Category Archives: Feelings

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings

Bored

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Lughnasa                                                                                College Moon

A beautiful day. Odd for me since I woke up early, got some work done early as a result and have time now, since I only workout on MWF, that I really don’t know what to do with. I’m bored. Which is in unusual for me. At least to admit it.

If folks say they’re bored and act as if the world owes them something interesting to do, I lay it down to lack of imagination. So, I loop this smug comment back onto myself.

Boredom, like melancholy, has come to have a place in my life though. And for similar reasons. They are both caesuras, gaps between this action and that one, between that project and this one. Too often I can use a writing project or that gardening chore, or working on this blog, or whatever else is available to fill uncomfortable lapses in time.

When I engage tasks for tasks sake, I learn nothing, I press away whatever might come to me if I go still, become quiet, as I do sometimes at night. Accepted in this way both boredom and melancholy have a purging effect, a cleansing of the anxiety driven task completion mode so common among us Americans. And doubly so among us Americans of northern European ancestry.

You might even see boredom and melancholy as cousins to meditation, a certain stilling of the mind, letting the gears grind more slowly or even go to full stop. I hesitate to assign them a utilitarian purpose because both have their dark elements.  Boredom’s I really can’t be bothered accents and melancholy’s self-denigration are negative in themselves. But when either boredom or melancholy helps us step back from our life, examine it, see what might be missing or what’s too abundant, then they serve a real purpose in the psyche’s economy.

 

Dogs, Feelings

Dogs

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Lughnasa                                                                          College Moon

Dogs. Vega clunks around, unable to navigate easily with the wide plastic e-collar (Elizabethan collar) attached to her neck. The e-collar keeps her from opening up the surgical repair of her cut, now stapled closed. It does not prevent, however, one of the other three from doing it for her, so we engage now in considered logistics as we move dogs from one room to another, always keeping Vega separate.

This is not a new situation for us, or for Vega.

Animals, be they cats or dogs, birds or fish, have special places in the homes of many people. It’s easy for an outsider, a non-pet lover, to wonder why. Pets, especially dogs, are expensive, time-consuming (we spent five hours with Vega yesterday), often messy and can make other life activities more difficult (think traveling, in particular).

What do they offer, these animals lodged somewhere between the wild and the domestic? Do they take the place of children? No. Do they take the place of friends? No. Are they vanity accessories? In some instances perhaps.

They are always life companions. No, they’re not children and mostly not even child substitutes. No, they are companions in their own animal way. Not a human friend, but, a canine or feline friend, under the particular terms of that sort of arrangement.

Each one comes with their own temperament, their idiosyncrasies, some breed determined, but most that same combination of genetics and experience that shape differences in humans. Rigel, Vega’s sister, on the first day at our house got her head stuck in the gate leading off from the deck. She wanted to see what was on its other side. I had to dismantle the gate. Her first day. Since then she and Vega have escaped numerous times, dug into the vegetable garden and the orchard and dug many deep holes.

On her own, though, Vega would do neither, escape or dig. Vega is a sweet follower outside. Inside she rules, outside she’s Rigel’s kid sister. Vega, on the other hand, finds thunder a non-event while Rigel goes back to her safe place by the garage door until the storm passes.

Celt, our first Irish Wolfhound, took a regal quality into his interactions with other humans. I.W.’s attract admirers. Their size and non-threatening demeanor encourage people to greet them. Celt took all this attention as merely acknowledging his special role n life. He would lie down, head up, paws crossed and allow people to pet him. When he was done, he got up.

Early on we thought Celt might like lure coursing, a racing event where sight hounds chase a lure around a course. When on the starting line, yellow vest with his number around his huge chest, Celt watched as the other dogs released yelping after the lure, turned and walked over to a donut stand. Much more interesting to him.

Each one Scot and Morgana, Tira and Tully, Sortia and Iris, Buck and Emma, Bridget and Kona, Hilo and Vega, Rigel and Gertie, Kepler and Simon brought their own unique personality to our home. It’s the ongoing relationship, the companionship that counts.

Dogs are pack animals, so we always try to have enough dogs to achieve some sort of pack. I imagine our true benefit from them is that we get to become part of the pack, too.

Feelings

Bad Moon Rising. And Setting.

