelling shook grit from the ceiling. My toque had gotten lost in the shuffle as I scrambled back, out of sight of the soldiers. I sat and shook, trying to suck some air into my fear-tight lungs. Occasionally a flake of something white would drift back from the mouth of the cave, but whether it was snow or ash from the burning monastery, I didn’t know.

I clutched my backpack to me like a squashy shield. The battered red nylon contained everything important: a laptop stuffed with 8 GB of words and images of this isolated part of the Himalayas; my meds; a thermos of the (horrible) butter tea Lekshe-la sent me off with every day; sketchbooks, and the camera I used to alternately document the newly discovered cave paintings (word of which was, no doubt, responsible for the Chinese regiment outside); and one last precious bar of chocolate.

I knew the monastery was technically part of the “Tibet Autonomous Region” but things had historically been quiet in this part of the mountains. Unlike most of the Tibetan plateau, there were no precious metals to be mined, it was too rocky for farming and the railway (with subsequent influx of Han settlers) hadn’t come this far. Even remote as we were, the nuns had worried that the discovery of ancient wall paintings would bring unwanted attention, and it had. I had been documenting feverishly trying to save what I could before thieves, tourists and/or the army ruined what had stood in silent safety through the centuries. Together with the nuns of Ganden I had been pushing to have the network of caves designated as a World Heritage Site, but 10 days ago the internet slowed to a crawl and then seemingly…stopped. 

What Depressed People Need to Hear

You know what doctors forget to say to people who are trying to recover from mental illness? They ALWAYS say: "Increase your exercise/activities/healthy food intake". They forget: "You may feel worse at first or even for a while. If you're lucky you may feel immediately better. But at the very least you will feel DIFFERENT from how you feel now". "You'll feel better" sounds like a lie, partly because you can't remember what "better" feels like. You will for sure feel sweaty, your muscles will possibly feel tired or sore, and you might feel more irritable as you move around in your neighbourhood surrounded by all the people who have no idea/don't care how shitty you are feeling. This isn't a reason not to do it, but leaving out the possible "argh!" part of what happens when you force yourself out of your apartment leaves the person with the illness feeling like the healthcare professional just doesn't get it. Feeling better in the exercise/doing stuff/eating well process will probably happen but health care professionals seem to want to draw a straight line where changing a behaviour automatically leads to a good result. I want to grab some of them and shake them, hard. IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY. 

Pema Chodron, on compassion.

Pema Chodron on compassion, idiot compassion, and the difference betwixt:


"Pema: Idiot compassion is a great expression, which was actually coined by Trungpa Rinpoche. It refers to something we all do a lot of and call it compassion. In some ways, it's whats called enabling. It's the general tendency to give people what they want because you can't bear to see them suffering. Basically, you're not giving them what they need. You're trying to get away from your feeling of I can't bear to see them suffering. In other words, you're doing it for yourself. You're not really doing it for them.

When you get clear on this kind of thing, setting good boundaries and so forth, you know that if someone is violent, for instance, and is being violent towards you —to use that as the example— it's not the compassionate thing to keep allowing that to happen, allowing someone to keep being able to feed their violence and their aggression. So of course, they're going to freak out and be extremely upset. And it will be quite difficult for you to go through the process of actually leaving the situation. But that's the compassionate thing to do.

It's the compassionate thing to do for yourself, because you're part of that dynamic, and before you always stayed. So now you're going to do something frightening, groundless, and quite different. But it's the compassionate thing to do for yourself, rather than stay in a demeaning, destructive, abusive relationship.

And it's the most compassionate thing you can do for them too. They will certainly not thank you for it, and they will certainly not be glad. They'll go through a lot. But if there's any chance for them to wake up or start to work on their side of the problem, their abusive behavior or whatever it might be, that's the only chance, is for you to actually draw the line and get out of there.

We all know a lot of stories of people who had to hit that kind of bottom, where the people that they loved stopped giving them the wrong kind of compassion and just walked out. Then sometimes that wakes a person up and they start to do what they need to do."

Just a thought.

Instead of spending endless time, money and heartache trying to control what a woman does with her own body, why not put all that energy towards creating a male chastity belt? (Surely those clever people at Apple could put out an effective, comfortable prototype in under a year?) Slap it on a boy when he hits adolescence & that's it until his wedded wife uses her key or voice recognition software! I mean, if the point is to keep sex strictly between married hetero people with no access to birth control or abortion, men should really be MUCH more responsible for making sure no woman EVER has an unwanted pregnancy. 


Does a make chastity belt sound silly? Uncomfortable? Invasive, & like it takes away your dignity and value as human being? YES, WOMEN KNOW EXACTLY HOW THAT FEELS.

Testing

Testing ;-)


Continuing to test. Not seeing an option to delete this test post, though. And having a hard time manoeuvring around Blogger.