• Category Archives Beyond the Boundaries

  • Beyond the tomorrow wall

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                             New (Healing) Moon

    “The cure to boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”  Dorothy Parker

    Things have begun to change internally, too. Yesterday all my various appointments for the surgery were made. That’s all I can do about prostate cancer for now. The sale of the Andover house relieved that drag on the day to day. As I reported below, planned changes are underway around the house.

    Though I do still have the holter monitor until July 3rd, I’m sure the end result of all the cardiology related tests will show me in good cardiovascular health. That leaves the question of my lower oxygen saturation when on Shadow Mountain. It’s normal at Denver altitude. My take on that. Let it be until after the surgery and recovery.

    With all this positive change underway, my inner compass, the one that guides me into the next work, has begun to wake up. I’m not quite ready to get back to the Latin and Superior Wolf, but I can feel tendrils of my imagination creeping out beyond the tomorrow wall. (see 6/13 post) They’re tentative, not always formed, but I know their marks, their sign.

    The most reliable of these marks and signs is curiosity. How might we seed and/or otherwise nurture native flowers and plants in our yard? Where are those books on Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan project? Would buying a 3-D printer for Gabe and Ruth to use make sense?

    Other signs. Making notes here and there for future projects. Planning new trips with Gabe and Ruth. Looking forward to visits from friends. Unpacking the remaining boxes in the garage and organizing their contents. Getting the generator installation underway. And the bookshelves and workplaces for the loft.

    The tomorrow wall still stands, but small vines have begun to penetrate it seeking nourishment beyond it.

     

     


    Beyond the Boundaries Faith and Spirituality Health Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Third Phase

  • Tomorrow’s Wall

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                           Closing Moon

    As I wrote here before, my internal timeline comes up short, now around July 8th, does not, will not extend much beyond that. This interferes with the kind of dreaming that moves projects like becoming fluent in Latin and writing a novel forward. With no time in the future-it feels walled off-there is little incentive for the incremental work necessary to move long term projects.

    This is frustrating, of course, but the effect, and probably the underlying sense behind it, focuses me on the here and now. This cancer. That appointment. This work around home that needs to get done. Stay close in to the center, don’t try to project your Self and your work out ahead right now.

    I trust the anxiety when it comes, as I trust the relief from it. This is not new for me, but the oscillations have become more apparent, their purposes more clear.


    Beyond the Boundaries Faith and Spirituality Feelings Health Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Third Phase

  • Surgery July 8

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                           Closing Moon

    The consultation with the urologist went well. My cancer has some outside the prostate presence, which makes the situation a bit more dire, but still one within the reach of a radical prostatectomy.

    Kate and I both feel good about Dr. Eigner, the surgeon/urologist, and his experience. He’s done hundreds of robotic prostatectomies and hundreds of open prostatectomies. Practice is important.

    We discussed the options, from hormone treatment to radiation to surgery. The moderately advanced nature of my cancer, my age and general health (good), make me a logical candidate for surgery. Kate and I had decided that already.

    On the irrational side, I want that organ out of me. It’s no longer on my side. On the rational side surgery gives me the best chance of negative margins, a procedure in which all the cancer is removed, none showing at the tissue margins.

    I feel good this evening, at peace with the choice, confident in the skill of my doctor and the support of family and friends.


    Aging Beyond the Boundaries Faith and Spirituality Family Friends Health Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Third Phase

  • A Yamantaka Moment

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                        Closing Moon

    Yama
    Yamantaka

    So. Today is June 11th. I feel a small hole in the pit of my stomach. Not often you meet a day when your life is at stake, but this is one of those days for me. This afternoon we’ll find out the stage (severity & aggressiveness) of my cancer. We’ll also decide on a course of treatment.

    It’s been an interesting time since the initial news from the biopsy. Once I absorbed that information and read the Schwartz book on Surviving Prostate Cancer, I’ve let the matter go for the most part, at least at a feeling level. There was a bracket around the time between then, late May and now, mid-June. In that bracketed time no new information could be gained and no action could be taken.

