Imagine All The People: The Authority of Charity
The following is one report of today’s activities on Planet Earth. We have a general idea of the location as Florida. This is a Fig Newton of the Imagination and does not purport to be an official 23:59 report from the United States of America.
It is impossible to fail when we imagine the possibilities to solve every problem. Our results may fail every so often, but when we collaborate to improve our methods then we will eliminate failure and deliver best results.
Here is what was downloaded from the Collective Consciousness. We hope you enjoy this story. Here it goes.
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Before Mother ate the body and blood of Christ once and for all, she took a deep breath. It was the most relaxed she had ever been, and the most excited. One thing you must understand about Mother and all people who suffer profoundly is that their travails are but wedding preparations.
Not the wedding preparations where people fight over who can be married or not, who is legally bound to bake a cake or not, how many bride’s maids there will be, and what color their gowns will be. Mother, like many orphaned and feral, regarded every trial as a wedding preparation. She, like every believer, knew herself to be the Bride of Christ.
Although she broke Dad’s heart by always placing herself at risk, he knew full well when he married her that she was a woman to administrate charity with authority, and authority with charity. He knew full well that Christ was her Master, her first love, the one more tangible to her than her own Father who perished in battle before she was even born.
It wasn’t always that way. Dead to this mortal coil in November 2016, she welcomed a terrorist and his incendiary device with open arms and open legs, as told here:
Alegría: The Health of Nations: The Story of Dixie Pride (lulu.com)
Long before there was material psychology or mega-donor schismatic religions, there was the man from Galilee who insisted that women read Scriptures, be treated with dignity, and not be made equal to a toilet by man’s ignorant fear of woman’s unique ability to turn his seed into a living child.
Long before Father earned Mother’s trust and married her in the Cathedral, he had won her heart at that dance in Jacksonville. He adored her upon first sight. From the back she was Black, but from the front she was the very apparition of Freya. As his own Mother with her kinky, blonde curls and her fair, alabaster skin was a trick of light and a treat of womanly shape, so was Mother. Father was the only one who healed her from her nightmares associated with her name. Dixie. Was she a conquered nation to be shoplifted and soiled by cowards called klansmen? Was she a traumatized orphan to be beaten, tortured, and mocked? How had she gymnastically unloaded every coward’s gun by welcoming them with open arms and open legs? Mother knew that cowards delight in the pain and screams of women and children. In never fighting the KKK terrorists who advanced upon her with their cowardice, she caused a droop in their cocks that would last for days. Mother knew that cowards want a fight. That is how they assume power and control. When she welcomed them with open arms and open legs, it unloaded their weapon, so to speak. They hated her even more, yet she loved them still, from a safe social distance.
Father gave Mother a new context for the name Dixie, outside of history, present, or future. “Dix” is the word for “Ten” en français. Father taught Mother by his actions, not his words that Mother was a perfect ten. Dix. Dixie. His little Angel, Miss Dixie Joy Pride, made perfect in love as Mrs. Sven Olsen, was Un Dix Parfait, a Perfect Ten.
She remembered this when it was time to make it right with the man who nearly killed her, but also helped to raise her. Mother could have left Mr. Stout behind, but she did not. Widowed, unable to walk, and without health insurance, the lame man had laid in his own sick for days before anyone discovered him. He was unable to care for the dilapidated old farmhouse that was falling in on him, much less the acreage, the livestock, and himself. Mother remembered she was a Perfect Ten when she first drove up to her childhood home, which had at once been a hellscape of hyper-nationalism and a treasure of tropical Florida horse country.
Avocado, lime, lemon, orange, tangerine, and pecan trees cascaded their fruits voluptuously in concert with the Spanish moss draped Oak trees that were older than the concept of time itself. Florida with its promise of eternal youth also held the promise of sudden death to all who dared awaken in its sultry bosom. Alas, Mr. Stout had seen almost 90 years, and was too weak to walk when Dixie entered through the front door without a knock. He could not believe his eyes. What was she doing here after all this time? Her flaming red hair cascaded down her back and bosom like the pomegranates and persimmons curling around one another on the South side of the land. Had she come to kill him? She had left so many years ago without a sound, and never returned.
