Category Archives: Aging

Aging, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Retirement, Weather +Climate

The Cold Month

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Winter                                                                       Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

Sunlight has begun to grow, but as is often the case here in January, the snow keeps the air near the ground cold and the amount of light increase will not begin to warm us until February, though by then the train will have left the station for winter.   It’s days then will, again, be numbered by rising temperatures, melting ice and corners in the city where cars on intersecting streets can be seen again.  But not now, not January.  This is the Cold Month.

Kate’s next to last day at full time work.  Her friends at work will take her out to Applebee’s tomorrow night after the shift ends at the Urgent Care.  Afterward she will come home and we’ll sit together a bit, listening to music or watching a recorded TV program, the last time we’ll play out this late night ritual save for the occasional, 4 0r 5, nights she’ll work a month for the next couple of years.

Vega and Rigel will go to Armstrong kennels for the first time since they came to live here.  They’re pretty flexible dogs so I’m sure they’ll have a good time.  All of our dogs have liked it there.  Emma, our eldest whippet who died last year, loved the kennel, eagerly whining and straining to get inside.

My friend’s wife has chosen a hormonal treatment for her adenocarcinoma.  They’ll go with that and see what results they get, if the tumors shrink.  Again, if you have a quiet moment and can remember her and her family, they would appreciate it.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Weather +Climate, Writing

Gut Check

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Winter                                                                    New Moon of the Cold Month

Last Monday night I ate dinner with my friends, six of them, at a restaurant, the Bukhara, which carries on the Mughal influenced culinary tradition of Northern India.  On the way home I got a gut check on my world view.  There was a light snow, the temperature hung at zero and the lights of other cars and trucks reflected off melted water on the highway as I headed toward Coon Rapids.

Near the intersection of 494 and Rockford Road some part of me, a deep part, reached up and said, your friend’s wife may die.  That part went on, speaking in images and feelings as the deepest parts of us do.  The reflected highway, a skidding truck, my death.  What then, Charlie, it asked?  What then?  Another aspect of my Self, perhaps even the same part asking the question, raised up an image from an old movie about Rome, The Fall of The Roman Empire.  Why?  What?  Oh.  Alec Guiness.  Marcus Aurelius.  A principled man, a Caesar, a Stoic.  The author of the Meditations.

How did this relate?  The epitaph.  Reported as the most popular of ancient Rome:  I was not.  I was.  I am not.  I don’t care.  Stoicism and a principled approach to this life.  Cast aside the final, eternal question.  Unanswerable.  Unknown.  Most likely unknowable.  Still act.  Still live.  Still care.

The windshield washers snicked, dirty water thrown up by vehicles in front of me cleared and I was back on the highway, headed toward 694.  And I knew.  Yes.  The deepest part of me knew, too.  Yes.  This life.  For all I’ve got.  This one.

Aging, Bees, Health, Humanities

Keep That Gray Matter Working

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Winter                                                            New Moon of the Cold Month

Geez.  I felt affirmed by this paragraph in a longer article by Oliver Sacks.

Whether it is by learning a new language, traveling to a new place, developing a passion for beekeeping or simply thinking about an old problem in a new way, all of us can find ways to stimulate our brains to grow, in the coming year and those to follow. Just as physical activity is essential to maintaining a healthy body, challenging one’s brain, keeping it active, engaged, flexible and playful, is not only fun. It is essential to cognitive fitness.

Oliver Sacks is the author of “The Mind’s Eye.”

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Health

Pain

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Winter                                                                 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

When a friend is in pain, the pain travels.  In its journey from one friend to another, the pain may not lessen, but its burden may grow lighter.  Such a journey is underway now with a friend whose wife has received distressing news, the kind of news we know about yet still hope will never be heard among the people we know and love.  Cancer.  It has such a brutal, dangerous, threatening aura.  Black.  Shot through with jagged points.  Hearing the word in the mouth of a friend sets the inner self back.  Creates a sense of fear and loss, loss even before any loss, a type of loss that may be the final stage of innocence, the end game of our immortality.

Then there is turning to face the truth, to talk to the doctors, to sort out the words, the feelings, the possibilities, the dangers.  And choosing, choosing about matters of life and death. Decisions no amount of prayer or meditation or forethought prepare us for, decisions about our own life, its length, its end.  Or, worse, the life of a loved one.  Hope?  Of course, hope always has a role, a horse in the race.  But there are other horses, too.

My heart has been heavy ever since I learned this news, an existential dread, the kind always there, under the surface, the knowing, the knowing about predatory nature.  Yes, she is our mother; yes, in all ways, yes; but, like Coatlicue of whom I wrote a few days ago, she not only gives life, but she takes it back.