    Now that bracketed time is over and the next steps, the real choices are just ahead. My confidence level is still high. Kate’s knowledge and support is essential as is encouragement from friends and family. Dr. Eigner is competent and practiced, and, unusually, open to serious questions and probing. I’ve done my research, have a list of questions.

    The appointment is at 2:30. More later.


    Aging Beyond the Boundaries Faith and Spirituality Family Feelings Friends Original Relation Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Third Phase

  • The Organ Recital

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                          Closing Moon

    Drove back from the echo cardiogram on Interstate 70, turning off at Co. 74 into Evergreen. Rock mitigation had US 285 one way and after my 4pm appointment I would have hit it at rush hour.

    Instead I ate at Sushi Win in Evergreen, overlooking front range mountains, some of which looked like old shield volcanoes. Looking at them while I waited for my spring roll and sashimi deluxe, I scrolled through (in my mind) the living images of my heart that I had just seen.

    Yes, for the second time this month I had a major diagnostic exam, first the prostate biopsy and now the heart echo. Noah, my sonographer, was a hip looking guy in black scrubs, spiky but neat hair and a pleasant manner. He talked to me throughout the exam.

    Awe. That was my heart, beating at that moment. I could, for those 25 minutes or so, look inside my own body. Think about that. The body remains sealed, even to those who inhabit it. Looking inside is a taboo. I read a book by a surgeon who said that overcoming that taboo was necessary to surgical training.

    The valves looked so tiny, so frail fluttering away in a steady rhythm, pumping my blood, taking it in from the venous return and pumping it back out, oxygenated by the lungs to the rest of the body. It’s miraculous, I said.

    Yes, Noah said, that organ amazes me each time I do this. Everybody’s is different.

    7-10 days from now I’ll get a call from my primary care doc, Lisa Gidday. She’ll relay the findings after Tatiana Tsvetkova, the cardiologist, reads the echo. Then you’ll get an official diagnosis, Noah said.

    Not done yet, however. I still have to wear a holter monitor. I get fitted for that another time. More fun with organs.


    Beyond the Boundaries Health Third Phase

  • Encouraging and Unsettling

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                      Closing Moon

    Since I’ve begun letting folks know about my prostate cancer diagnosis, a curious and, while encouraging, a somewhat unsettling thing, too, has happened. One friend wrote, “Don’t despair. I faced this ten years ago and am doing fine.” Another, “Because of my age (80’s), I have seen more than 50 men go through this and most of them are doing fine. Many over 10 years later.” Another, “We have three friends going through this right now.”

    That so many report good news obviously buoys me up, makes me feel more confident about the path ahead. I’m very glad to have personal testimony about the power of current treatment protocols.

    But. I compare the general awareness among men about prostate cancer with the broader and much more public awareness of breast cancer among women and realize something is out of joint. The pink ribbon, the runs, the NFL sneakers, the celebrities have all made breast cancer information broadly available. Women are keenly aware of the warning signs, the tests for its presence and the treatment options if faced with a diagnosis.

    Why don’t men have the same level of awareness? I imagine it’s a combination of things. Prostate cancer doesn’t strike, typically, until men are older. The average age at diagnosis is 66. The prostate is a less well-known organ that has a little understood function, even by men. Men have not had their feminist movement moment, so there has not been a broader cultural push for health related to men’s reproductive organs.

    Men have a stoic reputation when it comes to reporting health issues. I don’t know if that reputations bears up under scrutiny, but it does serve to obscure conversation among men about health matters.

    Then there’s sex. Our society has a confused, contradictory and tangled attitude toward matters sexual and the prostate is in that mix. We don’t know much about it to begin with and what we do know we don’t want to talk about.

    Is it time for all this to change? At one level, yes. Of course. Just makes sense. On another, no. It isn’t happening and doesn’t seem to be happening. What would it take to create a more general and healthy understanding of prostate cancer? I don’t know.


