Asylum sold for 1.5 million

News travels slowly when you buy an asylum. What if Paris Hilton had purchased the building instead of a local asbestos contractor who can make back that money on salvage?

"It's sad," my friend Kim told me yesterday as we walked around the building. Sad, but moving forward rather than sitting and rotting.

Following a Calling

I follow Google. And if you follow Google you know that when you type a phrase in quotations, you receive content from the universe where someone has used the same sentence structure. And you connect.

Today I entered “following a calling.”

“I’ll gain some perspective.” I figured.

I have a calling to make the complex clear. I follow that calling in my work. Curiously, my calling is tied up in a civil-war era mental hospital—the former Trans-Allegheny Asylum for the Insane. It goes up for auction tomorrow. Cwned by the state of West Virginia, closed in the mid-eighties when hospital services moved to anew facility, the hospital often called “Weston State” or “Weston Hospital” is scheduled an Aug. 29 auction on the steps of the Lewis County Courthouse. Because of this inkling that I must be present at this sale, I am about to drive five hours and stand on the courthouse steps watching someone buy a piece of my love story.

My love affair with a 150 year old mental hospital began, or blossomed, in the late seventies. I was born one century after the hospital was begun and as a college student, worked as a “recreational therapist” for four summers. Assigned to travel from ward to ward and engage the residents, I often played cards -- canasta one year, spades the next, then gin rummy, and finally “war” as deinstitutionalization took hold and residents were increasingly unable to keep pace with nuance of card play. I sometimes spent the afternoon on a screened in porch – of a former tuberculosis ward -- playing chinese checkers and coloring with with Linda Lou, a constant talker who claimed to be “sixteen today, 31”—birthday news she could never quite comprehend.. I danced the polka in the old ballroom with Belva, a toothless lipstick-smeared hellion who believed every other guy was her former boyfriend. I listened to stories. “I’ll never forget my surprise,” one elderly woman told me. “when my husband walked into the kitchen.” “Why I fell down right between the tea kettle and the beanpot.” “He’d been dead for 15 years.

So maybe I’m called by the spirit for my friends. Maybe it’s for the beauty of the building.

Begun in the late 1850s, primarily of hand-cut blue sandstone, the building was developed following the Kirkbride Plan, architectural style where building form itself was designed to offer curative effect -- "a special apparatus for the care of lunacy," according to asylum designer and reformer Thomas Story Kirkbride. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and is one of 16 National Historic Landmarks in West Virginia. 242,000 square feet of collapsing ceilings, peeling paint, broken windws, damp wood – and, according to many – plenty of ghosts. Up for sale to the highest bidder. My role? I try to understand this calling and turn to Google for advice. Google directs me to Seabury Gould.

Following A Calling
Seabury Gould

Callings are often experienced as longings that you feel, and you might want to act on them, instead of tuning them out. Callings may come through many different channels: intuitions, symptoms, dreams, afflictions, accidents, etc. Responding to a call means doing something about it. In the words of the Mother: “We are here upon earth to manifest the Divine’s will”. In the Bible, book of Romans: “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. “When you think about what your gifts are and what it means to live the life you are meant to live, always ask, what in God’s name are you doing?

This writer tells me responding to a call means “doing something about it..” That’s my goal: do something. I may need to fine-tune that goal.