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Lughnasa                                                                    Lughnasa Moon

Had some time over the last couple of weeks where my feelings began to spiral down, that heaviness began to creep into my bones and pointlessness was on the rise. That’s turned around. Could be a chemical bath, new or more neuro-transmitters sloshing in the cranial cavity. Could be diving back into the garden, the Latin, the packing. Could be a bad moon setting.

My energy level has begun to return, too. Might be because of the red meat I haven’t eaten-a mostly ban. Might be because I’ve cut back on dairy. A not as much commitment. Might be halo effect from making those decisions. Who knows? I am, right now any way, in a time when habit changes come more easily, with less undermining from the id or whatever drives me to the bagel late at night.

The older I get the more I believe these changes have a strong chemical component, a driver based not in our past or in our stars, but in our glands. Somehow the internal tides ebb and flow, bathing us in mood altering chemicals of our own creation. Can we influence them, counter them? Yes. Can we eliminate them and enter the happy pink cotton candy land that seems just over the hill of the self-help section? Absolutely not. Life is not easy. Has not not been easy. Will not be easy. But it can be fun, gratifying, exciting and fulfilling.

 

Feelings

Fall Is In The Air

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Lughnasa                                                              Lughnasa Moon

There is, among us and within us, a current that pulls toward deep water, toward a cold darkness. It takes the warmer waters of our surface interactions and draws them down into the crevasses of our psyche. There the surface loses its bounce, its vitality and becomes absorbed.

We often make the mistake of assuming that this current’s engine lies within our experience and our personality, in that highly fungible interface between who we believe ourselves to be and the swirling mass of life outside us. But for most the powerful motive force which takes us into the bleakness is both more and less personal.

It is more personal because its constituents are in the stuff which make us, our DNA. It is less personal for the same reason, it is pre-psychological, implanted not in our character but in our chemistry. Yet, it manifests itself, or at least brings its influence to bear through psychology, through the mood shifts and terrible ideas that flash up from below, rising like leviathans.

 

 

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, The Move, Writing

Walk In Free

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Letting go. Retiring. Easing up. Yes, the pedal has lifted up from the metal and the car has begun to slow down. And that’s a good thing. Letting go of the expectations, admitting they were not met and saying damn the consequences has lifted a large weight off the shoulder of my psyche. Retiring it. Shrugged off and glad to have it gone.

Does this mean I’ll stop writing? No. Does it mean I’ll stop writing novels? No. It does mean that I no longer have my self’s forward progress attached to the results. And, you might say, about damned time. Maybe so.

Why is all this bubbling up right now? The move. As the stuff of my work gets winnowed, I can see the bones of my ambition more clearly. The skeletal support of my dreams are familial, horticultural, intellectual, classical and creative. The flesh and bones will be grandchildren, sons and daughters-in-law, wife, friends, plants, ideas, translations and more novels.

Failure does not mean stop. Vanish. Extinguished. It does not mean failed. No, it means redirection, recollecting, revisiting. This move has given me the freedom to shrug my shoulders, let the load fall to the way side. I want to walk into Colorado free to live a life given to that place, those people, that time. Now I can.

Going west has always had an element of reinvention, claiming another facet of life. May it be so.

Commentary on the news, Family, Feelings, Health, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

A Cloud Blocking The Sun

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

A word about depression. I’ve experienced melancholy and perhaps one bout of true depression, back in 1975 after my first divorce, but I know the real deal when I see it. As I think I’ve written here before, three of my aunts were manic-depressive. One aunt spent the bulk of her life in a mental hospital, another was in and out and the other starved herself to death. It’s a subtle beast, depression, not at all like the usual presentation of the slump shouldered, gloom faced lump in a chair.

No, the depressed person can push right up against life, engaging in work and social life, perhaps with less energy, but that’s often not noticeable. A mix of obligation, habit and denial can even make a depressed person seem normal, even to those closest to them. Robin Williams worked hard, it said in the paper today, in spite of his depression. This suggests that yesterday might have been different, worse than the other episodes of addiction and depression he suffered, but that may not be true.

This might be the time when the impulsive met the depressive, the time when, just for a terrible moment, the idea of death outweighed the struggle for life. It could be that had someone accidentally interrupted this moment he could still be working today. This is not at all blaming someone else, rather I’m pointing to the deadly consequence of entertaining, even for a moment, the notion of self-extinction.

