Category Archives: Aging

Third Phase Cinema

July 20, 2013 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Moon of the First Harvests

As the third phase filter got added to my lens, certain books, art works and movies began to pop up, unbidden. They had been there all along of course, but now I see certain works as pertaining to this new moment of my life.

To Wit. Wit, the long decline and death of the professor of English literature starring Emma Thompson raises many quality of life issues for chronically or terminally ill people and couches them in the poetic context of the metaphysical poet John Donne. Definitely worth seeing.

Last night Kate and I watched Buena Vista Social Club. It’s a 1998 documentary so you’ve probably seen it, heard the album and moved on, but from a third phase perspective it’s worth another look. Ry Cooder, American guitarist and champion of American roots music as well as traditional music from another the world, went to Cuba in 1997 to record Cuban music. When he got there, the folks who had agreed to play either couldn’t come (West Africans) or couldn’t be found. So he began asking around and found musicians, many associated with the Buena Vista Social Club which closed in 1944.

The musicians he found were legends of the Cuban music scene who had passed into obscurity. The group, which called itself the Buena Vista Social Club, put out the best selling album of the same name and toured, playing the Netherlands and Carnegie Hall. Here’s the third phase connection. Many of these resurrected musicians were in their 80’s and 90’s. They had, most of them, given up music for one reason or another, i.e. too little money, arthritis, boredom.

Brought together they reignited in each other the passion, love and craft they shared, making music. It is a remarkable story of gifts found, nurtured and revived, just as it is a story of men and women found, nurtured and revived. What can we do, I found myself asking, to retain the gifts, the passion, the loves we have so they vitalize and revitalize us as we grow into the further reaches of the third phase?

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Retirement, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Being Human

July 16, 2013 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Moon of First Harvests

The morning after. The Woolly feeling lingers here, a gentle mantle over the back, around the fire pit where we gathered. A primary, perhaps the primary, purpose of the Woollies is to see and be seen. No invisible men allowed. We have bum knees, wonky shoulders, weak legs, poor eyes and sore backs. These are acknowledged, not for sympathy, but for recognition that we are each the sore back, the poor eyes, the weak leg, the wonky shoulder, the bum knee. And that we are none of us only or even mostly our ailments, more and mostly we are the ones who have spent this 25 year+ journey together, time that included wholeness, able-bodiedness and now includes physical decline.

We’re not exactly a support group. We don’t try to fix each others problems (usually). We do go in for empathy, but not too much because too much focuses the group on one while the whole has been and is the most important. We’re not a group of friends, or, at least, not only a group of friends, rather we are fellow pilgrims, traveling our ancientrails in sight of each other, calling out from our journey and hearing the other call out from theirs.

Though our ancientrails intersected less in times past, as we move into third phase life they intersect more and more. How to make this transition. How to create a life anew when work is no longer the primary lodestar. How to look death in the face, unafraid, even welcoming. No, not suicidal welcoming, but unafraid of what is common, ordinary, part of the path. We look at each others hearts, hear the pulse of each other’s blood. This is what it means to be human.

Aging, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories, Our Land and Home, Third Phase

Home

July 13, 2013 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Moon of the First Harvests

Home. Back in the early 90’s when we lived on Edgcumbe Road in St. Paul, I felt a sense of homecoming when I crossed Ford Parkway. I had crossed into home turf. It’s taken a long while for a similar feeling to take hold here in Andover, but now, as I turn off Highway 10 onto Round Lake Boulevard, that sense of homecoming greets me.

Yes, it’s marked by Baker’s Square, Wendy’s, Conoco, Burger King and a Holiday station, but, they’re our franchises, there for our use. The feeling gets even stronger going up Round Lake and begins to thicken at Round Lake itself where the water is on the left and the peat bog fields of Field’s Truck Farms are on the right. Those fields are the remains of an old lake, eutrophied completely, a process that has advanced a good ways in Round Lake.

As I turn onto 153rd Ave NW, our property shows up about 1,000 feet in and I see the 6 foot chain link fence we had installed because Celt, our earliest Irish Wolfhound, climbed the four-foot fences to go greet passers-by on the street. This particular fence was put in place after a derecho felled a large poplar and destroyed the one we had originally extended from four feet to six. There is, too, the truck gate, 10 feet wide that we had installed because we wanted to get trucks from nurseries and our own trucks back onto our property.

The trees have grown up, grapevines have covered them, the prairie grass has morphed over time but has a pleasing current configuration. On the six foot fence itself, the border of the prairie grass, grows our wild grapes. Wild grapes that we pick in the fall for jams and jellies.

The driveway, the sloped driveway that creates its own stories in the winter, goes up to the three car garage that makes our house look as if we live as an adjunct to the garages. On the right going up is a rusted and unused basketball hoop, an emblem, as at so many homes, of a boy, now gone. In the garage itself we have a unique five stall dog feeding set up that we used when our pack was at its peak and we had five Irish Wolfhounds at once.

