Category Archives: Feelings

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Health, Music, Woolly Mammoths

It Won’t Be Long Now

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                        Early Growth Moon

A poignant and salient answer to how to live the third phase came from an 18 year old Minnesotan, Zach Sobiech, who died yesterday of bone cancer.  Not much of a conversationalist or a letter writer, Zach’s Mom told him he needed to do something, something that would let people know he was here and leave them memories of him.  Diagnosed with osteosarcoma when he was 14, the cancer did not prevent him from writing and singing songs of his own.

He became an internet viral celebrity with the song, Clouds, downloaded over 3 million times.

Those of us in the third phase understand the challenge Zach faced.  Death was no longer an abstraction, but a certain visitor.  As he says in this song, it won’t be long now.  Oh, we may have 20 years or 30 years, compared to his 4, but the link is the moment when you come to know this life ends.  For good and for ever.

(Alphonse Osbert – Les chants de la nuit.)

How did he respond?  He dug into the riches of his Self, shrugged off the self-pity and depression, and turned those feelings into art.  This is the best and healthiest way to greet the coming of the Sickle Bearer.  Find out who you are.  Find out what best expresses your journey, the ancientrail that has been, is, your life.  Then open up that expression, put it outside yourself for the rest of us to learn from, to cherish, to embrace.  Because it won’t be long now.

Cinema and Television, Feelings

Upstream Color

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                Early Growth Moon

Saw Shane Carruth’s second movie, Upstream Color, tonight at the Walker.  He made Primer, a film about time traveling geeks who become paranoid in the course of their travels.  It was a huge hit, cost $7,000 to make and got Shane noticed by Hollywood and film buffs.  It won the grand prize at Sundance when it premiered there.

Upstream Color is another dense, need to see it again and perhaps again movie.  According to Shane, who was at the screening tonight and answered questions afterward, this movie began with the idea of a woman stripped of all those things that make her her–house, money, job, self-respect and then follows her as she tries to rebuild herself.  And this movie is about that.

But it gets there through magic worms, pigs in Circe like relationship to a group of human beings, a thief and orchid harvesters.  It also gets there in a circular narrative that has no apparent center, no apparent antagonist and finishes with an ambiguous ending.

Shane is a direct, humble, honest representative of his work.  And when I say his work, both films are his work to an extraordinary degree.  He writes and directs them.  He also composes the score and has a lead role.  He has also taken on the role of distributor, describing in answer to one question a film industry equivalent to the disaggregation of publishing I learned about it in my marketing seminar with Scott Edelstein.

This movie was at Sundance in January and now it’s here in Minneapolis in spite of a limited release distribution schedule.  It was fun to see it so soon after the Festival and to hear Shane talk about his work.

I realized I really enjoy being part of the Walker crowd, seeing and hearing things early in their arc, discovering artists as the world discovers them.  In the same train of thought I realized I’m really having fun translating Ovid, sort of the opposite aesthetic experience, one rooted in the deep classical past.  Then it occurred to me that I must really be enjoying life.

But.  Over the last two or three weeks I’ve been feeling, if not melancholy, at least morose. Triggered by the back pain and Kona’s vet visits, yes, but still, odd for one who’s enjoying so many aspects of his life.  Including writing the novel.  I guess all this means is that we are not one, but many and some of me has a happy life and part of me has a blue life right now.  At the same time.

Aging, Feelings, Third Phase

Ruts and Graves

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                            Planting Moon

 

The only difference between a grave and rut are the dimensions.  Oh?  At least when you’re in a rut you can still breathe.  Breathing means hope.  Nothing definite, for sure, but hope.

This cliche points at a perceived truth, that being stuck in sameness is a living death.  And you can certainly how that might be true.  Work at a convenience store, come home, warm up a tv dinner, grab a beer, fall asleep in the recliner.  Get up and do it again.

Or drive into the city, park the expensive car in the expensive parking slot ride the elevator up to a posh office, direct, command, leave and drive the expensive car home to the expensive house.  Get up and do it again.