    Beyond the Boundaries Health

  • Lucky We Live the Mountains

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                        Mountain Spring Moon

    Lucky we live the mountains. Yes, Minnesota is a beautiful state, but the exurban chunk of it in which we lived and the areas in which I usually traveled, south toward Minneapolis, only occasionally reflected the wonder of the northern part of the state. There was the Mississippi, the lakes in the city, the green belt of parks. There was little Round Lake on Round Lake Blvd. That was about it. The rest of it, the beautiful part, including northern Anoka County with its high water table, marshy and wooded terrain, had to be sought out by driving.

    Here the 3 mile drive home from highway 73 up Black Mountain Drive winds past a valley filled with grass and pine on the south side of which rises Conifer Mountain. To the north Shadow Mountain gradually pulls the road higher and higher, rocks jutting out, ponderosa and aspen dot the slopes and mule deer sometimes browse. Each morning when I go to the mailbox to retrieve the Denver Post Black Mountain is on my right, guarding the west and the eventual sunset.

    Anytime we leave home, whether to go into Evergreen for our business meeting or into Denver to see the grandkids or south toward Littleton for medical care mountains and valleys, canyons and gulches grace the roadways. Small mountain streams run next to the roadways, swift and right now, often violent. Walls of sheer rock alternate with wooded mountainsides. Always the journey is up or down until we get past the foothills onto the beginning of the great plains where the Denver metroplex takes over.

    This was my thought while driving home from the doctor yesterday. How short is a human life span. Not even a tick of the second hand to this rock. These mountains have been here for millions of years longer than the human species itself has existed. They will probably be here millions of years after we’re gone. What is one lifetime? What is a few years here or there? Compared to these. This was a comforting thought.


    Aging Beyond the Boundaries Faith and Spirituality Jefferson County Mountains Original Relation Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Third Phase

  • Wasted Years?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                Mountain Spring Moon

    Wondering about retirement, about the third phase, not from an abstract notion of this journey now, but from within it, on the path. I notice things like this. A weather blog I follow talks about the decadal oscillations (Atlantic and Pacific) that have a determining effect on drought patterns in the U.S. When the author says these may not change their influence until 2035, I quickly calculate. 92. That means I may live in the forest fire red zone knowing only drought conditions.

    Work. I commented here about work, about Latin and writing, gardening and beekeeping as work. And it’s true that I experience them that way. When I call them work though, I sometimes find myself confused. Am I retired or am I working? Yes seems to be the answer. Perhaps I need a new paradigm.

    What came to me as I wrote that last sentence was the Hindu notion I mentioned a while back, action without attachment to results. From within that idea it doesn’t matter, working or retired. Both. The doing, the acting carries the meaning, not the end. Related I think to the idea of the journey as the destination.

    Yet, I admit that the culture comes up inside me, makes me wonder about the wasted years, all that time since leaving the church, now 25 years. What have I done? Which really means, of course, besides being alive how have you contributed to the world? I was taught, in that it’s obvious, it’s the way it is manner that culture defines for us, that work means results. A man is his attachment to results and the results make the man.

    Results mean new law, building affordable housing, organizing citizen based power to balance philanthropic concentrations of wealth and to alleviate the pains of vast unemployment in Minnesota. Those were results a man could claim and in claiming lay down evidence as to his worth.

    But. What if the novel doesn’t sell? What if the effort to market work is so weak that it never really has a chance? Does that invalidate the writing, the patience, the persistence necessary to conceive, execute, revise? Then, if the action does not have the expected result, does it come crashing down on the man, rendering him less a man?

    Some days it feels like the answer is yes. If there is no book on the shelf with my name on the cover, then I am less of a man. If in writing, I have taken energy away from the political work which gave me tangible results, then I have contributed less than I could have. Have I allowed fear to dominate my marketing work over the last 25 years? Fear that I would be rejected time and again. Possibly. Does that erase the novels and short stories I have written? Or, to put it in the most blunt way possible, has it called into question all the “work” I’ve done in the past two decades and a half?

