Julius Caesar...one of the building fathers of the Roman Empire...A general both revered for his brilliance on the battlefield, and reviled by the
armchair warriors frightened his skills would unseat them from the power they'd shed not one drop of blood to acquire.
The Ides of March...friends...alleged friends under the cloak of camaraderie and trust, encircled Julius Caesar and repeatedly thrust their knives, daggers, blades into his unsuspecting, trusting body.
Dead!...no longer a threat to the usurpers eager to place themselves in line to fill the vacancy they'd viciously, cunningly, demonically created.
Throughout his long campaigns to assure Rome's supremacy, Julius Caesar excelled despite being challenged by the side effects of the
"Dropping" disease...known more widely today as
Grand Mal or tonic-clonic seizures.
Betrayed not by the enemy on the battleground, but by the likes of Brutus...someone he had sponsored into power...someone he believed HAD his back...not meant to STAB him in the back.
My daughter Kat, is an avid devotee of history. As an elective in middle school she took The Holocaust because that evil stain on our history as humans is not routinely taught...just as it is not routinely taught Columbus was not the kind, benevolent founder of the lands now called America but a wielder of carnage, brutality, and pain.
White-washing acts of unmitigated betrayal...and yet that does not alter the reality of their commission.
The Ides of March...we know the term, but did we as a species learn from it? Have we ceased stabbing people we call "friend" when they have their TRUSTING backs turned the other way?
You have no idea how much I wish I could say
yes.
Today we are still fighting emotions and concepts of hatred created long before any of us were twinkles in the turned on eyes of our parents. But evil waits, flexing and contracting its unjust lungs for one or a bunch of ones who do not mind operating from the shadowy corners of integrity.
You know who you are, and why you do what you do. But think about this...every action has a reaction...if you put something out into the cosmos, it WILL find its way back to you...maybe not immediately, but it will...and then what? Can you handle the fallout from the deeds you perpetrated?
Rome fell because betrayal and deceit grew into the norm. Trusting the man standing beside you, or the woman sharing your bed could and more often than not DID lead to your death.
Throughout the Bible there are repeated references to the punishment the betrayers eventually are castigated with. Many can quote chapter and verse from the Bible, yet learn none of the lessons its history has to share.
The Ides of March...friends betraying friend for what?
I have been watching Peter Jackson's
Lord of the Rings trilogy lately...(no longer have cable TV and refuse to buy another digital converter for a TV that is probably the last in the entire country still needing one.)
There's a moment when Eowyn confronts Aragorn with her displeasure over being assigned to the caves to care for the women and children and to be ready to care for the wounded. "What honor," she wants to know is in that?
She does not see the honor in care...simply caring for others...not swinging sword...but tending to the frightened and easing the anguish of those who were not given a choice about swinging sword and facing death.
Loving your people...your friends...those who have given you the priceless gift of their trust cannot be
quantified with a value...and it shouldn't. When someone offers you their trust, you have moved beyond being separate from them...you have become a part of the
Higher Selves you both now share...Betray it and it is not the person you are betraying that will suffer the most. Every person you betray takes away a piece of your
Higher Self, scattering it to the winds...announcing to all they dare not risk having faith in you lest they be the next person you turn your cold, calculating
treachery upon.
No one person is an island, no matter how much we might wish to be.
Napoleon was sentenced to isolation on the island
Elba, not because of any wealth or pastoral clime the island might claim, but because isolation erodes more deeply upon the spirit than anything else.
Betrayal of those we trust, turns us, the betrayers, into islands of dark, self-damaged Higher Selves that will take many, many lifetimes of atonement to wash clean.
The Ides of March...How many of you can recount stories of your own IDES whether they be the
Ides of June,
the Ides of September,
the Ides of April or any other month, day, hour, minute?
The Ides of March...here is my wish we learn from the historical mistakes so we can avoid making the personal mistakes.
Once you've broken trust the road back to disinterested disregard is a long one.
Today is
Saturday...a day to reflect upon the week just past. My daughter and I are homebodies...disabilities have given us no other choices for a very long time...so you would think there is little to reflect on over this previous week...but you would be wrong.