Cancer is not evil.  It has no intention.  It is.  It is a force majeur, an act of blind fate.  And yet.  We can, sometimes, turn it back.  Cancer’s aura has gotten a bit dimmer of late, a degree of lethal certainty has leaked away as drugs and drug regimens, research and surgery have chipped away at its powers.

So, I invite you to do the kind of thing in which you believe for my friend’s wife.  A kind and generous universe will know how to direct your message.  We all need love, love from places we know and places we don’t.

Aging, Family, Health, Retirement

The Last Week

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Winter                                                          Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Kate’s last week of work began with a 7:30 am drive to the gastroenterologist.  Good news from the colonoscopy.  So, she enters her last week of work and the first year of her 400_honey-extraction_0239retirement with good news on the intestinal tract.  She also three crowns going in a couple of weeks from now, new glasses (several) and the new hip (August) and the l-4 l-5 fusion last March.  She’s ready to hit the new year sewing and cooking and visiting the grandkids, all parts intact and functioning, more or less.  A big shout out to Kate as she starts her last week of full time work.

Aging, Memories, Politics, US History, Writing

1967

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Winter                                                                 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

1967.  Anastasia Pydych, a docent friend, has done a movie on 1968 which has a relevance to her father that I can’t recall right now.  A friend of hers, a writer for Rolling Stone, has a book underway about 1967.

When told her I was a sophomore in college that year, she said, “Oh, that’s perfect.  That would have been the perfect time.”  It reminded me of a comment made by one of the interviewees for the Sierra Club policy position, “I wish it could be like in the 70’s, when people had passion.”

We didn’t know it was historic, that year, we were living it.  It was a confusing, wonderful, chaotic, astonishingly hopeful, colorful, drugfull, penetrating, unafraid time.  Long ago, I don’t recall where now, I read that the 60’s happened because there was so many young adults than mature adults, that we, in effect, socialized ourselves.  That still seems like the most cogent explanation I’ve heard for the extraordinary sense of freedom and possibility that swept through my corner of the world, central Indiana.  As people passed through town, Muncie, and as some of us hitchiked around and saw other campuses in other states, we knew personally that it was not just us.  A crazy, heady wind had begun to blow, and the times, as Dylan said, were obviously changin’.

It was in ’67 when the draft became a big issue, right across the country.  And, yes, there is an obvious class bias involved in draft deferments, since those of us in college could get one and those who weren’t couldn’t.  Yes, again, there were many baby boomers, probably most, whose lives went on as they would have anyhow, taking a factory job, going into the military, learning a trade, trying out different jobs, getting married, settling down and raising kids.

That wasn’t the way it felt at the time, however.  In those years we believed, as I still believe, that US adventurism and a naive anti-Communism had caused us to insert ourselves in a civil war centuries old, a war in which we had no self-interest and chose our allies only because they identified themselves as the anti-communists.   Most of us men in college then, at least those of us on the left, saw the draft as a form of indentured servitude, only with a cruel twist, in this case the slaves had to die or kill.  Not a great choice.  Many of us, like me, were selective objectors, that is we opposed the Vietnam War as a stupid meat-grinder conceived in Washington and held in place by machismo gone wild, but we were not conscientious objectors, that is, we did not object to all wars.

That sense of being at odds with the ultimate power of the land, the Federal Government, was a powerful glue.  It stuck us together.  We were more disparate than unitary in our objections to the draft, but we were at one in our objection to the war.

This sense of overagainstness,  a feeling bordering on outlaw, made us courageous and reckless.  It made the days, the hours, we lived focus on experimentation, on analysis, on argument, on planning, yes, but also on relationships, parties, drugs and acid rock.  If the man didn’t understand us, we’d understand ourselves.  And boy we worked at it.

If you’re going to San Francisco…  I missed the Summer of Love and Woodstock, though I did make it to two hot years of the Cincinnati Jazz Festival.  I wish I could get the words to say how it felt then.  We felt free, even called, to challenge anything and everything:  our parents, their values, college administrations and their ridiculous in loco parentis, the draft boards, day-to-day reality, sexual limits, congress, the President, the military.  All of it, each day, every minute.  The times were so intense, so charged, so electric.

Well, here’s the thing.  Kate has a colonoscopy in the morning and I have to drive her.  I’m drawing Social Security and so is she.  This next week is her last week of full time work.  1967 is a long time ago is what I’m saying.  But, boy am I glad I was part of it.  It was quite a ride.