She should kill him, he thought. He cried out her name in pitiful sorrow, with a tone she had never heard. The name that seemed to have been a curse now seemed a new song to this broken man, bent and gnarled in pain. “Oh, Dixie. You’re home.” Perhaps he finally understood. Wherever Dixie was made a house a home. Men define territories and countries by wars and legalism. Women make wherever they roam a home. Dixie was not a conquered nation. Dixie was a Perfect Ten.
With all ten of her fingers laced behind his sweaty neck and knees, she hoisted his frail body up in her arms and carried him to her Ford F—150. She sang sweetly to him, as he cried. He would not blame her if she would kill him. “Way down upon the Suwannee River…” she sang sweetly as he wondered if she was going to shoot him. Flashes of every cruel thing he had done to her pained him. He remembered how hard she fought back, but how loyal and obedient she was in all the house chores. He especially remembered how she expertly organized his workshop with his Snap On tools.
While he had resigned himself to die by her hands, he cried when she laid him gently onto a clean air mattress set up in the camper cab. She washed his forehead gingerly with a cool cloth as she cooed, “Stay still, Sir. We’re going to get you home.”
Home. Where was home? It was no longer the old farmhouse bequeathed to him by his great-grandfather, who built it after the American Civil War. It was no longer the empty bed, devoid of all comfort now that Mrs. Stout was gone. It was no longer the empty table where he sat alone, struggling to eat the Swanson’s TV Dinners that were freezer burned after years of storage.
He never thought he would truly feel in his heart that home was within her own heart. As many times as he had chanted the song “Dixie”, written by an Ohio native to fabricate fiction of a land that really didn’t exist, he had never thought of his own foster daughter, Dixie, as his home. Now she was truly his only home.
As her truck glided smoothly down the highway toward an unknown destination, he cried as he remembered their four years together. Mr. and Mrs. Stout fostered her as parents from the time Dixie was completely orphaned after her Mother shot herself in the salty seas near the Saint Simon Island, Georgia Lighthouse. Dixie, who preferred to be called by her middle name Joy, had already suffered the loss of her Father before she was even born, whose only memories were imprinted in her ability to read shapes and colors. That’s how he spoke to her. That’s the story of most Military children. That’s why numbers and letters confounded her, while shapes and colors lead her right to the exact truth of every situation.
Mr. Stout wondered if Dixie would take him out to the Ocala National Forest to kill him. He prayed she would. He felt something he had never felt before, which was a profound sense of repentance for the constant war he had raged on this insolent child, now a woman, always a warrior.
As she glided through the Ocala National Forest and brought the truck to a smooth halt, he breathed in the perfume of Pine Trees and lush backwoods. At this point, he didn’t know what Dixie was about to do with his dying body, nor did he care. He closed his eyes, and drew in a deep breath, remembering all their battles.
He remembered beating her with a wooden dowel he fashioned in his shop from the thicket of Hickory Trees on the vast land. He remembered shouting for joy when it broke the skin on her legs and backside, then once again when the dowel itself broke half in two after more thrashes.
What a small man he was. Mr. Stout had never grown above four feet 7 inches tall, but he had been almost as wide most of his adult life. No one could make him feel shorter and taller than Dixie. He felt shorter when she would not obey his command to beg for her life. Instead of begging him to stop as he screamed at her to do, she shouted, “Thank you, Sir! May I please have another?” Instead of renouncing her vision of God and adopting his, she counted it all joy when he beat her like this daily. When he advanced on her, hoping to impregnate her and subdue her fiery will, she shocked him and unloaded his weapon.
That’s what a woman does when she welcomes a would-be rapist with open arms and open legs. She unloads his weapon, which he forgot to be a wand of light, a sacred tool of communion with which to create life, love, and joy. After the first time Dixie welcomed his evil advances in this way, he sustained a permanent inability to get to full staff. He beat her harder and felt shorter every day. He beat her every day on general principle. Even when she had obeyed him perfectly within the letter and the spirit of the law, he would beat her for committing the sin of picking everything up with her left hand. Sinister. This word was Latin for “left-handed”, and Mr. Stout nearly crushed her entire nervous system trying to beat her natural proclivity out of her.