Do you see what I mean? Home has an accretion of memories, memories attached to physical things like lakes and peat bogs, fences and basketball hoops. This is not somebody else’s memories but our memories, our family’s memories. It is those memories, those thick layers of past embraced constantly in the present, that make a home.

Inside the house are the same layers of memories, of guests and friends and immediate family, of dogs and workmen, nights and days, meals and passion. It is the thickness, the particularity of it all, that makes this our home and not someone elses. After 20 years, we have laid down many layers of smiles, tears, hard work and love. That’s why this is home.

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

Watching As the Lights Go Out

July 2, 2013 Charles Leave a comment

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.

Aging, Health, Third Phase, Travel

The Shoulder

June 18, 2013 Charles Leave a comment

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.)

Aging, Friends, Third Phase

Lady Fortune Takes a Break

June 4, 2013 Charles Leave a comment

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.

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

Rejecting Ariadne’s Gift

June 2, 2013 Charles Leave a comment

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.

Aging, Art and Culture, Music, Third Phase

Technology Is My Friend

May 27, 2013 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Early Growth Moon

Repeat after me: technology is our friend. Again. Technology is our friend.

A month or so ago I bought a 300 CD carousel player. This dates me in so many ways. In the first place to enter memos (we’ll talk about those in a moment) you can use a keyboard, but it’s not a usb connection rather it is the old male/female pin receptor. Fortunately, in my ever increasing museum of used computing equipment I had one. Score!

What that means is that I input a memo about each disk using the keyboard rather than the dial and point method necessary without it. That would have found me tossing the discs in the thing. Anyhow so I decide to put a memo for each disc because otherwise how could I know what it is?

Well, that means developing a system. We have a faux Dewey Decimal CD storage piece that has 4 rows across and 6 down of small wooden boxes that hold anywhere from 12 to 15 or so CD’s. So we named the rows A, B, C, and D. That means that each CD has to have a box number, so A1 puts the CD case in the upper left hand corner box. We’re keeping the cases for the liner notes. But, wait, there’s more. Each CD has to have its own number in the box so the first CD is A11 then the name of the CD in very short hand.

Another wrinkle develops with multiple sets of which we have many. For example, we have a 25 CD set of the complete works of Chopin. In this case, we’re now into the 3rd box, the number was for one disc, A316D24. The D24 meaning D24 in the Chopin set. In order to enter this data two buttons on the carousel player have to be punched, then the text entered, then saved. 300 times. I’m up to 60 right now and have already begun chewing on my foot so I can escape the trap.

Now to the charming reality that this dates me. First of all, who buys CD’s anymore? I mean physical objects that store your music and take up space in your house? What? Second, you mean you have to manually enter the information about the music? Why can’t the file just put it up like it does on my I-phone, I-pad, I-pod? That’s way easier. Not nearly so much work. In fact, no work at all.

That’s the frictionless world most digital natives inhabit. Their idea of a record collection weighs about 5 ounces and has ear buds. If you want to listen to at home, you just drop it in a receptacle that links your device to your home speaker system. Easy peasy.

Kate and I, however, inhabit the stubbornly physical recent past. Which means we were born before this millennium for sure and far back in the 20th century, too. This is probably the last time we will try to organize our music because if we decide to do it again, I’ll flee to the 20th century in my time machine. I carry it right here on my belt.

Aging, GeekWorld, Third Phase

Third Phase: Robots

May 24, 2013 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Early Growth Moon

Frank and Me is an engaging movie with a quick plot twist at the end that caught me napping, but the intriguing question raised is Frank’s relationship with the robot his son gives him to care for him.

Like most technophiles robots have been on my mind for a long time. Forbidden Planet came out, for example, in 1959 when I was 12. I read I Robot before that. At the time they seemed much more science fiction, probably only science fiction. In fact, it is very difficult to convey today the gap between many of those things we saw as science fiction and any reality we ever expected to experience. Space ships? With humans aboard? Moon landing? Video phone calls? Robots? Come on.

As a child of that era and a science fiction oriented one at that, imagine my delight when we land roving robots on Mars. Mars! Or, a human made machine leaves the solar system. The Oort Cloud! Calling my brother in Saudi Arabia and my sister in Singapore, with moving pictures and both of them on the screen with me at the same time. Get outta here.

When it comes to the question of how much care we can offer the elderly through robots, I’m jumping up and down. Let me at’em. I don’t want to plan robberies with one like Frank did, but I can easily imagine a relationship with a robot.

Some people, Frank Langella, lead actor in Frank and Me among them, think those kind of relationships should be with humans. A recent Wired article suggested that a fuzzy robot sold now as a companion for Alzheimer’s patients may work too well. People talk to it. They bemoan the relationship people might have with the robot.

