Waiting for healing to catch up to my wishes.
Spending long days breathing slow and shallow,
Recalling days before the painful emergency.
Today I want to gain years beyond what some expect.
This life I have been saving, is to share,
With the family we made from love.
Prayers for decades together,
Holding hands each morning with God listening.
Forever has a whole new meaning.
© Rick Wyman 7/19/2021
The tunes we built in our heads
Are those we’ve played over and over.
The creation of the negative images,
Born from words of others we’ve fended off,
Snuck back into our heads,
And hid away,
Camouflaged, in Continue reading
I don’t want to sit around, mixing my emotions.
I need to settle down, with my long days of devotion.
It’s been a life of watching, my ambitions reflecting,
Back into my eyes, too much time rejecting.
Sure to make myself smile, before this time is over.
I’m spending my next quite a while, making tea from clover.
There are people who make my heart’s desire
Satisfied as a cold man beside a roaring fire.
The chills I feel as I Continue reading
I have always had a therapeutic relationship with poetry and song lyrics. Writing free verse poetry helps me work through loneliness, worries, and tell my story creatively. My thoughts were always being written on paper, even as far back as when I just began to write. When I was in High School, writing seemed to help me better relate to the world and people around me. I had a stressful home life, and mostly kept to myself. I felt writing was a way to share a little about me with others. I read poems to friends, sang songs with lyrics I’d written, and was a self-taught guitar player.
My senior year in high school, a special teacher who taught business and typing, recognized that I had a passion for writing poetry. I sat in his class typing my poems while I was supposed to be typing a sentence over and over for a time and accuracy test. It was something like, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”
Noticing that I was not following the assignment, he told me I needed to do the time test to pass the class. I replied, “I took this class to learn how to type and I can type now.” I wasn’t as concerned about the grade. I was typing about 35 words per minute, which I thought was pretty good for a recent beginner. Rather than flunk me, he went to the school board to get permission to pass me if I could type the required words per minute, even though I was not typing the prescribed lessons. They gave him the permission, and he made a template and had the whole class type my poems. I didn’t know it, but he had a plan in mind, and gave me a priceless addition to my education. My classmates typed inside the borders of the template so it would all be in a uniform fashion. I remember feeling as though this teacher was the first person to give me a chance to be creative and pursue my personal interests, and it helped that the class seemed to enjoy reading and retyping my work.
The teacher and I discussed the possibility of having this collection turned into Continue reading
The moments in my life that have altered my direction of pursuit are much more in number than I would have ever guessed. Timing would have to be perfect for me to be where I am now. The cliché, “You play the cards you were dealt”, adds a bigger excuse or perhaps a larger understanding of why life does what it does.
I’ve read many books and articles about manifesting what we want in life. In my own experience, I have manifested many things, and I didn’t realize it until they were in the present moment. Looking back, I can now see how they were the start of a sequence of events that put me where I am now.
When I was a senior in high school I was preparing to be launched into the adult world by both my education, and my parents. My mother’s famous quote was, “I hope the hell you don’t think you’re going to live here the rest of your life, Buster!” My high school reputation was a mixed persona. I frequently got into fights and was a supporter of the underdog. This often put me in the position of body guard for the weaker person being threatened or harassed, and I didn’t take much grief from anyone who challenged me either. I also was a loner most of the time which led people to form opinions about me without really knowing me.
On the other hand, I was hard working and liked to write, especially poetry. Oddly enough, my dislike for the mundane practice lessons in typing class led me to having a book of poetry published. (I’ll tell you that story later!) It seemed very unusual to have so much positive attention, and it inspired in me a want for more education, but at the time I felt college was out of my reach.
