Groundless Observations

Bon Vivant

2009-08-28T15:14:00.000-07:00

It has been years since I’ve spent this much time with my Dad, and in my whole life, I don’t think we’ve ever been “just the two of us” for anything like the length of time of these five days. So it has been interesting for me to observe my Dad—and myself! Are our parents predictors for our own aging? Or are they merely possibilities for us, to choose to grow into or not?

“Youth in Age:” Last night at the restaurant to which we went for Dad’s 88^th (a steak place, so he could have “beef and a baked,” his favorite fare), we met the owner, Steve, and were waited on by a man, Gary. The former was maybe in his 50’s, the latter, maybe in his 40’s. Both asked my father’s age—and commented on how young he looked! “I hope I look like you when I’m your age,” Gary said—and in our family’s typical modesty, my Dad replied something to the effect that he hoped that Gary would never look like him! And I thought: You should have seen him years ago, especially before my mother died, when, indeed, Dad did look younger than his years. And maybe he still does now, to others, except not to me.

I wonder: Am I seeing my father? Or am I seeing myself, years from now, and thus feeling my own aging displayed before me? I don’t have the stake in seeing him as younger than he is—and he does not himself, for that matter. But the ways others view him is informative, if not instructive.

“Paternal Example:” Along these lines, my father has been a “meat and potatoes” man all of his life. I asked him if he wanted something “green” with his meal, and he laughed and waved me off! Other evenings, the restaurants where we’ve dined have served us salads. Dad pushes his away after a few token bites, and refers to how that would better serve his “special lady friend.” In California, I am immersed in a culture of health-obsession. Every item for intake is weighed and measured for its nutritional benefit or risk. One’s weight is a subject of constant worry, and the concern for “aging well—if at all” is ubiquitous. My Dad is oblivious to any and all of these concerns. Freed from the constant anxiety of eating right, he eats abominably—and prospers. When on the odd occasion he finds himself weighed and measured by medical personnel, he is told he has the BP of a 20 y/o and the triglycerides of a man half his age. Years ago when I, who eat my broccoli and spinach with ritual rigor, was finding myself with rising BP and the threat of either taking medication or stroking out, I asked my Dad whether he had encountered the same malady as he got older. I was looking for a genetic link. Instead, my Dad was merely confused: High BP? What’s that? This was as foreign and distant a phenomenon to him as maybe the likelihood that our President would be African American.

I wonder: My father’s diet has served him, if not well, at least not poorly, all of these 88 years. I should live so long! So why do I concern myself as I do with what I eat? I surely have other things to worry about! What I tell myself is: My family is “Mediterranean” in extraction—meaning, not only are the meat and potatoes OK, but a little red wine would only help. Pickling is another way of “aging well.”

“Hail Fellow, Well Met—Especially by the Ladies:” Watching my father make the acquaintance of waitresses and female salespeople and service personnel is observing a master. With a twinkle in his eye and a grin on his face, he greets, and quips, and jests until, in a surprised and often shy way, the woman’s face mirrors the twinkle and the grin she was given. My Dad is all rapport and repartee. She responds more often than not in kind, and a certain warmth surrounds the two as they realize that they can enjoy each other’s company. My Dad is not a flirt! But he does come alive in the exchange, and he does take pleasure in the conversation not being business-as-usual. So there is a kind of gentle seduction that takes place: an invitation, a dance, and gracious bow and curtsey of gratitude when the music of the moment stops. My father put the fox in fox trot.

I wonder: Would my children, who are often embarrassed by my behavior with waitresses--or my friends, who are (thankfully) more often bemused—feel the same way about it if they realized that I was unconsciously emulating my father? Or do I lack his grace, so that I am more accurately becoming the “dirty old man” my father has so obviously avoided being?

“Man to Man:” One of the joys for me about my relationship with my Dad is the level of our conversations. This level has deepened since my mother died, at least, so it seems to me. We speak not only as father and son, but also as men, about being men. As one might guess, “being men” often means “in relationship with women!” For the differences and mysteries of our genders continues to fascinate us both. But it also means that we share a commonality of experience as well as perspective. The bluff and bluster of masculinity bonds my Dad and me, and I thank him for that, since too often fathers and sons compete, and rivalry replaces respect. I think the nature of father-son bonds begins with the father; the father sets the tone and the terms. I haven’t always liked or responded well to the terms my father set, but now… now we are close. And relaxed. And easy-going. And comfortable in a shared and special intimacy. I am grateful.

I wonder: I hope I am the father my Dad is to me to my children, and especially to my sons. I hope that I live long enough to feel that our relationships have matured in this way. I am glad that both my father and I have lived long enough to have come to the relationship we now share. And I know that it means a lot to my Dad, too, because, if I know one thing about my Dad, it is that a deep love and respect for his father abides in him. Perhaps good fathering can be inherited.

Captain, My Captain

2009-08-28T08:01:00.000-07:00

The morning of my father’s 88th birthday eased itself over the mountainside and nestled in the bosom of the Lake like a grateful lover. It was cooler than it had been all week, but no less bright for that, and the sky was dashed with clouds, just enough for the winds aloft to smear shapes—“There’s an eagle!” my Dad cried—that invited our imaginations and gave a shifting canopy to the calmed water. The Lake borrowed some blue from the sky, making the horizon pale in donation, but the trees’ green kept them each in their own place, a blanket of discretion between intimate friends.

My father’s fears were relieved. He had worried that he’d “blown his chance” at a beautiful time on the Lake by his inadvertent plunge two days before. But as we stood lakeside again, this time more patient with the process of boat delivery, he could see the water was just as calm, and the sun was burning off what morning mist remained. It was better in fact, for the air being cooler. And we were less rushed—so we had cooler heads as well!

The high school student who went over the checklist of operational “do’s and don’t’s” turned out to be a jazz trombonist—just like my Dad and I! It was as if more than one sort of legacy of the Lake was being handed down.

Once we were checked out, we headed out, Dad at the wheel, I in the bow, for “ballast,” er, balance! Dad was, well, “heady” about his being at last on the Lake. We shot out the gate, and were movin’! We headed counterclockwise, which was right, or starboard as the case might be. In either case, we were at it! We headed towards where we were staying, then up along the coast until we got to the dam, then back to open water—a signal to Dad to open it up. We got to be movin’! It was fun!
I sat in the front, snapping pictures. Dad was in his element, on the Lake, livin’ and re-livin’. He was often so deep in memory that he didn’t respond to my requests to slow down or stop so I could take a clearer picture. We went on, past White Beauty, around the back of The Island, around The Other Island, across the other side of the Lake from which we owned, down into where the Lake narrowed again, and back in towards The Bridge. End to end, Dam to Bridge. Not quite record time, but, quickly enough.

Then back out again. This time, we were to pass in front of the property he and Mom once owned. I asked him to go slow, so we could see where it was. We still missed it! We took pix at the neighbor’s house, distracted by a huge blue heron that had landed on a float nearby. Eventually, we got it right. We headed out.

There was where we used to put the boat in and take it out. There was where we first spent Summers at the Lake. Here was the narrow straight were we used to swim from the beach to the Island—and in the good old days, ski from the beach, around the Island, and back to the beach, letting go into stand up landings... Those were the good old days, before increased boat traffic and regulations!

As we crossed over into the now extinct White Beauty View area where the Lake widens and is chronically rough (the Lake’s version of Tierra del Fuego), Dad let me take the wheel. This turned out to be a bold move on his part: he had to sit in the bow across the roughest water, into increased boat traffic. This was going to be a bumpy, kidney-bustin’ ride for him no matter how much I moderated our speed. Weaving around skiers and fishers we made it back to base—too early! I took us out across the Lake and around the Lake’s largest island, before I headed us back.
All I wanted to do was extend Dad’s ride. He was in near-ecstasy. He kept praising God, saying how wonderful the day was, and marveling at the weather. It truly was a joy to behold—for both of us.

Once we got back on shore, and on with the day, Dad kept talking about it. Evaporated in the heat of the experience was his fear that he had “spoiled” things earlier. Instead he was flush with the realization that all had gone well, splendidly even, and most likely in a manner fitting to the best that could be. All was right with the world, for my Dad.

For me, it was a once in a lifetime experience. I kept thinking: I am glad that I lived this long, to have this kind of time with my Dad. I kept wondering: Will any of my children think about what might please me this way should I get to be 88? I kept believing: I’m glad that I had the courage of my whimsy and arranged for the possibility of this day.

The very best thing was to see my Dad behind the wheel, making his own “road,” leaving his own wake. More than driving a car, driving a boat brings out my Dad’s true nature.

Drive to Live, Live to Drive

2009-08-27T12:03:00.000-07:00

To know my father is to know how important driving an automobile is to him. He is seldom more “at home” than when he’s behind the wheel—which is precisely, of course, when he is not at home! There is something spiritual in the synergy of the man, the car and the road that elevates his spirits and centers him in himself.

So when I got off the train, and as we loaded my bags into the back of his car, and I offered to drive to the Lake, I wasn’t surprised when he said, “No, I’ll drive. I know where I’m going.” And yes, he usually does. But he would also drive even if he didn’t know where he was going!

The drive up to the Lake let me know how well my father was doing. We see each other once a year now. I carry these memories of my father’s basic condition through the intervening year. This is base-line data gathering. And since his driving is his métier, his most comfortable environment, this is the ideal setting to see him at his best.

My Dad’s driving gave me little cause for concern. At no point did I feel that we were going to careen suddenly off the road, and out into the woods or over into the valley! His speed was what it always is—heck, what mine always is!—just a tad too fast for conditions. But that’s OK—his Odyssey has airbags!

His confidence behind the wheel is the best measure of his confidence in himself. So when he asked me to drive yesterday after his fall, he in effect told me how he was. And when he told me to drive us to dinner, I knew he had not fully recovered confidence in himself. Today he simply took the wheel and got us to and from the grocery store. If he’s not yet his “old self” again, he’s at least feeling more like it.

Of increasing significance is why he drives. He drives for therapy. He drives to grieve the loss of my mother. He is a driving Descartes: I drive, therefore I am. Not just around the block, either: He drives to the Jersey shore if need be! Some days he needs more healing than others…

None of this matters all that much in itself; what matters is what it portends for the future. What will happen when the day comes that Dad is told he is not to drive? I fear for him for that day. My Dad has made it, quite likely, as long as he has because his major strength in life is a kind of stubbornness. He got it from his mother, but he has parlayed stubbornness into a fine art!

My Dad exhibits a stubborn refusal to change. Oh, life and its circumstances change around him, and he adjusts all right to them. He is not delusional in his stubbornness. He knows his wife of 64 years, the most wonderful woman in the world, has died. He’s not in denial.

What he is deep into is stubbornness: he will drive until they pry the keys from his hand! THE most frightening event in his recent life was not when he woke from a nap with a non-functioning right hand and waited overnight to call for an ambulance so he could be examined at the hospital. No, the most frightening event was needing to have his driver’s license renewed—a procedure that required a note from his eye doctor about his vision, and a driver’s test. He passed the whole procedure with flying colors, and thus got a new lease on life.

For the moment, we (his children and the rest of the world) can breathe easy. He’s still a good driver. Will he ever know when he is not a good driver? Maybe not. As it is, he sits uneasily in the passenger seat, even when he consents to be driven. There is a car commercial that says something to the effect of: “In life, some of us are passengers, others of us are drivers.” My Dad is a driver; he does not handle being driven well.

In this regard, there is a verse in John’s Gospel that suggests my father to me whenever I hear it. To paraphrase, Jesus tells us that, whereas at the moment we are able to get up every morning and put our clothes on and go about our days as we choose, the day is coming when someone else will get us up, will put our clothes on us, and will take us where they want us to go!

That day is coming for me, I know. That day is coming for my Dad, too. I dread it more for him than I do for myself, frankly.

Of course, he could always surprise me! I’m always glad to be surprised…

Boat Enthusiast

2009-08-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

This trip is something of a remembrance of things past. So we have visited places that we knew when… IF they are still there! And we have dreamed of past glories.

Many of those glorious moments were spent on the water here. We water skied behind and rode in the various boats my father owned. He still fondly tells the story of his taking possession of the last boat he owned—actually, of how it took possession of him! For my Dad, it was love at first sight with that boat. And he showed that boat his love as long as she was in his life…

That’s the way my Dad is… He was, of course, the same way with my Mom.

No wonder, then, that once he saw the Lake, Dad thought about being on the Lake. We went looking for a place that rented boats.

We found two: one, near where we are staying; the other, near where we used to live. We chose the one near where we are staying because the boat was likely to be better—meaning, bigger, faster, and sleeker. My Dad may drive an Odyssey but his heart is built for speed!

We signed up, and watched a video designed to reacquaint us with the Rules of the Water, but we were like two kids in school—not paying attention to the lesson, and copying off of each other’s papers. We were know-it-alls! Lessons? We don’t need no stinkin’ lessons! They gave us our temporary licenses anyway… After all, how much trouble could we get into on the water?

Thing is, we never made it to the water—at least, not the way that we had planned. The folks with the boats were having a little trouble getting the one they were renting to us ready to go out. So my Dad and I had time on our hands. We walked down the ramp to the lakeside. We waited.

I could feel the restlessness grow in my Dad. He was impatient to get out on the water. I was looking out at the Lake, enjoying the day and the moment, when suddenly I felt my Dad was not there with me. I turned to see my Dad, like toddler, making it toward the dock. He got on the ramp, and negotiated its narrowness—until he had to step down more than 18 inches from the ramp to the dock’s gangway. As he did, the gangway sank with his weight into the water, and Dad pitched forward. He landed on the gangway, and rolled over onto his back, but into the water. By the time I got to him, he was flailing to keep his head above water and regain his feet. I reached down and grabbed his hand—but it wasn’t the sort of grip you see in the movies! Still, it steadied him, and he stood up in the water.

