• Category Archives Feelings

  • Lalalalala

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                    Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Earlier this summer I went outside and found holes dug under the orchard fence.  Vega and Rigel had figured out a new way inside.  Once in they dug up the earth around three of our apple trees, in one case exposing about half the close in root system to the air.  When I saw this latest breach of our attempts to lead two live, dog owners and gardeners, I froze.  Something just crumpled.  I couldn’t deal with another one.  Not again.  This was one time too many, the straw…well, you know how it goes.

    I told Kate how I felt.  She said she understood since it was the way she had felt the last couple of years working for Allina.  That got me.  What I experienced was almost disgust, a visceral abhorrence and she had felt that toward her employers.  Wow.

    Later on, after the feeling waned, I once again repaired the breach, came up with a new system of entrance denial, which Vega and Rigel promptly conquered.  So, I went at it again, then winter came.  We’re on hiatus now till spring with the ground frozen.

    When I flipped on NPR today, as I drove over the pharmacy to pick up my drugs, there was a debate beginning on gun control.  When I heard the opposing arguments, I had that same reaction.  Disgust.  Ultimate weariness.  A not again feeling.  I turned it off immediately.  This is not the first time I’ve had this feeling about political discourse.

    Each time I have it I turn off the radio, put down the newspaper.  Put my fingers in my ears and go lalalalalala.  Then, I think about all the years when I didn’t react like this.  When, instead, I joined with others of like mind and took political action.

    Each time I turn my head away from a political debate, I feel a frisson of guilt.  If folks like me don’t stand up, then who will?  And, the only necessity for the advancement of evil is for good men to do nothing.  I know this.  I believe it.  I even realize the self-righteousness trap in this logic and know it must not defeat action.  Still, at times, like yesterday, I turn away.

    Am I certainly right?  Of course not.  Is my opinion as important and as valid as anyone else’s?  Of course it is.  And I’m not alone.  Yet, at times, my feeling is that the political world has moved past me.  That I’m too old, too short term, too distant, too something to do anything.  At some point, I know, as with Vega and Rigel, I’ll lean in again, listen, parse, perhaps even organize.

    Right now though.  It’s lalalalalala all the way.

     


    Dogs Family Feelings Politics

  • Moving Up the Emotional Scale

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

    I have a spotter in the world’s least emotional state, Singapore.  Long term resident, sister Mary.  Singapore, along with much of Asia, loves campaigns to improve public behavior.  Mary spotted several current signs that attempt to deal with Singapore’s emotional flat line.  Here they are:

    This last one reveals a major part of the problem.  No, not the sunflowers.  But, soar like an eagle, dream believe achieve, learn from the best.  These make happiness a tool for success.  Ain’t gonna work.  Happiness happens.  It’s a secondary outcome of other attitudes and behaviors.  Check out the positive psychology folks for example.

    See Martin Seligman’s work at his website:  authentic happiness.

     


    Faith and Spirituality Family Feelings

  • The Past Is Not Past

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                                   Harvest Moon

    The internet is forever.  At least for now.  I learn this every so often and right now I’m learning it again in regard to a post of mine from two years ago that has become my most commented upon.  It talks of a difficult time in my life, when my then wife, Judy, and I bought a farm near Nevis, Minnesota, a back to the land moment.

    Johnny and Judy, could be a mack the knife sort of tune, left me standing by myself one weekend in September of 1974, standing alone on 80 acres of scrubby land with a house and some outbuildings.  They took off for the Caribbean to spend the winter working boats sailing those waters.  Judy and I were married.

    I took a quit claim deed to the farm signed by Judy and an uncontested divorce to the Hubbard County courthouse and legally resolved that episode of my life.  Legal action, of course, is not emotional nor does it shed history, rather it records emotional and historic changes.

    As I say in that short piece, written after a day of using the chainsaw on our land here in Andover, I don’t blame Judy.  I don’t.  Three years after this time I acknowledged my alcoholism and started on the long road to recovery.  My behavior toward her in the months and years preceding 1974 would have made me want to run away to the Caribbean.  A bad time in my life that reached its nadir right about then.

    Our life, our whole life, remains within us and within the memories of others.  It is not something we can set aside, push out of the way, deny.  We can, with time, place events in our life in context, in the trajectory of a whole life, yet they remain what they were.

    I am no longer that young man, just as Judy is no longer that young woman.  We have both aged, gone different ways and had our own futures.  Those were exciting, revolutionary times and much of the revolution happened at the personal level.  Judy, Johnny and I played a part in that change, a small part, yet large in that moment of our lives.

