This, a drawing, created in mediumship with Chagall, Braque and Picasso! Believe it.  I feel their hands in my life from time to time. Seriously not often enough, they turn the die, they screw the shuffler, they make me rearrange the best to be better as if you didn’t know it. And there is no way or words to pray as if the way had been lit by water. All a water molecule, all a daisy.  I wanted to do, to raspberry, to hang on your every word.

It could be that we’re not paying attention has to do with another unseen facet of reality… be it someone, thing or event that occurred without recognition.  It could be that something clicked as if the incident triggered a thought process which effectually resulted in a new solution to the current strategic bind.   It could be that something new appeared in the information you were assessing, that was striking or important to observe….  Like looking away from the tv for a second seeing only sexuality in your world and looking back to find nuclear war plastered all over the screens of your life. why?

I made a decision… I’d been hedging my bets for so long, I cleared the way so as to know the love.  Not any love.

The love of table, perhaps not today.  The love of tabla:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCJkjhNmsoI&feature=related

as if you didn’t know it:

Ravi Shankar accompanies the snake, actaaulized in the form of a tabla, telling the story of a prehistoric snake… The actual king from that movie, what was it called??? I forget. I do not forget my Spanish! Oh right be back with that soon

In the menatime enjoy this commercial break:

Maxell commercial

The love.

the lone individual? no!

the LOVE, the divine… those special signs which show you so much in yourself that you know great respect for the world.  the lies busted, the truth reveals itself.  and you drop in, so cleared that you know yourself to have more love.

Like stepping from stone to stone across a creek, the finding isn’t done in a fell swoop. we land, we search, we stride ahead.  And in time we land as if the other side were a whole new world.

You see, for some reason the thought of Spanish always brought a taste of blood to my mouth.  I even sort of daudled as a linguist in college, studying languages to get out of Physics in high school was a clear and present necessity but I did not understand why.  But Spanish was not one of the ones I deigned to study.

Recently I started and ended a project to cleanse my past lives, not that they’re horrible. They aren’t.  If I may so say, so many of these lives are veritably saintly in fact.  Even if they were so unextraordinary as to have been spent as animals, specifically ants and fish.  I would not yet again decide not to eat fish.   When I have devoured a fish that once devoured me.  When I may so deftly devour any little crumb as if our friends the minnow were subject to something akin to the rise in power of hitler.  Like I did for so many years of those, as if when I was a shark, I did swallow Arians who gave themselves bodies as fish… Perhaps someone or someone else or someone else again, even if they might also inhabit the body of a fish or a shark or maybe a minnow in the belly of another fish, man might not always be treated as if the water was so powerful to cleanse not the palate but our disgust and stuff.

But wait there is more…

Yet, as it stands, there is only one story to be told here. The one about me and the Spanish language and the other one about the boxer and still one more about saintlihood shall have to wait till another day.

Let’s turn our eyes instead to a freak of nature we all know and love named Barack Obama.  This man epitomizes something very guttural and strange in life and love.  A true Spanish speaker in a way, it is as if he, too, has this insanely adept language ability to translate himself into Spanish.  As if you didn’t know it, it is only in this life as his blood which any Spaniard would have to admit as reallly it is how we see him -the epitomy of being Spanish ¡si! is Barack Obama.  Let me repeat myself more clearly– Barack Obama does not speak Spanish that I know of, maybe a little bit, but, his blood drives us forward as if speaks volumes in Spanish.  Spanish, the language, courses thru his veins driving him forward passionately, like a bull.

But if you are Spanish you are not driven to water as is he.  By that I mean that you would not pour your blood out, even when it is your favorite pastime, like a Boxer (who shall yet remain unnamed…) it is as if water is something you despise– on some level.  I will explain that again later-for some maybe have heard that story before!  Of blood, and everything in it, is like a fountain for water that runs out of life, despising all that is in it. We all (humans that is) ironically now have something in common.  That is, that we all, as humans, love water.

Spanish speakers of course disagree somewhat.