I spoke to him calmly, gently and firmly: “Dad, see if you can kneel on the dock.” He got one knee up, then the other. He shifted, putting his back to me. I asked if he could get his feet underneath him. He could, but only with his hands on the dock to steady him as his legs shook. He went back to his knees—and started to crawl away from the shore, toward where the dock widened. I called to him, “Dad, if you’re gonna crawl, crawl toward the shore!” He turned around and crawled toward me.

At that point, I kneeled on the gangway, and my Dad rose to his feet with both hands on my shoulders. Then I got up, turned around, told my Dad to put his hands on my shoulders again, and we walked in tandem off the gangway, over the ramp, and back onto the shore.

There we assessed the damage: the back of his left hand was bleeding, and he was pretty shaken up, his eyes wide, his breathing shallow and rapid. He leaned on me as we walked together back up the hillside. We spoke to the owner’s son about what had happened, and he got Dad some first aid. Then I walked my Dad to the car, where he sat while I backed us out of our boat ride and completed some paperwork.

I knew my Dad was still shaken by this turn of events because, when I asked him for the car keys, he surrendered them without a murmur.

Once home, we almost literally had to wring my Dad out! I told him he was one big sponge! Thank goodness it was one of the warmest days of the year! More, thank goodness my Dad was not hurt worse. Being the man he is, he was more embarrassed than anything, except maybe regretful that he “wasted” a beautiful day on the Lake. I said, “Dad, there’s always tomorrow. Maybe today just wasn’t our day. Maybe we rushed things.” He nodded his head in affirmation—and told me I was to drive the car to dinner.

I don’t think that even Proust could have ever imagined that sort of ending to our day.

Geezers and Tweezers

2009-08-25T14:57:00.000-07:00

When I got off the train in Lansdale, having flown all night in a clean but crowded plane, and having endured a city’s public transport through its bowels, I lumbered my luggage down the steps and emerged into the bright, clean air of Montgomery County. I trundled myself and my baggage across the platform toward the station, looking all the way for my father. He was nowhere to be seen. I stood at the curb, lost, waiting to be found.

After several long minutes, a small man emerged from the parking lot, on semi-certain steps, his scant, grayed hair catching what sunlight it could, like a tattered flag would the wind. I kept looking for my father.

But as he came closer, I realized that this indeed was my father, now in a somewhat diminished version. He no longer had the dark hair and firm gait of a man half his age; now he had been fitted with a more appropriate appearance. And my heart sank, just a little, for I, too, aged in that moment. We were growing older of a sudden, the way it happens when we look into the mirror, not in the casual way of looking past ourselves, but in that glance-snatching, gaze-holding way of seeing on the surface the evolution that has been etching underneath all the while we have not been paying attention.

Two older men made their way to my Dad’s car.

My father, now, on the doorstep of his 88^th birthday, was officially a Geezer. By “Geezer,” I mean a wise and wizened, well-aged fellow, who, by years and maturity, deserved the title. Not merely “senior,” my Dad had come into something more than his own, more than age alone could confer. He’d become a Geezer.

I, on the other hand, still hoped to have Geezerhood out in front of me somewhere, like an anticipated land to which I’d want to travel, but not just yet, thank you very much. Yet, I knew I was no longer the middle-aged man who was at the top of his powers—as we are told we are or can be when we first show the signs of aging and grey at the temples and sag in the middle. I had been graying and sagging for too long now already! So what was I, then? Growing out of middle age, but not yet fully into Geezerhood, how was I to call my “in between” self?

I decided to think of myself as a “Tweezer.” Just as those who are still children, not-yet Teens have become “Tweens” or “Tweeners,” so it is, I think, that those of us men, past 50 but not yet 75 or more, are living through Tweezerhood. We are holding onto what dignity and capacity of being middle-aged we can manage, but we increasingly carry it like I did my luggage for this trip: like baggage, lugging what Youth we have left around like a burden we can still bear, but now must work to bring along. One day, we’ll simply forget where we placed it, and will walk off without it. Then, one of two things will happen. We’ll either be frantic, and anxiously search about for what no longer can be found. Or, if we are blessed with self-acceptance, we’ll feel surprisingly relieved once we’ve realized that we have let it go. Then we may hope to find ourselves to be Geezers—and not merely old men, waiting for the ultimate relief of Death and the life to come.

So I am not my father! It is not yet time for me to be my father. But he has managed, since my mother’s death nearly two years ago now, to grasp his Geezerliness. And I have made this trip, I know now, to learn from him how to survive the Tweezer Years, and prepare myself for being a Geezer—if only I shall be as blessed as my Dad.

Timeless Travel

2009-08-25T14:46:00.000-07:00

This is an experiment.

Apparently I have traveled to a land where the Net does not reach. I can receive emails, but I cannot send them out!

My situation has been explained to me, and I've nodded as if I understand it. But so much of this world is so different from my own, that I'm not really sure what is going on.

But you, dear reader, can help! IF you get this, and IF you respond that you have, I will know that in some fashion at least, I can manage two-way communication.

This is not exactly a cry for help! More like, a plea: How far from Home am I? Can you hear me? Is anybody listening! HA!

I'll be back...

Remnants

2009-05-02T10:13:00.000-07:00

A Cheerio on the back floor of my car remembers the child who sat in her very own seat, and ate in her very own way, and pointed at birds, and called them with a "buh" on her lips for the sheer pleasure of the sight and the sound.

A fan of feathers and fuzz on my front porch remember the bird who came to feed on the seed and became another creature's feed instead, as they met along that timeless cycle of Nature's silent turning.

The wheel of necessity may drive our natural forces but the small eddies of joy give Life meaning and light.

Starting Again

2009-04-16T09:52:00.000-07:00

My horoscope on the day I was attacked read as follows: "You're in high gear and can count on the occasional flub. Let nothing stand in the way of your productive mood."

Makes me laugh! I fully intended to "let nothing stand in the way" of my "productive mood" on that day-- and since. I was indeed in "high gear," working well and effectively on my most important creative project. I was goin' places and gettin' things done along the way!

...Oh well! What I've noticed is that, since then, certain areas of my living just stopped-- this blog, for example, along with another blog I'd been in the process of developing. There have been some friends I haven't contacted or kept in the kind of regular contact with that I had at the time. Looking back, I believe I kind of "pulled in." I think being assaulted effected me in ways I didn't anticipate at the time, and have not been able to reverse since.

So this post is Step One toward getting back on track! I can say that I managed to maintain enough focus that the creative project in which I've been involved has gone forward-- albeit at a slower pace than I would have liked. So my life did not come to a complete halt. But it shrank. It definitely shrank.

Before I was attacked, I'd been playing with the notion of "Full Catastrophe Living." I got it from the title of a Jon Kabat-Zinn book. I'd been feeling like the last two years or so of my live had been kind of inadvertent "full catastrophe living," and I'd wanted to embrace that notion more intentionally, both to bless what I'd been through, and to see if more good might come out of it.

Then, of course, another involuntary "catastrophe" literally struck, and suddenly the notion of embracing "full catastrophe living" had a connotation that was more than disquieting! Not more of that!, I silently screamed.

But before that catastrophe befell me, while I was still innocently toying with "full catastrophe living," a friend sent me this quote from Joan Halifax, author of Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death: "Catastrophe is the essence of the spiritual path, a series of breakdowns allowing us to discover the threads that weave all of life into a whole cloth." Indeed...

Of course, something along those lines was what I'd been contemplating, before... The challenge now is to contemplate them again. Now that I am proabably physically as healed as I will be, how to contemplate what happens when figure of speech becomes literal, when the dust from which we are created becomes ashes seeking to be dust again that it might be re-created?

OK, I went back to metaphor there... Can't help it! You can kill the poet but not the poetry!

And I guess, in that quick way, I've answered my own question: How to embrace the spiritual essence of catastrophe? By finding meaning in the meaningless. With the triumph of the figurative over the literal. By surrendering again to the Creator...

I'll write more in this space... Soon. Thanks for following...

One Week Later

2009-02-25T15:52:00.000-08:00

Since it has been a week since I was assaulted, I'm writing now basically to say I'm "OK," but also to try to capture some of the fleeting moments that have happened, basically before they fly out of my memory!

1) "Shattered Assumptions:" In part this is what I was talking about in a previous post. It's the sort of "official" description of what happens to a person when they are assaulted. I was telling someone how I felt about losing a sense of safety around what is essentially my backdoor. I was told that, along with the physical damage is this notion of "shattered assumptions," a kind of official PTSD term. Like, I assumed my garage area would be safe at 7 AM when I pick up my paper. One morning, I was wrong about that. But all it takes is one time, to shatter assumptions.

The issue then becomes, how both to re-assemble an assumptive world, and make appropriate adjustments, reasonably and with as little fear as possible. At least, that is how I put it to myself. So I had the company deliver my paper to the front door, where I can better see if someone is coming or lurking. Still, it's different getting my paper now...

2) Robbery was not the motive?: No, most likely not-- because nothing material was taken from me. What was taken from me was a sense of safety in my own home environs. I'm not the first to experience this, obviously.

3) Am I still a lion?: Being a Leo, I identify with lions. The symbol of them as regal. The whole "pride" thing! I even like that hyenas are their principle nemeses! Sort of puts lions in their place. But last week I was feeling less like a lion and more like a wildebeest! I felt like I had wandered absentmindedly just a little too far from the herd, had been jumped by a predator, and had escaped and made it back to the herd. I spent a lot of the week literally "shaking off" the attack, a la Waking the Tiger, and just being glad for the herd gathering around me. It was not a week to have to fend for myself.

4) I went to the ENT doc yesterday, which was an adventure in itself. One of the nurses told me that, given what I'd been through, I looked "good." I told her that was a lot better assessment than I'd received from other people, who simply had said I did not look "too bad." Now the ER doc had told me that they found nothing wrong with my brain-- which was a pleasant surprise in itself. But the ENT doc said that he couldn't do anything to "help" my face... which was kind of sad to hear. I mean, I'm glad about my brain, but I was kind of hoping to get some help for my face...

5) What people say: Art Linkletter (remember him?) made a name for himself by recording what children told him. His "Kids Say the Darndest Things" books were a riot. Well, I've read enough Dear Abby, and Ann, and Amy columns to know that people say the darndest things to each other at times of trauma. I've had enough trauma in my life to have heard some of them, and now I'm wondering whether I could find a way to get us to laugh at ourselves when we say the darndest things to each other in an effort to comfort. For instance, one person said to me, "This is going to age you." Well, yes... Other people said, "Protect yourself." Of course-- but I thought I either was protecting myself or didn't need to at that hour in the AM. Someone said, "You should have had a gun." Maybe, but, given how quickly everything happened, I probably would have found my own weapon used against me. I don't know that any sort of "preparedness" would have helped, really. Many people said things that had the ring of closing the barn door after the horses has got out-- because, after all, they too were trying to restore their assumptive worlds. More than just my assumptions got shattered.

This is probably why the most comforting things I was told had to do with how my telling them what had happened was affecting them in that moment. People said they were shocked, horrified, even sick to their stomach. They were sad, or angry, or worried for me, or sympathetic. Getting back some sort of emotion from others was like a Red Cross blanket and cuppa joe for me as I was sitting in my own disaster. There were offers to help, too, but we all knew we were helpless to turn back the clock and undo what had been done. So the "being in the moment" with me meant more than anything.

Honestly, there is more than enough good to have come from this to make me almost glad it happened... Almost glad, I said. Truly, I wouldn't wish this on anyone-- let alone me, all over again.

Calling All Angels

2009-02-24T08:07:00.000-08:00

There actually are more than a few gratifying things about being beat up. One of them is, you find out who your friends are!

No, sorry, I really do not mean to joke about this. I mean to express my gratitude and seriously affirm the abundance of the universe. I truly am "getting by with a little help from my friends." I have been lifted up, as by angels.

Here's what I would say about angels: Some of them have come from places I would hope and expect-- family, friends, people I know love me and whom I am privileged to love.

Some of my "angels" have come from within me: resources of intellect, emotion and spirit that I rely upon more than I know in everyday life, and rediscover when life is not so "everyday." Angels like my sense of humor. And my knowledge about and previous experience of PTSD... So when I'm in shock and numbed, I am; and when I'm shaking, and weepy, I am. And when I'm walking through the valleys of the Shadow that are ERs and doctors' offices, I am.

I am, I am able to be, because I am aware that I am accompanied.

Which brings me to the third sort of angels who've been called and who have come: those I didn't expect. As if to balance the Surprise of the One Who Would Harm have come the Surprises of the Many Who Would Heal. So: a neighbor brings dinner; someone I hardly know sends a card; people whom I wouldn't expect, call, or email; many offer to keep me in prayer.

All of this is more than gratifying, more than reassuring. This is a community of care I've discovered that I didn't even know I had, really, or better, that was part of my "assumptive world" yet not my presumptive world, if you know what I mean-- the tacit become tactile, the silent, speaking and speaking up!

I am more than grateful, because, at the moment, I need this widened awareness of the essential benevolence of the world. Nothing material was taken from me outside my garage, but still the motive was robbery: for what was taken from me was my sense that at least THAT part of the world was safe.

We all need to feel safe. I mean, yes, it does take courage to live and to go about living in this world. But some times it takes more courage than at others, and right now, at this time in my life, I needed to feel safe again. I needed to re-establish where I could be safe and whom I could be safe with.

The angels who came from without and within, the angels who might have been anticipated and those who were unanticipated, all served to make me feel safe again. My face and body would heal on their own, but the rift in my world could only heal with the help of these angels.

