Yes, we will fight your cancer, the system says, but in payment we will take all that you have saved, all your future income, and leave you and your husband destitute, without hope of recover, and racked by guilt, helplessness, and anger.

And guess what? This is a deal you can’t afford to refuse!

So when Mrs. Bishop, who has been successfully treated for lung cancer, watched President Clinton’s health care address the other night, she applauded. Her was a small lamp of hope being lit.

She got out a plastic grocery bag full of bills and opened a few to make her point. “I used to sit here and cry over them. Then I got this bag, and I just throw them in.”

She pulled up an unopened envelope. “I’ve got fabulous doctors in Richmond, but their billing is terrible. I went in one morning for a biopsy, and was back home thatevening. $6,200! They billed me as an inpatient! We get bills from the doctor and bills from the hospital. Now this one’s for $1,568, and that’s after the insurance has paid!” She threw the paper back into the bag.

“It hurts to know that you’ve got insurance, and then you’ve got to put up with all this stuff. It’s getting terrible. There’s so many court orders, and these bill collectors started calling and threatening. That’s what got me. I was I bed sick, and a guy called and harassed me. They get really nasty. They scared me at first, but then I learned to live with it. They were not going to mess me up!” said Mrs. Bishop, showing the strength and determination that had helped her beat the cancer.

But having won the battle, could she win the war? “I told the doctor the last time I went, that I felt like I couldn’t come back anymore (if I got sick again), because for 41 years, we’ve worked to get what little bit we’ve got. And I’d hate to see me get down and out, and my husband lose everything we’ve got.” Her voice cracked for the first time.

Carl Bishop retired from Fort Pickett this year, and now, after 47 years of Army and Civil Service, has to pay $330 a month for insurance, despite the government promise that at the end of his career he and his wife would be taken care of for the rest of their lives. It’s not that the Bishops don’t want to pay their bills. They are sending $50 a month to the hospital, but that’s like a drop in a bucket that never stops emptying. And they can’t afford to cancel their insurance. Caught!

“You keep getting these bills, and you don’t know what they are for. I went over there and told these people to get these bills straightened out because the insurance company is not going to pay them. But it just keeps going on. Here’s one: $850 for five minutes for a weekly radiation treatment!” She closed up the bag.

But Mrs. Bishop still feels lucky. At the hospital, she saw so many die, and seeing the children not come back was very hard, she said. She has friends who have been stripped of everything by the health care system. “I had a friend who was in the hospital for ten days, and they took everything he had.”

And there was another friend, who died from lung cancer. In fact, Mrs. Bishop was bringing her flowers while she unknowing was also sick with the same cancer.

“It was a year ago that I got sick,” she said. “Thought it was pneumonia because I had a pain across my back and couldn’t breathe.” She kept hoping it was bronchitis.

After the tests got back, that hope vanished. “When I got out of his office, it hit me. I had cancer! I just broke down and cried while my husband held me. “Alright, now we’ve got to go home and tell the kids,’ we said.” The Bishops have five children and 12 grandchildren, all in this area. Mrs. Bishop would no be without loving support.

When she got back to Blackstone and the life she had left there, everything was different. “Cancer changes your outlook a lot. I see things in a different way, and I appreciate my grandchildren more,” she said.

She had three chemotherapy treatments and radiation treatments following that.“The treatment doesn’t hurt or anything, but it does weaken your system. I did get real sick with the second chemotherapy. The worst part was the hour and a half drive to the hospital.”

I’ve been an artist for a long time and it was once hard for me to part with my work because of how much of myself I put into it. Now I see my art as something I wish to share with every art admirer whom my art may touch. Hopefully my gift in art will become all that I  see it to be and that you will to.

While younger members of the town’s street crew saw only the discomfort and indignity of operating equipment that had no heat, Hawkes still remembered how he felt when the equipment was new. “We didn’t have anything like that! Why, a piece of equipment that would do that kind of work! We didn’t have nothing but picks and  shovels!” Built simple and made to last, Hawkes and the grader had much in common.

Blackstone  has always placed great value in its heavy equipment and made sure there was advantage to be gained before replacing a piece. But when it comes to good workers, the town figures their value increases with the years. If you work for Blackstone no one turns your engine off before you are ready.

Hawkes is not the only town employee who has stayed behind the wheel long after retirement age. There’s Francis Johnson, 39 years on the Water Dept., and Ercelle Dewey, 41 years at the town office. And there’s 74 year-old Walter hart, 17 years with the town after 21 years with Garrett, Moon, and Pool.

