Life

From Now On, I’ll Be Mad

MatthewHoh Recovery, Spirituality , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fittingly, this was the poem I read on Tax Day:

Bewildered

There are many guises for intelligence.

One part of you is gliding in a high windstream,
while your more ordinary notions
take little steps and peck at the ground.

Conventional knowledge is death to our souls,
and it is not really ours. It is laid on.
Yet we keep saying we find “rest” in these “beliefs.”

We must become ignorant of what we have been taught
and be instead bewildered.

Run from what is profitable and comfortable.
Distrust anyone who praises you.
Give your investment money, and the interest
on the capital, to those who are actually destitute.

Forget safety. Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.
I have tried prudent planning long enough.

From now on, I’ll be mad.

–Rumi

Each day I read a poem from Coleman Barks’ very excellent collection, A Year With Rumi. Thanks to my friend Fareed for suggesting this to me when I first began recovery three years ago.

If there can be one thing I ask, please watch and share this video:

MatthewHoh Recovery , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

If I could articulate well and share succinctly my entire thoughts on PTSD, depression, moral injury, alcohol abuse and, especially, suicide, it would be ensconced in this 4 1/2 minute video from Ze Frank.

When I was first shown it, my shield went up and I spurned it, wanting to disregard his words, because he was talking about teenagers and that certainly doesn’t apply to the pain and experiences of a returned warrior [cue the self-indulgence…;)], but I listened and everything, EVERYTHING, he says applies to me and to so many like me who have suffered and are suffering from the pains of mental and psychiatric wounds.

Frank’s description of himself, his breakdown, his rejection of others, his forays into getting help and how bloody hard it can be, and how this mental pain, this psychiatric trauma, is worse than anything physical, applies to those of us who carried rifles in far away lands just as it does to civilians at home. This commonality of suffering does not just unite us as humans, children of a natural and spiritual order, but it a source of relief and compassion. For, as you may be suffering, just as Frank and I suffered, you know that you are not alone, and through that shared suffering, through this community and commonality, you can find assistance, begin recovery and, through time and effort, including seemingly inevitable regression and relapse, you can regain your life.

The video ends with words to the effect that “if someone sent you this video it is because they love you”. No one is going to ask you to watch this video who doesn’t care, who doesn’t love you or who won’t help you. Most importantly someone who has sent you this video is offering their hand. They are not going to leave you and they will help you get to that other side.

Please watch and share.

 

Two Poems: One of Death, One of Life

MatthewHoh Recovery, Spirituality, War and Conflict , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I wrote an essay a couple of years ago expressing my views and feelings towards Veterans Day. I still hold those sentiments in my mind and soul as true.

At the end of my essay I emplaced Siegfried Sassoon’s World War One poem Suicide in the Trenches; which I vowed to read each Veterans Day, or Remembrance Day as Sassoon’s contemporaries, festooned with poppies on their lapels and overwhelmed by much dead in the ground and in their memories, would establish to mark the war to end all wars….

This year I read Suicide in the Trenches at our small Veterans for Peace Swords to Plowshares Memorial bell ringing service at the North Carolina State Capitol on Veterans Day. Here are Sassoon’s words, a more eloquent, concise and honest description of war I do not know:

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

War and its primary companion, suffering, may take possession of your life, but by no means does war need to be in permanent claim of your mind and soul, by no means does war need to be the victor. Through love, through mercy and though kindness your soul and your mind may find forgiveness in yourself, and this, which is a process and a journey, is often enabled and emboldened by the grace of a stranger.

Such a stranger sent me a poem. The life war takes away, love, and its acts, can restore.

The Summer Day – Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

So now I have two poems to read each Veterans Day. One to ensure those who have suffered never leave my purpose and my life, and the second, to remind me that this is my purpose and that this is my life.

Thank you Megan.

Individual Outreach

MatthewHoh Recovery , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A veteran and counselor in upstate NY sent me this video he made as part of his outreach to help veterans and service members as they struggle with their own personal issues and sufferings inside their heads and souls from war.

It is this type of outreach, this type of effort, that serves to assist veterans in finding help, alleviating their suffering and regaining their lives.

Thank you Roland.