Why? I mean, it’s not like we’re going to send people robots and then say, “Now, you have your robot. Let’s not ever hear from you again.” No, the robots will be part of a care-giving strategy. Perhaps they’ll do household tasks and some particular care-giving like medication administration. Perhaps they’ll be dialogical, with a capacity for learning and different accents.

We pay home health care aides around $20,000 a year. And there are fewer and fewer signing up for the jobs. It’s not hard to see why. This trend has accelerated just as the number of elders in our culture will increase enormously. I’m glad the Minnesota legislature voted to let child care workers and home health care workers organize. If they can get better pay, benefits and training, we’ll have more people wanting the work.

But my sense is that even if that sort of improvement changes their lot somewhat, it will still not be enough to meet the needs of people who. like myself, want to age in place. We can do it, but most of us will need help of some kind.

(Hector, a mobile assistive robot and smart home interface for the elderly. forbes magazine)

It seems to me that a joint work force of robots and better paid home health care aides is a big step toward solving the problem of affordable care for the rapidly increasing elderly population. And I will welcome it.

I think back to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. He suggested we were moving toward a High Tech, High Touch society. That is, the more technologically sophisticated we become, in the same proportion we become eager for human contact, need human contact.

Those who write about the elderly and robots always seem to paint things as either/or. Either we increase the number of in home health care workers or we use robots. No, we’ll do both. And we’ll love it.

I want mine for my 70th birthday.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Memories, Third Phase

The Numinous

May 23, 2013 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Early Growth Moon

One of the problems with the Self model I proposed yesterday is that it is sticky. When the ego has its way, which it wants to do all the time, feelings and thoughts gum up the mental works, a problem that zen and other meditative disciplines can correct, or, at least, diminish. Example. Waking up at 4:50 am this morning, then running through the evening at Tom’s 35th anniversary gig. Nothing in particular, just this thought then that thought, which might lead to an emotion which can careen off in another direction.

This not unusual for me, neither is it usual. It happens. Rather than eliminate the self to control the ego I choose to say, it happens. And not worry the matter beyond that. Then I can move on, albeit with less sleep than I might desire, but I can always–and always do–take a nap.

At 10:30 I see John Desteian, my analyst (Jungian), of long standing and we will discuss the numinous. At least that’s the question for the day: what is the essence of the numinous? I’ve had some time to reflect on that since John and I last met.

Rudolf Otto invented the term numinous in his book, The Idea of the Holy. In this book he wanted to get at the non-rational aspects of religion, the holy and the sacred being the usual terminology for it. He felt these words had a lot of baggage and had gotten confused in the up take of rationalists who wrote theology, did historical criticism of biblical texts and generally tried to shoehorn the whole of the religious experience into the reason paradigm forcefully advanced by Enlightenment thinkers and the newly regnant science. Otto wrote in 1909.

The numinous is his word for the dimension of the holy and the sacred not touchable by reason, yet crucially important to their lived reality. Jung, born in 1903, came to Otto’s work with a deep respect for the small r religious life and adopted the numinous as critical to his understanding of psychology.

Thus, the question, what is the essence of the numinous? As I see it right now, the numinous is an affective response to an experience of the other, an example of which would be the ego experiencing the Self. The ego, as the command and control center of the psyche, believes it has full authority for advancement of its priorities, but not so. The ego works best and accomplishes the most when subservient to the overall needs of the Self.

That is, the ego wants to arrange matters to optimize the survival and flourishing of what it perceives to be me, the sense of I that has the most developmental history, and also the sense of I most invaded by cultural or personal expectations that may not advance the interest of the Self, but may try (too often successfully) to bend the Self toward the goal of career, ambition, money, fame, power. This bending or truncating of the Self in service of needs defined by externals–the culture or persons influential in the individual’s history–leads to deep unhappiness, a sense (and the reality) of betraying one’s Self.

The power of the numinous comes in its ability to challenge the mundane priorities of the ego. Note, the ego’s priorities are not bad or wrong. To the contrary, they are in line with the need to survive and, within limits, to thrive. Those limits are, interestingly, the places where the needs of the Self conflict with received expectations, either cultural or from your personal history. In other words, the unexamined ego will take me down the path of whatever expectation hollers loudest.

When the numinous, the whole Self, (or God, or Brahma, or shunyata) intervenes, it enlists the ego’s powers of organization, protection and survival and marshals them in a more holistic direction, that is, fulfillment of dreams and hopes that connect the individual to the collective, not in the sense of overpowering it or coming to dominate it, but in a manner that synchronizes the gifts of the individual with the needs of the many.

This change of direction can be terrifying, can seem like abandonment of everything mom and dad taught, of those very things the culture says are most desirable, and such a direction threatens the individual with isolation and failure. The most familiar direction seems safest and an experience of the numinous challenges it.