For Town Manager Larry Palmore, having men like Hawkes and Johnson at his elbow when sewer and water lines have to be replace saves time and money. Better than maps, they can tell you not only where everything is buried but how it was buried. “When they say we used to do it this way, I listen,” said Palmore, who was hired by the town eight years ago to replace water lines. “Johnson could put his foot on every valve that was buried.”

But it is not only the knowledge these older workers possess that makes them so valuable: they also remind the younger generations of the pure joy of work. “When I first came here, Jap Hawkes said you don’t every have to worry about running out of work,” said Hart. Obviously, in the mind of these men, running out of work was like running out of food.

“I’ve been working since I was five years-old,” Hart continued. His lean ody didn’t have any excess and he didn’t have much use for anyone who looked forward to the absence of work. To Hart, the end of work was death.

“Epes Harris told me—see I’ve had two open heart surgeries—not to ever quit work…I know two or three people who retired at 62 and didn’t see 65. I know one man who died the day he retired.” Epes told him that sitting at home with nothing to do but think about himself would carry him away as quick as a bad disease.

“Retiring? I’ve retired two or three times and come back!” Hawkes laughed even when he wasn’t on the grader. “They don’t let me go…and I appreciate it. You take a man my age, don’t nobody want to fool with you.” Except Blackstone, that is.

Hawkes doesn’t operate a street grader anymore. Arthritis gets his knees, he says. But he does mow everything that grows on the town property during the warm months. “He’s just like clockwork,” Palmore commented. “Never cutting anything he shouldn’t and taking care of the equipment. No one ever complains about Hawkes.”

Town employment has been good for men like Hart and Hawkes. “I bought my home. Paid for that.  Bought three or four more homes around town, trailers and things…I paid for that, too!” said Hawkes.

When Hart came to work for the town, all three of his sons worked here. “I’ve had a good life,” he said, not meaning that it was over, to be sure. Hart grew up on a Dinwiddie farm. One of 15 children, and weathered the depression “better than those that had one or two children. Back then you raised everything you ate.”

Palmore laughed. “Hart doesn’t understand why the men should want a break.”

“When I come along, we didn’t have breaks…and it ain’t never hurt me!” Hart said, raising his eyebrows. Work in Hart’s mind was more the n just the means to a pay check—work was the pay check!

Palmore had more to say about the town’s older workers He said keeping their town running smoothly and helping people is what keep them going long after the expiration date of 65 years society has set up as the norm. “They are not here because they have to be, but because they want to be.”

The tooth is out!
Once more again
The throbbing, jumping
Nerves are stilled.
Reader, would you avoid
This pain?
Then have your crumbling
Teeth well filled.

-David Bares (1810-1876)

The obscure poet, David Bates, who wrote the above lines may be forgotten, but his “throbbing, jumping nerves” are well known to anyone who has ever had a bad tooth and needed a dentist.

But where does a dentist go when the “Throbbing, jumping nerves” are his? That’s what Leroy Bradshaw wanted to know when he finished dental school and returned to Blackstone to practice dentistry with his father, Dr. T.C. Bradshaw

Leroy had everything a young man should want: a good profession, a beautiful wife, a nie house, healthy children…but he was miserable.

“For the first six or eight years, we were really dissatisfied here,” Leroy recalled, “I was in debt and our marriage almost failed.” This wasn’t where I was supposed to be, thought Leroy. What had happened to his dream of being a minister? He had let it go so easily.

“After two weeks at William and Mary, I decided going into the ministry wasn’t a good idea because I couldn’t get a good grade in English.” So Leroy took biology, got A’s, got approval, and ended up…a dentist.

Then he applied to seminary, and again slowed someone to discourage him.

Disparaging thought began to decay his self-esteem. Once more again the throbbing, jumping nerves…Now he had a major cavity. No dentist could remove this pain.

Fortunately, dentistry hadn’t kept Leroy from being active in the Baptist church. When he and his wife Sylvia went to a medial missions conference, they never suspected when he returned home he would be exulting: The tooth is out! And that their marriage would be repaired.

Leroy, now a minister of Jonesboro Baptist Church for the past five years, still visits that turning point in his life for inspiration.

“We were studying the Book of Jonah,” said Leroy, when his teacher startled him with a revelation: ‘You are just like Jonah, trying to go somewhere other than where God wants you to be.’”