People have said to me: Take care! Be wary! Be cautious! Be alert! And yes, I am more aware of where I am and who is around me now than I was. But I also know that if I go into the world in too much fear, if I am jittery and apprehensive, if I am suspicious and distrustful, if I am short-tempered and reactive-- then the Assailant won.

So I will not live in fear and I will not let my basic trust be broken. I will walk in confidence and I will be unafraid.

How can I do that? Well, I got Angels watchin' over me!

You do, too! Blessings...

Can Sense Be Made of the Senseless?

2009-02-18T15:51:00.000-08:00

This is no rhetorical question for me at the moment.

This morning, when I went to get my newspaper, I was jumped! Assaulted. By an unknown assailant. And beaten about the face and neck. Until he ran off...

I was down for the count on the first blow, and so did little to protect myself from what came after. Then, when he was gone, I got to my feet, and called 911. I did some other things, too, but remembering them became problematic.

The police and the paramedics were wonderful, both professional and kind. Plus, they laughed at my jokes!

So did at least some of the medical personnel at the local hospital. They were kind, too. The nurse told me about her own facial trauma, from a car accident, and I guess that was supposed to make me feel better since she's looking OK right now.

And the MD gave me the most surprising news I've ever heard. He told me that the CAT scan of my head showed "there was nothing wrong with [my] brain!" Many other people have told me just the opposite with less concrete information to go on! I was relieved.

Physically, the immediate outcome is that I have a broken nose. I am becoming more like my father everyday! But he got his from an opponent he could actually see-- in a boxing ring in the Army.

My assailant? I got a look at his clothes, coming and going. And I didn't see what hit me... But I also didn't see his eyes... This is what bothers me most right now: I can see him coming at me, in his black hoody, but I can't see his face, and I can't see his eyes...

Like Death: black hood; no eyes...

I'm pretty achy at the moment, and I can't breathe very well, but I still have my half-wits about me, and I'll survive. But I have experienced a "random act of violence." One of the few that occurs in my neighborhood every decade or so...

And I can't yet make sense of it... That's the hard part at the moment-- I mean, except for the breathing. It doesn't make sense to me.

It didn't at the moment either. I mean, I didn't scream or cry out or say, "NO!" or any of the things self-defense classes teach. All I did was shout: "Why are you doing this to me?"

Of course, he didn't say...

Death never does have to explain himself. Maybe his younger brother, Assailant, doesn't either.

Poets, Society: Dead or Alive

2009-02-13T14:56:00.000-08:00

I am still trying to figure out what to think about Elizabeth Alexander's poem, "Praise Song for the Day," the one she read at Barak Obama's inauguration. At the time of the reading, I was underwhelmed. I realized that she followed one of the great orators of our time-- our new President. Yet, I wanted her to rise to the occasion, as Maya Angelou had done for Bill Clinton, and more, as Robert Frost had done for JFK. So I was disappointed.

I took some consolation in reading afterward, that I was not alone. Little of her imagery had stuck in the minds of many-- and what are poets, any way, if not image-stickers? I felt for her. How often do poets get so grand a stage, so great an opportunity to make the case for poetry? When Alexander missed the mark, the rest of us might too. Yet now, more than ever, we need creative writing. On the coming-down side of our national shopaholic binge, we could all lift ourselves up by the bootstraps of our language-- if we simply were inspired to do so.

Two events have occurred to inspire me. One is to read that a radio DJ in New Jersey has been about inviting "remixes" of Alexander's poem. He seems to realize it needed some redeeming, too. Kenny G is his name, and we can listen to him on www.wfmu.org. He's also posted 51 MP3 remixes on WFMU's blog! One of them simply took all of the words in the poem and put them in alphabetical order-- which turned out to be a poem all its own.

I don't know what Alexander thinks of this, but I find it to be in the spirit of poetry itself. Robert Frost used to say that a poem was never "finished, only abandoned"-- a view I've come to take about my life itself. Maybe Alexander's offering was meant to be remixed or reworked or otherwise taken in by us and redone, like the abandoned given a new home.

The other thing that happened was an editorial in the local paper, that begins with this quote from JFK: "Power corrupts, but poety cleanses." Ah... I'm breathing easier already! Then the story is told of what really happened on JFK's blustery inaugual day: Frost abandoned the poem he was going to read, the one he had written for the occasion, and instead recited from memory, "The Gift Outright." Who knew? "The Gift Outright" was shorter...

Anyway, here are the closing lines of the poem Frost wrote, "Dedication-- For John F. Kennedy, His Inauguration":

"Some poor fool has been saying in his heart
Glory is out of date in life and art.
Our venture in revolution and outlawry
Has justified itself in freedom's story
Right down to now in glory upon glory.
Come fresh from an election like the last,
The greatest vote a people ever cast,
So close yet sure to be abided by,
It is no miracle our mood is high.
Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs
Better than all the stalemate and's and if's.
There was a book of profile tales declaring
For the embodied politicians daring
To break with followers when in the wrong,
A healthy independence of the throng.
A democratic form of right divine
To rule first answerable to high design.
There is a call to life a little stearner,
And braver for the earner, learner, yearner.
Less criticism of the field and court
And more preoccupation with the sport.
It makes the prophet in us all presage
The glory of a next Augustan age
Of a power leading from its strength and pride,
Of young ambition eager to be tried,
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour."

Frost got much right in that poem-- a fair forecast of Camelot, and our national mood in the early '60's. But the line I like the most is the next to last: "a golden age of poetry and power...". When we approach our personal lives and our national life together with that order in mind (poetry, then power), we'll not only get through this dismal and discouraging time, we'll find new ground for pride and new reasons to rejoice in triumph.

Reality Shows

2009-02-13T13:44:00.000-08:00

Given our celebrity culture, I am frequently amazed at who we admire and of whom we are envious. Television influences us more than we realize-- which is why I confine my TV watching to sporting events and the occasional PBS special!

But I read about television and its shows, just in case I find something interesting, but mostly to justify my decided lack of interest. So there I was the other day, reading a review of a TV show-- and I found myself reading good writing! How did THAT happen?! Mary McNamara wrote an intelligent review of a show that is either unintelligent or unintelligible, I don't know which.

Here's the line that hooked me: "So it's true then. John Updike is dead and we are left with 'The Real Housewives of Orange County'." Well, yes, and we were left with them even when Updike was alive, but even he could not have written about them in any way that was redeeming.

But curiously, even as she skewers those lamentable housewives (who admits to be being a "housewife" any more?; and is this what "housewifery" has come to?), McNamara is almost sympathetic in her prose: "They embody the moral, spiritual and intellectual anorexia that writers have grappled with for years, but in terms a child can understand. Cheever for Dummies." "Hedda Gabler left the building years ago; these heroines are tragic only in their lack of consciousness." "[T]hese women will no doubt remain right where we want them to be: trapped in the fabulous shabbiness of their lives, having conversations that run back and forth like trained rats along dim and narrow mazes of the mundane. Which is precisely why we will always need our poets."

Ah, yes, our poets... Surely emptiness and vacuity are not confined to Orange County and its families (for don't vacuous men find vacuous women attractive?). Maybe the OC is more like a cultural Void into which vacuity flows and collects? But which poet among us can make meaninglessness meaningful?

McNamara did not seem to know one. I don't. I'm waiting for the "Real Bards of Orange County" on PBS...

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

2009-02-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

I had a dream the other night that I was crawling through a cave. It was a genuine spelunking experience, with stalagtites and stalagmites, and mud and water dripping.

The thing about it was, I could see where I was going. The whole narrow cave was lit up, as if by a light on a camera. I felt like I was in one of those history channel experiences, you know the ones, where the man intones that he is going to be the "first" to explore this dark, underground place, but we see him enter, so we know that the one who really got there first was the cameraman?

When I woke, I remembered a Monty Python sketch wherein all of the characters realize they are being filmed, and look for the cameraman, find him, then realize they are still being filmed, so search for THAT cameraman, and so on in infinite regress.

"Someone's watching us," Bette Midler sang, but most of our experiences of being watched in this way are more close up than her "from a distance."

Which I learned in another way today from the man who'd come to replace my wind-shredded awning. Like a lot of guys in businesses having to do with roofing, this awning salesman was in recovery, and not shy about saying so. No wonder. He had quite a testimony! (He thanked me for listening, saying not too many other people tolerate his preaching. I told him I knew what he meant!)

He recounted with some bravado some of the life-threatening experiences he had survived-- including three marriages!-- but "survived" wasn't his word. He spoke more of being "brought through," as in guided. "I was being watched," he said.

In addition to his three marriages, which led me to think about my own (we were like "brothers" in a now life-long marriage-recovery program!), one of his adventures was a car accident that nearly took his life. This, too, led me to think of one car accident I'd had. Like him, I'd done a lot while in shock that I wasn't aware of doing at the time. And like him, afterward, I knew I was still alive because I was in a lot of pain. But also like him, I had the experience of being "brought through:" not just watched, as if the Watcher either had no interest in the outcome or couldn't do anything about it anyway; but something more hands on... Involved... The cameraman may be taking the picture but he is also shining the light.

And he's walking backwards, while facing forwards, his eyes on me...

Maybe this is God's singular saving capacity: to be able to walk backwards, with sure steps and bold, yet keep us in sight as we are brought through our peril and led safely home. Amazing Grace!

Go Like 60!

2009-02-01T10:21:00.000-08:00

"Tell me one thing that's good about being 60." I'm at my dentist's office, and his assistant has just discovered that we are very nearly the same age. She takes great delight in knowing that I am a few months older than she.

But her question stumps me. She notices my pause, my unusual lack of a quick answer. Any snappy retort I might have spoken has already snapped like the buttons of those who don't eat at Subway. But even the ricochet strikes nothing worth repeating.

"See!" she says, triumphantly. "There's nothing good about being 60!"

Especially for women, I'm thinking, remembering a conversation I'd had recently with a female friend who wanted to set me up with a friend of a friend. "But she's over 60," my would-be yenta lamented. And we went on to talk about how women "change" when they get to 60, how they feel their age in certain sad, fleshly ways. We concurred with the old cliche that men get distinguished, women just get old, and the time for that turning seems to be about the age of 60.

I don't know the truth of any of this, but I'm guessing that my dentist's assistant was thinking something along these lines about herself, and feeling a kind of loss of attractiveness or desirability. I'm guessing that this varies, and I'm sure it is more or less an internal sort of thing. I mean, my dentist's assistant was attractive enough to me that I might have flirted with her if she weren't married. But then, I've been told I flirt a lot, even indiscriminately.

The saying goes that "there's no fool like an old fool," and I'm just now finding out what that means. One of my discoveries on reaching 60 is that, while I've been a fool many, many times before, now I'm having the experience of being an old fool! It's having a curbing effect on my flirting, as if at this ripe age I might finally be learning to be a little more discriminating.

Unfortunately, it just feels like I'm too old to have as much fun as I used to! Now THAT is a sad thought!

Being 60 has led to another kind of vulnerability besides the relational one, and that's the vocational one, the one that connects the significance of one's life to one's accomplishments. Much more than the way my age influences my attractiveness in terms of how other people see me, my age influences my sense of my life's meaningfulness.

(Of course how I am perceived by others is no small thing: just try to get a real job or even health insurance when one is 60 or older! I was told by a health insurance salesman the other day that "60 is the age when everyone starts 'breaking down'." I told him we aren't used cars... But he didn't seem to get the point. Besides, he's got a ways to go before he's 60!)

Anyway, I'm watching this movie the other night, a foreign film that, on the eve of the Oscar's, is being re-released into selected theaters, as foreign films seem to be. I read a wonderful review of it in the paper, and then, lo and behold, discovered it on my cable's pay-per-view! This is the closest thing to an Act of God (at least, a positive one) to happen to me for some time.

The name of the movie is, "The Secret of the Grain." It is French, with English subtitles, and it is about a Tunisian man and his family, so even the French is not what we learned in school, because it is spiced with Arabic like en Provence with turmeric. Point is, the man is 61, and he's just been laid off from a ship yard where he's worked for 35 years.

He's at a certain point in his life that resembles mine in the uncomfortable way that art and life can imitate each other. There was one line in the movie that especially resonated with me, a line that revealed his innermost thoughts. He says, "All this time, and what do I have to leave my children? What do I have to show for my life?" At least, that's a reasonable facsimile of what the line is, and I can't remember whether he actually says, "nothing," or just distinctly implies it.

Either way, what he expresses is what it means to be 60 and male. There truly is this turning in us, from the so-called "power years" of the 50's to the "dis-empowered" ones that begin in the 60's. We go from feeling we are useful to fearing that we are utterly useless to anyone.

Realizing that this turning is occurring can lead to some rather comic/tragic decision making. In the movie, the man decides to invest his severance in transforming a scrapped fishing boat into a restaurant. I decided to invest my retirement in writing. In the movie, the man's decision has some tragic consequences-- but as I was watching it, I kept hoping they were going to turn out comically! I have the same experience in watching my own life: I keep hoping it is going to turn out comically.

In either case, I am learning first hand more about what it means that "there is no fool like an old fool!"

And when I come up with an answer to what is "good" about being 60, I'll let you, and my dentist's assistant, know.

The Importance of Being Human

2009-01-31T08:44:00.000-08:00

Living with open ears gets to be challenging in a noisy world, and almost nowhere in my world is it as loud as it is in spinning class. One difference between an indoor ride and an outdoor ride is that at least with the latter, you get somewhere! But another has to do with the noise level. I am not an I-Pod wearer-- maybe among the last of us without earbuds and a white cord dangling. So I am not accustomed to having ambient sounds crowded rudely out by music at volumes approaching rock concerts or planes escaping the runway. Spinning has meant adjustments for my legs and heart to the exercise, and my ears (and heart!) to the music's volume.