Aging, Family, Memories, Travel, Writing

Warp and Weft

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Winter                                                                            Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Other blogs seem to have a slant, a bias, a thing.  I suppose I do too in a general way, the idea of ancientrails, the Great Wheel, the garden, a po-mo pagan sensibility, but what I’m doing is more like an online journal.  On a bookshelf I have two rows of journals kept in various forms since 1971, many erratic in the entries, then, as life moved on, I became more regular.  At one point I had several journals.  A diary like one in which I wrote short entries about my day, a spiritual journey one in which I recorded my experiences of meditation, lection divina, contemplative prayer, scripture study, another in which I took reading notes while I studied Islam, the year after 9/11, several more with reading notes from a year + when I gave up writing and took to reading the classics:  Divine Comedy, Faust, Metamorphosis, works of that nature.  During the year I studied Islam I read the Koran twice, once just to see what it said and another time during the month of Ramadan as I fasted and read enough to finish the entire Koran in thirty days, as many Muslims do.  Yet other blank books contain notes on art history, taken over many years of continuing education at the MIA, ideas for novels, short stories, about writing.

Writing is the thread, the weft I have chosen to weave the tapestry of my life.  The warp threads, stronger by far, developed in body and mind, feelings and thoughts as this Self has moved through life since birth.  The stuff of my daily existence has been the weft when shuttled through with the language I learned at my mother’s knee and my father’s typewriter.

So, this blog is just another pattern,  a particular tartan for this phase of my life.  It may pass away at some point, I certainly will, but, as I wrote the other day, the Web may have granted us bloggers a type of immortality.

When Kate I and were on our honeymoon, in late March or early April of 1990, the last phase of our trip which started a block from the Spanish Steps in Rome, we took the train from Edinburgh to Inverness.  Inverness is the capitol of Celtic Scotland, the northern reaches of the Picts.  The river Ness, from the storied Loch Ness, runs right through town.  On a stroll one afternoon, Kate and I made our way to a tartan mill, a place where tourists could go in and watch tartans being woven.

That day, the master weaver changed over from one tartan to another.  What this involved has stuck me indelibly since then.  The master weaver carries in his head the particular combination of colors, of large spools of yarn, that make, say, the tartan of the clan Sinclair.  He achieves that  particular combination of colors and patterns not by computer, not by telling weavers what to do, but by placing, on a huge rack of iron hooks, individual spools of yarn.  The number of hooks across the top of the hook rack, maybe 25 or 25, below each hook came at least 20 more, maybe 25 more hooks creating a large frame of individual hooks slanted up.  By his placement of the spools the master weaver achieved his design for the yarn from these spools fed precisely into the looms which clicked and clacked behind them.

Later than night, after we had finished our meal at the Station Hotel, Kate and I walked along the river Ness, tendrils of mist floating up from it, weaving themselves forever into our memory.

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Myth and Story, permaculture, Retirement, Weather +Climate

It’s About Time

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Winter                                                                 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.” – T.S. Eliot

Though the calendar, as reformed by Julius Caesar and then Pope Gregory XIII*, rolls over tonight at midnight, and, confusingly to me, has already rolled over on several midnights already, you might notice that the time I keep remains the same.  Tomorrow we will still be in Winter and the Moon of the Winter Solstice will still be waning.  The Great Wheel does not recognize a calendar; it counts time by terrestrial movement through the heavens, moving, instead of hands, solar radiation and expressing itself not in hours or minutes but by days and nights and seasons.  Of course, an accurate calendar makes sense for the world of humans because we figure time in much smaller units and like to be able to do things according to spans of weeks, months, years though these are not, no matter what some might say, natural measures.  They are measures created by the human mind, invented to follow our fascination with chronological time, that is linear time, probably occasioned by our awareness of death.

Note, however, that measuring time does not create more of it, nor make of it less.  All calendars and clocks do is divide up the turning days and advancing nights, make smaller divisions in the more basic cyclical time generated by spaceship earth in its star-loving path.

We can choose which time we want to emphasize in our lives.  I prefer the cyclical time, the turning of the Great Wheel of the heavens, the coming of light and dark, the changes of spring, summer, fall and winter.  As much as possible I try to order my life and encourage myself to respond to seasonal change, but I, too, live in a world in which I am 63, soon to turn 64 in the year 2011, the third millennia after another bout of terrorism in the Middle East.  In this world people will only release money to me based on the linear trajectory of this body.  As for me, I cherish now the inner life brought on by the long nights, the cold and snow.