Back to Barack, you see this man sometimes for his blood- a love of life in language expressed as passionately and sincerely as Spanish.  Does that mean Spanish is the language of biology or neurochem? I think not.  Instead I’d like to suggest, Spanish is to Love of Hate as Hindi is to Biology.  [Let's start rewriting all those biology books- you can expect that a few more bicep curls would help you in getting what you want if you choose to study biology.  For that matter some nadhi strengtheners, extra large index cards and more pens may also be necessary. ] (Hindi joke! sorry, I couldn’t resist!)

That is to say that hate is almost a necessary aspect of love.  I wish I could dangle that phrase out there and let a few Hindi speakers explain that .. but knowing still a lot more about humans as well as about the Spanish language (simply from regurgitating my Spanish speaking past lives), I demand your attention in clarifying this statement.  Spanish which is alll about love creates a forcefield to contain another form of love called hate which is inspires the love  for living the lies of life….

What the fuck is she talking about??? [This is so Spanish you see...]

Let’s express instead as if Love itself has to be divided.  It has so many different forms and expressions and one of them is hate, nevermind the kind of hatred which divides but is only fear.  I speak instead of a love innately Spanish- oh sorry I lost myself in the thought- a hate rather so innately Spanish it is love.

A hate for one, such as Barack Obama does not understand.  His love of water is English.  He simply sees it as the blood of life.  But for many of us, Spanish speakers (I claim this with much disgust for him as well as myself) see water for it’s potential threat. How could you see water as the blood of life?  As if seeing water as blood of life is so completely distressing it thins our very blood.   Nevermind loving the water and everything in it, seeing water sometimes evokes a sense so distressing it can keep us up at night. It’s not a fact I can relate to except on a deeply, clairvoyant level, something buried in my blood, perhaps for hundreds of years.

For its capacities to increase the love of life and everything in it, Barack Obama sees Spanish as blood and water for the same.  A unique strategem for discerning well in this world, Barack, or Mr. President, to me, is well prepared to examine why life should be better in this world because his blood is well-prepared to argue, make love (well, you know) and create a new vista for living well.

But with Spanish lives once lived, Barack Obama cares as if not to besmirch reality when, as if we didn’t know it, now is a time not for hatred of the lowest kind, but as he has said, it is the time for what I know.  And that is the love of knowing how to despise what we as humans did wrong as if we see blood thinning.

So, hasta ella cala ¡si¡ españa, because

***  This, by the way, is psychic work… not linguistics, nor linguistic paralysis as some might argue ,  nor are these images an indication of Alzheimer’s, because these are things we all experience from our past lives. If we look at Alzheimer’s, it might be more like ‘Dandelion’ the video? ¡no! It is more like the experience of ‘Dandelion’ the blog entry and therein being inclusive of the video and musical content which screams of relief. So if, you idiot candidate, have skipped the parenthetical content, so to speak, as if, ‘oh! I have had it! this … refuse … you are spewing much resembles the dialogue of someone like …’ Well, I say, no.  It is not that, it is simply that Alzheimer’s is the reference I was making… And that this experience actually offers a unique vantage to the human mind, if not body,, because it appears that the Alzheimer’s body which otherwise stagnating has a propensity to detox something for the rest of us.   and this, is much like tennis and everything it does for the world.  Because as you watch the ground, so red, as we walk on, run on, dance on, tennis watchers, look to me? no look at the faces of the athletes doing the tennis and wonder whether they might in fact be processing information as if they are the supercomputers of the human consciousness. I think so.  Yes, I think these people… the athletes, the alzheimer’s patients and in fact you and I, the viewers, are equal participants in these matches.

If you debate this well… that is fine. But, ¡no!, well, more on that later.  As for the story of the running of the blood, tune in later….  [Again this is a short point but you might want some musical accompaniment- for your emotional enjoyment and nothing less.  Music for Films, Aragon by Brian Eno http://www.allmusic.com/performance/aragon-mq0000286231]

No, I cannot finish this today… because there is more to be said.