It is the volume itself that makes actually listening to it difficult. Otherwise, one's whole body becomes an eardrum, and vibrates, like everything else in the room, to the beat. That's where the heart-part comes in: is my heart beating to the music or is the music beating my heart? Hard to say. My legs keep pumping anyway!

So it is unusual when, having become the noise I am immersed in, I actually hear the lyrics, especially if the song is new to me, as one was the other day. I heard this chorus, emerging over the relatively dulcet chords: "Are we human? Or are we dancers?"

I love it when existential questions rise like the Lady of the Lake (or Angelina Jolie) from beneath the primordial ooze of everyday distractions.

Turns out, the questions were posed by the British punk rock group, The Killers, in their web-released song, "Human," last September. Turns out, bit of controversy there. (You'll be helped to hear what I'm writing in that last bit by re-reading and saying "controversy" in a British accent!) More than one critic called the lyric "silly"-- which is both damning and positively saying something when it comes to rock music lyrics, most of which hold meaning like a sieve holds water. But one post opined that when the song appeared in German, the meaning suggested that maybe The Killers were likening us to marionettes. Some of the lyrics appeared to have allusions to puppetry. Maybe it helps to hear rock music sung in languages other than our own?

Point is, I really got caught by the dilemma of the questions-- thus (a)mused my way through several intervals, jumps, and sprints. Are we human? Or are we dancers?

I want to make two quick comments, not by way of answers, certainly not one way or the other, but in order to speak out of both sides of my mouth:

Yes, we are human-- and since it is our basic humanity that gets too often lost in this brutish and inhuman world, affirming it, confirming it, and returning to it requires a daily spiritual discipline. We are helped when we can treat each other with compassion and embrace ourselves and each other in our common humanity. We ARE human. But we need a kind of common encouragement to be our all-too-human selves...

And, yes, we can be dancers! In fact, would that we were dancers! Would that we could develop in ourselves a capacity to transcend our humanity, even if only for brief moments in time, and dance! And participate in that which is greater than ourselves with a freedom straining for abandon! And be moved by music that we hear with our whole selves, and give ourselves over to, so that we are made lighter, translucent even, by moving at the speed of sound!

Ah, maybe making us riders into dancers-with-pedals is what our spinning instructors are aiming for? Why then do I feel only the sound barrier? In the noise, I huff and puff and am reminded all too well of my humanity. In the music, who could tell what hills I might climb?

Requiem

2009-01-31T08:31:00.000-08:00

The following is one of John Updike's last poems, to be published later this year in a collection to be titled, "Endpoint." Updike died this past week at the age of 76. I'm posting it here both because I find it to be a moving self-memorial by a gifted writer, thus for what it says to me; and for what it lets me say about myself, thus for what it says for me.

It came to me the other day:/ Were I do die, no one would say,/ "Oh, what a shame! So young, so full/ Of promise-- depths unplumbable!"

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes/ Will greet my overdue demise;/ The wide response will be, I know,/ "I thought he died a while ago."

For life's a shabby subterfuge,/ And death is real, and dark, and huge./ The shock of it will register/ Nowhere but where it will occur.

A Spirituality for Our Time

2009-01-21T17:25:00.000-08:00

A newspaper article recently reported on the rise of, shall we say, "condensed" spirituality enhancement aids. This is not to say, "quickie" spiritual growth. But it is to concede that people these days are busy, and time is more and more of the essence, so it becomes important for people who are interested in their own spiritual growth to attend to it in the few free moments they have.

Publishers are willing to accommodate. Evidently some recent titles include: "The One Minute Bible, Day by Day;" "5 Minute Theologian: Maximum Truth in Minimum Time;" "Aunt Susie's 10-Minute Bible Dinners: Bringing God into Your Life One Dish at a Time;" and "7 Minutes with God." If these sound too adult-only oriented, you could get, "The Kid Who Would Be King: One Minute Bible Stories About Kids." Don't even have time to read? Listen to an evangelical "Faith Minute" on the radio. Don't have time to stop? In Orange County there's a mega-church that offers "drive-time devotionals." Not Christian? There's a Temple in Los Angeles that offers a "Friday Night Live" gathering for young professionals that includes cocktails along with more traditional features. Buddhist? Check out "10-Minute Zen: Easy Tips to Lead You Down the Path of Enlightenment."

This whole trend is understandable and would be more laudable than laughable if it were not such a sad comment on our ever-dwindling attention spans. It probably started long before television, but since TV, it has been shown that the most we can pay attention at any given time is about 22 minutes, the length of the average television show. (When I say, "it has been shown," it isn't that I'm especially aware of any real research on attention spans. What I mean is that, "it has been shown" to most preachers by the elders in charge of their churches that the congregants can't really pay attention to a sermon that lasts much more than 20 minutes-- especially because sermons don't usually come with commercial interruptions, to give attention spans a break. To my knowledge, this information has not "been shown" to preachers in our African American churches.)

And now, we have the Internet, and Websites, and blogs... Like this one... Blogs, I am told, should be short-- about 250 words, by my estimate-- so that people can visit, scan and leave quickly. Not like this one...

But here's my point: as our technology becomes both more sophisticated and prolific, it changes us. One thing it changes is our attentions spans. I fear it shortens them-- and then I console myself with the hours on end my son can spend playing World of Warcraft on line!

The thing is, spiritual growth is both a daily and a sort of "World of Warcraft" thing: One has to pay attention over a number of years really if one is going to grow spiritually. It's not gonna happen in 5, 7, or 10 minute bites. Spiritual growth takes more sustained dedication than that.

So how DO we grow spiritually in a world where our lives are replete with distractions? I think the answer has more to do with changing the way we live than with trying to adapt our spirituality to fit with the little time we have for it.

At least, that is what seems to me to be yet another "inconvenient truth."

Survival of the Lucky

2009-01-21T15:55:00.000-08:00

A Parade magazine article a couple weeks back (Jan. 11) trumpeted: "You Can SURVIVE! 9 Ways to Stay Alive When the Worst Happens." Its author, Ben Sherwood, trombones his research: "Is it just luck when somebody makes it though a catastrophic accident or illness? After interviewing hundreds of survivors and experts from around the world, I've found that overcoming adversity comes down to a combination of factors. Here's how you can increase your own chances of surviving and thriving."

Since "surviving and thriving" in the face of adversity is of some professional interest to me (see dealwithchange.com), Mr. Sherwood got me at word one. Unfortunately, at least in the instances he mentions, it turns out it truly IS mostly luck-- along with a little good positioning. Let me add my own baritone voice to this brassy choir.

Situation One: Escape a Plane Crash: Surviving this, Sherwood says, turns on knowing where to sit. Seats near an exit row are "safer." Caveat One: We learned recently that surviving a plane crash might depend less on where one sits than who sits in the pilot seat! Caveat Two: If you are Muslim or look like you might be Muslim, don't have this "safer seat" discussion after you get on the plane. A couple of weeks ago a Muslim couple were escorted off a plane for doing just that, because some passengers were alarmed at their conversation! The money they spent for their aborted flight was returned to them, but the airline did not pay for booking them on another, later flight... I don't know what happened to their luggage. Such are ethics and etiquette in a post-9/11 world.

Situation Two: Get Out of a Hotel Fire: Lesson: don't take a room higher than fire ladders can reach!

Situations Three and Four: Don't be admitted into nor discharged from a hospital on a Friday or a weekend. In other words, time your illnesses and recoveries for when hospitals are adequately staffed. Good luck with that!

Situation Five has to do with the initials of your name! You'll do better, evidently if you so name yourself that your initials spell out something positive, like ACE, WIN, or WOW, as opposed to those whose have "bad" connotations, like RAT, BUM, or SAD. What about those of us whose initials spell a color? My father's are: RED. And how does it work if, say, in your monogram your last initial is in the middle, and your middle, last? I mean, can one rearrange one's initials so that they spell something that increases one's chances or surviving-- or even, thriving?

Situation Six: Turns out, if you're planning on risking a cardiac arrest, go to Vegas. There are more defibrillators there-- and Someone is always watching!

Situation Seven: To "walk away from an accident," sit in the middle of the back seat... If only I could drive from there...

Situation Eight is essentially being extra careful when walking across a street on Halloween, Dec. 23, and New Years Day... OK, so Christmas Eve and Christmas are safe?

Situation Nine amounts to "research" that men are prone to die just before their birthdays and women, just after. My mother died the week before hers, but then, it was observed that she wore the pants in our family... (Just kidding, Dad!)

All of this drivel would be nothing more than attributed meaning if Mr. Sherwood were not serious enough about the conclusions he jumped to, to publish them in an upcoming book, with the subtitle, "The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life."

I think his so-called research just goes to substantiate one of my favorite sayings of Mark Twain: "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics!"

Watch out for yourself! It's a dangerous world out there!

Virtuous Citizen

2009-01-21T14:56:00.000-08:00

On this day after the inauguration of Barak Obama as our 44th President, the nitpickers and the pundits have begun to splash in the puddles and even pools of unparalleled joy that remain after yesterday's flood. As he spoke of storms, we felt the heavens open in showers of blessing. Now, the day after, things are being said about the things he said.

Like, while he said he was the 44th man who'd taken the oath of office, he was actually only the 43rd, because Grover Cleveland took it twice! And even as he said "man," as grateful as we were for him, we couldn't help but wish for the first woman to take that oath.

On the other hand, the text and tone of his inauguration address is being assessed for what it is and what it is not. Much is being made of it, and rightly so! But not so much that I would be prohibited from adding my two cents.

Cent One: For the first time in my memory, an inauguration address began with "My Fellow Citizens" instead of "My Fellow Americans." I take this to be a significant shift, for in it is an appeal to participation, to engagement, to awareness, and to commitment that simply is not carried in our being merely "Americans."

We are indeed citizens of this republic and of this great experiment in democracy. As such, we share a responsibility-- a responsibility that Obama articulated in part-- for our life together as nation. By reminding us that what we have in common with each other, and with him, is our citizenship, he appealed to less to our emotions and more to our intellects. When he, in another part of the speech, pronounced the end of tribalism, he in effect declared that we are bound together by something that transcends blood and race, and individuals' histories, and groups' self-interests. Our "membership" in America is as citizens. In that sense, the Greater Good, indeed what I would call using an outdated term, the Common Weal, is to be our principle concern and aim.

Cent Two: Along these lines, it was interesting to me what he said at the end of the address, where he remembered for us George Washington's use of the words of Thomas Payne, I think just before he led the Continental Army across the Delaware and toward Valley Forge. Those words were, in part, "Let it be told to the future world... that in the depth of winter, when nothing by hope and virtue could survive...". Ah, I thought, the great irony of that! When in recent memory do we know of "hope and virtue" being the only survivors in the face of adversity? In our time, hope and virtue were among the first casualties of the war on terror, murdered by fear and expediency.

So the man who inspired us to hope and gave us confidence to believe that we could find the courage to hope for real again, after hope was assassinated in the '60's and virtue was stangled in the '70's, now tells us that we might find it in ourselves, individually and collectively, to be virtuous again. Indeed, Obama is calling us to be "virtuous citizens," and is promising us that he, at least, will strive to be one.

What a departure from "Presidency as usual!" What a change from "Presidency as we have known it!"

One final observation: No one I've read seems to have picked up on what I think is the most powerful line in his whole speech: "This is the source of our confidence: the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny." Now, I'm not entirely clear what he means here-- because I'm not sure how we go about shaping an "uncertain destiny!" But I am clear that he believes that there is a Providential Demand as well as Guide involved-- so we are not alone! Perhaps because he believes this, and believed it in this way, I actually believe him when he says, "God Bless America."

Vulnerable to Excitement

2008-12-19T16:18:00.000-08:00

I was listening to one of those business news shows on NPR this AM, when I heard a startling thing. The report was on why there are no especially compelling toys to buy this year: no "Tickle Me Elmo's" sending parents on searches that can be frantic and retailers on challenges to keep shelves sufficiently stocked.

A comment was made about how there are years when these toys arise and years when they don't, regardless of the economy. But in a time of "economic downturn," the likelihood of such toys catching on is further diminished, was the point. Here's what was said: "When you're thinking about how to spend your money, you're far less vulnerable to fads and excitement."

At first, I felt really sad. I mean, at what other season of the year are we to be "vulnerable to excitement," if not Christmas? Christmas/the Holidays is all about excitement! If the economic problems we are facing, both in our families and in our country, are diminishing our vulnerability to excitement, then these are hard times indeed.

But then I remembered another time in my life, a time when I was unemployed, and very much "between" jobs, and my income was, as we would say now, "extremely limited." Times were not as tough for everyone then as they were for me and my family, but it also was not exactly a time of consumer-confident hysteria. We were living near Chicago, a locale that can be quite bleak at this time of year, the fleeting beauties of a White Christmas made terrifying by the sleeting realities of what happens to transportation when roads are icy.

And Cabbage Patch Dolls were the rage. And my daughter was 7. And because she was "vulnerable to fads," I was.

I remember futile searches of toy store shelves and frantic trips for miles to other, perhaps better stocked neighborhoods, and calling stores and timing visits to shipments and the sheer determination not to disappoint my daughter driving me to great distances. All to no avail.

Then, just as I was settling into the tragic task of preparing my "sorry, sweetheart" Christmas morning speech, word came from up North. My wife and I had a friend in the town were we'd met, Houghton, MI-- a place so far North in the US that a road sign reads, "Houghton, 10 miles; End of the World, 15 miles." Our friend called. He had found a Cabbage Patch Doll! One of the last ones in that Northern outpost of civilization.

