Category Archives: Third Phase

Cinema and Television, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Third Phase Work: Wit

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Summer                                                            New (First Harvest) Moon

An HBO movie that went DVD on Sept. 11, 2001, Wit, directed by Mike Nichols, is many things.  It is first a fine drama showcasing the talents of Emma Thompson and Audra McDonald with a very touching and important moment featuring Eileen Watkins.  Wit is the story of a middle aged (48) professor of English literature, Thompson, and an expert in the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic ovarian cancer.

The storyline takes her from the moment of the diagnosis through all her 8 cycles of full dose chemotherapy to death.  She only has one visitor, Watkins, her Ph.D. advisor, who is with her when she dies.

There is a fine and I suspect very tight interplay between the poetry of John Donne, especially his well known work, Death Be Not Proud, and the dramatic arc of the movie.  There is also a damning portrait of professionals so focused on their work, saving humans, that they can’t see the humans in front of them:  Thompson’s two oncologists and, ironically, Thompson herself.  Another storyline depicts with damning specificity the increasing powerlessness and dehumanizing of hospital patients.

(Marble funeral effigy of John Donne, 1631,
at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, where he
is buried)

The poignant, and they are heart wrenching, moments come in the interaction between Audra McDonald, an oncology nurse, and Thompson.  It is not maudlin even in its build up, but the nurse sees Thompson, listens to her, empathizes with her, touches her compassionately and finally initiates a conversation about whether she wants to be a DNR, that is, do not resuscitate.

This is third phase work, viewing this movie.  Relative to the theme that I’ve given for my Woolly meeting on July 15th, home and what does that mean to you, it shows the hospital as the anti-home:  a place cleansed of personal belongings, choice, simple comforts like, as Thompson says at one point, “…shoes.”

However it may come to us, “gluttonous death” (a Donne phrase) will come and I hope that it can come for each of us surrounded by loved ones, in a place we choose to be.

Aging, Feelings, Friends, Health, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Watching As the Lights Go Out

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Summer                                                                        Solstice Moon

When we gathered last night at the Woodfire Grill, five of us Woollies talked, catching up on family, discussing current events, laughing.  Then, the talk turned serious and deep, as the fly fisherman said, “existential.”

A sister-in-law, a chiropractor, called one of us and told him she was retiring.  “Because,” she said, “I’ve been diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s.” That brought silence around this table where the youngest was 64 and the oldest 80.  As is his way, this one wondered how to be present to her, not to fix her, but to aid her in her present situation.  How might he stay present to her over time, perhaps learning enough to alert her children, who live far away when things become dire?

I pointed him to a website I recently added here, under the link’s title, Third Phase, called Watching the Lights Go Out.  Here’s this 68 year old retired physician’s description of its purpose:

“In September of 2012 I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. This blog is the story of my day-to-day life with this illness and my reflections upon it. We tend to be scared of Alzheimer’s or embarrassed by it. We see it as the end of life rather than a phase of life with all its attendant opportunities for growth, learning, and relationships. We see only the suffering and miss the joy. We experience only the disappearing cognitive abilities and ignore the beautiful things that can appear.”

One of us has an obvious anxiety about this since he has a mother with Alzheimer’s and definitely does not want to place that kind of burden on those who would be his caretakers. What will I do, he asked, if this becomes me?

We turned to the writer who cared for his mother-in-law, Ruby, who tipped over into Alzheimer’s after open-heart surgery.  He has interviewed many Alzheimer’s sufferers and said that after a couple of years of sometimes intense existential dread, there comes a peace with the disease.

“But I don’t want to not care!” said the one of us who was anxious.  “That leaves my caretakers with the burden.”

This conversation continued, all of us trying to put ourselves in the situation of watching the lights go out.  It was not pleasant, but neither was it hopeless, because we had friends around the table.

A primary inflection of this whole conversation was readying ourselves to live into this and other dark realities that loom not far down the stair case of aging.

 

 

Third Phase

Stand Up

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Summer                                                                                            Solstice Moon

Been trying to figure out what I’ve stood for and stand for.  This is different than what I believe in since beliefs and actions don’t always match up, but actions remain after all thinking is done.