Bringing herself to present time, the Caregiver remembered her promise to the National Park Ranger and set about her duties swiftly. After preparing a hammock betwixt the tall Pine Trees, she set Mr. Stout in there gingerly. She nursed him with cold water from her Igloo Thermos, then set out to clean the entire Women’s Bathroom. She removed everything from all four shower stalls, toilet stalls, windowsills, and sinks. Then she scrubbed every surface, tile, and toilet with her own supplies. This is what she called Field Stripping a home. With her simple act of service, she had established ownership of a once drab restroom littered with trash and cobwebs. Now she was ready to get to work.
Mr. Stout could hardly believe his eyes. Here was the girl he had nearly killed, naked before him leading him into a warm shower. She held his forearms, walking backwards carefully in flip flops. “If you feel like you’re about to fall, just grab my hips. Don’t grab my boobs or we’ll both fall.” He could hardly believe his eyes. She was absolutely beautiful. It was not as though she was giving herself to be viewed as something sexual.
It was that she was giving herself to be as vulnerable as he was in his time of dying. Naked as Babies born into life, they both stepped under the warm water, which soothed him as she scrubbed his scalp and skin. She handled him gingerly and caressed his quaking brain when he cried out. “Oh Dixie!” He screamed as he remembered the scar underneath her right rib cage. He remembered how it got there, after throwing her across the room many times when she was a vulnerable child. She kissed his forehead and worked the dandruff out of his hair as he continued to cry, remembering every time he called for Mrs. Stout to hold her legs down while he beat her into an unconscious state. He punished her for having a high IQ test, which is one reason she hated school. To Dixie’s simple country mind, IQ tests were like prison. They were a way to separate people from the general population. Like guns, they were a wonderful way to sterilize women considered too intelligent to do a lowly thing such as birthing a child. The only IQ test that mattered is could a person distinguish between good and evil.
Until this point, Dixie had been unable to conceive. She had never contracepted and had lived a long-time past walking through the broad gates of Atlanta. Where most women happily took pills to prevent that most precious gift of life, Dixie saw from her days on the farm that there could be no other reason to lay with a man except for life. It seemed men now a days with the modern conveniences of pills, sponges, and death on demand had forgotten what their Fathers knew. Low is the man who cannot lengthen his gestation period. A man’s gestation period could never equal a woman’s at 9 months, but it could certainly be longer than 90 seconds.
Low is the man who is angry at a woman for conceiving life. Low is the man who mistakes a woman for a glory hole. Womankind only lowers herself in her desire to equal him. Sick is the nation whose children handle lead without realizing its poisonous effects. Dixie had learned guns well, if not for the therapeutic value of shooting them at safe targets, then for the terror of keeping them away from her own head.
It seemed the Second Amendment had become the walking middle finger of the Bill of Rights. Was America the envy of the world because of its rule of law? Or was it the envy of the world because of its material excess? America was not a loud thing to Dixie, because its constant wars for constant peace rendered her an orphan. Just as Dixie was an imaginary nation within a nation, so was America an imaginary land within the Americas. Men draw national borders by wars, treaties, and laws. Women create nations from their wombs and hearts. Just as no building can legally stand higher than the Capitol Dome, so can no nation stand higher than its own Mothers.
So it was that Dixie had come a long way since beating the living daylights out of any man who had been in her bed when her menses arrived. His only purpose in life was to impregnate her. This had been her evil thought in days of yore. She married my Father, speaking to him openly about this trouble in her mind. He knew she may never be able to conceive given her travails, but Sven married her happily.
Mr. Stout breathed deeply after letting his tears flow underneath the warm shower head. Dixie rubbed Johnson’s Baby Oil into his skin, patting his skin dry with the soft, fluffy towel. It was the best shower he had ever had. She spritzed some Old Spice on him, wrapped him in a terry cloth robe exactly like hers, and scooped him up in her arms.