Nearing the end of high school, graduation only a couple of weeks away, there was one incident that turned out to be unexpectedly life changing. My class was the first to graduate from a newly built school, and on this particular day, a newspaper reporter was talking to our principal about the new school building we had been attending for the past six months. They were walking around the not yet landscaped grounds and discussing the plans in progress. I was watching, and noticed the principal reprimand a male and female student for holding hands while leaning on each other and talking during lunch break. It appeared harmless to me and everyone around, and his comments in front of the reporter were humiliating to them. For some reason, it really got to me. I thought it was unnecessary and demeaning, and I felt he owed them an apology for choosing to embarrass them in front of the reporter.
I decided to take it upon myself to straighten him out, and waited until lunch break was over and went to the school secretary. I remember being really upset, and felt determined to find the principal and tell him I felt it necessary he apologize to the two students. Noticing my clenched fists and angry look, the secretary Continue reading
It was a beautiful fall day in Vermont, and the bow and arrow season for deer had just started the weekend before. It was a week day and there was no school that day. I hadn’t had my drivers’ license for that long but I had quite a bit of experience driving back roads and standard shift vehicles. A neighbor was anxious to go deer hunting with me and we decided to ride around looking for a good place. Due to the fact there was no school, my little brother was also home. I was 16 and he was 10, and I didn’t particularly want to have him ride along or go hunting with me at the time. I felt that I was older and shouldn’t have to babysit him when I wanted to go out in the woods, but he insisted on coming along.
Somehow I came up with the idea that if I scared him with my driving he’d want to stay home and leave us alone. I told my neighbor friend, David, that I was going to drive in a wild stunt to scare my little brother into wanting to be brought home. He grinned as if he thought it was a fun idea and was ready for it. We were a couple of miles from my house on the dirt road, and headed toward Cavendish and in third gear. The car was a 1964 Chevy station wagon, 3 speed standard on the Continue reading
There are many influences that can make adolescence a complicated time of life. Bullying is one of them, and the defense against it can make or break someone’s self-esteem. When I was a kid, I was proud of my ability to defend myself against the worst kind of bully I ever encountered. He is still in jail for murder, and was an adolescent who should have been stopped then, but somehow manipulated the system and made it through without any deterrent that he respected. Later in his life, he admitted to figuring out how to give the right answers during interviews and to get by the authority that should have kept him off the streets.
I made it through many stressful meetings with him, and to make matters worse he was my neighbor on our country dirt road. Here is one incident to show the devious bully I knew. This one I’d say was the worst, but I lived to tell about it afterwards. This person is an example of how someone devious and without proper direction can manipulate those around him until it’s too late. I have changed his name.
I was about 13 or 14 years of age and lived out in the middle of nowhere in Vermont. One of the life skills my woodsman father and his friends taught me was trapping. During the winter it’s the season for muskrats and mink. I checked the trap-line every day and roughly at the same time because there isn’t a lot of daylight after school. One particular night I recall having yet another violent encounter with the tall and mean neighbor up the road. Johnny lived about a half mile away but it was within view of the path I followed through the snow along the banks of the beaver pond and stream where my trap-line was set.
Johnny evidently was waiting for me to show up that day, and had some sort of plan in his head about what he wanted to do to wreak havoc on Continue reading
Thanks for reading my blog again. I wish to apologize for the past month of being absent. I have been extremely ill. For several weeks I have been unable to eat or drink normally. It all culminated with violent pain in my abdomen due to a catastrophic perforated ulcer. After an ambulance ride and emergency surgery, I awoke with a large scar and much diminished ability to function. I had never had pain like that in all my years, and with all my surgeries and broken bones. Fortunately for me, I have a remarkably supportive wife and some friends and family who have helped to make the road back home easier after a 6 day hospital stay. I’ve been home for about a week, but the trauma of adjusting to a patch in my stomach and trying to ease from clear liquids to full liquids and some soft foods is not as easy as I thought. Things were bleak, but now there is a whole new chance to get back to healing my cancer and enjoying my home and family.
What I didn’t realize is that there is also a psychological beating that goes along with my emergency journey. The worse I felt emotionally, the less appetizing food became, and I began to worry about failure. The thought of failure meant the worry of a shorter future. Having those heavy weights on my mind, stress is a huge part of my daily life, and I struggle to not become too depressed. My patience has become much shorter with everyone, and everything I am trying to accomplish seems farther away.