Yes, existentialists, and I count myself among them, see suicide as a possible affirmative choice in a meaningless world. If life has become unbearable, for whatever reason, the decision to end it needs to be taken seriously, not discounted or abjured. And perhaps especially because I feel this way I’m sensitive to the effects of a momentary mood, a flight of dark fantasy, that may have irrevocable results. These moods are not the same as an existential choice, being overtaken by a feeling of worthlessness or dead-endedness is not a choice; rather, these are situations of capture when the self becomes hostage and even victim to psychic weather.

Moods, as the weather systems of the psyche, have great power and in our interior world we often mistake weather for climate. That is, we take the mood as indicative of a general state of existence, when it is really a thunder shower or a cloud blocking the sun.

We humans, and our lives, are so fragile, so vulnerable.

Family, Feelings, Memories

What Lies Beneath?

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Lughnasa                                                                 Lughnasa Moon

Clearing out files this morning. When I came to a group of dog related files, vet records, 1000P1030765pedigrees, lure coursing material, I got stopped for a while. In Sortia’s file, our second Irish Wolfhound, a black bitch that weighed 150 pounds, I found a letter from the University of Minnesota Veterinary Hospital. Sortia was euthanized there against our wishes during an overnight stay.

(Rigel and Vega taking the sun on our new deck)

Though the care our dogs have gotten at the U was usually exemplary, this event prevented us from saying good-bye to Sortia. Reading this letter about the incident brought it back to me in a flash. A wave of sudden sadness and deep grief gripped me for a moment, so strong that I had to put down the file and sit back while I stabilized. This feeling surprised me, came up strong from dead stop.

I also had an unexpected response a few weeks back while watching How To Train Your Dragon II.  In a reunion between the lead character, a young man, and his mother whom he thought dead, a wave of yearning swept through me. I wanted my mother to hug me. She’s been dead 50 years this year and I can not recall a feeling this strong about her in decades.

Here’s what I’m wondering. Do these strong feelings lie waiting for the right triggers, somewhat like PTSD? Or, do they swim around in the neural soup, always this strong, but engaged in another part of our psychic economy? How many of these knots of emotion exist within us, still tied to their original sources, and what significance do they have?

I may not be saying this well. As a general rule, I’m not in the grip of strong emotion unless something political is going on or I haven’t had enough sleep. Politics taps into something primal, as if a god within wakes and demands action. (I use this analogy with some reservation because I don’t believe my politics are divinely inspired, but it gives the right tone to the depth of my political feelings.) Being sleep deprived makes me irritable and far from my best self, so anger comes more easily then.

Now, maybe strong emotion could ride me more often.  Maybe I’m missing out on some part of life that flies those colors with some regularity.  But as a white middle-class guy, educated and with northern european ancestry, friends and spouse of the same, my emotional range is muted and these events, like the ones I describe, are rare.

No conclusion here. Only questions.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Third Phase

Nocturne

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Summer                                                            Most Heat Moon

As the night settles gently here, Kate is home and has taken Kepler with her to bed. He sleeps in his own bed near ours.

There’s a dynamic when she’s gone, a bit unsettling, but also affirming. Let me see if I can be clear about it. We are, together, more than two, but also two. When we are apart, the twoness remains in memory, but the day-to-day facticity of it shifts. There is no other body in the bed. Nor at breakfast. Nor as the day goes by. The simple joy of a dog’s antics, wonder at some passing insect or cloud, soothing of a momentary mood, a reminder of each other’s value just by being present one to the other is lost. Only for a while, but lost anyhow.

The affirmation comes in knowing these things by their absence. The unsettling rises with this third phase certainty, some day one of us will leave and not come back. What then? The facticity of the relationship will be gone and with it all those subtle, ordinary, sacred moments that make up a common life. Death brooks no return and the loss will be in that sense total.

That is not now, for us. And I’m glad. Happy that we had this day together. And hopeful that we will have tomorrow. We do, after all, have that move to prepare.

 

Commentary on Religion, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Theogony

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Summer                                                             Most Heat Moon

“Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.”      Iliad opening lines, Fagles translation 1990

Let’s see. What I was trying to say in the post below was this: political life and our opinions, our proclivities do not have to be all one thing or another. We confuse ourselves and others if we pretend it is ever other.

We make a similar error with individuals (and with ourselves). We define people based on what we see of them, usually just a small slice, and that is true of even our closest friends. We imagine that the clues, the defining moments we know of, adhere in a package that makes some sort of sense.

