Thoughts From The Heart
2013 February 07
By: Joseph Smith
0300HRS:

Broken Spirits, Souls and Lives Are Repairable
Part 1

Here the writer sit, not being able to sleep, due to the events that unfolded in the prison visiting room while visiting my beautiful twenty year old daughter - who is in her second year of a nursing BNS program at Case Western Reserve College. The writer is very "preoccupied" - about writing about events that take place in his childhood and teen years. But the writer now knows and understands, through the love of a child; silence is not golden any longer - for if true healing is to come - the writer must stop feeling like a "victim"!!! But as a "survivor". A few hours ago - the writer entered the prison visiting room to visit with my child and to meet someone special who has come into her life.

But yet I only see her; her eyes are red & swollen, with tears running down her face. The guard who I know, says - "Smith, we don't know what's wrong - she just started crying - I'll tell you what, I'll put you guys in the attorney interviewing room - so you two can have some privacy." I go to her, we embrace each other - I lead her to the room - just as I'm about to ask, what's going on?? We sit, she takes my hands into hers and says "Dad, I was over Grandmother's house - helping with the clean-up, when I came across some of your army things and footlocker - I took them home - and found your journals, I'm so sorry about what those nuns did to you at that school. I was not prying!!! Please forgive me!! I love you so much Dad, you are still my hero." Ever since I was a young boy, I have kept journals of my dreams, things and events that had taken place in my childhood up to my teen years. I had thought over the years these journals had gotten lost, or destroyed over the years with all the moving around. The last place I thought they would be in my mother's attic. I never expected that these journals and the contents which written within them, one day would come back to haunt me!!!!!!!

Things that had broken me physically, mentally, and shattered me spiritually to the point that both my physical life and soul's very balance were severely threatened. My journey like all journeys have a secret destination, and that destination that awaited me required every step I took along the way, however mad or dangerous. Fortunately, I acquired "some" tools on my journey, tools I would need at this very moment, as I sat across from my child some forty years later. Reaching across to dry her tears, not able to look my loving child directly in her eyes. I let her know, that I'm not upset with her about reading the journals, and that I love her - but I'm in two places mentality, here with my child, who is no longer a child, but a young beautiful woman, and back at that school. I remember to the day, when my mother informed my twin sister and I, we would be attending Catholic school - not public school. Years later I found out - no Hebrew school would allow us to attend - due to my mother's intermarriage to a "Goy" [non-Jew], most of all to a "Schvartze" [black person - often used derogatorily]. In the Jewish world - intermarriages, is one boundary which when crossed, cuts a Jew off from her family immediately. My father's family can be traced back to Ethiopia and Nigeria and other African countries before making their way to America. But under Jewish law, "Halacha", the child draws from the mother's lineage, it's called matrilineal descent. I don't know why I'm telling her all of this, but at the moment it seems the path I wanted to take is unclear. This is not the path I wanted to take with her, but when our paths are blocked by the shadowy figure of our inner doubt and shame, it is easy to get detoured off one's path. Some people fall into paralysis at this point. Others get hoodwinked into taking on more and more tasks, each promising to yield the requisite proof of our worthiness to move ahead. "Let sleeping dogs lie", the "past is the past", "time to move forward". Sometimes it's hard to live by these expressions. For too many, unresolved injuries or injustices from our past are like wounds that have not fully healed, and when someone gets too close to them, as in my case, the pain breaks through the layers of time and demands one's attention to address the past. One's past can be like a millstone, a weight around one's neck. Now at this very moment in time my dark shadowy figure from the past has come to impose its dark force upon me and has clocked my path. And at this very moment has blocked my thoughts, thus causing the writer - writer's block!!! So until next time I leave you with this: "Life is not always a straight path, there will be detours - so enjoy the view."