Actually, facebook is the best at capturing the world’s secret fantasies.  Yes while you sit there and harbor hatred as if the fantasy doesn’t work that person’s life you get stuck on brings you down? no. For whining’s sake and some other philosophical craziness, we look up because of the resentment, that simple disgust, we feel from looking at Facebook.  No, that resentment is what was lacking before? Sort of.  Why not explore Facebook seems to say… resent away. So long as you know it and admit it it becomes a creative force.

Seriously, the death of a friend recently made me freak out. No one mentioned it to me.  I couldn’t handle it they said.  Wrong.  Didn’t you know? I get the hint long before?  Well, maybe it’s just not on facebük.

But if tennis were an indicator of something extraordinary, (how could it be? nah, i choose not to fantasize or let myself slip away in that. Spaghetti dinner facebook, mmm that is a meal.)

No tennis is toppling, a pile of spaghetti that has been plaguing me -or rather us- for nearly a century.  What I see going on the court does not come off in the same form.  For instance, yesterday ish, someone described himself as gay before the match he played, as if a fantasy lingered in his mind, ‘hmm could I be that?’ And then… someone else came on the court and did  the same.  In the first, let’s say ‘match’ it got us creeped out, as if all the world saw ‘him’ (nah I wouldn’t really tell you in this circumstance) as if he …. or she… got caguht I mean caught for it.  As if, he or she came out sipping a strong cup of  Dandelion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urzxg3IAWNE   wine.  Then suddenly, you realize, oh not what I thought was happening in that person’s life.   but by the end of the match there’s something different there.

Never in my life’s path would I have thought this is exactly the drama we feel and see everyday on facebük. I felt it didn’t you? He held the murder weapon in his hand and it was plastic.

Plastic, I see.  fuck you plastic.  You cannot be in this world anymore.

For those of you following the Aussie Open, and perhaps sports in general, you may have noticed some grunts, groans and sometimes squeaks emitted from the general vicinity of the court. From my  perspective, these seemingly ominous, distracting, focus oriented and even well-construed sounds are an indication of an interesting conversation or lack thereof. As a clairvoyant I am someone who sees the body and being of humans as energy. Everything we see, hear, feel, do and think has an energetic expression.  Sounds like those we hear on and about the tennis court are often indications of beingness (or the spirit) which is slightly out of whack.  These grunts and groans pertain either to developing aspects of the personality or simply to wounds in the psyche or new but un-assimilated aspects of the individual. The former appear healthy, constructive, even, but the latter often appear a might funky, kind of like really moldy cheese.

My own dad was always like this, but not on the court. Monosyllabically was the way he conducted himself out and about and even around the house. Personally I found his guttoral contributions to our ‘conversations’ quizzical, like Wheel of Fortune playing in the background but a single sound could indicate the use of anywhere between 2-25 letter and word spaces. (Speaking of which, more U2 perhaps? With or Without You!) Until recently, I thought his grunts and groans to be expressions of disgust or rejection of the topic at hand. As it turned out, it wasn’t exactly that… It’s more that he had always disagreed with the way ideas were presented in our family.  His love of communication was a ‘broken’ area in his psyche which lead to him banging it out monosyllabically. He couldn’t even manage a few words! It just came out a jumble of letters, like a jammed typewriter. I only figured this out the other day, over a year since meditating on his vocal participation in the world. Energy healing on this relationship in his psyche was all it took to produce words from a man who had heretofore been strictly guttoral at home. The monosyllables are gone, intriguingly, at a time when you might expect his ability to produce words to be weakened. Don’t get me wrong… he still has Alzheimer’s and it’s harder and harder for him to find the exact words with which to discuss things but… surprisingly he is, all the same, using more words, less grunts. In lieu of a string of epithets of my own, let’s just say, ‘woe is me that I couldn’t have discovered my own simple solution many years ago.’ But, all things in due course. Of course!