One thing I’ve stood for, or rather sat for, is learning.  Ever since I started school and learned to read, I’ve been on one long ride, most of it in the presence of words.  There is admit, something profligate, unguided, voracious about my desire to learn.  It has taken me down unexpected roads, but then it would not be learning if it didn’t, would it?

Early on I took the idea that we are responsible for our own education, not the teachers or the schools or the curriculum.  We had to decide how to focus, how to integrate and eventually how to guide our own learning.  It was clear to me from around the fifth grade or so that schooling was temporary, while learning was lifetime.

Another thing I’ve stood for is justice.  Injustice rankles me, gets under my skin, especially if people aren’t doing anything about it.  Or, if people feel life is set up to give them a raw deal.  Again, from very early I opposed things done for the sake of tradition, because somebody said we had to do it that way, because somebody said there was nothing else to do about it.

This pushed me into politics since power and its wielding often determines how just a given circumstance is or can be made:  class president, university senate, student rights, anti-war politics, civil rights, feminism, neighborhood based economic development, a jobs response to unemployment, a bank for the poorest of the poor, Sierra Club legislative politics.  We can’t do it is not a phrase that makes any sense to me.  Never will.

Art.  Painting, sculpture, prints and drawing, literature, poetry, theater, dance, classical music, jazz, blues.  Not sure you can I stood for it, but I can’t get enough of it.  It’s always at my side, on my wall, in my head, pushing out the boundaries of my heart.

Family.  Even though the path has been dotted with failure and often laden with pain family continues to be a lodestar in my life.  Never more so than now.

The Ways of Mother Earth.  This was slow coming on, but it has occupied more and more of my time and thinking as we pushed into perennials, then vegetables, finally fruit.  And explored various methods for caring for the plants.  And the bees, of course.

Dogs.  They are in my life and have been and will be.

Creativity.  I believe in it.  I do it.  I work to support others in it.

Travel.  Being the stranger in a strange land.  Seeing how others solve the puzzles of human life.  How they build and love and cook and sell and live.

So, let’s see.  I stand for learning, justice, art, creativity, family, the ways of Mother Earth, dogs and travel.  These are the primary things, that I can think of now, that have occupied my time and energy.  And I’m ok with them.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Third Phase

the moon

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Summer                                                                    Solstice Moon

The super moon has come and gone, the moon only its normal lunarity tonight.  Deciding that each moon at perigee is a super moon strains the adjective too far.  The marginally larger and closer moon would be truer.

The lead up to the super moon did reignite my never far dormant moon watching passion.  This Japanese ritual seems very well suited to life’s third phase.  Quiet, dignified, can be done without glasses at home.  No money changes hands.  A glass of tea, or a shot of single malt, a beer.  Some cheese and the moon beside us on the deck.

As our closest neighbor in the overwhelming emptiness that is our universe, the moon has a special place, a unique place in our lives.  It illumines the night, goes through its phases each lunar month, defining tides and creating romantic moments.

I’m finding it hard to describe why the moon fascinates me so much.  Not about astronomy.  Or moon walks.  Something about its floating, silvery presence.  A silent partner to the dark its moods changes with the seasons.  The floating harvest moon, round and large and orange differs from the white full moon that passes through the cold skies of the winter solstice time.  The moon of the summer can preside over long evenings outside, a dim lantern providing just the right amount of just the right kind of light.

It also figures in story and myth.  The goddess Diana and her crescent moon, which appears in so many portraits of the virgin mary, especially our Lady of Guadalupe.  Lon Chaney’s version of the Wolfman:  “Even a man who is pure at heart, and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

Not quite getting there and I’m tired.  Will try again soon.

Aging, Health, Third Phase, Travel

The Shoulder

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Beltane                                                                                            Solstice Moon

Finished my p.t. visits for the shoulder.  When asked at this point what he thought caused this pain, “Rust.  Or, dry rot.” David Poulter said.  In this case some form of cervical impingement and possibly a rotator cuff tear.  On the likelihood of its return.  “If you keep up the resistance work, you’ll minimize it.”  But.  Since it is rust, the probability is that something, if not the exact same thing will happen again.  Hopefully not for awhile.

