• Category Archives Feelings

  • Being. Together.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                   Bloodroot Moon

    The Woolly Mammoths met tonight at the Red Stag.  Stefan, Lonnie, Bill, Scott, Frank, Warren, Mark, Tom and me.  We talked of grandkids and blood sugar levels, the first days of retirement and the career of Teddy Roosevelt.

    Some time ago I learned that these kind of gatherings are therapeutic in and of themselves.  By that I mean there is no particular therapeutic strategy in play save the most ancient one of a gathering of friends, yet that one, the ancientrail of friendship in a group, has curative powers.  My shoulder feels better.  I have a smile lurking just around the corner of my mouth.

    Here we are seen by each other.  Our deep existence comes with us, no need for the chit-chat and polite conversation of less intimate gatherings.  The who that I am within my own container and the who that I am in the outer world come the closest to congruence at Woolly meetings, a blessed way of being exceeded only in my relationship with Kate.

    Now over 25 years of being together.  Then, in the second phase of work and nuclear family, now mostly in the third phase.  What will we be to each other as this life change gradually envelopes us all?  We suspect it will be more than it has been up to this point and up to this point it’s been very good.


    Feelings Friends Health Woolly Mammoths

  • The Undiscover’d Country

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                          Bloodroot Moon

    At times my past bleeds into the present, creating small emotional events, upsetting my inner equilibrium.  Right now is one of those times.  Many of us are heir to understandings of ourselves as malformed in some way, not quite right.  I certainly am.

    (Dante Gabriel Rossetti    Hamlet and Ophelia 1858 pen and ink drawing)

    These irruptions come in the OMG I’m not doing enough form or OMG I have not done enough or OMG I’ll never do enough forms.  My anxious self underlines and bolds these self-declarations as my mind races back to find the not enoughs in the past–no graduate school, no published books, never made it to Washington, the not enoughs in the present–Missing not revised, Loki’s Children not started, no time for serious in-depth reading, not helping out enough at home or making enough time for friends and then uses both of these information streams to predict a dire future:  no books published ever, no friends, no concrete results of any kind, then, wink out.

    If this line of thought continues, I’m going to have to visit my analyst, John Desteian.  In touch with him (and, now, Kate) I’ve been able to dispel these strong phantoms, learn to live with facts not illusion and get on with what is a good life.  This is, I think, as much due to faulty wiring as anything else, my family coming with a strong genetic pattern for bipolar disorder, though I don’t believe my issues rise to that level of dysfunction.  I know, not enough even there, eh?

    Not long ago I re-read Hamlet’s speech in Scene I, a scene I had memorized long ago for a dramatic presentation contest.  It’s baldly existential view surprised me, even shocked me. A line from it came to me as I woke up this morning and it captures my feeling tone right now:   “…the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”  This exactly describes me when I get into these episodes.

    In the lines just before this one Shakespeare refers to death as the undiscover’d country from which no traveler returns and identifies the dread of that journey as producing the pale cast of thought, thus rendering a person unable to act.  To be or not to be neatly summarizes all this.

     


    Art and Culture Faith and Spirituality Feelings Health Third Phase 📎and tagged

  • Another Country

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                               Bloodroot Moon

    A few pictures from my trip to Mt. Vernon.

    Before the pictures though.  Here in Washington and at Mt. Vernon the early history of our nation has a presence on the street, among the documents, in the traditions, and by shaping the forms of architecture from government buildings to residential homes: the brick homes, the limestone greco-roman revival government buildings and monuments and the cobblestone street in Alexandria, Virginia.  The constitution and the declaration of independence lie entombed in the Archives not far from where I write this.

    Each place you go some element of our history peeks around the corner, waves. Says, “Psst, want to see some history, kid?”  I remember the same sense when I was on the Capitol, the sleeper train that runs between Chicago and Washington.  Once we got into central Pennsylvania the architecture changed.  We passed places I knew mostly from history books.

