wild horse of death races in the westward ho

today a wild horse
is racing through our halls
nostrils flaring
crazy eyes glaring
teeth bared
slow down death
wait for us to catch up with you
try to touch you
ask you
what sent you mad
you want death
you know that wont help you
only life will fix
whatever gave you this pain
you hate yourself
tomorrow you will be kinder
to your tortured soul
frothing at the mouth
now now try to sleep
but take care you dont
leave us in your drunken state
mistaking death for
mere sweet slumber
dont forget to wake up
wild man
tomorrow life will not be
so hard to take

Bougainvillea lookin' at you! Arizona's finest flower

I went out walking in my new spring blouse ($1) and purple pants along the south wall of the Westward Ho which features the glorious bougainvillea which blooms the year around but never more bounteously than in the spring. Everywhere bougainvillea! What a gift of a flower to man. I am so fond of it.
An old friend's picture was posted on the bulletin wall though. I spoke to Gabrielle in the office and found out Vern died yesterday quite suddenly I always admired Vern, in his seventies, because he had to wear a prothesis after they cut his leg off, I believe from having been torn up in an old war. But he never went to a scooter. And he was very active, too. Well, this might be the best way to go.
Water from a leak in these ancient pipes in here was dripping down into the mail room. Which made me think about my air conditioning and wondered when they were going to get around to fixing it. Plumbing and other maintenance problems keep them hopping, so I will have to wait my turn.
A lovely morning altogether. Hope yours was too.

A friend, Karen, only 51, was found dead here over the weekend

I thought I was feeling extra sad Sunday when I was making the video about pro life, but I did not find out about Karen's death until this morning. Karen was my closest neighbor for about five years, and I was concerned about her then. She ended up in the hospital with a heart attack undoubtedly caused by the diabetis she did not know she had. She fought the diagnosis, even to getting up and leaving the ICU to go home! She was a very independent soul. I was so alarmed about her inability to accept her diagnosis I would make chicken soup for her and encourage her to get on the medication by talking about my sister Ann with far worse diabetes. I remember asking her one time what her blood sugar was and she said, "Oh, 300 or so, I don't remember." I expressed lots of alarm. I just could not see her dying so young. She had also started drinking again and experienced violent mood swings under the influence, so I was trying to keep close track of her, wondering if she was going to stabilize, but she finally did and seemed to be doing well for the last two years when she finally got a bigger apartment she had wanted so long.
She and I had a mutual friend in Bob and we both spent hours talking to him. Bob was so easy to talk to. We were both extremely upset when he got cosmetic surgery for his eyelids and ended up in emergency. We were calling every hospital in the city trying to find him when we received the shocking news tht he was on life support. Imagine dying over cosmetic surgery on your eyelids. I know Bob would have to laugh at that unique cause of his demise.
I went to another friend's house this morning to find out what had happened to Karen. I was relieved to hear that she probably had the most peaceful death possible. She was found just sitting on her couch as though nothing has happened. So the cause of death was surely a heart attack or other cardiovascular accident that hit her so fast she did not even have time to move. She was staying active, going out to Sun City to visit her father quite often, and I would see her in the halls or on the bus and we would have a good chat. Karen made beautiful quilts. That was her hobby.
I am sure she is the most concerned over her father's upset at surviving his daughter. I have made contact with Bob who says he has been with Karen ever since it happened, and he will stay with her as long as he is needed. I think now that Pierre's presence here was a warning as he was also a good friend of Bob's. We all played pool together every day for two or three years, until Bob quit because of his droopy eyelids.(He couldn't see the balls he said) Instead he started learning all about computers and ran the computer lab for two or three years.
I just screamed when I heard Bob was dying, and I am sure Karen did, too. It was a shock, but I knew Karen had had big issues with her health so her death was somehow not such a shock even though she seemed far too young to die. Still she was alone in the world except for her beloved cat Freeway and her friends and her dad mostly. She did not have children. I don't know if she ever married.
I am so thankful Bob is over there, because if ever there was a good friend to her it was him. Yes, I do believe the ghosts in this old hotel wander through the place all the time. I had Ellen on my mind, too, this morning who died last summer but who played such an active role here. Now Karen has joined them, so easily, so softly, still with friends, her time to go. Not enough to hold her here, she is moving on. Goodbye Karen, Bob will take care of you until you get used to your next life.