I’ve been battling this disease using natural therapy for 3 ½ years. Things were going well and I had beaten many of the odds given me by the traditional institutions and their treatment regimens. Doctors are very unwilling to budge from their views and accept my wishes for this route of therapy. I had at one point shrunk my largest tumor by 1 ½ centimeters and my then oncologist was very unwilling to give me any credit for my success. Her words were that I had done a tiny bit of improvement. It was at the time very discouraging and shook my confidence, so I began searching for different alternative therapies. After a time I allowed a scan and the doctor called a meeting to tell me my tumor had grown “a lot”. I attended with my wife and there were three professionals in the room. The oncologist I was working with told me somberly that it was time to now pursue full blown chemotherapy and there wasn’t time to wait. I asked how much a lot was, and was told it had grown 1 full centimeter. By my calculations, I was still ahead by half a centimeter, and after an exchange of numbers and images of my scan, I was very skeptical of their findings. My trust in the doctor waned, and I decided against the chemo, which I still view basically as poison.
I spent a lot of time since researching therapy choices and tried a variety of them. I eventually came to the conclusion that the one that had originally shrunk the tumor, the Budwig protocol, was the best fit for me. It had worked once, so I will assume with my diligence it will work again. A little over two months ago, I started again with full force. I also added some complementary nutritional therapies into my schedule. Perhaps, in my enthusiasm to rid myself of disease, I overlooked the fact that there are side effects of successful cancer cell die off. Once cancer cells die they become toxic and cause huge negative effects, and the body needs to be detoxed through the liver and kidneys especially. Now I know I need to take detoxing very seriously and try to be aware of symptoms. I am also aware that stress could also have contributed to my ulcer, and will try hard to keep it in check.
The road is not an easy one, but it can be done. Positive thinking and education along with supportive family will lead me to a longer future. Love is a key ingredient to make things happen. Thanking God that I was able to make it through this set back in my life.
Please keep reading and stick with me. I’ll keep writing.
(c) Rick Wyman
A lot of people I knew in high school, and some I didn’t, made a reputation good or bad at Barney’s Garage. The place was just across the street from Chester High, the school I attended, my first year being 1967. It was a real garage and a real place of business. The man was as nice as could be and rarely ever complained about the patronage of students that frequented or spontaneously showed up there. The parents of a lot of the students were his customers for gas or minor work on their cars. Some of the older students themselves were customers and I believe one of his children was a student at the school too.
Sometimes the students would loiter out in back of the garage to have a place to smoke or just hang around talking. Often the students would go there for answers to challenges by one of their adversaries. You’d often hear someone shout out in the halls of the school, “I’ll meet you behind Barney’s Garage at lunch time.” But more often it was, “We’ll settle this behind Barney’s Garage after school tonight!” No matter what the adversaries looked like, there was always something to watch happening there. My reason for going to Barney’s was usually to buy a bag of chips or soda and candy bar out of the vending machines.
One day while I was standing there, two cousins with an age difference of a few years, and 50 to 75 pounds difference in weight, arguing and daring each other to do stupid things. They were trying to prove who was the bravest, or perhaps the results were to prove who was most foolish. I tried to talk the younger one out of taking one dare in particular of a most disgusting and what I’d call dangerous nature. He was dared to Continue reading
The old man was a tough task master for me while growing up. The longer I live, the more I can look back on the lessons and realize his mentoring was just what I needed to become respectable and self-sufficient. I learned to have confidence and survive under adverse conditions.
Growing up, I never really worried about his providing for us because, well, he always did. We lacked money and luxury, but I never thought we were undernourished or without plenty of entertainment. The word bored was not one I can recall using when describing my day to day life. My father was a man who had an overabundance of suggestions to keep me busy as he was himself always on the task of something. If we were low on food he would know Continue reading
mind salvage 