You can’t truly understand. But I feel so empty today. A mild sadness. I don’t know where the emptiness or mild sadness comes from. Is it age? Is it old trauma? Is it purely physiological? Is it this May Gray and June Gloom digging in late July? Or, dysthymia?
Or is it just life — or my particular state of life?
I really have nothing to complain about. Life’s never perfect, but it’s good right now. It really is.
You can’t actually understand because all feelings, thoughts, and sensations are subjective — that is Wittgenstein’s Beetle in a Box thought experiment. If I tell you I have a headache and you say, “So do I,” there is no possible way to know we feel the same feeling in our respective skulls. I can only assume how your head feels. And the same applies to feeling tired, anxious, hopeful, or sweetness.
With her head in her hands at the end of a makeshift conference table, a veteran social worker named Michelle looks up and sighs, “We long for the days of heroin.”
Two hours later, a lighter flickers with metronome cadence from beneath a ragged blanket a few feet from the entrance of the homeless shelter. The Director pulls back his covering without a flinch.
I wonder about my safety.
It’s fentanyl.
It’s everywhere.
A man smokes fentanyl in Española, N.M., on March 8. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
As head of Telos Consulting, I’m honored to serve this client, the city’s only homeless shelter and drug rehabilitation facility in a town infamous for poverty and generational drug addiction stemming from the days of the Chinese railroad, Española, New Mexico.
Stories of overdoses. Stories of death. Looks of despair. And no big city nearby to provide funding, volunteers, or basic awareness.
I’ve worked in all the major cities: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago. None can compare to this.
How to describe the insidiousness of fentanyl? Fifty times — fifty times more powerful than heroin. Forty years ago, a gram of pure heroin cost around $2,000. Today, about $500. Fentanyl, a small fraction of that.
You never give up hope. And you always utilize proven best practices in both services and development.
Can this town save itself from fentanyl addiction?
Ideally, a holiday is a day to remember. To observe, reflect, celebrate — to muster a mindful posture.
Most of all, a holiday is about being aware. We are to take a step back, turn off the noise of the day, and attend to that for which the day was created.
In the case of birthdays, of a life. Religious holidays, a historical event, the transcendent power of spiritual reality, and values around human behavior. And holidays such as Independence Day and Memorial Day to reinforce the unique elements of our great nation.
In 2021, President Biden led an effort for the creation new federal holiday: Junteenth. The history behind Juneteenth is foggy to many. In short, though the Emancipation Proclamation was effective in 1863, slavery remained because Confederate states remained. But on June 19th, 1865, about 2,000 Union soldiers rolled into Galveston Bay, Texas. And they announced the new federal law: slavery was illegal.
A quarter of a million African Americans suddenly were free.
Juneteenth celebrates our country’s “second independence day.” Although long recognized in the African American community, this tremendous event remains unknown to most Americans.
As leaders, none of us today deal with the insidiousness of anything close to slavery in our workplaces. And yet each of us must, as leaders, bring awareness to other forms of injustice — forces that, while not illegal, often deprive organizations of attainment of success.
These include the existence within the staff of mental illness, sexual misconduct, toxic factions, and personal setbacks at home, such as the illness of a child or spouse. The forces can include subtitles that leaders, too often burdened with the pressures of measurable metrics such as KPIs, overlook.
Invisible powers, such as toxic emotional processes, can slowly damage a positive corporate culture.
A holiday is a time to orient our minds — to foster awareness on or around a particular day. Good leaders work to amalgamate the same awareness into the very fabric of each day.
Mom passed away almost two years ago. And I’m unsure how I feel without her on my second Mother’s Day. I tetter between grief and gratefulness. Grief because I still think I can’t believe she’s gone.
From time to time, I feel alone on this earth without her.
Of course, I’m also grateful. She did love me deeply. She encouraged me. She adored my children. She saw goodness in me that I sure didn’t see.
I do think of those not as blessed as me — those who never knew their mother or those whose mothers didn’t have the tools to love them properly. I also think of women who wanted to be mothers but could not.
It’s weird how days that are supposed to bring happiness to everyone can also be painful to many. I wrote about my hell after my stroke HERE.
If there were a way, Mom would not tell me not to be sad today. Take Luna for a walk. Enjoy this beautiful day. And, of course, smell the roses in the backyard.
Home is a small place, a dot on the globe, especially the more you travel. Let me explain.
I’m in Northern New Mexico for a while. In a remote oasis, 50 acres with streams and ponds and trees, tucked between a number of snowcapped mountains, one being the renowned Cerro Pedernal. It’s rural out here. But there are some gems given the beauty of this kind of rural topography. The great late artist Georgia O’Keeffe, perhaps the most influential female artist of the past century, left her home in New York to retire here. Retire in the sense of allowing the raw and rugged landscape to shape her art, shape her mind, shape her soul. New York City is big, the biggest city in the world some say. Northern New Mexico? A different kind of expanse, and appeal. Arthur Newton Pack — a wealthy American naturalist and writer living during the early 20th century founded the American Nature Association and the periodical Nature Magazine. He understood, and called this area “the best place in the world.”
I’m from Southern California, just south of Los Angeles. Orange County. Born and raised. “Home” has so much to offer, the least not being its beautiful beaches, Los Angeles up the freeway, and Holywood. Until I moved to London, where I lived for a few years. That new home in England was large also, in a different kind of way. Cape Town South Africa has a largeness about it, Tokyo in many ways, too.
I had previously thought there was nothing like Orange County — actually, that it was the best place in the country to live. But the more we travel the more we come to realize that home can be nice and all, but the world is a very big place, and home, wherever it is, is always a dot on a map. And we always tend to think our thing is the best thing.
I took this shot during yesterday’s drive with my Leica q2. No filters or anything here. I pulled my old Land Rover Discovery II to the side of a very long and very remote two-lane highway. I actually left the car running for some reason. Climbed through a barbed wire fence. And took a dozen or so shots in that kind of silence — the kind where only the wind is heard and you feel really alone and small.
New Mexico in my mind is one of the most underrated states in the country.
Home is a small place, a dot on the globe, especially the more you travel.
A man smokes fentanyl in Española, N.M., on March 8. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