She dried his hair and dressed him in an orange, white, and green sweat suit. He had never seen the colors together. He had never considered the words. Where was this place? Who was this Team? Florida A&M Rattlers, his shirt and pants read.
He collapsed in fatigue as Dixie prepared the fire. She sang James Taylor songs. She told him the story of when she ran away to Georgia from Florabelle many moons ago and worked in a nursing home in Dahlonega. She fed him some pinto beans and corn bread heated on the Coleman stove. He relaxed and let his mind wander into her fecund imagination. The story went just as he had imagined her going so many moons ago.
She had gained access to the nursing home, as only she could do, with her excellent manners and distinctive style. She wasn’t old enough to be a Nurse, nor educated enough to be a Nurse Assistant, but she was young and energetic enough to be an awesome Caregiver.
People in nursing homes don’t care where a person comes from; they are just happy someone is there. Dahlonega Gardens is where she earned her sobriquet, the Caregiver. She never said no to extra shifts. She worked for days on end. She slept in the broom closet, embarrassed for anyone to discover that she was a homeless run-away foster child. She was always cheerful. Yet she usually had her head in the clouds, thanks to lack of sleep and the inevitable impact of so many brain injuries.
One day, she was deep in thought as she gazed at the World Map at the opposite end of the long corridor. She stared at an archipelago way down yonder from her point of native reference, Florida. What was it called, she wondered as she walked closer to the map. South Sandwich Island. Now she did something only she would do, which is to walk even faster and with more purpose, staring straight up at the skies visible through the skylights in the ceiling. It was a beautifully cloudy day, and she wondered what people argued about in South Sandwich Island. Were they angry that they were stereotyped on the world stage as only eating sandwiches? Who got the best sandwiches? Did they also eat burritos and waffles? Who preferred peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches to tuna salad sandwiches? What was the ethnic breakdown of sandwich control? Were people imprisoned for preferring peanut butter and banana sandwiches over roast beef sandwiches? Where did a Philly Cheese Steak fit into South Sandwich Island’s economy?
As her brain permuted the plethora of possibilities in South Sandwich Island, her body crashed into a metal sandwich cart, sending what seemed like a trillion plastic plates all over the once immaculate hallway. People screamed in horror. She could hardly believe her foolishness. She expected to be beaten, just as Mr. Stout expected to be beaten as a child. Just as he taught her to expect to be beaten. Yet God has another plan every day. Amazing grace. Amazing grace rang out from Miss Oletha, the Dietary Manager, who thundered, “Praise God! You found my watch!”
Watch? How had she found her Boss’s watch? Such a device was arcane to the Caregiver. She had never owned a watch, let alone cared to look at one. Time eluded her long ago, and she only knew that whatever time it was, God was always on time. She escaped the cruel stereotype that Germans were always punctual, since she herself rarely was on man’s time. Not only was she terrified to leave the house, but she was also always happy to be interrupted by the natural rhythms of life, which meant that she would always stop and talk to Samuel the Street Preacher on the way to work. He always had Boiled Peanuts for sale, which she bought to help his ministry. She would always stop and pick up someone’s groceries when she saw them fall down on the sidewalk. She knew that no one was born on time, nor broke a hip on time, nor died on time. These things all happened in God’s time.
Miss Oletha was quite punctual, as she had been for ten years at Dahlonega Gardens. Today was her last day, since she had her husband just purchased a landscape business and won a contract at University of North Georgia, which was the Military College of Georgia. Miss Oletha intended to landscape it towards the future, whilst pruning its past.
Miss Oletha was in a quandary since she misplaced her watch earlier that morning. It was a simple Timex watch, but it was bequeathed to her by Grand Selathea. Grand Selathea was her maternal great Grandmother, who prized that Timex watch she purchased at Montgomery Ward. Miss Oletha remembered her words exactly, “She who is on top of time is on top of everything.” Dixie cleaned up the plates and the mess from her collision, while Miss Oletha soothed the child’s humiliation over such a mishap. Miss Oletha felt compassion for the child, who had rarely been on top of anything except a list of at-risk children.
