My Soul in a Cage

I have contemplated blogs for several years. I tend to go with Thoreau on this one. His view is, "How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live." - Henry David Thoreau Personally I don't enjoy blogs very much. They seem to become the verbal vomit of some unhappy soul. What makes me think I, or mine will be much different...I don't know...does it matter...I suppose not.

What is written here is often written in my journal and I write it because writing has been a friend of my heart and the release of my soul. I write it in hopes that some day someone will meander through my steps and emerge more of a person in the early days of their life than I will ever be at the end of mine. Most often I write to God, He the creator and healer of my soul knows and understands me best.

Today, it is Sabbath, I will refer to Saturday as Sabbath because that is what it is to me. Not to offend any. I have finished writing yet another journal full and in the move placed my blank ones in a special place so that when I finished this one I could use my blank ones without having to buy more. Makes sense, except now I am clueless as to what safe box I put them in and have not located my blank ones. Amusing.

I am on the path to medical school. I have not committed in such a sense as to actually start school as of yet. That is planned to happen in August. We have moved. I "quit" my job in Pagosa and we struck out for North Carolina. It is pretty here...and getting hot. :) Having not really quit my job I am working from home. So my foot is on the path to medical school.

Yet I have not taken the step that I fear most...the loans. Why? It is done every day. People live off loans to go back to school year in and out, who cares? This is where my soul begins to feel trapped in a cage. I have felt the strangle of debt and it repels me. The thought of once more plunging in, eyes open is frightening.

Here is where the complications rise. Today I looked beyond the news to the real world. The world inside and outside of the USA where humanity suffers and it crushed my heart. I read about the people of the Darfur region of the Sudan, pressed out of their homeland by rape, torture and death into Chad where they live in camps. But the Janjawid have come there as well destroying them. The SHAC 7 sitting in Federal Penitentiaries for allegedly peacefully protesting the ill treatment of animals at a testing lab, yes that is in my great country. Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest and others in Myanmar for wanting a Democratic government. And then the things I experienced in my travels to Cambodia.

Some may say, but it is complicated and what can we do, what can you do. Oh God, I wish I knew there is little we can "do" to put an end to it all. But to stop the pain and be of greater influence in someone's life who is suffering is what I wish. To actually have the balls to walk out and without regard to myself do what was right. That is all I want to do.

Now how does that play into medical school. Well, I will tell you...bet you thought I would leave you hanging. ;-) Medical school will leave me with debt. Albeit less debt in these schools than in some but debt nonetheless. With debt I am a slave to a system that would drive me to see more patients than almost physically possible, to feed the greedy corporate system, and to let me get the kind of money I need to pay that debt off at a fast rate.

Well, why not just go work in some little town that pays not so much and pay it off slower. Because these countries need volunteers and I WANT TO BE ONE OF THEM in the worst of ways. My soul desires this more than anything. But a person cannot spend their life volunteering when they are strapped to a debt they must repay.

So I wonder, is my EMT training enough? Can I get that corporate greed job and tough it out to pay the debt I have now and go like I am? I won't be as useful but I will be useful sooner. In countries where they die of a lack of a vitamin pill, because of defecating to near there house, do they need Drs or do they need simple knowledge that I already have?

Secondly, and quite honestly I have the same conflict of interest that everyone has. I like stuff just as much as the next girl. It is too easy to feel I need this or that when I don't, or do I? Where does one draw the line? A person needs things to "fit in" and be "respectable" but in the end, what does it matter when people die daily for want of simple things? "...as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched." Henry David Thoreau in Walden.

So that is why my soul is in a cage. Some of you may know this feeling, this feeling of helplessness and being trapped not sure which direction to go. I guess we'll see how it goes. These desires to help others, are labeled by some as naive and rose colored. Oh God I have been there and tried to help the child prostitute only to have them turn from me, my heart breaking as they turned to tell their 40 year old buyer about our efforts to help them. No, I know reality. But no one changes the world by focusing solely on reality but on a dream. It is something I have been cursed with, this dream. I wonder where it goes...

If someone from Pagosa is reading this, yes I would like to help the Pagosa people, but honestly in my soul I know that there will be a hundred people who would do that, because it is a park, a haven, but how many will go to the ugly parts of the earth and help those? Some obviously but not as many.

Keep me in your thoughts and prayers as I struggle with my desires, my fears and my dreams.