Leroy had never linked himself personally to the parables in the Bible. He had always read them like he read biology: objectively, rationally…safely.

Now, without warning, like a monster from the sea, the Bible opened its great mouth and swallowed him. Instead of being outside reading it, Leroy was inside—being read by it!.

He was Jonah! Blackstone is where I’m supposed to be, he realized. Leroy gave up fighting himself and found peace.

Leroy frequently reaches down into the Book of Jonah to touch that pearl of wisdom he had been shown in the belly of the whale.

The painful tooth that was extracted had been transformed into a pearl of wisdom.

When Leroy came out of the Book of Jonah, he took charge of his life and gave himself permission to be who he was. It was OK to be a small town dentist and the minister he really wanted to be.

The similarity between the opened mouth of the whale and the opened mouth of the dental patient is not lost to Leroy.

The words of the dentist and the minister seem to come from one mouth: at some time in your life you have to surrender to God (and the dentist); at some point the pain of sin (a decayed tooth) is less than the fear of the Lord (the dentist); at some point, you have to let Christ (the dentist) reach inside and heal you.

“And the person has to accept the filling (Word),” Leroy added, happy to discover yet another metaphorical bridge between his worldly and spiritual life. “A person has to take responsibility for the care of his teeth (spiritual life).

“Through neglect and abuse, the teeth (one’s whole life) break down.” Everything about dentistry is perfect for teaching and preaching, Leroy discovered.

To bring this story back from the deep, having been inside one whale of a metaphor, take a look at how the Bradshaws have taken their dentistry/ministry abroad. “The more we give away, the more returns to us,” said Leroy, when asked why they go on missions.

Since 1981 they have spent their vacations in mission work, both in Appalachia and in Haiti, once and last month in Columbia. The Bradshaws have found this gift of their talents maintains the bridge between the ministry and dentistry.

Sylvia, who works as her husband’s assistant, picked up a fruit jar containing 188 decayed and broken teeth they had extracted from the mouths of the Columbian poor.

In place of these teeth, the Bradshaws hope seeds of Bible study had been planted “They will come with a tooth ache and at the same time get their spiritual needs answered,” said Sylvia.

When soldiers arrive at Fort Pickett, the supply office is one of the first stops. Expecting the usual ritual forms and more forms, soldiers are always surprised by a collection of military crests covering the rear wall of the supply clerk’s office.

While requests are being filled, soldiers, whether reservists, national guard, or regular army, walk up to the wall and examine the emblems. Always driven by the same compelling questions, they want to know: Is my unit represented here?

Winter and summer, the scene never changes. The collection continues to grow like leaves on a tree. When Betty Branum, who has been collecting crests since 1971, pins new crest on her wall boards—no soldier has ever worn his crest more proudly—you can sense why crests keep coming.

A Supply Clerk at Fort Pickett for 28 years, Betty is remembered by soldiers from all over the United States, including NATO countries. She receives each crest given her as if it were the most important crest in her collection.

“It’s just amazing what they will give me,” exclaimed betty. The crests, which are issued for Class A uniforms are hard to come by and are not cheap.

While military units come and go, and army personnel change every year, Betty and her crest collection are a constant at Fort Pickett. Every soldier wants to have his unit displayed on her collection boards—which hold about 800 crests now, so many the office doesn’t have enough wall to hold them all.

In addition to posting the crest, she included the name of the unit and the soldier who gave it to her. Some have sent the history of their units, which she keeps at home.

This is more that just a collection of collar pins. Each crest is a miniature shield or battle flag, a symbol that soldiers have given their lives for since soldiers have given their lives.

The crests represent the greater whole of which each soldier is a part: that mysterious bond that gives each soldier his meaning, that “mother” who holds all her sons in one embrace.

“I get accused of knocking them down and ripping them off their lapels…But I really don’t do that,” she added, just in case a qualifying footnote was needed.

“I have crests to collect before I retire,” she said with a laugh. “They say there are about 11,000 out there.”

Many of us, old or young, don’t know who we are or what we really want to do. Kimberly Brown, a Kenston Forest 10^th grader, said she “feels blessed” that she sits in the saddle of life at this early age knowing what she wants to do while most young people today are “all muddled up.”