Apparently, the prized Timex watch had been placed on one of the lunch trays when she removed it to wash her hands. It might have been scraped into the trash unless the Caregiver crashed into the dirty dishes cart. She sent its contents into orbit. Scores of partially eaten tuna salad, egg salad, and peanut butter with honey sandwiches flew everywhere. With bread and its contents akimbo, the Caregiver hurried to pick up the cart and clean up her mess. The Caregiver used this opportunity to serve Miss Oletha and the entire Dietary Department by deep cleaning the cart.
Mr. Stout laughed, and relieved himself from a lifetime of hatred, shame, and pain. How could this child come back to him? How could she love him so? He had been so cruel to her, at least that’s what he remembered. Yet she remembered something so much more important. Dixie remembered that he had clothed her and housed her. She remembered that his cruelty was only his expression of weakness. She remembered that like her and all people, he didn’t even know what he was doing was wrong when he was doing something so wrong.
Here is a deeper meaning of forgiveness. As Christ on the cross begged God for mercy on people who persecuted him because they knew not what they did, so did the Caregiver know that Mr. Stout knew not what he did. At the time a person is committing evil, they don’t even know the difference between good and evil.
Ten hours passed from night into day, with Mr. Stout sleeping deeply within the hammock. He felt super cozy within the FAMU Rattlers sweatsuit Dixie brought him from the Tampa Classic. He released himself from the worry of letting the land go for back taxes. He released himself from being a third generation Grand Dragon of the KKK. He released himself from the hatred of how Dixie welcomed him with open arms and open legs years ago every time he tried to rape her. Her courage caused permanent erectile dysfunction in him. He hated her for that, which is the only way she knew to love a man. If she wanted a man, she fought him. This was hard for Dad to get used to, since he was a true Knight in Shining Armour. If she didn’t want a man, she would welcome him with open arms and open legs.
Every rapist is a coward who delights in the screams of his victim and wants a fight. Mr. Stout screamed in agony when he realized how many foster children whose innocence he had stolen, as his was stolen. He didn’t need to say a word. Dixie held his hand and washed his forehead with a clean, cool cloth. She sang Old Man River as she rocked him in the hammock gingerly.
Her authority was her charity, just as her charity was her authority. Right then and there a powerful alchemy occurred that bonded them deeper than if she was begat of his own loins. Right then and there in the Ocala National Forest Mr. Stout and the Caregiver became Old War Buddies.
When he died three days later, and I was born ten months later, there was no question about why she named me Charity. Everything that had blocked her blessings had been released by the “Open Sesame” of forgiveness. Forgiveness is not some high and mighty thing, but a humble, objective realization that some people don’t know the difference between good and evil. God can have anyone at His table except the one who has not forgiven. People may still have to pay for their crime with their flesh, but their spirits could be freed.
Mr. Stout had called her a race mixing whore, amongst other things. She had believed that for a long time. Yet safe within the marriage bed after he died, a beautiful thing happened. Me. Life. Charity. I am the product of over 9 nations, from Ghana, Sweden, Germany, Gambia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Scotland, Ireland, and Italy. Dixie, the Caregiver, Dixie Joy Pride, Alegría, Leggy, Mrs. Sven Olsen, earned the most sacred name in any language. Mother. She earned it not just in birthing me, but in mothering herself and those around her.
She gave her life just before Hillary was elected as the story was told here:
Alegría: The Health of Nations: The Story of Dixie Pride (lulu.com)
Hillary might not have been elected to the White House when Mother died, but just as God’s elect were chosen before the foundations of the Earth were set, so were women all elected to inspire man from his bloody battles towards a culture of life.
Mother paid the back taxes on that farmland in Florabelle, Florida when Mr. Stout died. It is now part of Florida A&M’s Agricultural Sciences program. She knew it was not enough to repent of sin and regret the wrongdoing associated with terrorism. She had to make it right.
That’s why I am here today to tell this story. That’s the authority of charity. I am Charity, thanks to my fiery Mother and Father who loved her.
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This has been an unofficial 23:59 report from the Universe. Imagine the possibilities when we connect through compassion and mutual guarantee.
#planetearth #ourhome #unity #generosity #empathy