    Some days it feels like the obvious answer is no. What is the result of loving a woman? What is the outcome of raising a child? Where is the success in a flower bed or a dog? All these most important actions rely not on the actions of the man, or at least not solely. Loving a woman does not make her a better woman, does not create an achievement. Raising a child, though important, does not make the child. Children make themselves, influenced no doubt by the parent, but still, the responsibility is theirs. The same with grandchildren. Flowers and vegetables grow, too, again perhaps aided by the gardener, but it is their task to produce a bloom or a fruit or vegetable. Dogs live their lives in the orbit of the humans who love them, but their life is the result and who can claim ownership of life itself?

    Another angle. The taking in of knowledge, developing understanding, all the reading and attending to cultural artifacts like art, theater, chamber music, movies, what does that amount to? What is the result, the thing that matters? Is there any point to it all?

    Not to mention that I have made almost no money for the last 25 years. Not none, but not enough to count.

    As I write this, see it laid out on the page, though, I’m inclined toward compassion, toward acceptance of the man who has done what he has done with as much energy and passion as he has, a man who has stayed faithful to his wife, his son, his stepson and his family, dogs, gardens, bees, who has remained constant in following his inner path regardless of the outcomes.

    Bill Schmidt’s find of this poem says what I feel better than I express it myself:

    Love after Love

     

    The time will come

    when, with elation,

    you will greet yourself arriving

    at your own door, in your own mirror,

    and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

     

    and say, sit here.  Eat.

    You will love again the stranger who was your self.

    Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart

    to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

     

    all your life…

     


    Aging Beyond the Boundaries Faith and Spirituality Original Relation Third Phase

  • The Biological Arc

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                              Mountain Spring Moon

    Wild. Wilderness. These ideas have established themselves as a filter in my mind, a sort of osmotic membrane that pulls notions out of books, magazines, my own thoughts.

    Last night, as I went to sleep, wild and civilized kept pushing through various permutations. I recall best the idea that life itself is a wild adventure, a biological arc, for us mammals it extends from conception through birth to death. This idea sets to the side the notion of civilization as counterpoint to the wild and focuses on inanimate material animated. And not only animated in the human instance, but aware. And not only aware, but self-aware, knowing the biological arc, knowing our location in that arc at any one point in our life.

    This is a radical, wild variation on the cold vast wilderness that seems to be our solar system, perhaps our whole universe. If we conceive, we humans on earth, of wilderness as a spot where nature can proceed according to its rhythms, ruled and influenced only by its own law-as it does in the vasty reaches of space, then we might consider the role within it, of an individual tree or wolf or rabbit or stream or mountain.

    In a wilderness that really represents an unbroken continuity with the deep biological and geological past a particular tree is still, just like each living instance of the human, the inanimate animated. The tree reaches down with its root system-let’s imagine this tree is a bristlecone pine-into the soil beneath its trunk and develops an intimate relation with the minerals, the biome beneath the surface and available water.  It transforms the riches found there into more bristlecone pine. This individual tree, this bristlecone pine, in this pristine wilderness is an agent of literal metamorphosis, taking the inanimate and making it animate.

    No less would an individual human in a pristine wilderness or one in the heart of its polar opposite, a contemporary megacity, accomplish the same magic. With one crucial exception, of course. Photosynthesis. The bristlecone pine not only reaches into the soil beneath, but into the air above and pulls out gases, incorporating them through its leaves into its whole body, mixing those gases with material drawn up from the soil. And one more. It takes the furious wild energy spawned in the nuclear fusion reactions of our sun and uses it to drive this process of animation.

    In this sense then the individual bristlecone pine in the wilderness and the human on the streets of Shanghai are both radicals. That is, they both animate the inanimate, take up the elemental shards of the primeval universe and reshape them into patterns not native to their physics.

    Within the biosphere, the realm of the living, most of its constituents live, then die. The magic drains out of the individual fish, the domestic cat, the high flying condor, the deep swimming whale. They release the elements they have animated back to cycles linked directly to the act of cosmic creation.