So what happened? Why is Kimberly riding life tall and straight in the saddle? Perhaps it started “when I was growing up,” she said as we settled down on my deck to talk. “We had cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, everything you could image. I got a rabbit and it was my full responsibility. I had to do everything, brush it, feed it.” It sounds like it was like growing up on a farm, I added, but what about the horses? “Across the road was a horse farm and that’s where I started riding Skippy…I loped for the first time on my first lesson,” she said proudly. “I was six. She was a tall thing.” (But to a six year-old everything is tall, I thought)

Now, years later, Kimberly rides Henry, “He’s a big time show horse. He can win some stuff!” Kimberly said she used to rim her room with ribbons she’d won but now, out of space, she just hangs pictures of her shows on the wall.

I stopped writing this story here. This is not what I wanted to discover and share with you, the reader. This interview was not about awards, showing her horse in competition from here to Ohio, or the long hours she put into her horses. No, there is something deeper here. Lets find it, I thought. This story is also about us and our high fence between our thinking mind and our feeling body. This is a story about a girl who is in harmony with herself and animals on a feeling level. Where others are lost, she has found something, something healing. But what did she find? So I left my conventional writing and got to the real point.)

“Are you a horse whisperer?” I asked her, anxious to get to what was happening on the inside with her and horses. Not sure how to answer, as now we were getting a little outside the normal boundaries of horse talk. “I don’t think so…I’m not a fan of horses. It’s just my life. It’s what I do. Go to the barn everyday, feed ‘em, clean the stalls. Sometimes it gets so hot and I wonder why I’m doing this, but I go back everyday.” Now here was something, I thought. Not a fan of horses. It’s what I do….

Are you riding the horse, or is the horse riding you? I brought up an R.W. Emerson quote: “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” We talked about my cat and how I’m at its beck and meow.

“Someday I question that…We try to ride horses.” She was not sure how to answer. But there was something coming out. I could feel we were on the right track. We continued. She began to talk about her mother, Holly Brown, and her passion for animal therapy, first with dogs and cats and now with horses. Go to www.heartlandhorseheroes.org to find out more. We talked about how older people depend on their pets to keep them interested in life. “they love animals as their companions and their best friends.”

What is healing about animals? I asked.“I don’t know,” she said, thinking. “They seem so caring and kind. They give you everything they have, like unconditional love. You don’t see that with most people.”

Have you seen Avatar, I suddenly asked (my favorite movie and one in which I see a great healing message to man) It’s all about bonding with the earth and its animals, how you feel what your horse is feeling and your feeling connection with all life. In the movie the horse is an extension of the rider’s being. (But now I was doing the talking.)

She picked up the thread. “You can really feel what the horse is feeling when you ride it. You can feel it!” she emphasized. “If you are nervous then the horse gets nervous. He will give you visual hints how he feeling. If you put everything together you can feel what (animals) feel.” She was describing how the rider and horse reflected each other’s feelings.

Now I switched topics. Are you going to college? What do you want to study? “Psychology,” she said with a smile. “I want to know how people think. I would love to do animal therapy with people.” We talked about how this desire of her maturing intellect to know more about the interior world was now rising out of her body/mind relationship with her horse.

I held my two palms apart. Most people are like this, waving the hands at each other. The mind is one hand, the body is the other, and neither knows what the other is doing, and usually they fight each other. I brought my hands together and made them wrestle. But you bring your hands together like this. I brought my hands together like praying hands. She smiled and nodded.

Now I found myself making a huge leap. Let’s see if she could follow. Are you familiar with the Greek mythic figure called the Centaur? It’s half man and half horse. Her face smiled in recognition. Well, you are a Centaur. You bonded with animals when you were a child, when the window was open. If you started riding now you probably wouldn’t have the ability to bond with animals because that stage specific window would have been closed long ago.

Now we began talking about how she feels feeling. “I always try to feel one thing at a time. It’s pretty simple. You can move on from there.” Is your mind quiet, I asked.? “When I’m alone or bored my mind just wanders. But when I’m on the horse, I’m REALLY focused on how he’s acting and trying to get him to focus…yes, I’m more focused on the horse,” she said as she seeing something she had not noticed before.

Look, I said, the horse is body, you are mind. When you get on the horse, the horse brings your mind down from the sky and grounds it in the greater feeling body, in this present moment.” I told her the story about the Zen master who when asked by his student how he got enlightened, he said, “By watching my cat.” Kimberly really lit up with that one. She knew exactly what I was saying. So your horse is the master teacher of the art of living and you the student, I said, throwing out a metaphor to bait her mind. She then explained how she learned how to master life by being a student to her horse.

