Photo: The Wooden Soldier Diner, Fairhaven, Vt., yesterday. We had breakfast there.

“Joy is prayer; joy is strength; joy is love; joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.” – Mother Teresa

Happiness is not a matter of intensity, wrote Thomas Merton, but of balance, order, rhythm, and harmony.

I am working now to get myself back in balance.

I was nose to nose with suffering and death the past few weeks; I am returning to life day by day, resting, thinking, walking, reading, meditating, hanging out with my best friend and partner, and our dogs here on the farm.

Bedlam Farm is a healing place, a spiritual home, a grounding place.

As one who has dealt with mental illness all of my life, I am vulnerable to sitting with death day after day, and also, when I am distracted and tired, to the intrusive and sometimes hostile nature of our world.

When I am well, I ignore the broken and angry people.

When I am weakened or not myself, they swarm like flies, as they did last week. And I argue with them. They appear suddenly and vanish, they strike and snarl, then are off to peck at someone else.

I am convinced it is the anger and pain inside of me that draws them to me,  and they always remind me that I have the kind of illness that I can recover from every day. And that I will always need to recover every day.

My friend Susan Popper was not so lucky. She was struggling to come to consciousness in the months before she left; she did not live long enough to get there. Her sense of self had been battered out of her, and she had no real idea who she was, even at the end.

I call the swarms of nasty people Peckerheads, Toothless Ducks, and Midgets. I love the name, and it fits.

They don’t kill, and can often be harmless. They can nibble one to death, though.

They were all over me last week, even as I struggled to help Susan. I know they always appear when I am weakest and most fragile. Their genius is to know. I think there is a secret mailing list where people spot the hurt and wounded and get everybody moving.

Why not ignore these people?

People ask me all the time why I bother to respond to them, but I know the truth. Because I have always been willing to face the worst parts of me, and nothing anyone can say about me is worse than the things I have felt about myself.

That is the legacy of my early life, and healing from those wounds and putting those broken pieces together is the hard and continuous work of my life. It will never be finished. When you don’t love yourself, it is so easy for other people not to love you.

When I get myself in order – I may not live that long – the Peckerheads, Toothless Ducks, and Midgets will nibble somebody else to death. The energy stream that binds us will be broken. When I heal, they can’t get what they need.

You know these people, we all do, they are the people who always knock other people down, never lift them up. The people who live to correct mistakes, the angry cynics who believe there are no good or sincere motives in any other people, and who feed off of warnings, rage, argument, and suspicion, the people who always have a bad word to say about other people and the world.

They do not know themselves; they have not been awakened; they have not come to consciousness. Their fuel and mission are harming and judging others and telling other people what to do, as if they know.

Their natural habitat in the new world is social media; its architecture is built for them to roam freely, to avoid accountability, to hide and run, to disapprove continuously, argue endlessly. They nest on Facebook and Twitter, venturing out when a victim appears in the ether.

For me, they are a continuous challenge to my search for spirituality, and a boon to my motivation to know myself and grow and get better. They teach me about myself all the time.

I consider it a moral obligation to challenge them; otherwise, they will grow and grow like some intrusive weed from the other side of the ocean. Sometimes I confront them joyously and with perspective and humor. Sometimes not. I need them. I don’t wish to live in a cocoon only of praise, much as I love praise.

I fear growing arrogant and lazy. I can’t just post messages of praise.

I believe people need to know what critics think of me. And lots of critics of me are not mean and crazy, I often learn from them, especially when they are civil. They are often right.

I have a masters degree in negativity, I’ve been thinking about and reading about it and studying it for years.  Eckhard Tolle believed that all negativity is caused by an accumulation of past time and a denial of the present.

Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear I have experienced are caused by too much thinking about the future, too little thinking about right now.

“Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of unforgiveness are caused by too much past, not enough presence,” he wrote.

In my experience, consciousness must come before peace and liberation. All spiritual teachers point in the same direction: awareness must come before we can free ourselves of negativity, anger, and fear. Easy to say, hard to do.

Anger and resentment come from the past. Fear comes from the future. The present offers peace and awareness. The Peckerheads, toothless ducks, and midgets all live in their past; they are not able to escape it.

My friend Susan did not suffer from negativity, except when it came to her own life. She never tore other people down; she was too forgiving and too accepting.

But she did not know who she was, and could not find peace and freedom. She accepted the pain and suffering in her life, and when she finally chose to know herself, it was suddenly too late.

Life is tough; it makes no acceptions, gives no quarter. Last week, the anger and fear and dislocation rose in me, what else could happen in a week shaped by sickness and death and sadness?

The broken parts of me never completely vanish; they hibernate below the surface, waiting for triggers. Of course, I took on the Peckerheads, Toothless Ducks, and Midgets at a time when I should have just run away from then.

But mental illness, like life, can be ruthless too. It shows up just when you least expect it or want it around. I can always hold things together, and function, but the souls become dark and angry.

I know what to do. I write I take photos, I go out with Maria and walk in the woods, hold her hand, laugh and talk. I take Zinnia to the Mansion or Bishop Maginn High School.

I get my focus back. I bought scrubs for the Mansion aides with the help of the Army Of Good, and next week will help the Bishop Maginn seniors get the graduation ribbons and favors they need for the graduation ceremony but can afford.

Small acts of great kindness. Each one takes me farther and farther away from death and the broken people.

I do share Tolle’s caution, though; I saw the awful toll of denial every day for weeks.

If I do not become more present, do not become more conscious, do not continue to learn to tell the truth about myself, then I too will find myself in a similar state of suffering and fear, like the shadows that follow me wherever I go.

There is only one serious problem in my life, that is me.

The Peckerheads, Toothless Ducks, and Midgets are my medicine and inspiration; they remind me, again and again, to wake up, pay attention, be conscious, know myself, and life in the present. Today is a perfect day.

The sun is out, Maria and I are going to see a movie about fungus (Fantastic Fungi) and have dinner together at a Thai restaurant in Massachusetts.

This is all I need to know today to be peaceful and free.