No. People are not one thing or another. They are as Walt Whitman observed of himself, “multitudes.” To say it philosophically we are one, we are many. I’m not identifying a psychological pathology here, rather stating that even the most rule bound of us violate our own rules and sense of duty, probably daily. The least rule bound among us may stagger through life from one interest to another, one opinion or another, one activity to another. And all this is usual, normal.

Coherence is a naive tool for understanding. We have our reasons, yes, we do, but our reasons often contradict each other. We know this when we are honest with ourselves. And our emotions. Well, they come unbidden, sometimes riding us like storms, other times calming us in periods of upheaval. Notice, too, that we try to guide ourselves both by reason and by emotion, when in fact these two faculties are not two, but one, or if not exactly one, then inextricably woven together, woven so closely that we cannot without great effort separate one from the other.

It is no wonder, when we consider these complexities that there is the saying, African I believe, that when a person dies, so does a universe. What I take from all this is to be easy with myself, forgiving, since the universe that I am does contain multitudes and at times this version of the universe holds sway, at other times this one.

It may be, probably is, that such an observation reveals the origin of the gods. There are those within us, anger for example and its more intense cousin, rage, that can take control of us, organize our lives in ways surprising to ourselves and to others. (see the opening lines of the Iliad above.) Or, grief. Or, love. Or, fear. Or, vengeance. Or, delight. Or, abandon. Or, control. Or, poetry. Or, thought. To go against Hillman I would say not that we meet our gods in our pathologies, but in our inner selves.

(Banquet of the Gods, Frans Floris)

In Voudoun the practitioners talk of being ridden by the god, an enraptured state brought on by intoxication and dance and openness. I say we are ridden by gods and goddesses all the time. To our great joy and our great sorrow.

To paraphrase Whitman, “I contain within me many gods, I am a pantheon.”

 

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Right Now

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Summer                                                               Most Heat Moon

My favorite subscription e-mail is brain pickings. The creator and writer, Maria Popova,crane engineering generates it through intense reading and intelligent choice of materials. Last year she wrote an essay outlining 7 things she’s learned in the 7 years of writing brain pickings. You can find the whole essay on her website, but I wanted to focus on one in particular because it reminds me of a lesson I’m learning from my friend, Tom Crane.

Being present, how he shows up in the moment, from moment to moment, is his top priority. I don’t know whether he would counterpoise it to productivity as Popova does here, but his business success in forensic engineering certainly suggests he’s no stranger to productivity. He is clear that he does not want to be measured by his efficiency, earnings or his ability to do this or that. Which is saying something since his company is very well-regarded, growing and prosperous.

Here’s Popova:

  1. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshiping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

And a bit more from an interview with a talented writer/observer:

“I think productivity, as we define it, is flawed to begin with, because it equates a process with a product. So, our purpose is to produce — as opposed to, our purpose is to understand and have the byproduct of that understanding be the “product.” For me, I read, and I hunger to know… I record, around that, my experience of understanding the world and understanding what it means to live a good life, to live a full life. Anything that I write is a byproduct of that — but that’s not the objective. So, even if it may have the appearance of “producing” something on a regular basis, it’s really about taking in, and what I put out is just … the byproduct.”

The moment and our questing in that moment for connection, for understanding, for clear seeing is all we have. Ever. Placing the moment and our immersion in it first swings us out of the past or the future, if we’re tempted to sojourn there, and back to the now.

I like Tom’s insistence on showing up and Popova’s emphasis on understanding as our purpose, and productivity as a byproduct of that process. When at a farmer’s market, it would be understandable to see the fruits and vegetables as a product of gardening, but in fact they are the byproduct of a person in love with the soil, with plants, with the changing seasons and the interplay of wind and rain and sun.

The main dilemmas of our current approach to agriculture can be tied to productivity oriented thinking.  This way sees the fruits and the vegetables and the grains and the meats and dairy as the product of farming rather than its byproduct. What I mean is this, when we love the world in which we live, when we treat it with care and thoughtfulness, when we understand our needs and its needs, the world will produce what is necessary for our existence. That’s been the successful ongoing contract between living beings and the natural world of which they are apart since the first one-celled organism began to wiggle and move. It is no different today.

That’s what I understand right now.