    Here’s the thing.  I’m a Midwestern guy born, raised and never left.  A heartlander.  This does not feel like my country here on the east coast.  When I think of Minnesota from here, it feels far away, up north and filled with pine trees and lakes.  Which, of course, as most of you know who read this, it is.  Pine trees and lakes are in a large part of the state and they do define our identity as Minnesotans.

    This feels like the old world, Europe to our heartland new world.  A place so built up and fought over and crusted up with money and power that it has a different tone entirely from the one at home.

    Sure, we’re all subject to the same government and fly the same flag, speak the same language and send our kids off to the same military.  True.  But the east coast, like the south, the West and the Left Coast are different enough to be different countries in Europe or Southeast Asia or Africa.  You know this, I’m sure, but I’m experiencing it right now and it unsettles me in some way.

    Here are the pictures.

    This gallery contains 5 photographs in all as   photograph etc.

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  • Sightseeing By the Dollar

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                 Bloodroot Moon

    Whenever I travel, I get performance anxiety.  Weird, huh?  Spending the amount of money required for travel makes me want to get plenty of sightseeing in per dollar. But, how much is enough?

    Surely walking past the Willard, the Dept. of Treasury, the Whitehouse and out to the Lincoln Monument, then back is enough.  Isn’t it?  How many hours at the museum or paintings per visit is enough?  Does eating in the cafeteria count?

    Now I wouldn’t raise these questions at all if I felt I’d done enough, so  you can tell how I’m doing by my own barometer, but I question my barometer.  At home I work most in the morning, usually a couple of hours in the afternoon after the nap, too.  That seems fine to me.  Most of the time.

    (Me wondering about enough.)

    On vacation though I get up in the morning around 8, my usual time, wander to some breakfast place, then head off for sightseeing that counts.  However, about 1 pm or so, my everyday nap habit reels me in, back to the hotel.  After a nap it’s the middle of the afternoon and doing much else just doesn’t happen until dinner. Which is the big event, then I’m done, not being a drinker, dancer, night outer type.

    Anyhow, it’s a very bourgeoisie problem.  Or, it’s not exactly a problem so much as it a perception of value for the dollar.  How much more Babbity can you get?

    Ah, finally I’ve written long enough to get to the nub of it.  After my trips the memories and thoughts enjoined during them always enrich my life. Always.  So, it’s not the sights seen, nor the miles walked that matter.  It’s the quality of the time overall and it has been this time and will be next time, wonderful.   All that thinking on power that I haven’t written about yet.  But I will.

    This is a guy, just some guy, in front of the D.C. city hall getting made up for a press conference on the front steps.  A very D.C. moment.

     


    Feelings Third Phase Travel

  • Percussive

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                                           Valentine Moon

    Woke up.  Turned on the phone.  Nothing.  Frozen.  Onto the internet.  Tried several fixes. Nothing.  Over to Verizon. No joy there either.  I’d had my HTC Thunderbolt for four years, so I opted to get a new phone, an HTC DNA.  Another Android phone, in the same lineage as the Thunderbolt so I already understood its basic use.  Not cheap, not outrageously expensive.  Did add one feature to the plan, text messaging.  Yes, after four years of owning a smartphone I’m catching up with today’s elementary school kids.

    Later on Kate and I went into the McPhail Center, a place for music learning and performance, now located very near the new Guthrie and the Mill City Museum.  We were there for a performance by the Bakken Trio featuring the gamelan.  The gamelan is an Indonesian instrument, a percussion instrument played by several people.  It includes gongs, zithers, xylophones and upside down bronze pots that each have a tone and are struck with a mallet.

    The gamelan’s music organizes around rhythm and melody, having as a particular feature density of tone achieved by the layering of one rhythm on top of another simultaneously.  There are no harmonics.

    Joko, an Indonesian gamelan artist who teaches gamelan, has lived in the Twin Cities now for 18 years.  He said that a full gamelan orchestra is the largest percussive ensemble in the world.  (see image above for an Indonesian setting).  Gamelan concerts typically run 8 hours and gamelan musicians in Indonesia may play 8 hours during the day and another 8 at night.  Geez.

