• Category Archives Feelings

  • 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

  • A Third Phase Entry: Learning How to Die

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                              New Garlic Moon

    Whew.  Over to Riverfalls (east into Wisconsin, about an hour) for Warren’s father’s funeral.  Then, in rush hour, out to St. Louis Park for the Woolly meeting this month at the Woodfire Grill. (west of the Cities)  So much driving.

    Funerals.  The wedding equivalent of our age range.  We meet friends there, catch up, honor the family and the final journey.  Then we go home, secretly glad we were attending another funeral, not being featured.

    Though.  We agreed tonight, Mark, Scott, Bill, Frank and myself, that what we learn from Moon’s recent death, Warren’s father and mother, Sheryl’s father and mother, Bill and Regina’s confrontation with cancer, is how to die.  It is the end of this phase of life as surely as a degree ended the first phase, career and family the second.

    It is this that changed at our retreat two weeks ago.  We acknowledge and are ready to learn how to die.  And how to live until we do.  It is a joy and a true blessing to have men ready to walk down this ancientrail together.  And to be one of them.


    Aging Faith and Spirituality Feelings Retirement Third Phase 📎and tagged

  • Rainy Weather

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                New Garlic Moon

    Rain.  Thanks, weather gods.  Lightning and thunder and high winds, they scare Rigel and Gertie.  Rigel tries to bark the thunder away.  Which, needless to say, increases the noise level some.  All the veggies got a good soaking, the orchard and the flowers.  Nice.

    Kate said tonight that her first job was a great fit, wrapping presents at a gift shop.  She also said she thought medicine fit her, too.  I surprised myself then by saying, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever had a job that fit me.  Not one.  Except maybe the last 20 years.”  Writing, being a husband and a father, gardener.  Sometimes I get exasperated with the boss, but that’s true in every work situation, right?  (just to be clear.  le boss est moi)

    Kate thought I might have made a good journalist.  Maybe.  Hard to say.  Strange to look back over my life and realize I never worked (by that I mean, employed specifically for) at anything I really enjoyed.  I did a lot of things I considered important, good, worthwhile, but that’s not the same, is it?

     


    Family Feelings Weather +Climate

  • A Thought, A Sigh

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                            Beltane Moon

    All day.  A thought comes.  A sigh, hoping to delve into, oh, say, renaissance humanism.  Dive in and just stay there until all there is to absorb crawls inside my skin and remains.  Or, maybe Romania.  Wondering just how the Slavic countries ended up north and south of Romania-Hungary-Austria.  Here’s another part of the world about which I know almost nothing.

    Later, watching Kate, seeing her sinking back into a life without paid work, a sense of relaxation, of being at home.  At last.

    Looking at the Google art.  A kris.  A southeast Asia blade with a wavy, not straight edge.  Indonesia.  Again, a country with a population comparable to the US and lots of islands, but, again, not much is in my head about it.  A little.  Bali.  Krakatoa.  Suharto.  My god, it has 17508 islands.

    Lyndon Johnson.  In the first volume of Robert Caro’s four volume (so far) biography.  He dominates, pushes, acts out against his parents.  The hill country of texas.  A difficult place, a trap for the unwary.  Most of the people who lived there.

    The dogs.  At the vet.  18 years to the same vet.  Many dogs, all panting, all nervous.  Rigel, Vega and Kona today.  Rigel and Vega, sweet dogs.  Kona more aloof.  A grand dame.

    Irrigation overhead busted in the southern vegetable garden.  Pulled loose from the pcv that feeds it water.  Have to fix it.  Plant more collards and beets.  I’ve touched most of the plants here, memories.  Buying them at Green Barn.  Digging a spot for them.  Pouring water on them.  Over the years, 18, lots of plants, thousands.  One at a time.  In the soil.  Maybe pick it up and move it or divide it.  That sense of a deep, long connection.

    Dream of the Red Chamber.  Chinese literature, the third classic of the four major ones.  Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  Monkeys Journey to the West. Sinking into the rhythms of another culture.  Reading it on the Kindle.  Odd juxtaposition of past and present.

    original by Ivan Walsh)

    Now, tired.  Smelling the lilacs Kate brought me.  Thinking of sleep.

     

     


    Dogs Family Feelings Literature Travel 📎and tagged