Sure.  That can mean a restricted, narrowed way of greeting this vast opportunity called life.  But.  People like me find certain routines soothing, they pave the way for creative activity, for hard concentration.  Routines allow the needs to be taken care of.  That way the non-routine acts of writing, scholarship, thinking, close looking and reading can happen on their own rhythms.

I like the bowl of fruit, some cottage cheese and a tomato in the morning, reading the paper, having some tea, then heading downstairs to start work.  I suppose you could call that a rut, the food boring, the repetition bland, I find it nourishing and centering.  You say cereal, I have tomato.

My opinion?  Pick your routines and habits carefully, make sure they support the things you do that matter the most, not the other around.  Then reinforce them as much as you can.  If you’re like me, that is.

Feelings, Friends, Health

In the Company of Old Men

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                            Planting Moon

A full moon tonight.  And good cards.  Fortuna walked with me throughout the evening, giving me winning hands including one lay down.

Ed, a regular, came in tonight and said he’d made driving mistakes twice, once on his way to his house and once on his way back and wasn’t sure he would make it through the evening.  He did, but I thought it was brave of him to acknowledge his anxiety, sharing it rather than fussing about it the whole evening.

Dick’s PSA, after 37 radiation treatments, is 0.0.  A good report at the same time his wife, on a recheck for a nodule on her thyroid, was told it was no longer there.  A good day all round.

(trump in sheepshead)

Bill continues to walk straight in his life after Regina’s death, acknowledging her absence and the profound effect it has had on his life, yet he reports gratitude as his constant companion.  He waits for a clear signal as to what comes next in this changed life situation.  He says, like Ram Dass, Still Here.

Art and Culture, Feelings, US History

Mystic Chords of Memory

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                     Planting Moon

Monday afternoon around 5:45 pm I turned on NPR as I drove on 694 headed toward Bill Schmidt’s home.  It was mid-report on something that had happened in Boston, something important, so I stayed with the news.  At a recap I learned of the bombings during the 4 hour plus mark of the Boston Marathon.

I hollowed out and a sense of deep sadness raced in to fill the void.  The feelings from 9/11, not the event, but the feelings joined these.  Not anger.  Not bitterness.  Sadness and emptiness, a sudden vacuum in my interior world.

(Summer Evening, Hopper)

Then there was the ritual of repetitive reporting, the redundant witnesses, the guesses, the breathless commentary by this person and that one.  A reporter for Boston public radio said the Marathon would be forever marred.  And I thought, no.  No.  This will come to mind and it will be known as the work of an other and will not be allowed to mar the race, rather it will become part of the race’s history, its collective memory.

The most intense part of my initial reaction came when I realized what those feelings meant, the emptiness and the sadness and the vacuum.  They meant I am an American.  That this event was about us, was done to us.  Here, on a highway in the northern central part of our large country I felt violated and hit.  It makes me think of Lincoln’s line about the mystic chords of memory.  It was those chords that bomb caused to resonate.  It’s important, I think, to say out loud that those bonds make us strong and that it is good that we feel them.

It comes from the close of his 1st inaugural address:

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Feelings

Not Sleeping

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                    Bloodroot Moon

Sometimes my brain does not want to stop doing whatever it was up to during waking hours.  Not often, but sometimes.  Like last night.  Into bed.  Lay there.  Roll over.  Again.  Still awake.  And this after an intense workout with resistance.

Downstairs.  Print out some pages for our family meeting.  Dither here and there.  Read a couple of chapters in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.  This guy knows what he’s doing.  Or, rather knew.  He died at 58.

Back to bed 2 hours later.  Ah.

Now, though.  A little sluggish.  I gave up worrying about these things, these intermittent sleepless hours.  They’re uncommon enough and I’ve done what I can with a regular routine before bed, darkened room.  After a while I had to let it go and let it be.

 

Feelings, Friends, Health, Woolly Mammoths

Being. Together.

Leave a 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.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Health, Third Phase

The Undiscover’d Country

Leave a 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.

 

Feelings, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, Politics, Travel, US History

Another Country

Gallery Leave a 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.

Feelings, Third Phase, Travel

Sightseeing By the Dollar

Leave a 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.