On the court, there are a few interesting users of the monosyllable. Foremost, Maria Sharapova puts her exascerbating focus on display through the sounds of her wail on the court. For Maria’s psyche, this sound is quite similar to that symbol you see on your computer… you know, the one of the dial going around and around or of an hourglass running its course? Maria’s extraordinarily loud wails are an audible indicator almost exactly like this! Contrary to popular opine these sounds are neither distraction technique nor focus technique, but a signal of how exactingly she is calculating, assessing and strategizing. Though sometimes her sounding off  betrays resentment at her father for insisting she hit that tight angled shot again and again, it’s not always so because Maria Sharapova also uses this sound as an elaborate expression of the pain she endures in calculating how to hit and place the ball and disguise her game plan. If only ‘I could hit her, it would be far quieter,’ is what the opponents think but actually if only Maria could stop buying into her father’s bogus extremely bland version of the game then she’d probably have a whole new sound to express her calculations. Think of the sound, Maria, as an indication of a development in your game which is forthcoming, like Tron: Legacy as opposed to Tron the original.

Compared to her competitors, Maria’s distracting parental relationship is virtually healthy. S Williams’s grunts and groans seem a distressing conversation about self worth, not for wont of the theme here, as defined perhaps by her father’s insistence on playing tennis with extraordinary precision. It is as if she grunts to avoid saying, ‘Dad, I just can’t do this anymore’.

Azarenka on the other hand, doesn’t appear to have that kind of relationship with her father at all.  She might as well not be appealing to anyone at all in fact I’d gamble that she is attempting to distract though that sound she makes is awfully cute. It is pretty, intentional, and distracting even to herself at times. She, unlike, say Maria, does really love the money in its entirety. Victoria rather likes her success on the court as if the athletics involved propel her towards happiness. It’s not that her journey specifically must relate to tennis but she instead must act as though the destination is what is important. Listening to her you have the feeling she is someone who would advocate suffering as the basis for all reward. It’s as if she were the daughter of an early 20th century Russian general in her most recent past life. (hint, hint past life reading would be good for this one!) [Seriously? need more musty music? U2 Where The Streets Have No Name...]

Wozniacki in her recent match vs. Sharapova squeaked quite a bit. Not a norm for her, this squeak was her own self pity! An auditory oops! if you will, it seems as if she is regretting not having pushed herself in her pre tourny workouts? I dunno, this one is a little more evasive. It appears she must have dropped some aspect of her regime and clearly appears to have regretted it!

Nadal, however, is much worse.  As if he in serving, is announcing, ‘I hereby commence in aggressively disgusting behavior. I will follow my instructions and hit the ball as instructed and beautifully so but I will not cease in being disgusted with myself for these actions. And when I engage in these actions, I will not love any human being for putting me in any compromising sort of position because I would so prefer to be kicking a soccer ball.’ Nadal’s expressions seemingly mock himself but betray an emotional austerity for the discernment required on the court.  It seems as if growth in this area would yield a wonderful humanness to this player who can otherwise seem so closed off to wonder both on the court and off, as if there never was a soccer field to dream about.

Ferrer and Djokovik smiled across the net to eachother as they commenced play of their quarterfinal match. As they proceeded to hit, David steadily regressed back into his earlier years, diving deep to find extraordinarily wary glances, and the growl of a 6 cylinder engine. Highly tuned, it whined around the corners and strained against his parental guide rails, containing him to the performance of his parent’s idol, the shadow of Bjorn Borg looming over the court. Djokovik revved his engines on the other side of the net, ‘I’ll be fine. It’s ok. It’s not a big deal. I’ll be ok…’, the child inside shoved untenderly to the side for the man to fight off the raging opponent on the other side. When the child suddenly cried out, tugging at Djokovik’s hamstrings for a long moment, Djokovik stopped to reflect, ‘What can i do with this child? There’s no immediate solution but if I just walk carefully it will snap back into place. Oh! There it goes!’  This is an example of self fulfilling prophecies, fortunate and un, both extraordinary for their curve hugging technology.

Lisicki on winning her Round of 16 match also squeaked! This was a sign of development internally wherein she was cleverly disguising an ‘A Ha! I finally figured out what was holding me back!’ Well you know how it is with an ‘A ha!’ Sometimes it takes awhile to assimilate the information therein.