It was as if it came from Santa himself! He sent it. It arrived. It turned out to be a "she," and her name, we found out on Christmas morning was "Charity Wilma." Charity Wilma made my daughter's Christmas. Charity Wilma saved me from being the sad father, the disappointing and disappointed dad. Charity Wilma, more than Baby Jesus that year, was our Christmas miracle!

Now, the fact that my daughter, at her mother's the following Spring, left Charity Wilma behind in the playground, so that we never heard from Charity Wilma again... does not take away from the excitement and even joy that Charity Wilma gave to all of us that Christmas: not just to my daughter, but to me and her step-mother and even to our Northern friend and benefactor, who in a real way got to play Santa.

So today, I thought: it is precisely when we have only a few dollars to spend that we want to spend them on something special, something that isn't the last of many gifts under the tree, but something that is THE one and only gift under the tree-- the way Jesus was the only baby in that barn that night. Searching for that Cabbage Patch Doll, gave my Christmas focus and purpose. Knowing the dolls' scarcity, gave value to our finally getting one. Being vulnerable to the excitement meant also being vulnerable to other feelings as well.

Over the years, on other occasions, my daughter got other Cabbage Patch Dolls-- and those she has kept with her. She's told me that she plans to share them with her daughter, and that is a wonderful thing. Charity Wilma, although gone, is not forgotten. Recently I asked my daughter how many Cabbage Patch Dolls she had. She hesitated, like a mother who's had a child die, who then doesn't know how to reply to the question of how many children she has. She said, "if I include Charity Wilma, or not?" I said, include her. She was with us for a time. She was, for a Christmas, our evidence of divine generosity.

And really, isn't this the affirmation we want to make every year, and need especially to make this year: That God is Great and God is Good and now we thank God for God's Giving. Especially when we feel like the world has taken away so much and left us vulnerable to our fears and insecurities, we ought to take comfort from the Christmas message that God's giving is so great, it encourages us to be vulnerable only to excitement and joy.

Pacific Palace Aids

2008-11-29T15:32:00.000-08:00

The ocean was as placid as I've ever seen this morning,
as calm as a dreaming baby,
as smooth as a seducer's spiel.
I rushed to the shore to join the sentinel line
of sleepy-eyed seagulls, watchers and holy ones.
I arrived before the surfing magicians
could conjure up their waves.
And sure enough, my mind floated out to sea,
leaving me thoughtlessly on the shore.

I realized my body needed to be kneaded
by those foamy fingers curling gently
as from a young mother's hand.
I wanted to be bread dough, to smell like yeast,
to be pulled and stretched and made supple again.
I wanted to be washed, to have the stain of my shame
worked out of me; I wanted to be clean again.
I wanted to be squeezed and squeegeed as the sky had been,
cloudless and bright; I wanted to be clear again.
I wanted what only the sea could give: new life.

A flock of shadows flew across my face,
and I turned my body for home,
letting my mind find its own way as it will.
Suddenly a butterfly flew around my head,
crowning me like the monarch it was!
I picked up a sand dollar, small change
when I was hoping for something larger?
No, for the priceless epiphanies of this morning
I would have paid much more...

Horizons

2008-11-28T17:44:00.000-08:00

The Phoenix did not rise tonight,
but instead flew fiercely across the horizon
like a pelican streaking for home,
its belly lit by the fire of the setting sun,
its wing as outstretched as an angel's,
eventually trailing a rainbow streamer
across the length of the horizon.

There was no such spectacular promise
in the orderliness of the day.
The line of the horizon was razor sharp,
like Occam's, cutting sky from sea with clarity.
The waves wrinkled to shore like folds of skin
massaged by the wind's gentle hand.
And the clouds were combed and parted,
the silver strands of an aged gentleman waiting for a lady.
Tranquility reigned at last.
We needed to be soothed,
after two tumultuous days and nights of unpredictability.

Which lent surprise to the day's ultimatum:
The fire next time!, it proclaimed,
but not as a threat; more like a pledge.
And as Saturn and Venus took their places
in the cobalt sky, above the crimson band,
and we waited for the moon's sliver
to cut the night's curtain,
we knew we had something more to look forward to
than merely passing days upon the earth.

Rainbow Splash

2008-11-27T16:24:00.000-08:00

Arching from inland to ocean,
the storm dragging its tail,
it pours its essence out:
indigos and teals fill the water;
blues rise to the skies and spread themselves
in the mirrors of the shallows;
greens blend and reach out to each other
in the vegetation of land and water;
yellows and golds drape the cliffs
and fly away on the breasts of kestrels.
I look for reds, like blood at the scene of a crime,
and find them splashed on stones and shells
and pooled in the ominous tide.

How will we harvest the rainbow?
Will we wrap ourselves in it, like Joseph?
Or are we to remain in the pit,
never to be the dream-meaner
who saves his people-- and thus himself?

Anyone can see the colors.
Only a few can wear them.
Fewer still can let the light illuminate them.
And fewest of all become the prism
of their own luminescence.

Tracings

2008-11-26T15:58:00.000-08:00

I walk the scalloped coastline
as if I am tracing the lace edge of your bodice,
my knuckles soft across your surface,
our hearts beating like waves chasing each other,
seeking to escape the gathering storm
by breaking, over and over again.
My arms spread wide to take it all in,
to take you all in.
I'm a supplicant to beauty!
Let the weight of the wide sky fall on me
like a downy comforter!
My eyes spring with surprise,
as if at a dolphin sighting.
The aperture of my body is as open as can be,
a wide angle lens bending, stretching to receive.
I am backlit as a wave at sunset,
crimson, transparent, on fire.
I am light, and glad to be, even
glad to have been, when the light goes out.
The waves of passion have scratched the shore,
leaving sand paintings for our healing.
There are parables in those parabolas.

A Day at the Beach

2008-11-25T20:09:00.000-08:00

Sights, encounters, and reflections from a day at the beach:

Sights: I am a solitary figure among solitary figures. Many of the seabirds are loners at this time of year: a lone cormorant dips and dives not ten yards from shore; the occasional curlew is flockless; I walk around a single gull standing on one foot, in order to respect him, for this is his beach, not mine. Out on the water, a solitary surfer waits for one last wave as the darkening day joins the sky and the sea in gray. This is a good time to be alone on the beach, for I am not alone in being alone.

Encounters: Yesterday, a boy runs up behind me and yells, "DAD!" at the top of his lungs. He is shouting to his father, I'm sure, but I hear him as if I am he, when he startles me out of my reverie. Down the beach I meet "Flat Stanley," a doll sent by her great granddaughter to the great grandmother who is now photographing Flat Stanley's oceanside adventures for the great granddaughter to share with her class. Travel by proxy, like a garden gnome. Flat Stanley speaks to me: one of us is going places, he says. Two boys break away and run screaming at a group of seagulls minding their own business. A classic case of boy meets gull-- and as is usually true on such occasions, the gulls simply grumble and move along.

Reflections: I am wondering what our hearts are made of. I carved my name into her heart of stone, hoping to leave a lasting impression. But her heart turned out to be made of sand instead, and whatever impression I might have made was gone with the tide. Above the cliffs flies a POW/MIA flag. Some impressions are more permanent: in the battlefield of love, some of us are Missing in Action, others, Prisoners of War-- but lost forever to "take no prisoners" romance.

Insane Dependence

2008-11-24T14:07:00.000-08:00

I remember when our most benighted of Presidents told us, in a State of the Union Address no less, that we were a country "addicted" to oil. When even he recognized our economy, indeed our culture, had an irrational dependence on a substance, well then, surely it must be true. Then we got globally warmed to a point that our relationship with fossil fuels became ambivalent at best. And finally we followed the inconvenient truth far enough to believe that there might actually be alternatives to our crude addiction. We are now in love with "hybrids." Hmmm...

The other day, on NPR, two reports laid bare the dilemma of our alternatives. In one, the limitations of battery-powered personal transportation vehicles was examined. Thomas Edison himself had promised Henry Ford that he would make a battery-powered car for Ford's wife within their lifetimes. He didn't of course-- and cars were a lot lighter then! Now battery powered car technology turns on basically one option: lithium-ion. Alternatives to that option are not being sought-- except by the lead acid folks who've made our car's batteries for a long time.

OK, so what's so dangerous about lithium-ion? Don't they power our cell phones and cameras? Well, yes... And if that isn't fair warning, then maybe we ought to pay attention to where the "stuff" to make such batteries comes from. That "stuff" is cobalt and another element I don't remember (this was radio I heard this on). Turns out, most of cobalt is found in the Congo-- not a very stable place to be mining our futures-- and in "southern China, near Tibet," which is also where most of that "other element" is found. Hmmmmm...

So if our present is about dependence of foreign oil primarily from the middle east, could our future be about dependence on foreign cobalt from China? And haven't we already mortgaged our future to China who owns most of the paper of our national debt anyway? Hmmmmm...

Suddenly, all of Obama's brave pronouncements to the contrary, I was a lot less sanguine about our futures...

But the future is not really mine to see. What struck me more was the insight of a possible analogy: As it is in our fiscal economies, could it be in our emotional economies? That is, is it the case that, no matter how hard we try or how many alternative choices we feel we may have, that each of us finds ourselves perpetually dependent on obtaining something we need from those who are foreign or alien or even hostile to us?

You see, I'm puzzling about my own insane behavior, and looking to rationalize over the wider spread of the human condition...

As anyone in recovery knows, the definition of "insanity" is "doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result." Being in recovery from a recent romantic relationship that could only be described as "insane" on exactly the same terms, I have become a student of my own irrational, self-destructive repetitive behaviors. I'm looking at myself asking, why did I continue to do that?

Well, the answer, my friends, may lie in the stars-- and there would be a certain relief if I could point to "destiny" to exculpate myself. But more likely Shakespeare was right, and it lies in "ourselves"-- and I get some comfort from thinking I may be an idiot but my behavior was not idiosyncratic! In other words, I am not alone in my penchant for insanity.

To be precise, maybe there truly is something built into the human condition where we eventually discover that we actually do need for our own better functioning what another has within them. Like we do with middle eastern oil, or we might with Chinese cobalt. Maybe the world is so structured that we are become aware that each of us have the parts of the other's puzzle. And that to complete ourselves, we need each other. Maybe in the worst way...

Or maybe we are to find out how not to need each other in the worst way, but instead how to deal with this "the way things are" in a manner that does not bring about insanity, but something like vulnerability and cooperation.

The thing about the definition of insanity is not the repetition or the compulsion, but the expectation. Our expectations of ourselves and others is what is so screwy! Maybe we are to deal with this need for what the other has for us that we cannot supply to ourselves-- but change our expectations. Maybe it is our own expectations that drive us insane.

At least that is where I'm going in my own life, and in whatever future romantic relationships I might be blessed to have. But maybe we need to learn that geo-political economic lesson now as well. What we need, those who are foreign to us have. So why should we expect anything different?

I'm thinkin' about this... I'm workin' on it!

More Passing Thoughts

2008-11-20T15:34:00.000-08:00

I cannot help but think that, since we cannot help but attribute gender to our conceptions of a personal diety, and since the notion of "Mother-and-Father God" seems to have gained some relative currency among those who pray that way, perhaps there are times when we prefer one gender attribution to God over another.

Like, maybe we begin, early in life, in our infant and child ways, to feel pretty good about Mother God, taking care of us, providing, as classic mothers do, protection and provision.

And then there comes a time in our lives when the adventures of the world beckon, and mastery, and competence, and testing ourselves against the elements and each other becomes more important to us than the relative comforts of home. Maybe then Father God appeals: strengthening, encouraging, picking us up when we're knocked down and dusting us off without coddling or infantalizing us, and sending us back into the frey again. In Father God's world we have enemies, but we have Him at our side, or better at our backs... The Good Father, growing us into adults.

Ah, but then there comes a time, or times come more frequently as we age, in which we need tenderness again. Not like before, but wounds need to be bound, our frailty acknowledged, our fatigue forgiven. More than anything, we come again primarily to need to be held, to be understood, to be accepted-- to be loved as only a mother could love. In the latter years of life, perhaps Mother God returns, to invite us into Her comfort, to put to rest our misgivings and to quiet our fears, and eventually to invite us to the sleep of the angels, when once again, in spite of all we've been through, we get that look on our faces of contentment and peace, a look She hasn't seen since we were wee.

All in God's good time...

More Passing

2008-11-20T15:07:00.000-08:00

Well, it has happened again. First there was Pogo. Then Calvin & Hobbes. And recently, I wrote about the passing of "For Better or Worse." Now "Opus" has "bit" the dust...

You know, if the comics are "poor man's entertainment," in this economy, more of us are going to need to be reading them, and it seems like the level of excellence is declining. No slight to those who remain, but even La Cucaracha reprises Boondocks! Thank goodness for Frazz and Doonesbury!

Anyway, Berkeley Breathed gave us Opus readers ample time to anticipate his passing-- told us the date, and even invited folks to suggest a "place" for Opus to go-- with a "first place" prize of Ten Grand! Talk about stimulating reader interest!

So when Sunday November 3 rolled around I wasn't surprised to see the last strip-- only at Breathed's choice. (I had thought to send Opus to Galapagus, to evolve and further the evolution of all species. Penquins rule!) But BB didn't put his choice in the paper. I had to go to a website to find where Opus had been put to bed...

Which is exactly what Breathed did: he ended the strip by putting Opus in bed next to the little bunny in the children's classic, Goodnight Moon! There's the momma bunny, across the darkened room, reading: Goodnight Opus, and goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.

I loved it! Whimsical. Wonderful. And appealing.

I thought: when the time for my passing comes, lay me down with someone soft and sweet and bunny-like to cuddle me 'till my eyes close forever. And let me hear the Great Mother saying "goodnight" to me, and to all that I have held dear...

May we all go the way of Opus! The model is somewhere in the children's book of our choice.

