Abby Caplin

Tikkun author Dr. Abby Caplin sent me a link to her new blog, Permission to Heal, a while back but I haven’t managed to take a look until now. I found it a sweet read. She started off by saying:

Welcome! This blog is for people living with chronic illness, who might be up in the middle of the night, or down in the middle of the day. I hope this blog will give you hope, ideas and confidence so you can start to feel better soon!

I don’t have chronic illness but I found a good deal of what she wrote was relevant to just living with the chronic condition of being a human.

Secretary Clinton’s visit to Pakistan has been remarkable in the candor and sense of relative equality in her exchanges with the Pakistanis. The students, women, and other groups with whom she met do not like American policy, and they let that be known. Clinton listened to their objections, but argued instead that an anti-terrorist alliance between the Pakistani and American militaries was the way to go. She treated them as peers and rivals. She did not condescend, and they did not treat her as representing an overweening bully against whom they had to protest.

The exchanges reflect real changes in the global situation, especially since 1989. Once it lost the cloak and nightstick provided by anti-communism, the United States lost much of the political clout that kept nations lined up behind it. Its “cultural power” — jeans, rock music, i-phones — was so linked to the market, that it quickly diffused, becoming an example of “globalization,” and not of American leadership. Its economy became weaker and weaker and less appealing as a model, as its reliance on artificial booms became clear. That left it with naked military force, a basis for coercion, but not hegemony.

North of the equator, it is the season when day dies sooner and night insists upon itself earlier. Summer retreats. Cool air signals winter’s approach. Brilliant autumn leaves paint the landscape with deep mature colors, and on bright sun-splashed days they defy description. The leaves fall and we turn them into piles to play in. The air tastes like a tart crisp apple. We breathe pumpkin orange and cranberry red. Halloween is near.

The Eve of the Feast of All Saints, All Hallows Eve, is an enchanted witching and bewitching time when the veil between life and death, dark and light, clarity and obscurity, good and evil ascends. Children dress up in innocent fantasies, go out with their parents after dark and come home with candy. This is a true holy day. For adults Halloween opens the door to a more serious moment. The mystery of our own being, the conundrum of us, the paradox, the aporia of our own self knowledge beckons us to behold the side of ourselves we would rather not see. It insists that we drop the fiction of our own ontological goodness and face the facts of the evil that resides in our personal humanity. Demons and monsters live inside us born from our fears, growing strong in our denial of their existence. The vampire, the untamed canine howling at the moon, Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the wicked vixen, Satan’s lover, lives inside us and makes each of us capable of perpetrating unspeakable horror.