As for Federer, well, he so cleverly almost evades my eye by vocalizing, ‘Come On!’ instead of grunting. Leave it to Roger to make even his inner dialogue into something discernable. Ostensibly to fire himself up, I think more likely this is him forgetting himself, intrepidly changing the subject and unavoidably breaking himself down to stay tight with his father, any next of kin who care and Mirka, too. What we see is usually good result, but I can only wonder as to the nature of the extraordinary result Roger would yield were he in a more exacting conversation with himself.

Ps. Plagiarizing not appreciated even in Swedish.

It is kind of crazy looking, I admit.  You really have to wonder what goes on in this poor fellow’s head when you see this happen.  Some think he’s bound to fall.  It’s been a couple of months  since the home where he lives proffered the walker.  To the best of my knowledge he hasn’t actually fallen but of course there usually is someone walking with him and helping him along.

What kills me is when people speak with him as if he were an idiot just because he’s walking this way!  He might be out of it… he might look totally incapable of driving a walker… But the guy’s actually really freaking intelligent.  He does know how to use the walker properly.  We have seen that on more than several occasions. And oddly there are still plenty of times when he doesn’t seem to need it at all.

And that makes it all the more confounding!  Why can’t he gather his wits about him and the walker as well?!  Well that is the question his caregivers and I have been struggling with over the past few months.  That apparently is the Alzheimer’s…. It is as if the disease stops the movement of his brain’s commands:  as if he is in a constant state of interrupt.
To me, it seemed whenever he started to drag his left foot behind him, it was because he wanted to say something. It’s obvious to me having spent so much time with him and knowing his personality.  Let’s put it this way I don’t think it takes clairvoyance to predict when your parent would comment on a situation.  When you’re with someone who you know well sometimes you can intuit their social cadence…. For my dad’s pre-Alzheimer’s behavior this cadence might read something like this: step, step, step, pass a nurse on the left, [insert charming comment from Dad here].  Today his stage directions read more like this step, step, step, pass a nurse on the left, drag leg behind until teetering at the point of falling.

Dad’s left leg for whatever reason bears the brunt of a cat holding his tongue.  Whenever Dad got started walking down the hallway and thought to say something, his left leg turned out and dragged like the hunchback in Young Frankenstein (it’s a Mel Brooks movie)!

We proved this in front of the doctor the other day.   Dad on entering the medical offices was overwhelmed with his new surroundings (read: he really liked the looks of the nurses.)  Not to be jaw droppingly obvious, Dad just dragged his leg around instead… I mean it was extraordinarily tough getting him to walk the 100 feet to the doctor’s exam room.  The nurse’s gentle encouragement didn’t get him going … he seemed to get less focused and less able to move himself along.

Then we talked with the Neurologist.

The neurologist, a man, had a nice clear directed conversation with Dad and I.  He ruled out Parkinson’s.  He nodded his head that yes, Dad appeared to have Alzheimer’s and then, he asked Dad to step out into the hall and walk.

Dad got up out of his chair, sneered at me disdainfully and walked down the hallway.   He turned around practically prancing and with a flourish of his hands, doubled back down the hallway to cover an additional 25 feet of the carpet covered runway.   He looked up at the Doctor as if to say, ‘See I don’t know what she’s talking about!”

We returned to the exam room where the doctor took an urgent page, Dad grinned exultantly, and I sputtered helplessly and laughed to myself, wishing someone else who knew my dad were there to witness how annoyingly composed he’d proved himself yet again.

The neurologist released us. What with no evident issues and a pressing need to depart for ICU, he shrugged us off and said, ‘Well it’s not Parkinson’s. Looks like you’re on the right track!’

We started out the door and sure enough as soon as Dad passed one of the beauties in the next office, his left leg stopped keeping pace.  I looked back only to see the Doctor grinning.

‘Yup.  Looks like he’s got a slight issue with multi-tasking.  Talk to PT.  They’ll help you out.’