When spring breaks winter’s grip and flowers begin to push through the earth, when the garlic and the strawberries and the asparagus start anew to grow and flourish above ground,  then too, will I cherish the smell of moist soil carried to me by moist early spring air.  It will not matter to me whether that time comes in March or April or May.  Oh, it may matter to the horticultural me who needs to get leeks and peas and lettuce and other vegetables planted in their due time, but even those kind of changes cycle, too.  The bees will re-emerge to begin their dance with the blooming things, driven not by the clock, but by the presence or absence of the sun, the bright colors of flowering plants and the demands of the colony.

We have our preferences, I know, and mine for many years was the dayplanner, meeting time, always moving stream of time.  No longer.  At least not when I’m at my best.

*wikipedia  “The Gregorian calendar, also known as the Western calendar or the Christian calendar, is the internationally accepted civil calendar. It was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII, after whom the calendar was named, by a decree signed on 24 February 1582, a papal bull known by its opening words Inter gravissimas.[4] The reformed calendar was adopted later that year by a handful of countries, with other countries adopting it over the following centuries. The motivation for the Gregorian reform was that the Julian calendar assumes that the time between vernal equinoxes is 365.25 days, when in fact it is about 11 minutes less. The accumulated error between these values was about 10 days when the reform was made, resulting in the equinox occurring on March 11 and moving steadily earlier in the calendar. Since the equinox was tied to the celebration of Easter, the Roman Catholic Church considered that this steady movement was undesirable.”

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Humanities, Myth and Story, Writing

Listen, This New Year’s Night

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Winter                                                                       Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Have you ever been touched, brushed by a faint wing as it passes?  Perhaps a brief hesitation in an other wise confident progress, or a stutter in your step as you return home?  Some of us feel the passing of these birds of pray more than others.  We’ve not yet perfected the thickness, a protection against stooping falcons of unrest, leaving our Selves out there, unprotected, waiting for the faintest grazing, perhaps seeking it, knowing the tentativeness is real, life fleeing either before us or behind us, who can tell which?  Until it fails us altogether.

I’ve always been this way, though it got a burnishing after I entered college and studied philosophy, then anthropology.  Doubt, skepticism, questions come so naturally to me I have trouble noticing when they take me too far, leave me out there, dangling by myself, a victim of my own questing beast.  In my life there is no such thing as certainty.  Perhaps I was born post-modern, always aware of the interpreter, always aware of the Self as interpreted, subject to oceans of ideas, rivers of feeling, no life guards on this beach, the tide out, vanishing out to sea.

It sounds, I don’t know, dark, or at least gray, but I don’t experience it that way.  Instead, I take in things anew, fresh, not as expected, but as inspected, weighed, considered, felt.  This gives life a newness, a just been seen character that, no matter how exasperating to the other, gives me a world born again with every breath, every step, every sight.

It also means you can’t count on me to agree with you, can’t trust my perception of things since it’s so idiosyncratic, in fact, I don’t trust the things I perceived a day ago.  Perhaps this is true of everyone though I doubt it.  It is the fruit, whether rotten or delicious, of trying to know myself.

When I set foot in Delphi, walked the sacred way up to the temple of Apollo and put myself on the ancientrail of others seeking wisdom from the oracle, I was at my holy of holies.  Here you either learned to know yourself as the sign on the door way commanded or risked losing a kingdom.  Just ask the shade of Croesus.

Listen, this new years, for the sound of flight, air moved aside by feathers, softly.  It might be a raven who owns the sun, or an albatross who has ceased to follow the Ancient Mariner.  If you hear her, go still, watch.  Perhaps you can follow toward those caverns measureless to man.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Family, Holidays, Literature, Retirement

A Visit From the Goon Squad

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Winter                                                               Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

More time with Ovid.  It went slower today, but I’m down to verse 60, at least with my rough draft translation.  Tomorrow Greg and I will go over it, give me a lesson in Latin vocabulary and grammar, polish my work.  We’ll also further refine my knowledge of ablative absolutes and the passive periphrastic.  Which needs, I must say, refining.

Kate’s down to 8 days, 7 days after tonight.  She’s almost giddy.  We’re still putting the finishing touches on her party.  It will be a lot of fun.

Started the HBO series, The Pacific, tonight.  I know something about the European theatre of WWII, but almost nothing about the Pacific.  This should be a good start, give me a way to guide some future reading.

I’m reading a holiday gift, A Visit From The Goon Squad.  The goon squad is time.  Jennifer Egan has taken material not very interesting to me, the music business, lives of socal punk era kids and made them into a combination medieval morality play and cinema verite.  A good read.  I recommend it.