    I wanted to see this because I’m fascinated by how other people do things.  In this case, music.

    The concert itself featured quartet pieces by Ravel and Debussy, both influenced by a traveling program focused on Javanese culture, plus a work by a contemporary composer, Louis Harrison.  Impressed with the gamelan music and its difference from the Western tradition Debussy and Ravel both incorporated it.  Especially in pizzicato and in movements with narrow tonal ranges.

    (Ravel)

    Both Debussy and Ravel are in the romantic tradition and, for some reason I can’t explain, I don’t like romantic classical music.  I say for some reason because in painting and literature I find myself a romantic by nature and inclination.  There were some beautiful melodies, especially in the Ravel, his String Quartet in F Major.

    The Harrison piece, though, Philemon and Baukis (for violin and gamelan), was wonderful.  It was airy and spacious, filled with the rapid changing of tempos typical of gamelan music. Harrison builds and plays the gamelan himself.  Philemon and Baukis, btw, is a story found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  It was the only piece in which the gamelan played.

    Following the concert we ate at Sea Change.  We had a miserable experience there a few years back, but tonight was pleasant.  Then back home to the burbs.

    Over the meal Kate and I discussed a possible (probable) move into the city at some point before infirmity strikes us so we can enjoy the city life again.  I’m hesitant about it, having spent 19 years adapting myself and my life to the exurbs, but aging has its own relentless pressures.


    Art and Culture Asia Feelings Third Phase Translating Metamorphoses 📎and tagged

  • It Takes Courage To Get To The Ancient Altar

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                                 Valentine Moon

    “It takes courage to get to the ancient altar
    of the moment where I create individual time…I am making it, my time visibly becoming me.”    “Individual Time,” Alice Notley

    If I interpret her poem correctly, in it Alice Notley has commented on this author picture, arguing against those who would have had it prettied up.  And I get it.

    When we talked about wrinkles and road map faces last night, I believe we were in her territory.  I wanted then to quote a favorite author Jorge Luis Borges, but the quote was longer than I could recall easily.  Here it is:

    “Through the years, a man (sic) peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.” – Jorge Luis Borges

    Combining the two we could say that it takes courage to get to the ancient altar of our own aged face.  And to follow Notley, why alter what it took courage to gain?

    The Keaton side of my family, my Mom’s family, wrinkles early and the men go bald.  That means I look my age and then some.  I have no problem with that.  This face is what you get when you look at me; it’s the one I’ve earned and I’m glad to have it.  No amount of smoothing, lifting or making up will change what it is, the patient labyrinth of lines that trace my own image, the long journey to this ancient altar.

     

     


    Aging Faith and Spirituality Feelings Third Phase 📎and tagged

  • Ghosts

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

    Today, a bit tired due to early rising, moving books put a weight on my shoulders.  It was the past and its tangled feelings.  Found my first passport and saw a young man with a full head of dark brown hair and a beard that matched.  Surprised me, so long have I seen his gray descendant in the mirror.

    (arrestedmotion.com 2012 10 upcoming aron wiesenfeld new paintings arcadia-gallery)

    That was my passport for Colombia, the trip to check out a bank for the poorest of the poor.  Carolyn Levy was in my life at that point, between my divorce from Raeone and meeting Kate a year plus later.  A hard time, raising a 6 year old boy, working night and day between church meetings and organizing.  A hard time, too, since the future had grown unclear.  Something big had happened or was about to happen, but its outlines in my life were not yet clear.

    Then I moved out the books related to shifting my ordination to the Unitarian-Universalist movement.   Again, a time when the future had become unclear.  Writing had not shown the promise it offered when Kate and I agreed I should leave the Presbytery.  Frustrated there, I regressed, headed back to the trade that I knew.  More lack of clarity.

    Poor decisions.  I chose Unity UU over First Unitarian for my internship.  An error.   The humanist congregation would have fit me much better.  Then, at the end of an interesting year, I accepted a job as minister of development.  Chief fund raiser.   OMG.  One of the really boneheaded decisions in my life.  Not the only one, for sure, and not the worst one, but dumbest?  Probably.  Kate saw it coming. I ignored her.  Sigh.