***

It makes you wonder, of course, whether perhaps this is somehow working to Dad’s advantage?  Is he per chance arriving at the desired result- obtaining more constant attention, gaining the company of a few lovely younger friends- just through slightly masochistic (though subconscious) means?  hmmm…

After years of having this inner broadcast, one day it stopped. And I forgot.  how I let this vanish I don’t know…  I had always loved this about my world!  The music itself, yes, the surprise over which song it might be, the variety, all added up to the kind of inner dialogue that occasionally broke me out in laughter.

Recently I found that the radio’s been malfunctioning… or well maybe not as clear as I’d choose to listen to were I actually, say, listening to the radio in the car.  (You guys remember what tuning a radio is like right?)

For some of us the issues revolve around this.  For some they do not. If you want to know more, if you want to be able to discern yourself and others better, you probably would benefit from getting this aspect of yourself tuned up.  It’s not like it would hurt that’s for sure!

Needless to say, competition runs high among my immediate family.  My parents were both athletic.  Mom, a competitive sailor, field hockey player and daughter to an Olympic hopeful, earned recognition on the water.  Dad, the oldest of 4, smarter than the average guy, captain of his high school basketball team, wanted to win at everything.

Apparently a favorite pre-marital date of theirs was spending an evening driving around town with one of them blindfolded in the back seat of the car. When the car stopped, the blindfold-ee had to correctly announce where they were.  (For the record I was not conceived as a direct result of this game.)

Despite my innate competition with my dad, I early on learned that it didn’t pay to develop an argument with him.  Instead I learned to avoid them.  Naturally I preferred staying his little girl to contending with his opinion however skewed. After all he was sharp of mind and I wasn’t that masochistic!

I had to step up though as our relationship and lives have seen a lot of challenges.  Alcoholism knocked at Dad’s door and forced me to grapple for his life.  He developed a relationship with a gold digger which forced me to fight for his financial well-being. Now his Alzheimer’s ravages stronger and stronger which keeps me striving to establish a peace between us and find more love in our relationship.

These days he, especially, seems to have an argument. His stance itself declares, ‘I will not participate in your world.’ Using his Alzheimer’s as an excuse, he seems to have realized his disadvantage in the competitions he has always loved to engage in.

Though not necessarily in the traditional sense, fighting became his better side: as if arguing his unspoken point of view stepped up his worth and love in the world.  At times this made him a strong competitor. It was clearest in the games or pursuits of his choice or when he had someone to argue his competence with. He generally was pretty good at whatever his argument entailed.

But this latest argument of his, the one that placed him at a sheer dissent with his love for people, kept him from interacting with the world and in a grumpy, unconscious state.

I objected. I tried to seduce him from his bed with sweets, invitations to play pool or talk of trips with his family.  For a while, it worked too.  The indulgences, the dreams, the intrigue of the outside world or the company of friends charmed him away from his discontent.

His Alzheimer’s took him deeper though and the posture of dissent took a stronger hold on my dad.  I couldn’t hang out with him without seeing his distrust of the world.  He no longer knew where he belonged or how he could participate.  He limited his involvement by getting lost in the land of tv, ‘reading’ and critical thinking.

One day I found myself arguing with his determination to stay put.  I sarcastically charged, ‘Oh you want to stay in bed all day.’

Like a light switch, his eyes lit up and opened wider. ‘Of course, not! I want to get up.’  The brakes unlocked and he quickly shifted around to get out of bed- as if to say, ‘No way. I’m not staying in bed all day.’

From that moment I realized the importance of his beauty- his argument- in everything he did.  That hidden desire of his to be better at the world than others was critical to engage him in the world.  He needed to be able to fight for an advantage… as if to assert his authority.

Suddenly it became clear what was emerging in dad was a longing to be in the world, despite his weaknesses, despite his disadvantage… He could still fight with me and the rest of his caregivers and that brought out the best in him.

Strangely, this need was relatively free from his battle with Alzheimer’s, a trump card if you will to his beingness… it was like a get out of jail free card. Seeing him get up and get going with less resistance is well worth it, for both of us.