     


    Feelings Memories

  • Mr. In Between

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                           Harvest Moon

    This hanging in between, between the trauma of the operation and a recovered back to normal state, has begun to wear on me.  Already.  I’ve forced myself, as I said below, to go slow, rest.  Now that the pain has almost totally subsided, that’s not so easy.  When there was an ouch or two or more to deal with, I reached into the reserve we all carry for those things and pushed through it.

    (former web page vanished)

    In the time while I’m still vulnerable to undoing the repair that has been done and beyond the pain, this time, my guard goes down.  Fatigue and unrealistic expectations begin to set in.  I remember this from my Achilles repair, too.  As I got closer to the end of the two months in a cast and on crutches, my desire to throw them away, cut off the cast and get on with it was extreme.

    The main effect I see now is mental.  I’m physically fatigued and my body still has work to do on integrating that mesh which leaves my mental acuity less than I need.  Latin just seems too hard.

     


    Feelings Health

  • We Needed Each Other

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                                       Harvest Moon

    The Woollies gathered tonight at Scott Simpson’s house.  Our usual first Monday meeting night.  Unusual to be in a home for this meeting. (usually held in a restaurant)  Scott and Yin felt a quiet home would be better for a time with Bill Schmidt.

    It was.

    Bill continues his centered, positive perspective while acknowledging tears and grief.  We listened to him.  Ate a meal together.

    Main thought/feeling from the evening.  How rare and precious it is to be part of a group of men who could come together with a member who has lost a spouse, the day after, in fact, and be important enough to matter.  This time, this meeting was, in many ways, like other times we’ve been together, focused on the situation of one of us in a tough or delicate situation in our lives.

    Those other times, the retreats, the casual gatherings have glued us together now with a bond not seen normally outside of families.  Bill needed us and we needed to be with him.

    A gift beyond measure and one we have given to ourselves, over and over again.  Thanks, guys.  I was proud of us tonight.

     


    Feelings Third Phase Woolly Mammoths

  • A Peat Bog

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lugnasa                                                        Hiroshima Moon

    This has been a down August for me.  Still slogging through molasses.  Only bursts of energy, clarity.  Don’t like it.  Doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it.  One foot in front of the other.

    Worked all morning on Missing.  Right now I’m summarizing chapters, creating character bios and defining scenes.  The result will be an outline with chapter summaries and a read through, quick, yes, but still a read through.  Once the read through is done and all chapters summarized, I’ll be ready to start working on Loki’s Children.

    When that comes, my days will be Missing revision, writing Loki’s children, translating Latin and the occasional tour.  Hoping that I will get assigned to the terracotta warrior show since I’m prepared already for Qin Shi Huang-Di and the rise of the Qin dynasty.

    Right now all this sounds too much, but a hold over from the days of salaried work is a good work ethic once I’m clear on where I’m going.  That means I’ll keep going.

    The bees.  Dejected, yes.  Defeated, no.  Last year I decided I would buy packages, build up the colonies and take the honey they produced, all of it, including their winter stores, then start over again the next year.  This was partly a response to difficulty over-wintering bees, partly to mite loads.  Fail.

    So.  I have to look at this a first year project, in which case I have one colony, the aggressive one, that will have plenty of honey and brood for the upcoming winter.  The other, the less active one, had, today, brood.  Surprise!  They must have swarmed earlier and created a new queen.  Not sure right now how to encourage them through the winter, but I’ll find out.  If the strong colony produces any extra honey, I’ll give it to the weak one.


    Art and Culture Asia Bees Feelings Writing

  • A Theory

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lugnasa                                                         Hiroshima Moon

    I have a theory, at least part of a theory, about melancholy.  As it applies to me.  It has two parts at least.  The first is that there is a dark river, my own Styx or Cocytus, that flows through my soul.  It’s headwaters are back in the distant, psychic past, perhaps my mother’s early death, perhaps even my childhood bout with polio.  Both shocks to the inner cathedral, perhaps cracking its dome?  This river, often underground, below consciousness, surfaces occasionally and interrupts daily life, flooding it with the blackness of those times.

    The second may seem odd.  A movement toward creativity.  That is, when I decide–conscious choice–to get to work at my writing, with the intention of staying at it for a long period of time,like writing a novel, there is a turn inward and downward, a sort of deflection of energy from the outer world into the place–you know it if you’ve been there–where the ideas live.

    Somewhere in here, too, is the question of succeed or fail, achieve or fail; a question I addressed a while back in the post, there is only make.  This tension may get reinforcement from the second part of the theory.  That is, as I move into writing, my succeed or fail flag gets raised and along with it a flag that reads danger ahead.  Be cautious!