Sunday...I don't remember much about Sunday. My calendar says I went to Aldi's on para-transit...so I probably did. I try to go twice a month, once in the beginning and once in the middle...but with Labor Day claiming so much of the beginning of September, last Sunday would have been the earliest...Although I do not specifically remember it, I know with two broken ribs...which I have...shopping is nothing short of an adventure worthy of the likes of Tolkein creating an epoch saga around me. Can you picture me as the next Hobbit star? Jim, I need you to morph me onto a hairy footed Hobbit.
Monday...well now, Monday I remember with too much clarity. Why? Kat, my most precious daughter, had a violent seizure, breaking her jaw. Most people do not understand how dangerous seizures are. They think of them as the convulsive thrashing, but once that is over, the person is hail and hearty again...So NOT true.
To those who do not know this, Kat has broken her fingers, her shoulder, her foot, and now her jaw. She has had concussions, blood on the brain, memory lapses, and simple exhaustion. Think of how you would feel after running say twenty miles...when you stop your body is weaving from the exhaustion, the blood pounding through your veins sounds like a stampede of spooked cattle, and your eyes are seeing triple. Multiply that by ten and you are getting close to what Kat is like after a bad seizure.
With her jaw broken, she cannot conduct her BTR show...in steps Mom with my broken ribs. Got Monday's done...and yeah...also got Wednesday's although I screwed up royally...Sorry Cynthia.
Tuesday...other than trying to take nothing more than shallow breaths, Tuesday was relatively uneventful.
Wednesday I spent the day trying to formulate enough background on Cynthia to do a fair to middling job on her BTR interview. I apologize from the bottom of my misconceptions to Kat, Cynthia, and the poor visitors stuck with my confusion that joined us in the chatroom.
Thursday...yeah...that knocked the stuffing right out of me. For the third time in less than a year my therapist is no longer my therapist. The first one, Lisa, was badly beaten by her Autistic son...my second, Claire, I grew very close to in a short time because we have pretty much traveled the same path...no one understands abuse victims better than other abuse victims. I was in her office when without warning they came and made her pack up and leave. (Seems the clients liked her too much.) And now Staci who decided just last week to move to VA to be closer to her niece and nephew.
There's talk of another therapist squeezing me into her schedule somewhere in the next few weeks...but I'm not sure I want to be SQUEEZED in again. Staci squeezed me in this past June...So Thursday I felt a bit shell shocked and crawled into my own little cave of protection.
Yesterday...was a day of flips...on the one hand I think the new Neurologist is going to prove heads and tails above any of the previous so-called experts for Kat...but medical transportation didn't come back for our 10:30 return trip. We walked that parking lot for over two hours...and neither of us had dressed for the cooler weather.
I can walk a bit before the nerves in my right leg start burning and the leg literally gives out beneath me...and my knees can stand some walking...my left kneecap still bares the scar from the time my ex kicked it with his steel toed cowboy boots, splintering the kneecap quite spectacularly. (By the time I could have a doctor see it...two years later...it had healed with shards of bone here, there, and yeah down there too.) Today, my knee looks like I stuck a bicycle tire pump into the knee and pumped with glee. My right leg, the one with the nerve damage is sending knifeblade sharp arrows of pain from my thigh all the way down to my toes and back. My left foot...I have this metarsal thing that feels like I have a rock in there when I come down on the bottom of my foot during the walking process...today it feels like a boulder.
Kat didn't fair much better...luckily the two seizures she had in that parking lot were what I dub her mini-seizures and I was able to angle my body against hers well enough to keep her from taking us both down to the pavement.
Seems transport didn't forget us so much as our assigned driver was having battery trouble and they, the dispatching portion, didn't think that maybe they should send another driver. THREE total hours!
Today is Saturday...a day for reflection...and I am going to reflect myself back into my cave and let my mind veg out on doing nothing more strenuous than watching DVDs.
I know somewhere in all this a story will evolve...so there is a silver lining in every black cloud...still...Blue skies...are they too much to ask for?
Ginger, Love...we're glad you're home from the hospital. Get well My friend.
Everybody else...I'll check in with you all in a few days.