For it’s benefits I recognized these revelations as a great triumph.  Not only do I get to compete with him but I get to see him out and about in the world.  Somehow it leaves me feeling like I’ve won a huge argument myself. Here I might not be the little girl or even the daughter but I might get to have a little more of my clear-eyed, alert, dynamic Dad.

From what I’ve seen of Alzheimer’s patients, this is true of many of them. There is an aspect of their personality distinct enough that others might engage and use to draw them out of the cocoon of their disease.   Likely too, we might learn more of one another, whether or not we have Alzheimer’s, that we might engage the ourselves more fully in our lives and draw others more fully into theirs.

His shuffling slowed us both down. I wanted to be showing him the world, reminding him of a bigger picture and finding new things to laugh about.  Instead I had to stabilize and protect him. Not only that, I was now freaking out: with the shuffling came an intense shadowy presence.  As he lurched along, something else lurked right along with him -an emotional storm of resentment perhaps.

The daughter in me tried to adapt to his loss. Accepting this storm as a natural response to losing more capacity in the world, I thought to myself, ‘Ok, now it’s about getting through the day.  Try to let go of some of those expectations, kid!’

As a matter of policy, I didn’t normally meditate for my dad all that frequently.  I chose instead  to focus on myself and send him some grounding and healing attention every once in a while. This shadow aggravated me so much that one day I broke down and decided to meditate on it.   Forgive me dad for not doing so sooner!   I rationalized, ‘isn’t this part of taking greater responsibility for his well-being?’

So I hammered away at the murky shuffle.  Only to find, it shifted dramatically.   Suddenly dad’s gait elongated and his focus transformed from preoccupied to conversational and light.

It was immediate. He smiled.  Although his nice long steps didn’t endure all that thoroughly, what stuck was a greater sense of witness of himself.   I smiled.

As his shuffling sort of faded in and out, I tried my best to handle his gait issue without shifting my attention to it fully.  Admittedly my new role of service provider and healer to my father was taking a back seat to chauffeur and daughter.  Still I couldn’t help but think we were making great strides.

***

A few months of these small discoveries later, I finally stepped up for him in a new way… As if suddenly I realized this was my responsibility as much as being his chauffeur or sometime attendant. And so, I invested some time in exploring whether I could take it further and make some more lasting steps towards improvement.

As I turned inwards I shifted into a higher state of awareness and honed in on my dad’s jumbled walk. There were many factors at play, all entwined in one another but equally shouting to be disentangled, to be restored to his Self. I worked on the most prominent first, disengaging its source of strength. Essentially this first tangle pertained to his dissent with his own life’s journey.  It was as if life were asking him to turn a corner and he in turn said no.  Naturally, this dissent with himself  created a disturbance in his being but in a “normal” human psyche the person could negotiate the issue, perhaps by discussing it, perhaps by deciding to wrestle with it later or perhaps by releasing it altogether. From my perspective it was the Alzheimer’s condition (sorry I’ll get into this in a later post) just stopped it, the issue remained in constant locked in mode, waiting to be dealt with but not.

The second major factor stopping dad’s gait had to do with the bigger world. This is what a teacher of mine once called, ‘The Loss.’  Something to do with a huge, huge shift the earth itself is taking is forcing life to change.  Yet, once again dad’s condition is impaired in that his energy is unable to shift, the same way a non-Alzheimer’s individual’s energy would shift.  This particular energetic shift had something to do with his capacity to move.

So, that is to say that by meditating on dad’s human condition- issues we all grapple with and debate with as we eat, walk, talk and work- and healing it, I was essentially able to short circuit the symptoms, if you will, of Alzheimer’s.

With greater understanding they say comes greater reward…  Today, Christmas of all days, I arrived at Dad’s apartment only to find him dapper, ready to go and walking in full strides.

Guess the new cane the assisted living team loaned him  wasn’t needed today!   We went off to dine with some great family friends and I found his gait held strong all day – sans any added participation from me!  My attention went back to smiling and sharing a special day with the family.

additional tunage …