David also said that I had gotten in three weeks the amount of improvement it takes most folks to get in three months.  That made me feel good because it speaks well of my body’s continuing capacity to heal itself.  The key in this case apparently is steady work.  Which I’ve been doing.  I don’t like pain, but am willing to endure it to put it behind me.

David is an interesting guy.  His brother lives in Brittany and the time trials for the Tour de France are in Mont St. Michel this year, so he’s packing up and moving to Brittany for four months. He’s 54, born in Lancastershire, moved to Australia, then New Zealand and eighteen years ago to the U.S.  His sport is cycling so he’s going to ride the 35 miles to the time trials and generally hang out as a cyclist, a Brit who speaks bon francais, but who has a desire to become fluent.

Of course, Brittany is that oddity, the Celtic part of France, speaking a native tongue closest to Cornish.  David told me that Great Britain comes from the island, Britain, plus the little Britain, Brittany.  Further, that the French/English animosity comes from the Roman, then the Saxon, then the French invasions which pushed the native Britons (the Celts) into the peripheral countries of Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, the Isle of Mann and Brittany.

(Brittany in dark blue.)

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Third Phase

Outside, Inside. Again.

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Beltane                                                                          Solstice Moon

Summer is its own creature, a season apart from the others, especially here in the north.  Things grow.  Outside has only insect barriers, no cold or ice or snow or chill.  Yes, rain and thunder and tornadoes and derechos. Yes.  But only occasionally.  Usually the sun shines, heat climbs, jackets and boots stay in the closet.

It is now, finally, summer.  In three days the summer solstice will arrive, midsommer as celebrated in Scandinavia.  Here, this year, it will almost mark the beginning of our actual summer.

With the bees and the flowers, the vegetables and the woods, now the fire pit and visiting kin you would think I might love the summer.  And I do, in my way.  I appreciate it, look forward to it, enjoy it.  In particular I like working outside, planting, tending, harvesting.  Having the self expand out into the world beyond the house feels good, extends my understanding of who I am and of those whom I love.

Still, I will celebrate not the light on the day of the summer solstice, but its opposite, the beginning of night’s gradual increase.  I don’t know whether it’s my northern European DNA, or the mysterious lure that drew me north ever since reading Jack London, or a tendency toward melancholy, or a more general sense that my most vital activity occurs when the nights grow long and the temperature falls.

What I do know is that as the shadows lengthen and twilight comes sooner, my inner life begins to deepen, ideas bubble out of my interior.  My creative self flourishes.  It just occurred to me as I wrote this that attention outside draws me away from myself and from the inner work, undoubtedly a good thing, but as I sense the need for outside attention wane, my inner world grows more demanding.

If this is in fact the way it is, then I’m glad, for it means my inner life and the progression of the seasons have begun to synchronize in a powerful, subconscious way.

Latin, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Getting Good

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Beltane                                                                        Solstice Moon

I’ve let the creative writing business slide for a couple of weeks, just got out of the rhythm with garden and other matters.  That Loft class starts in three weeks and I want to get further along in my revision before then.

Been reading information about learning plateaus, as I wrote below and I’m certainly on a plateau in both the writing and the Latin right now.  Just plugging away.  Read a piece drawing on work in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest that suggested embracing the struggle, the sameness, the lack of progress or even the regression.  Makes sense to me.  When I can remember it.

It’s easy for me to fall into the despair trap.  The one where lack of progress proves lack of talent, lack of smarts, lack.  I fell into it for several years with the writing.  I had this mindset, either you’re doing it or you’re not.  Obviously not true.  Learning anything takes time, often lots of time.  That 10,000 hours stuff, I don’t know about that, but it does take a long time to get good at anything.

(Dreamer of Dreams, Edmund Dulac)

 

Aging, Friends, Third Phase

Lady Fortune Takes a Break

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Beltane                                                                              Early Growth Moon

Fortuna shifts her affections.  I fear I’ve been late in my sacrifices to her over the last month.  She left me dangling near the bottom of the pack tonight at Sheepshead.  Balancing things out, I suppose.