“In the show you’ve got to feel what you want to feel. You must feel confident, feel you can rule the world. And if you don’t, the horse knows and shows that feeling back to you” Kimberly was really lighting up to this new way of seeing what her horse is doing for her.

Yes, I said, suddenly realizing a new metaphor for what the horse was. Your horse is a bio-feedback machine! Since she was going into psychology, I explained what bio-feedback technology was and how it helped people get in touch with their feelings by showing them the connection between thinking and feeling as they were hooked into the machine. Picking up the thought and getting back on her show horse, “I learn to take the good feeling and leave the bad….because the horse will feed it back.” Showing the horse’s best qualities meant that Kimberly must show her best qualities as well. So who is really getting the trophy, I wondered.

She added that she like watching the body language of people. “I can picture what a person is feeling by their body language. I feel blessed” she added. I told her that she was not really special but just normal. Being a centaur is normal. It’s the rest of us who can’t feel our body/mind, who are at war with ourselves that are abnormal. As children we are centaurs, (I held my palms together) but then our hands separate. She liked that. For a teen it’s always good to feel normal.

Then she explained how she helps her friends come down to earth. “They come to me with their problems and I usually tell them ‘It wasn’t THAT bad.’ I tell them to dig deep, feel the situation, and go from there.” As her horse helps her, she helps them focus on their feeling ground of sanity. It sounded to me like Kimberly was herself a feedback machine.

But her best friends are horse people, she said. “Young people today have no idea what they want to do. Their minds are all jumbled up…except horse people. They know what they want to do. They are not looking for anything outside themselves” Ah, that was it, I thought. Feel the situation and go from there. Get grounded in your body/mind unity, then act. You’ll get a trophy!

“Animals know more than we think they do,” Kimberly said, taking us back to the animals and their wisdom. “They know how to live, take each day as it comes, and use it to be productive and happy….IT’S SO SIMPLE!”

I asked her if she had ever seen the old TV show Mr. Ed, about the talking wise horse and the human who was his student. She said she hadn’t. I lent her a copy of Avatar and she said she would watch it for sure.

^{Clucks replace moos for local dairy farmer}

Most people are familiar with the story about the flock of sea gulls that saved the early Mormons from starvation by eating the locust. But how may people know about the Nottoway dairy farmer who was saved by a flock of chickens?

In 1985 a double-fisted blow of drought and deteriorating farm buildings felled Johnny and Chuck Johnson’s dairy farm like a cow in a slaughter house. It was either go deeper into debt or sell the dairy herd which their Swedish grandfather had started in 1916 hen the bought 220 acres on Route 460 west of Blackstone.

In the following 70 years, two succeeding generations of Johnsons had built up the original farm to 660 acres and almost 250 dairy cows. But the times were not friendly to the Johnsons now.

“Why not chickens!” Johnson’s wife Patricia said as they were looking for some way to keep the land. She had crown up on a chicken farm across the highway. Here was something she could help her husband with. Intuitively, she knew that without his farm, her husband’s happiness would dry up like their corn had without rain.

And chickens meant Holly farms. “We decided on chickens in December, and by Jly we were pickin’ eggs,” Johnson said, still a little amazed at the speed the plan was hatched.

And picking eggs Johnson and his wife were, three times a day, seven days a week. Next to the decaying milk parlor and in the shadow of the empty silos, two long 400 foot “egg factories” lay. Inside 16,000 pullets and over 2,000 roosters produced approximately 10,000 eggs on a good day.

Part of the larger Holly Farm system, these eggs were picked-up twice a week, hatched and sent to another farm where they were raised as broilers. There were few variables left in the system. Weather and feed prices didn’t bother the chicken farmer.

Mrs. Johnson felt she had come home to a place she had almost forgotten. “The first time I walked in when we put the shavings on the floor of the houses I remembered walking through the sawdust as a child—the smell and the feel was the same.”

Johnson was wearing a dust mask while gathering eggs. “I missed the cows, but it was a good choice for the farm,” he said as his large fingers felt under the warm hens for the fragile egg. In the winter when the window curtains were shut to trap the body heat rising from the sea of white chickens, the dust and the shock of ammonia hit like smelling salts.

“Watch out for the roosters” Johnson warned. “They’ll jump you once in awhile.” They were hard to pick out because they were the only birds with feathers on their backs. Unlike cows, chickens will peck at anything.

“They’ll even pick th sunlight,” he said with amused disdain.