Signs of a big election participation means people care this year

I don't know whether to be super excited about the big interest in voting this year but I think every time America decides to vote it is a good thing. Doc and I spent the day doing a video about the two of us deciding to run for president We are announcing our decision and presenting our platforms. We finally got one we both could live with and it is on its way up to Youtube right now. I will be able to download it on this blog tomorrow.
I was happy that Sheria was able to respond to my objections to the democratic party's platform for choice without anger, even though I know she feels passionately about this issue. If we can all just manage to talk about the issues and different solutions without going to war with each other it will be a plus. She mentions some very important points for anyone to consider who wants to see the decision overturned when Roe vs Wade went to the Supreme Court, which in my opinion would result in far less deaths under the states' jurisdiction. I think the legalized abortion experiment across the land has been a mistake because the deaths are too high, and it has encouraged people to use it for birth control. That to me is not humane.
I do feel that every time people feel pressure from a rising population they are tempted to seek violent solutions. If man turns to violence that means he has essentially given up on the solutions from a higher power which would eliminate bloodshed. Legalized abortion was practiced heavily in China and Russia before the rest of the so called civilized nations adopted it to control the burgeoning population of the poor mainly, is my belief. The people who favored it were in too big of hurry to develop more civilized solutions to such problems. Maybe they were too savage to believe in them. If you read Chinese or Russian history, after their revolutions the communist party became responsible for large numbers of the adult populations being exterminated, as well.
The price we have paid for advances in medical science is longer lives. To those who hate a challenge, perhaps that is something that can't be tolerated without the option of pro choice, which means don't interfere if your nieghbor wants to abort her child, but my view on this was always that only a desperate woman considers abortion, and what society needed to do was support the non violent solution. Yes, that has to be done in every way, and it was being done before Roe vs Wade We had years and years of trying to make society more supportive of pregnancy so women would not seek back alley abortions or resort to the infamous 'coat hanger' to cause their own abortions. I always thought that society needed to take some responsibility for every abortion that happened in those days.
Now these support systems have been greatly weakened after 35 years of legalized abortion. It is as though we are pointing the way to the abortion clinic for desperate women. If we create a society where so many women are going to have causing the deaths of their own offspring on their consciences, we are doing a disservice to those women. Laws help women not to resort to such upsetting acts. Good laws tell women that society recognizes violence is not a good solution, so laws need to exist to help people not to commit violence. Abortionists should not be sanctioned by law, people who profit from the deaths of our own offspring. This should give anybody pause. And if we do not allow abortionists then we will be expected to provide other kinds of help to desperate women in order to save their children just as we did in this country for decades. We knew we had to provide support and many caring people were involved in providing support. Churches have provided sanctuaries for centuries for the desperate. We have to see the full picture. I was 42 years old before Roe vs Wade so I saw what was in place in those days, and how rapidly these services weakened with legalized abortion, until we are aborting children who wouldn't even be conceived if abortion weren't legal. That is how bad this law is. It encourages abortion, that is all there is to it, and if the numbers do not convince what will? I thought we still had a long ways to go in providing good outcomes of these kinds of problems. We needed to tackle them in all kinds of ways. Death is the most primitive solution possible, the one where the least thought is required, the one that says we are giving up on progress without killing.

In "Soul Shift," Mark Ireland teaches us about the spirit world...