    As I said, too, a while back, I’m at a point where the reasons are less important than the reality.  A reality that I know includes a gradual climb back up, up to the place where I know there is only make.  The place where that dark river disappears again underground and where the creative work is underway.  A place I look forward to tonight.


    Feelings

  • More Doing

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                                      Hiroshima Moon

    More doing.  A couple of weeks ago our dogs, imagining we were bored, I think, decided to dig under the orchard fence rather than vault over it where I had put the electric fence.  Thing is, they succeeded.

    (a 2010 effort, getting ready for the Olympic digging)

    The first route underneath resulted in a shallow cave under the second of two blueberry mounds that we have, leaving them in danger of collapse.  That was when it was too hot to move, so indolence carried the task through until today.  Got out the shovel and reversed the dog’s action carried out with their two front feet.  If it was Vega and Rigel, and I’m sure it was, then they probably took turns, as I have seen them do numerous times.  One gets tired, the other steps in to continue the task.  Two big dogs can move a lotta sand fast that way.

    Digging underneath the fence requires a different strategy than electric fence since I don’t want to run a low wire-rope.  Too much trouble with plants, snagging, that sort of thing.  My method in this instance is to bury chicken wire after having wired it to the larger mesh we have between the wooden rails. This works.

    The California fence that we had put in for the vegetable garden, five foot tall chain link in
    black with red cedar posts, top rails and bottom boards, would have worked better here, too, but we didn’t choose it.

    (California fence)

    Also collected the onions whose tops had fallen over, the sign for harvesting, put up the old screen door on supports in the near garden shed and laid out this year’s yellow onion crop for drying.  After about a week they’ll go downstairs into our small root cellar simulacrum.  The yellows keep best.  Reds don’t keep at all; whites in between.

    Finished weeding the mounds around our fruit trees and the blueberry patches, helped Kate start the mower and came in.  Kate came in a few minutes later to say she had disturbed the ornery bees.  Two stings.  We have one hyper-vigilant colony and one almost somnolent.  Odd.

     


    Feelings Garden 📎and tagged

  • La Revedere

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                       Hiroshima Moon

    The Hiroshima moon rose in sickle form over the front range, its young light just above a bank of storm clouds.

    Left Jon and Jen’s tonight around 9 pm.  Ruth came up and grabbed my legs, put her head against my waist.  She didn’t say anything.  I hugged her, told her I loved her and left.

    Though children are never as innocent as we credit them, they are often transparent in their feelings, which appears as innocence.  Perhaps it is innocence, to be out there in the world as  you are, with no guard up.

    We may mature as we age, but to the extent that we become opaque to the world, we will never again know innocence.

    Innocence is the rising of the young moon, slender and beautiful, perhaps aging can be the waning of the same moon, a sickle slender and beautiful.

    Grandchildren touch the heart in a way no other relationship can.  Ruth and Gabe occupy that part leaning toward the future; the part of the heart that will not die, but will live on in the lives of others.  In a profound sense we need our grandchildren far more than they need us.

    Without them most lives hit a barrier as bleak as the dark of the moon, extinction.  With them the heart never stops beating, it transfers bodies, ready for another lifetime.

     


    Family Feelings

  • I’m So Glad

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                     Garlic Moon

    Be Glad You Exist, the Greek inscription I mentioned a few posts ago, got me thinking.  A persistent prod in American culture is the I’m not doing that well enough, or fast enough, or soon enough or with the right attitude.  Not studying enough, eating too much, not working enough, not working out enough, not relaxing, not being charitable enough or financially successful enough.

    It’s an argument from lack that has as its premise that jockey metaphor I came up with a month or so ago.  In case you forgot, I did until just now, I suggested that many of us take on board, sometime in childhood, a jockey who rides us, rides us hard, always pushing us toward the next, the better, the hoped for, the not yet achieved.

    This argument from lack is the jockey’s prod, his quirt that comes out when he senses flagging will or decreasing purpose.

    But, what if Be Glad You Exist was the baseline?  Just that.

    Then we might start not from a place of lack but from a place of adding, of completing, of maturing, of enriching.  Moving ourselves not with the lash, but with a model more like Maslow’s where the underpinning opens new possibilities, like the emergence of the butterfly, say, from the caterpillar.  A caterpillar is not a lesser butterfly, but its necessay precursor.

    Orienting ourselves this way (I realize I’m writing about myself here, but maybe a bit about you, too.) does not require the scorched earth of bad diet, bad language skills, inadequacy of any kind; rather, it could have Be Glad You Exist as the ground of our being.  Sounds like a good thing to me.


    Aging Faith and Spirituality Feelings Humanities Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Third Phase