Three Scary Thoughts

2008-10-31T18:06:00.000-07:00

Maybe because it is Halloween, I found myself with three scary thoughts about this matter of climbing the Fourth Butte, Old Age:

First, after four games of racquetball this morning, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that we only get as far in life as our joints take us. I am blessed with joints that work! My knees are fine, my hips and elbows and shoulders all work well enough, without complaint. (Well, one shoulder nags a little, but only enough to let me know that I'm alive.) But I am aware of the ills that flesh is heir to, and if not the flesh itself, then the things of the flesh that keep us connected, and prevent our simply falling down. So this AM, I gave thanks for my joints! But its scary to think how fragile we are physically. We need good joints to climb the Fourth Butte!

Second, there was an article in the paper the other day that noted that the suicide rates were up in our country. Evidently, they have been steadily rising for nearly a decade. And "the most alarming increase" has been among "middle age" adults-- 16%. It turns out that people aged 40-64 are at much higher risk for suicide than previously thought. This was especially true for "whites" in that age group: 16% for men, 19% for women. No one quoted in the article seemed to know why. They speculated about "stresses of modern life" and incidences of depression. But maybe at the very least we can take from such information the implication that this transition, from Middle Age, off the Third Butte, and then across the valley and climbing up the Fourth Butte, is a fairly hazardous transition for more people to make. It's scary to think how fragile we are psychologically. We need to find resources in ourselves to make it to the top of the Fourth Butte. (Where, according to the article, suicide rates for people over 65 have remained relatively unchanged for some time, after declining 18% from 1986 to 1999.)

Third, it occurred to me that the way we get off the Fourth Butte is by dying... Maybe that means being "lifted up," or maybe that means climbing down and heading across yet another valley-- I don't know. But I do think, from having observed folks who were dying for ten years or more, that a whole lot happens on the Fourth Butte! I have seen people flourish as the end of their lives grew near. And I have seen people become discouraged, weighed down by disappointment, and despairing of a sense of purpose. One challenge of the Fourth Butte, it seems to me, after we have made it to the top, is to continue to discover a sense of meaning to one's living. Why am I here? becomes Why am I still here? It is scary to think how fragile we are spiritually. We need to be spiritually aware and vital if we are to be able to scan the horizons of the Fourth Butte, and appreciate what we are seeing.

And seeing as this is Halloween, I don't know that I have three antidotes to these scary thoughts! Maybe its enough to be frightened at the moment! BOO!

The Butte-y of Aging

2008-10-30T14:50:00.000-07:00

In a recent Frazz, the eponymous college-educated janitor of an elementary school, turns to one of more precocious students, Caulfield, and says: "Henry David Thoreau said to beware of all enterprises that require new clothing." To which Caulfied gives this reply: "Like aging."

Yes, like aging...

Like many of us I suppose my aging has meant a constant adjustment, not only in my wardrobe, but in my sense of myself. I remember I few years back going into a department store where I'd usually bought pants, going through the stacks, finding my size, and going to the cash register to pay for them. The sales person took one look at them, and another at me, and said, as tactfully as could be, "Don't you wish to try these on before you buy them, sir?" No, I said, I knew MY size. Well, sure enough, when I got home I found out that the size of me was not "MY size" anymore! One would think that there's only so much of that sort of adjustment a person could take, but the fact is, I've had to adjust "my size" several times since!

I like to think that I do pretty well with this "aging" thing, but the truth is, I'm still a sucker for the compliment that goes along the lines of: "you look (or sound) much younger" than my chronological age. And to think that, when I was a child, and even a youth, I took it to be a compliment when someone would say that I seemed "older" than my age! Somewhere in the course of middle age/adulthood, the compliment gauge was switched.

I have come to believe that our culture gives us no good, useful, confirming and guiding models for getting older, and telling us what aging might truly mean for us. We have no good names for people of a certain age. "Seniors" doesn't sound too good-- unless it leads to discounts on movie tickets and the like. "Elders" might be more accurate, but in our culture people have to be enjoined to respect their elders (because it doesn't seem to come naturally) and having lived so long does not seem to me to be in itself an achievement worthy of respect. And sometimes, one can simply seem to be way too "old!" John McCain, I think, suffers from this. The appeal of Obama is to the "young" supposedly-- and that means not just those of only a couple or three decades of life, but also maybe those who think "young." And "inexperience," which used to mean something negative, McCain is finding out, is not such a detraction. We have this shared sense in our society right now that we are moving into a time that none of us have experienced, a time when all of the paradigms seem to be shifting, and so,what would "experience," in itself, teach us? This, of course, is how the "young" think anyway!

I've begun to believe that we are requiring for ourselves a New Paradigm for aging. I was impressed to have been listening again recently to a cassette tape (you see, even saying that dates me!) of Robert Johnson, the eminent Jungian, talking about the strengths and limitations of the Parcifal and the Holy Grail myth for modeling male identity. Basically, what it boiled down to was that young men, coming of age, would benefit from understanding their lives in the light of the Parcifal tale. Fathers would certainly do well to teach it to their sons. But it scarcely applies to older men. The story "runs out," as it were, of meaning. It fails to be instructive, let alone enlightening.

In its place, Johnson subsitutes Shakespeare's King Lear-- which I found even less instructive and not at all enlightening.

And this is my point: if aging into and beyond seven decades of life is to be accomplished in some meaningful and meaning fulfilling way, then a good mythic structure for it certainly would help. Maybe not enough visionaries and myth-speakers have lived long enough (yet) for our culture to have generated such narrative underpinnings. All we have now is "retirement," as a constant vacation ended mercifully by death, hopefully before too much suffering or lingering or otherwise eviscerating one's material and spiritual resources. Rather dismally vague, wouldn't you say?

OK, so if not from our culture, perhaps from another? I would like to recommend the following from the Arapaho, as recounted in Joseph Bruchac's Our Stories Remember:

As we travel, we shall come to four buttes. We must be ready when we come to each of them in turn, for their sides are steep and rocky. If our steps are not careful, we may slip and fall and go no farther. When we reach the top, which is flat and wide, we may stand there and look far in all directions, both behind us and ahead. But, sooner or later, if we would continue, we must climb down the other side. As we pass through the valley between that butte and the next, we are met by White Owl Man. He tests us to see if we remember what we learned from our climb, from what we saw while we were there on the top, from our experience of leaving that former high place. If we remember all that our past experience has taught us, then we are allowed to continue on until we come to the side of the second steep slope. Then we begin the hard climb again.

So it goes for each of the four buttes in turn. We must make the difficult climb, stand for a time on top seeing far vistas, but then, at last, descend and prepare for yet another ascent.

Each of these four hills has a name. The first is Childhood. The second is Youth. The third is Middle Age. The last is Old Age. That journey which leads us up and down is called the Road of Life.

With this narrative map, I can come to know where I am in life: climbing that last butte of Old Age. It tells me that the butte is worth climbing-- and that it is work to do so! So as I struggle with myself and with where I am in life, I am really answering the questions of White Owl Man, who is evaluating whether I am worthy to go on. This makes sense to me. This frame of reference grounds me and gives my present life meaning.

Perhaps the best mythic structures are the oldest-- older even than the Arturian Legends!

Mothers' Little Helper

2008-10-29T16:17:00.000-07:00

One of the advantages of having a grandchild is that her mother reads all sorts of material that otherwise would never gain entry into their house and my world.

On a recent visit, I was shown the magazine Cookie, subtitled, "All the Best for Your Family." One article about this "best" in the September 22 issue was "The Cookie 100: 18 Pages of People, Places and Things that Make Moms Happy."

Following the premise, the article's lead admitted that the selections were "random," ranging from ketchup to Pixar to mascara! "But slid under the mom microscope, each product, service, person, or trend selected by the Cookie editors is as integral to our maternal well-being as the bedtime ritual or the synced family calendar." "In short, they are the things that make moms happy. Because when you're happy, it usually means everyone else is too."

On this basis my daughter showed me item #1: "Creamy Crayons:" "chubby beginner crayons" in "intense, rainbows-on-steroids colors." Ah, yes, what mother wouldn't be happy with her child's drawings in steroid-amped vibrancy! Much happier than with your fuddy duddy Crayolas, I imagine.

Lest you think my emphasis on the "drug" reference unfair, Number Two of the Top 100 things that make moms happy was: Cocktail Hour! Yes, Cocktail Hour: "the one hour of the day that no sticky fingers can sully, no high-octane tantrum can hijack." (Yes, I'm quoting here.)

I am not making this up! Not even fingers got sticky from drawing with steroidal crayons can disturb the mother who is attending to her own happiness during cocktail hour! And you know, the mom who has a drink or two in her before dinner just might be a "happy" mom. And if one's child throws one of those pesky, annoying, over-the-top tantrums, perhaps trying to get her attention-- well, pour another round! The crying might not stop but after a few smooth ones, mom will hardly hear it anyway. And perhaps when there is this sort of "happy" mom around, everyone else will be "happy" too? Or maybe just free to seek their own "happiness."

What's even better is that #3 on the list is "Family Cookbooks," in case a now "happy" mom might like to remember to do some menu planning or maybe even some cooking. The cookbook suggestions are good ones, too. One of them even "belongs in every kitchen, whether you're a parent or childless, young or old, human or alien." Or, maybe, intoxicated.

The thing is, the misuse and abuse of alcohol is widespread enough already to be a major public health issue. And if their Top 100 list reflects the Cookie editors' personal priorities, this is really quite scary because the behavior and attitudes they are encouraging are probably their own. Certainly, no one at the magazine thought it might be the least bit inappropriate to be saying that Cocktail Hour was "as integral to our maternal well-being as the bed-time ritual or the synced family calendar." Maybe they did their editing after a cocktail hour of their own.

Think of the social implications they are encouraging. Evidently, our psycho-therapeutic professionals and alcoholism- and drug-treatment facilities are not already blessed with sufficient numbers of patients. Or perhaps, we do not yet have enough adult children of alcoholics suffering through life--many of whom are seeking the same "happiness" their mothers (and fathers did) during their cocktail hours.

The thing is, people who would see Cocktail Hour as not only "normal" or "usual" but "integral" were most likely raised by mothers and in homes where it surely was! More, they are likely raising their children in such environments.

I have no idea what the immediate impact of Cookie's advocacy will be. But just the other day, I was talking with a group of businessmen about how the business day had changed over the last decade or so. Less booze in it, was the consensus. The infamous "three martini lunch" a thing of the past, they said. Then I read the Cookie piece. Maybe the three martini lunch is destined to come back.

Coyote Tales

2008-10-29T15:18:00.000-07:00

One of the things about this blog that maybe only I understand well is its aim to provide a space for me to express some of the "Trickster" in me-- the Native American story-genre that means a great deal to me, even as it confounds, if you ask the Indians, most white people.

I've been reading this wonderful book, Our Stories Remember, by Joseph Bruchac, and find that he has some edifying things to say about tricksters. Ethnologists who've written about the coyote and other tricksters and their stories have invariably remarked upon "the inconsistency of having a character who is profoundly sacred and clever on the one hand and incomprehensibly stupid on the other." (Maybe "inconsistent" to these authors, but for me, a remarkably appropriate mirror!)

Bruchac writes: "Okay, okay, but just listen for a minute. How can you have a character such as Coyote who is the Creator of the people one moment and then a total buffoon the next? Not only that, he is dishonest, deceitful, totally libidinous and licentious, as dirty and malodorous as two-day-old road kill. Everything about the American Indian Trickster seems to be the antithesis of the image of the Indian that non-Indians still appear to be most comfortable and most familiar with, the noble nineteenth-century Indian-- in particular, the Hiawatha of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow." Or, one might add, our contemporary sense of the Noble Savage seen in as diverse places as our fascination with "shaman" training and Old Town, San Diego.

Point One is, Trickster speaks of Native Americans from Native Americans in a way that resists our efforts of romanticization, idealization, or otherwise "cleaning them up" to make them fit with our sense of who they should be.

Point Two is, Trickster spoke to Native Americans about the nature of the world they were living in, and the underlying nature of humanity and of all things. So the "inconsistent" combination of the sacred and the profane that people of other cultures had such difficulty appreciating-- because they were trying to reconcile the irreconcilable-- made sense to american aborigines. Trickster said meaningful things about how the world was.

What I wonder is: Why did we Indo-Europeans not develop mythic stories on a par with those of the Tricksters? Do we really think the world operates all that rationally, all that orderly?

My guess is that we do, or we think that it should. But, to my mind, it doesn't. And maybe never has.

To tell a story that demonstrates the "trickster"-nature of our world these days, I want to tell you what happen to the mother of my daughter a few months back when she attempted to fly from the East coast to the West for a visit.

With all good intentions, she packed two things in her suitcase: a jicama; and a word game like Scrabble that comes in a convenient-to-travel-with cloth pouch, shaped like a big banana-- hence the name of the game: Bananagram. She placed both objects in her suitcase for travel under the plane, and proceeded to the gate to await take off. The flight however was delayed. In not very short order she found out that she, of all people, was the reason for the delay! She was summoned by TSA to an "interview" room, and asked repeatedly about what she was carrying in her suitcase. Over and over again, she had both to spell "jicama" to the agents and explain what it was! Then she was asked why she was carrying a "grenade" and where she had got it. This was of course even more puzzling to her-- a non-violent and gentle woman-- than the agents' unfamiliarity with jicama. But while they were interrogating her, the authorities closed the airport (yes, the whole thing) and called the bomb squad. Only once the bomb squad arrived was it determined that the "grenade" she was alleged to have been carrying was the Bananagram game. Heck, it looked like a grenade on the x-ray! As near as I can tell, pretty much without apology, and certainly without explanation to the other delayed passangers, they cleared her to fly, and everybody went on their way.