In keeping with trying to make the world of spirit more real, I am reviewing Mark Ireland's book called "Soul Shift." Mark Ireland was the co-author of a book about his father, Richard Ireland, world famous Phoenix psychic, called "The Phoenix Oracle." His father is shown with actress Mae West in the photo. This book was written not too long after his father died, and Mark did not do much with the psychic world until after 2004, when a monumental event occurred in his immediate family. As he describes it, it was a Saturday and his youngest son, 18, was going to go on a hike on the McDowell Mountain near their home. Mark had felt uneasy about the projected trip because his son suffered from asthma, but he had done these hikes before and reminded his father that his asthma had improved for at least 3 months due to a new medication and he had hardly been bothered with it at all. They probably both assumed that if he did get into some stress with it, his inhaler would take care of the problem.
As it turned out, he suffered from such a severe attack, hardly even realizing it, that his inhaler did not work at all. He and a friend started back down and he suddenly told his friend that he was seeing light all around them and needed to lie down. Up to then his friend said Brandon had even been joking! Once on the ground he quickly expired. His heart had simply quit from the lack of oxygen. In the meantime another group of hikers who had stopped because one of their members was having trouble with asthma came and immediately called 911 for rescue. It was too late. I remember readng about this sad event in the newspaper, and I was thinking then that Phoenix appeared to have completely forgotten Mark's father, Richard Ireland, who was one of the most amazing psychics I have ever seen. I puzzled for months after seeing his show here in a place on Central Avenue. How could he do what he did I asked myself over and over. This was a case of having trouble believing what I saw him do with my own eyes. I could not help but think that Mark had perhaps turned away from his father's psychic activities so did not perceive how much danger his son was going to encounter in this hike.
So when I saw this book "Soul Shift" at the Phoenix Library today, just out, I got it, as I figured the soul shift phrase referred to what Mark Ireland has experienced after a beloved son died. I am finding the book fascinating, worthy of more comment than I can possibly write here in one session, but I believe that if we in Phoenix even half way understood the amazing feats of Richard Ireland and other psychics we would not have so much trouble believing the spirit is real. In his book Mark Ireland says that his father was probably the most amazing, 'shocking' psychic of the 19th century, and I think he is right. I tried to write about his father in my journal and I thought some of what he did was too shocking to keep revealing. I didn't think readers were going to be able to take it in. I had to conclude that most of us live on a very mundane level, not even realizing how psychics like Richard Ireland were able to move freely between this sphere of reality and that of the spirit.
And he started exhibiting these extraordinary gifts when he was 5 years old, when the nurse found him bouncing a ball against the wall and catching it with his eyes blindfolded that had just been operated on. He explained to her that he could still 'see' the ball. He thought everyone could see as he could. Mark Ireland says that he never saw his father make a mistake when he was reading off the serial numbers of dollar bills audience members would hold in their hands. He could 'see' the numbers blindfolded and on stage. That is what he did the night I saw him. Mark says he used to play games with them and he could 'read' off a whole deck of playing cards blindfolded and never make a mistake. His demonstrations of ESP left audience members who came in skeptics stunned, unable to understand how anyone can do what he did. Then he would go on and startle people with his ability to tell what was going on in their lives in detail. Mark said it was a little disconcerting to have a father that always 'knew' everything. Once he asked Mark what gift he would like for his birthday. Mark told him he would like this certain balsam model airplane, and his father told him to reach up on the shelf, and there this same model was. Richard Ireland had already bought the gift before hearing what his son wanted. Mark says he does not know how he did this, whether he put the idea in his mind or what. Most of us don't have fathers like Richard Ireland.
Yet, he developed an addiction to alcohol, probably from doing his shows in a nightclub setting and being feted and wined and dined by celebrities. After his son died, Mark was able to speak to his father who told him that he felt he had neglected him. So in spite of his great gifts he was just human, too. He had faults and failings. But he had been there to greet his grandson, Brandon, when he passed, and he told Mark that he would look after him, which was a great comfort to him. He said this was a second chance to do for his grandson what he had not done for his son.
I do think our world needs to study and think a great deal more about what happens to us when we die, what happens to anyone, including the ones who have been conceived but are not yet born. There are some amazing stories of people like Richard Ireland whose purpose for being born with such gifts seemed to be to teach the world more about the spirit that does not die.