Johnson’s first flock was nine months old now. Holly Farms would pick-up the exhausted hens in May, coming in at night to catch them off guard and ship them to the soup factory Johnson thought. A flock just wasn’t as smart or lived as long as a cow.

“You can’t have the same relationship with a chicken you have with a cow. The sound of an egg dropped and the chickens closed in on it blindly. “You know the cows by name; chickens you know by the flock.” Johnson’s voice was almost lost as the 8,000 throats of his flock suddenly surged and crested a cacophony of clicking and crowing as if it were a single animal.

Yet something was missing. But when asked what, Johnson could only say “I don’t know…I just like cows.”

It wasn’t the money because Johnson had more spendable income now with the chickens than he had with the cows. It wasn’t the hours because he could gather the eggs at 6:00 a.ml instead of rising at two in the morning. And he didn’t have to spend his days growing feed for the chickens because Holly Farms supplied that. Nor were those freezing winters to be stoically endured because no matter how cold it was outside, he could work in his shirt sleeves in the enclosed chicken house. And when a chicken got sick, he didn’t have to stay up worrying all night with her like he did with his cows.

“But I just like the cows,” Johnsons said again looking down and toeing the ground with his foot.

He liked them so much that every other morning he was up at 2:00 a.m. to milk for a neighboring dairy.

“Johnny said th first time he milked down there he would have milked for free,” his wife said, trying to capture his private relationship wit the cows in words her husband didn’t have.

Johnson’s earliest memories were of work on the farm. His father had to work away from the farm during hard times. Before he was big enough to move the milking pot, Johnson was working weekends full time to help his mother run the dairy.

The land, the farm, the flow of continuity, the rhythms of nature, these were the bonds which could not be broken without severe consequences. It was not hard to imagine the anxiety Johnson experienced when he contemplated cutting away from the motherly source which had fed him and his family all his life.

The transition from cows to chickens had been smooth, Johnson said, like moving from spring to summer. But the chicken houses only took up a small piece of the farm and Johnson’s mind. He was planning to raise some beef cattle in the coming summer and he talked about automatic nests which would give him ore time for the farm.

And as for the future. “Well, some day I’ll build the herd up again,” he said, thinking of his son who wants to “fool with the cows.”

In May, the Johnsons will have a month without gathering eggs. Holly Farms will wash and sterilize the houses before new flocks are literally poured into the houses. It will take three weeks before the chickens start laying.

“Next time we’ll keep the dogs tied up,” Mrs. Johnson laughed, recalling the pandemonium when a few chickens leaked out into the yard and excited the dogs.

Johnson was sanding clean a dirty egg after the morning’s gathering. He looked up and laughed when it was pointed out that he was spending five minutes cleaning a two cent egg. He smiled and picked up another egg.

Chickens or cows, nothing had really seemed to change when it was the love and care of the farm that mattered.

“Of course, we do eat a few more eggs now, he said with a laugh.

Order vs. Chaos by Ed Conley

As a lifetime house cleaner and the enemy of clutter, I have some experience in this war. My wife is my partner and as she is on the side of Clutter as my “enemy” of order, she has taught me so much wisdom. This is a timeless war, Order vs Chaos, Good vs Evil or however you want to call it. But whichever side you fall on—and most fall heavily on one side or the other—recognize and love your opponent. As Jesus said, love your enemy. So……if your enemy is clutter but you can’t seem to win in this war against this insidious terror, it’s because the enemy is YOU. In all wars of order vs. chaos, the tide goes back and forth, and just when you think you have imposed order at last, and the fighting breaks out just where you’ve cleaned. It’s a civil war that can’t be won! Would that our President would read this!

So what’s the answer? Well, I advise that you recognize that you are both order and chaos. And that because you identify with one side, the other side (also being you) matches your efforts. It’s like both your hands wrestling each other.

If you take your stand in the middle between the warring armies of Order and Chaos, and there take the neutral position of a witness, you can then accept both sides as being a matched pair, twins fighting it out. So by accepting Order and accepting Chaos as being who you are, you can relax and enjoy each side. It becomes okay if there is a mess; it becomes okay if you can’t sweep back the tide of chaos; it becomes okay if someone messes up you just cleaned space. You see, when you take position in the Middle Way, no matter what you do, clean up or if others mess up, you are okay.

The point is that you can still clean up, and you can still mess up, and it’s okay which ever side you are playing with. This take the SCREAM out of housework. it becomes more like playing with sand castles at the beach. It’s okay if the wave comes in and washes away your work. Fighting the ocean never works.