    In humans this biological arc goes from conception through live birth to death. Both ends of this continuum, this biological dialectic, are, relative to human civilization, moments deeply wild. They participate only lightly and then inconsequentially in the world of ideas, technology, skill, labor, culture. They both represent key inflections of our wild nature: coming to individual life and leaving it. These moments are not mediated by culture, rather they rip into its fabric and insert or remove individuals from its complex ministrations.

    So each of us is wild and free at the moment of our birth and our death. The question then is how much civilization constrains our inherently wild nature. I’ll consider this in another post.


    Beyond the Boundaries Faith and Spirituality Third Phase

  • Born To Be Wild

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                 Mountain Spring Moon

    In late April, early May I will attend my 27th retreat with the Woolly Mammoths, this year in Ely at the YMCA’s Camp du Nord. Often we have a theme and I suggested the following:

    Been thinking about topic and theme. Seems like Ely area cries out for considering the wilderness, the wild within and without. What does it mean to be wild? In your life? In your heart? In and with your passions? Does wildness have anything to say to the third phase? How does wilderness feed us, heal us? Why? Another aspect of the same idea. What is to be human and wild? How do humans fit into the wild? Do we? Can we? It seems to me this is much of what Will Steger has dealt with.

    As I’ve begun to consider these questions, take them into my heart, my civilized and my wild heart, they’ve begun to pull information out of the surrounding atmosphere. As often happens once we focus on something.

    One source that has been prodding me over the last week is a book, The Great Divide: A Biography of the Rocky Mountains, by Gary Ferguson. In the first chapter on Mountain Men comes this observation. Richard Slotkin, an American studies professor at Wesleyan University suggests that a main theme of early America was the shredding of conventional European mythology and getting to a more primary source, the “blood knowledge” of the wilderness. Since was the time of Emerson and Thoreau, too, both of whom were instrumental in the turn away from European influence and toward development of American letters, American thought, American literature and who were, again both, focused on the natural world as a source of inspiration, it seems this tendency to turn our back on “civilization,” whether European then, or decadent American late-stage capitalism now, and look to the wilderness for guidance is an integral aspect of the American character.

    It may be less so now than then, but nonetheless, it endures. Look at the heritage of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, the outdoors ethos of Minnesota, Colorado and Alaska (to name state cultures I know), the idea of the West.

    In this same chapter Ferguson counterpoises the Easterners romanticization of the mountain men as true individuals living with unfettered freedom with the civilized and European inflected culture of the East Coast. This was true, he says, throughout the 19th century. In fact, many of the mountain men worked in companies of 20-30, with some trapping, some hunting, some cooking, some taking care of supplies and pelts. They also tended to travel with their families and were surprisingly well-educated. About 1/5 of the mountain men left memoirs and many were fluent in both Latin and Greek.

    I mention this because when our gaze turns toward the Boundary Waters Wilderness, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada range or the expanses of wilderness in Alaska, to mention only a few of the wild areas in the U.S. alone, we often look toward them as places of healing, zones where civilization can be shed, as mystical bounded lands within which magic of a sort is still possible.

    In fact though these are simply places where the hand of civilization has been light-though not absent. Witness acid rain, the extinction or near extinction of apex predators, and now the slow creep of climate change. And the need for a word like wilderness, the notion of wild occurs only when its dialectical opponent, civilization, has become ascendant.

    So, to consider the wild in our hearts, in our lives, in our country we need also look at how civilized we are. What being civilized means. What needs civilization meets that wilderness does not and the reverse. We must also consider that the dynamics of these questions are bound up, in a particular way, with the American experience, with our sense of who we are as a people and a nation. It is not enough, in other words, to imagine the wild heart, but we must also attend to its gilded cage. It is not enough to seek the blood knowledge of the wilderness, but we must also attend to the context, our everyday home, where that knowledge has been lost.


    Art and Culture Beyond the Boundaries Faith and Spirituality Great Work Humanities Mountains Original Relation Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. The West