(fortuna)

Of course, there were a few self-inflicted wounds that I can’t foist off on her.  But there were those really bad hands.  And, yes, that one very good one.

Had supper with friend Bill Schmidt.  We ate at Pad Thai on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, near Macalester College.  It’s interesting to note how perspectives change as age downshifts expectations and heightens other facets of life.  A factor we both gave a nod to is one little admired in our mobile culture, the virtue of inertia and of its sometime attendant virtue: rootedness.

The soul, I believe, craves constancy, needs some stability and a key way we get that is to put down roots somewhere.  I’ve talked about it elsewhere, but it may be especially important in the third phase.  This is not to deny the attraction of travel, even of picking up and moving somewhere else, but the decision to do so late in life needs, I think, to be carefully made, with an eye not only to what will be gained but what will be lost.

Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Men Around the Woodfire

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Beltane                                                                 Early Growth Moon

A gathering at the Woodfire Grill in St. Louis Park: Mark, Frank, Stefan, Tom, Bill and myself.  We spoke of Frank’s trip to Ireland and France, of Mark’s hunting down morels, of Tom’s single crystal which is on its way, of soil tests and gardens, Austin and the hill country of Texas, Michael Pollan’s new book: Cooked, and a book Mark is reading called the World through Drinks:  Beer, Wine, Coffee, Tea and Coca Cola. (plus one I can’t recall)

We meet, hear each other, see each other, then leave validated again.  Affirmed again.  Friends, still.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Third Phase, Writing

Rejecting Ariadne’s Gift

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Beltane                                                               Early Growth Moon

I skipped some steps in my life education.  And I did that post-college when I was hungry for intellectual stimulation and found the cheapest source for it in seminary.  Instead of noticing what had my full attention, studying scripture with the tools of higher criticism, I followed my radical political passions into the ordained ministry.

Following the 60’s slogan, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, I embarked on a decades long immersion in political work.  I believed and still do believe that political work is important and necessary, a responsibility  of a citizenry that would remain free as well as a corrective to social injustice cooked into the current culture.

But.  I also believe that when the creative life, the one where the Self you have been granted by the random, but highly particular thrownness you have experienced, finds its highest and best purpose, it equals the level of urgency of political action.  Why?  Because each of us are precious, unusual, unique and as a result need to offer the world what only we can provide.

This is at best a dilemma, at worst it can create paralysis or misdirection.  In my case I followed one path, political action, from college through my early 40’s.  That I did this through the church is only a happenstance, a function of the odd synchronicity of my time in Appleton, Wisconsin and a minister there, Curtis Herron, who knew United was, at the time, a politically engaged seminary.

My rationale for being in seminary, drenched in the zeitgeist of the 60’s, led me to pick up on all the threads that led through the labyrinth toward a political minotaur.  They were bright threads in those years, the early 70’s, and had the additional compelling flavor of righteousness, a dangerous route to follow, but one I pursued anyhow.

The threads I left lying on the ground, less bright and flavored not with righteousness but with tradition and imagination, came to me as I soaked up literary criticism, the history of the Pentateuch, the redactions of the gospels, the tradition criticism and form criticism so useful in the Hebrew scriptures, even the brief exposures to Hebrew and Greek.  Had I stuck with them, followed the literary and creative impulses they roused in me, I might have neglected some political work, but found my way to writing much sooner.

But I didn’t.  Now I’m in my late 60’s and, thanks to another lesson I’ve simply refused out of stubbornness and fear to learn, how to sell my finished work, have nothing to show for having finally picked up the threads less bright, yet the ones more in touch with my full Self.  Although it may sound like it, I’m not whining here, just observing the length of time I spent on one section of the labyrinth, not because I didn’t have help, but because I couldn’t discern the true help I did need.

Now, finally, I have all the threads in my hand, I’m following them to the end, aware that there is still ahead the Minotaur, a last battle.  When will it come?  I don’t know.  The labyrinth still has turns ahead and the way, the ancientrail, is dimly lit.