I just wish that the local news folks had had sense of humor enough to report that the international airport had been closed down for a couple of hours and evacuated all because of a jicama and a word-game. But maybe they couldn't spell "jicama" either...

The thing is, this is Trickster at work. This is Coyote in our world. For our world is not the smooth running and orderly place we like to think it to be! It is disorderly and irrational-- and even TSA agents make silly mistakes.

Finally, it must be said that the meaning of the Trickster tales, the "end of the day" reason why they are told in the first place, is to lead us to laughter. Fact is, maybe the only way they were/are like us, Native Americans tended to get too "serious-ed up." Coyote and the other tricksters reminded them of the divine comedy we are living.

That's what trickster tales do for me, too. If for T.S. Eliot, the world ends "not with a bang, but a whimper," for me the world ends in laughter-- laughter at ourselves, laughter at the way things are.

Another story goes that a European, maybe a well-meaning ethnologist, noted that the Indians called the North American continent "Turtle Island," because their creation stories had described how it came to be on the back of a Great Turtle. The rational European asked what was "under" the Turtle. The Native American, a little trickster in him, replied, "It's turtles all the way down." Turtles, maybe; laughter, certainly.

Rock Formations

2008-10-29T15:05:00.000-07:00

Recently I found my oceanside meditations interrupted by what I was seeing.

On the one hand, there were two rocks, separated. As the ocean rose and fell around them, the rocks created two indentations, like eye sockets, and the water, as it went past, would swirl into eddies, which sometimes would create a "face" in the water: two eyes, and when the eddies joined, a sort of a smile beneath them. It was a grim smile though, and with the sunken eyes, more skull-like than anything. Maybe I was too close to Halloween!

On the other hand, there were two rocks close enough together to be taken to be one. When the ocean swelled around them, a very different phenomenon occurred: There were still two eddies, but as they swirled back on themselves and as they joined shore-side of the rocks, they created a heart-shape in the water, two currents going back to meet again, one thin one pointing away.

I thought of separation and how being too far apart can be deadly. And I saw how closeness, being just close enough, could bring out the heart, even from the sea.

Sharing Tears

2008-10-14T11:36:00.000-07:00

Someone is missing in my exercise classes. He was there all through the first part of this year, his long hair shaggy with sweat, his piercings and tatoos accenting a body that was in enviable condition.

Then he was gone. Then he came back! "Where've you been?" I asked him. He measured me, then said shyly, "I've had a little problem with depression...". I tried to appreciate his vulnerability, said something to indicate that I did, and joked with him a little. "Welcome back. I've missed you," I offered.

A couple weeks later he came running up to me as I left the gym. "Good to see you! Haven't seen you in class...," I started to say. "No," he said, "I'm not in good enough shape yet. I'll be back..." "Lookin' forward to it," I small talked. I noticed he'd removed his piercings.

It was the last time I saw him. I've been thinking about him, wondering where he is and how he's doing. Has the black hole of depression swallowed him again? I don't know.

We don't know each other very well, really, at the gym. We see each other in such limited contexts, and make the talk small enough to fit the moment. How he managed to squeeze that word "depression" into the cubicles of conversation we usually allow ourselves, I don't know. But he trusted me enough to do that, and I've felt myself caring about him more ever since.

In the paper the other day there was an article about the outpouring of affection for a homeless man who'd died when someone poured gasoline on him and lit it. Turns out, this man had family-- three sisters who looked after him as much as he would allow. He had sunk into depression years back and couldn't stand the treatment so chose the streets. He'd made friends of the people in his neighborhood. In addition to his family, 200 people came out for his memorial service! An astonishing outpouring of caring...

I am marveling about this phenomenon of human caring, that happens everyday, and that mostly goes unnoticed or at least unremarked upon. Henri Nouwen writes that our word "care" has its roots in the Gothic "Kara", which means "to lament." Thus "the basic meaning of care is: to grieve, to experience sorrow, to cry out with." I'm reminded that "compassion" in the Latin means "to suffer with." Nouwen adds: "in fact, we feel quite uncomfortable with an invitation to enter into someone's pain before doing something about it."

Ah, the American way of caring: doing something about another's pain. And when we find out that there is likely nothing we can DO about it, we add our discomfort with our helplessness to the uncomfortableness we already feel about entering another's pain-- and we move away, or otherwise shun.

There is another way to respond, and it has to do with affirming the "with" of caring and compassion. For human pain and suffering is not a "problem" to be solved; it is, first and last, a mystery to be lived with... It is in fact an act of extraordinary hospitality when someone opens up to us and invites us "in" to where they are in pain. They likely are not even expecting us to "relieve" the pain for them-- they are simply expecting us to share that pain-filled experience with them. I think that's what the sisters and neighbors of that homeless man discoverd. And I'm trusting that I responded adequately to the honor my friend at the gym bestowed upon me...

To be able to enter that space of the "with" means that we have to be comfortable with our own pain, with the "with" of our own suffering-- for our pain and our suffering are always "with" us, too. And, being "with-in" us, they are the sources for whatever hospitality we can offer to others to come, be "with" us.

Odd that we feel that our pain is best kept hidden. No wonder we end up feeling alone and isolated. Our pain is our invitation to be open about our humanity, and to share ourselves with others. Somehow my friend and that homeless man seemed to know this. Maybe I can come to know it, too.

It's a Jungle Out There

2008-10-13T17:09:00.000-07:00

First, a disclaimer: I never go to Starbucks. Never. I'm a Peet's man, through and through.

Except when I travel, and there are no Peet's in the airport terminals, but plenty of Starbucks, you can bet your life.

So I was surprised to find that, along with my coffee, I got words of wisdom. "The Way I See It," Starbucks calls these quotes. And they are numbered, like Snapple Facts, only longer, because you can print more on the side of a Venti than you can in a little circle under the cap. But same principle. Opportunities to learn abound!

The thing was, I really liked #233, from Maria Fadinian (I think; I had to copy it down and I can't be sure of my own writing any more; I'm a casualty of the computer age; soon I won't be able to spell, a casualty of the texting age...), who was listed as a Geographer, ethnologist, and National Geographic Emerging Explorer. This is what she said:

"I used to think that going to the jungle made my life an adventure. However, after years of unusual work in exotic places, I realize that it is not how far off I go or how deep into the forest I walk that gives my life meaning. I see that living life fully is what makes life-- anyone's life, no matter where they do or do not go-- an adventure."

I took this initially as great consolation, simply because I don't go anywhere. I am the least well-travelled person I know. Unless you count the wild places of other people's lives that they have shared with me, or the forest of feelings I am invited to visit. But the many-miled Starbucks user, I am not.

Except on this trip something happened that made me realize how strange a world it is out there. I went with my family to see a professional baseball game, something I hadn't done in years. Things in the ballpark were pretty much as I remember them-- meaning, the home team lost, again. But on the way out, as we made our way to the car through the jungle of disgruntled fans and all-too-eager peddlers of bottled water and soft pretzils, one young African American man was standing in the gate, selling T-shirts. At the top of his lungs, he was shouting what was written on the shirts: "Romo is a Homo!" (Referring of course to the Dallas Cowboys QB...)

Then, when I got home, an email acquaintace sent me a picture, of a man on a motorcycle, stopped in traffic. The back of his shirt read, "Nigger, please!" Then something I couldn't make out...

OK, so I'm a recluse who travels in genteel company when he travels at all. But I have to say, I haven't heard or seen such blatant homophobia and racism in, perhaps, far too long. I'm not so naive as to think that these feelings are no longer out there. But evidently I was something of a babe in the woods to think that people would be more ashamed to express them in public.

I wondered what our Starbucks geographer and ethnologist would make of these places and ethnicities in our own country. Sometimes around the corner can be an unusual and exotic place.

But maybe its up to us all to become "emerging explorers!" Certainly, it is important for me. Because these peoples' prejudices give their lives meaning-- even as I find them appalling. Perhaps the adventure is in this discovery of comparative meanings, of persons and cultures.

As I pursue my own life's adventures, sometimes I can't help feeling dismayed but what I find.

Confession

2008-09-28T17:05:00.000-07:00

Not much to say today, but something to share, again from the writing of Henri Nouwen:

"How often is the intimate encounter of two persons an expression of their total freedom? Many people are driven into each other's arms in fear and trembling. They embrace each other in despair and loneliness. They cling to each other to prevent worse things from happening. Their sleep together is only an expression of their desire to escape the threatening world, to forget their deep frustration, to ease for a minute the unbearable tension of a demanding society, to experience some warmth, protection and safety. Their privacy does not create a place where they both can grow in freedom and share their mutual discoveries, but a fragile shelter in a stormy world." (from Intimacy)

I confess the rarity in my own life of "intimate encounters" that were an expression of mutual "total freedom." Too often I have preferred "a fragile shelter" to what it seemed was no shelter at all.

So, Fr. Nouwen, how do two persons encounter each other intimately in "total freedom"? If there is this Possibility, then there must also be this Promise: that such relationships can happen for any of us... Even me.

Sea of Love

2008-09-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

I was startled in reading Henri Nouwen recently, to see him say of God, "Your sameness is not the sameness of a rock, but the sameness of a faithful lover." This in the midst of an extended metaphor: God, "you are the sea." Thus, God's is a "sea" of love-- in Nouwen's word, "unwavering."

It might seem unfair to deconstruct Nouwen's beautiful prose and, er, deep thoughts, like this. He may not have succeeded in helping me understand God better, but he certainly made me think about what it means to be a "faithful lover."

Now Nouwen was a priest, and so his sense of how faithfulness actually works in love may be a bit on the imaginary side. But his insights into the human condition are consistently charitable and compassionate, and there is something to be affirmed about someone who views us less cynically than most.

So what does it mean to be a "faithful lover"?

My first thought goes to a comparison often made between "attachment" and "detachment," the latter more often than not being held in higher regard than the former. Nouwen himself implies this when he writes that "sadness is the result of attachment. Detached people are not the easy victims of good or bad events in their surroundings and can experience a certain sense of equilibrium." Ah, but this is not the "equilibrium" of the sea, which could easily be said to be an "easy victim" of the events of its environs. And if fidelity in love has to do with "detachment," well, how involved in the actual loving is that lover? I've been in love before (as the song goes), and I cannot seem to love without a certain degree of attachment, and therefore sadness. But I've also been loved before, and I can tell you, that being loved by a "detached" lover is like being embraced by an idea: it might warm the heart, but it does nothing to keep the body warm on a cold night. So, for me, I want a little attachment in my loving and being loved. And if that means sloshing about in the events of each others lives, then so be it.

My other thought turned to those I've known whose "faithfulnes" would almost universally be confirmed. (And heavens, I do NOT mean myself! It probably could be said of me that I practice a form of fidelity that best suits me and does not likely meet any universal standard.) A friend of mine is one of these people. He is a "faithful lover" to his wife and children. He knows himself to be such, and his family sees him that way as well. But I see something missing in his fidelity: he seems to me to be faithful to his wife at the expense of being faithful to himself. He loses himself, and even betrays himself, in his constant effort to be a faithful lover of his wife. This occurs, in part, because his wife's fidelity is more to herself than to him-- and being a faithful lover means, to her, being less than active on the "lover" side of things. Faithfulness has turned into a form of indolence and indifference for her.

So doesn't being a "faithful lover" mean, in some sense, activity, and involvement, and interest in the life of another? And doesn't being a "faithful lover" also entail a fidelity that does not result in a betrayal of oneself? In this active attachment of loving, surely "faithfulness" entails a kind of balancing of self and other-- like the sea, shifting, the waves evidence of the dynamic balance being attended to and maintained.

All life seeks to maintain this constant balance-- constancy, "faithfulness," being a dynamic not a static experience. Rocks do, too, as well as bodies of water-- and Nouwen may actually understand this-- but rocks' efforts are lost to the narrowness of the human frames of time and reference. The sea, on the other hand! Ah, there is a dynamic "sameness" we can--sorry, gotta say it!-- see...

I think that maybe if we understood that God's being our "faithful lover" manifests a kind of dual refusal on God's part: a refusal to betray Godself in loving us, and a refusal to be "detached" from us in that loving; I think we might find in that a divine model for human fidelity in relationships. Maybe not "sameness," then-- for, indeed, the sea is constantly changing; it is never the "same." But maybe the dynamic constancy of balance, of losing regard neither for other nor for self, and holding both, somehow, in a relaxed, non-anxious tension. Perhaps that is how God is our "faithful lover." Perhaps that is how we can be "faithful" lovers of each other.

Come with me to the Sea of Love!

Divine Thoughts in Passing

2008-09-24T14:40:00.000-07:00

I have been blessed with travel to see family in the last couple of weeks: blessed with the family, and glad for the time with them; and blessed with the sort of time that travel gives one, to read, and reflect on what one has read. It is sort of like having seeds injection-planted into the fallow field of one's thoughts, and then watching whether anything bearing something edible manages to grow amid the weeds.

Here's what I've harvested so far, and am chewing on:

--Ram Dass in his gentle Ram-Dass-ian meditation on aging and dying, Still Here, talks about how important his Maharajji became to him after his stroke. He writes: "My link to Maharajji is very strong. He's the very context of my experience. He's my friend, my constant imaginary playmate. He's an imaginary playmate who's wise, loving, understanding, rascally-- all the things I like in a playmate. What's wonderful is that that kind of playmate is available to each of us, because its inside."