    (Vincenzo Foppa The Young Cicero Reading 1464)

    Those books were the heaviest to move because I’ve traveled out of the UU circle, too.  A solo practitioner am I, as the Wiccans say.  In that vein though I retained many of my books on spirituality, works on natural theology and those commentaries I mentioned on the Torah and the book of Revelation.

    Heavy, especially with lack of sleep thrown in.  Ghosts.  They’re real and they live in the closets, basements and attics of our mind.


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Feelings Travel 📎and tagged

  • All Aboard

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

    Of course, it’s just a spot on the earth’s orbit around the sun.  The very spot where you or I slid out of the birth canal, or, in my case, were excised through the abdomen, kicking and bawling, with no clue about why the world had suddenly gone from watery and warm to non-viscous and cool.  No wonder we cry.

    (So, there I am, just a bit more than halfway between perihelion and the spring equinox.)

    And, it’s an extremely ordinary event.  I mean, everyone who ever lived–everyone–had one.  Certain cultures, I’m told, place no emphasis on the birthday at all and maybe they’re right, but the sentimentality of our way pleases me all the same.

    People call us and tell us they love us.  Are happy for us.  Gifts come.  Cards.  Smiles.  A feeling of particularity overshadows all else for at least one day.  Love gets concrete on birthdays.

    Advancing age makes me no less interested in celebrating this most ordinary of events which is, of course, supremely extraordinary in one important way:  it’s the only time this happened to me.  Or you.  66 is a good number.  So was 16.  26.  76.  The number says you’re still on board spaceship earth and punching your ticket for another full ride.

     

     


    Family Feelings 📎and tagged

  • Getting My Kicks

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                                             Valentine Moon

    Woke up, saw fluffy white snow outlining the trees, shrubs and fences.  A beautiful way to start my 66th year.  Spoke with brother Mark, Mary kept off by technical issues.  A new hard drive.  Always a good way to lose a program or two.  As they say in the Old Testament, blessings and curses.

    I’ve been motoring along this morning finishing up a lengthy session in Ovid.  Or, I should say, several one hour or one hour + sessions that equal a lengthy one.  I’ve translated 21 verses and I’m confident of most of what I’ve done.  There are still hitches in my git along, but at least for right now I seem to have a flow underway.

    Almost finished with the Eddas.  Then I’m going to put pencil to large format desk pad and start roughing out Loki’s Children.  I want to get it thought through to some extent before I start my revision of Missing.  That way, if I have to change things in Missing (and I think I will) I can do that in the upcoming 3rd revision.  I hope #3 is what will make me ready to start the search for an agent.

    As I said the other day, I’m cruising into the third phase of my life, which I count as having started with the arrival of my Medicare card, with clarity of purpose, emotional support from family and friends, and good health.  Here we go.  Charlie, the final chapter.


    Family Feelings Friends Latin Third Phase Translating Metamorphoses Writing 📎and tagged

  • Fixed

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                                 New (Valentine) Moon

    Over the course of my life I’ve learned how to do many different things.  Among them has not been handyman type jobs.  I’m not clueless but you probably couldn’t tell that if you watched me trying to figure out how to rehang the front door today.

    Between us Kate and I approached that door with more years in educational institutions than would be good certification for our sanity.  It defeated us.  We called a mechanical engineer now working as a handyman.  He fixed it.  My kinda solution to these kind of problems.

    Having said that I will admit to a sense of male inadequacy during the time he was here.  I mean, I know I can’t fix it; I know he can; so, where does that put me in the testosterone parade?  Pretty far back, almost to the x chromosomes.  I’m not proud of it, but there it was.

    Although, on my side, I have read that baldness occurs due to increased testosterone, so by that measure I can just about be the drum major.

    Best of all though I have a partner who knows my flaws–I’m bad with a hammer and screw driver–and still loves me.


    Feelings