Ram Dass says lots of other things about Maharajji, but this notion of "play" and "playmate" at the center of his spiritual life simply sprouted in me. What if I were to think of God as my "playmate?" What if the living of this life were to be more about "inter-play" with the Divine, than obedience and rule-following-- or even "playing" by the rules? What if God were making up new rules as we went along-- and I could, too? (Just like we did when we were very young children, before we got all growed up, and got victimized when rules were broken, or punished when we were the ones breaking them....) What if my life were, indeed, more this "divine comedy" than the human tragedy I too often take it to be? What if spirituality were more about developing a sense of humor instead of a determination to take everything very seriously? Wouldn't we all be having a lot more genuine fun?

I know, it's an outrageous line of thought. It makes people angry, just as Sam Keen's article in Playboy did back in the late '60's-- the one that was accompanied with a picture of a laughing Jesus. True, no one read the article; in Playboy everyone just looks at the pictures! Still the image of Jesus laughing was a bit too sacrilegious for some-- even more than the nudity! Now that tells us something about where the heads are of the religiously minded!

--Henri Nouwen has also been with my on my travels, and I find myself fertilized by his fecund writing, especially his meditations on the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

(First, a little background: I have always found that parable to be anong Jesus' most profound. I identify with all three of the men, the father and both sons. Having lived the role of the prodigal, in spite of my being the older son in my family of origin, I identify with what it's like to be in a "far off" place ("far out," in my case!), and being afraid about how one will be received at home. But I also am the elder, so I know the lure of being well-behaved and being well-thought of, and wanting to please one's father. And I am a father, whose sons are their own persons; but through them I wrestle with how to love, especially when love can connote approval instead of acceptance, and the whole way a father's own hopes and dreams can come to be lived out in his sons, in spite of them, in spite of him. Although, in the parable, the father is often taken to denote God, I see God as being "in the midst" of this triangle of men and their emotions. God is in how the whole parable plays out, how it is enacted, how it is brought into being. The meaning is about God-- and ourselves... .)

Well, anyway... Back to Nouwen: In one of his startlingly frank reflections, he speaks to his indentification with the elder son. He says he has "harbored a strange curiousity for the disobedient life that I myself didn't dare live...". He's "envious" of the "wayward son." He observes: "There is so much resentment among the 'just' and the 'righteous.' There is so much judgment, condemnation, and prejudice among the 'saints.' There is so much frozen anger among the people who are so concerned about avoiding 'sin.'" Then he asks: "which does more damage, lust or resentment?"

As someone who has struggled with his own lust(s), and with his own resentment(s), I came to have new words to describe the younger and the older son in me. And while I have felt my measure of both guilt and shame for my lusts, I wonder if I've sufficiently appreciated how my resentments have inhibited my coming into the abundant life God has intended for me. My lusts and my resentments have both betrayed me-- or rather, have been ways I have betrayed my self. But while a plethora of Others have arisen to remind me that I should indeed feel both ashamed and guilty for the ways my lust has betrayed me, almost none have extended the mercy, forgiveness, understanding and acceptance that might have kept me from resenting their being judgmental! Thus I find myself on this pendulum, from lust to resentment and back again. Unpleasant. Not good.

I suppose that this "swing" could be halted on the lust side-- but Nouwen does not suggest how. He does, however, make a connection that would halt the swing on the resentment side. He says: "There is always the choice between resentment and gratitude," and it is of one or the other, because "resentment and gratitude cannot coexist." Ah... So the resentments of those whose "frozen anger" leads to the denial of their own sinfulness, which thus results in their judgments of me-- they might free themselves for gratitude, and more gentleness and mercy toward me and others, if they would just make that choice. And I, in turn, can choose not to harbor resentment of them, if I choose to be grateful, if I find in myself a grateful heart for all of my life experience-- including others' reactions, and resentments.

How do I do this? How do I find my own way to freedom from resentment, toward gratitude and grace?

--Well, maybe the answer has something to do with finding the father of the parable in me. Maybe that father is more like Ram Dass' Maharajji than like the Father God of most Christian preaching. Because, what does the father of the parable want most to do when the prodigal son returns? He wants to play! He wants to party! He wants to step into that relational space beyond resentment; he wants to choose gratitude.

I think we are always surprised by that father-- and often disbelieving. Or else, we say to ourselves: That's OK for God-- but it wouldn't work in "real" life! But Jesus does not say that the parable is an allegory, and that the father in it stands in for God. He is really saying that we experience God in our lives whenever this dynamic occurs-- whenever play triumphs over judgment; whenever grace and gratitude triumph over resentment.

Whether this happens in the "real" world, among persons, is another matter. But the thing is, these triumphs can be experienced within me, in my own reality, within my own self-- just by my choosing to let my father play with my prodigal, and enjoin my elder to get with the program!

Just like Ram Dass' Maharajji, the father of the parable is "inside" me-- along with that elder son, and the prodigal one. There's a Life of manifest gratitude, grace-- and playfulness-- waiting for me, if I just choose to live it.

Enemy or Guest

2008-09-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

I am finding myself in a certain time in my life, when I have the time to reflect upon my relationship with myself. Usually I have thought first of my relationship with others. But now, perhaps led by the Springsteen song, "Your Own Worst Enemy Has Come to Town"-- meaning, of course, oneself-- I am feeling a sense of burden and dread: Have I indeed been my own worst enemy?

One of my favorite spiritual writers, Henri Nouwen, contrasts "enemies" with: "guests!" Of all things! Not "friends," but "guests." He writes in Reaching Out that "our vocation" is "to convert the hostis into a hospes, the enemy into a guest...." Coming as I have from a "hospice" background, I think it would do well for that movement to talk of those under its care not as "patients," but as "guests." They certainly aren't "enemies!"

But I also took in this meaning personally. What if my "vocation," my spiritual "work" with myself was to "convert" my way of looking at myself from that of being my own worst enemy to being my own best guest? Nouwen is writing about the virtue of "hospitality"-- again, which I usually think of in reference to relationships with others. But what if I were to be more "hospitable" to myself? What if I were not always at war with myself, but instead took it upon myself to be welcoming of myself: my moods and moodiness; my foibles and my failures? How much differently would I live in my own skin if I worked more to make myself at home there? As opposed, for instance, to struggling with myself, or blaming myself, or even berating myself? How much more at ease I'd be in my everyday life, if I would aim to be my own best guest than to blame myself for being my own worst enemy!

Everyone might agree that hospitality begins in the home. But maybe, even before that, hospitality begins in ourselves. I am working at welcoming myself-- even into my own world!

For Better or Worse

2008-08-31T08:25:00.000-07:00

Seems life endlessly begins-- and ends, sings Counting Crows. In the art imitating life/life imitating art cycle, the comic strip "For Better or For Worse" ended yesterday.

I am a fan-- which, given the article in the paper announcing that the end was near, may be something of a mixed bag. FBOFW evidently had as many dislikers as likers. Something to do with its emotional content. What I liked about it was that it spoke to "real" life issues. A beloved pet died, and was mourned. Kids grew up, and went to college, or not. Parents and grandparents died, and siblings faced each other in the process. People got sick--and didn't die, but lingered in twilight states. You know: real life.

Well, almost. I mean, if anything, there wasn't enough failure. No one didn't succeed. No one was unemployed. No one used drugs or alcohol, or found themselves addicted in any way. No one compromised themselves for what seemed like good reasons at the time... or otherwise found themselves in ethically ambiguous positions. So FBOFW wasn't really all that real! Just maybe as real as the "comics" can get.

People got divorced, for instance, but then they were married to the "wrong" people in the first place, so the wheel of life turned and even those tragedies were "corrected" comically. Thus it is on the last strip, one of the main characters, Elizabeth (aka, "Lizardbreath!" I like that!), marries her high school sweetheart, Anthony, who is divorced from a caricature of a woman who has left him with their daughter to raise. (The daughter, despite being abandoned by her mother is not very bratty... See? No one really has emotional issues in the comics.) So a "wrong" is righted. And Elizabeth and Anthony immediately after exchanging vows leave the wedding/reception to visit her grandfather in the hospital, where he's been laid low by circulatory compromises (stroke, now heart), but is being dutifully looked after by his second wife, Iris, who has become a hero to his family for her devotion. Whew!

OK, but Iris' testimony closes the strip. She says: "It isn't easy, but we made a commitment... This is part of loving someone-- with all your heart-- and with all you have to give. It's a promise that should last a lifetime. It defines you as a person and describes your soul. It's a promise to be there, one for the other, no matter what happens, no matter who falls... For better or for worse, my dears... for better or for worse."

As someone who has left relationships, and been left as well, I found myself unusually touched by these words. I have known for some time that it is precisely this sort of exchange of commitments that I have been looking for in my life. The lack of this defines my emotional life at the moment. I'd made this sort of commitment earlier in my life--and then decided I couldn't keep it-- but then didn't realize its significance: its uniqueness, its specialness, its difficulty. Frankly, I wonder how many who make this commitment do take it seriously.

Recently, I had occasion to be back in touch with some old friends. Both of them reported that, since we'd last been in contact, their spouses had been diagnosed with cancers and were now "cancer survivors"-- which meant physically compromised and emotionally challenged. I've often thought of cancer as a "family" disease-- by which I mean that, when it rears its ugly head and makes its presence known, it affects more than just the one in whom it is found. Like a lot of adversities in life, one never knows, really, how one will respond until one is "in" it. My friends and their spouses have responded in the "for better or for worse" fashion-- allowing their mutuality to be shaped by these events, but not allowing their mutuality to be destroyed by them.

It is indeed difficult to "hang in there" when someone you love is facing adversity. There is a kind of horror to it, an OMG, I didn't know this was going to happen! And there is a kind of "surrender" that is required, in order willingly to let the adverse events in another's life effect one's own. A lot of the time, instead of surrender, there is only resignation. But resignation carries with it despair, and despair breeds resentment, and pretty soon one who has resigned oneself to the situation actually emotionally abandons-in-place the one who is in need of something more, something other.

This place of surrender is difficult for most people to reach. We are much more accustomed to resignation, I think, and thus fall prey to other forms of resistance. Not too long ago, even in "media" time, John Edwards showed us all another side of himself, when his affair with a campaign aide became all too public. I didn't pay any attention to his media "outing," so I don't know how he and his family handled themselves, but I felt for them all. We had made such heroes of John and Elizabeth, and had so elevated their marriage, that it was almost sadly predictable that John's humanity would disappoint us in equal proportion. They had lost a child tragically; then came Elizabeth's cancer; now John's infidelity. Their life experiences are so far from mine, I cannot imagine what "for better or for worse" means to them. Yet, you know, I hope at the end of the day, they are able to be content with the commitment they have made to each other-- as Iris said, "no matter who falls...". I thought when John persisted in his Presidential ambitions that he was trying to overcome his resignation to his life circumstances, instead of surrendering to his commitment to Elizabeth and her life-threatening cancer. But then, maybe his undoing himself publicly was one way to re-do himself privately. Maybe he has moved now, from resignation to surrender. I hope so. And I hope Elizabeth has, too.

There is another side of "for better or for worse" that we don't often think about, and that is: how "for better" can be just as challenging for relationships as "for worse!" But that may be the stuff of another blog.

This one ends in this way: There is more to Life than one can find in the "funny papers," but it is nice when one finds enough of Life there, framed in a comic way, to allow us to laugh, when we may feel like crying. I will miss the lift that laughing to FBOFW gave me. This is for me not the end of the world that the cessation of Calvin and Hobbes was, but it is a loss nonetheless. Where else am I to turn for Canadian wisdom about what Life is really all about, anyway?

Blessings to you all-- for better or for worse!

Unnatural Order

2008-05-01T09:58:00.000-07:00

I work to get my plants just so;
I snip and trim and tend.
For if I let them simply grow,
watering now and then,
they would go all over the place!
Who knows what would happen?
In this labor I find solace,
a peace approaching Zen.
Yet it meddles in their nature,
to make them twist and bend
into the shapes that I prefer,
not what they were given.
I fear for what has got wrung out
and lost in the bargain.
Then a humming bird comes, and shouts,
the holiness regained.

Going to Pot

2008-04-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

There was a "Peanuts" cartoon lately that I identified with. Charlie Brown is lying in bed, not sleeping. He says, "Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I think, 'Maybe I can change my life around.'" In the second panel, he thinks, "Then a voice comes to me out of the dark, 'Sure, make a lot of paperwork for the rest of us.'"

Lately, I have been creating a lot of paperwork for many people! This truly is a common consequence of change.

I have been transplanting. Last Sunday I took to gardening, always a nervous time for my plants. I took almost all of them out of the pots they'd been in, and put them in others. I pulled them up by their pot-bound, intertwined roots and shook 'em until they gave up as much of their "old" dirt as they would let go of, and then I put 'em in "new" dirt, in new "digs," by themselves, or with new "bedfellows." I fertilized/fed and watered.

And now I wait. I wait to see how the "transplant" has taken. Will they like it? Will they flower? Or will they shrivel, shrink from the shock-- or simply because they liked it the way it was? (I mean, plants like people can grow comfortable when roots are intertwined in familiar ways. Freedom-- room to grow and be ourselves-- can be a formidable thing.)

I have been transplanted. For thirty years or more I had been living in the same series of pots, in the same soil, trying to live in some way true to myself and also "bloom where I was planted," as the saying goes. Well, what I found out was that some soil is not altogether fit for some plants, and vice versa. Hopefully, I have been transplanted into soil better fit for me to thrive in-- as myself, for the gifts I have been given and the gifts I have to give, to bear the fruit I actually have within me to bear. I cannot know for sure.

I can only trust The Gardener. I know that I wouldn't have been transplanted were it not for my own good, because The Gardener does not really care about how much paperwork such change eventuates! And I know that The Gardener is watching, watering, and waiting.

This column, this new blog, is my effort to see if I can bear new fruit, find another voice (or voices), to see for myself if this transplantation isn't truer to myself.

Let's see how this goes, ok, Dear Reader!