Category Archives: Aging

Aging, Bees, Family, Friends, Retirement

Sheepshead

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Samhain                                               Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

The card gods were pretty good to me.  I had some good hands, some good luck and a lot of fun tonight at sheepshead.  We had a great evening with a lot of laughter.  It’s nice to be with guys who can see the humor in their own lives.

The wisdom teeth began to throb tonight, a bit surprising after a calm period since the extraction.  I’ve felt fatigued and a bit spacy, but no real pain until today.

I will be happy when Kate’s work is done in early January and she goes on casual time.  Having her here will make our home feel more vital.

Over the weekend I plan to put the bees to rest for the winter and make some more soup with the last of the leeks.  Latin tomorrow.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Myth and Story

An Ancientrail, Still Traveled

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Samhain                                                  Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Tracking down a quote from a Mary Oliver book led me to Plato and to his Symposium, in particular a portion dedicated to the mysteries of love.  It reminded me of my initial excitement in studying philosophy, created in large part by J. Harry Cotton, a professioral stereotype at Wabash College.  He wrapped tobacco in a light paper plug, inserted it into his pipe, applied a match and away we went into the history of Western philosophy, J. Harry’s head wreathed in tobacco smoke.  He often quoted whole pages of Plato or Aristotle in Greek, showing us the key words on the blackboard, explaining the intricacy of their translation and how an interpretation could turn on a single word.  I’d never met any one like J. Harry and my memory of him is still fond.

The excitement he stirred slowly winked out when I had to transfer to Ball State University, out of money for Wabash.  There the logical positivists still reigned, even though their star had already fallen in graduate schools across Europe and the US.  At Ball State I had the opposite of J. Harry, Robert something.  He was the head of the department and an avowed enemy of all metaphysics and a champion of philosophy as clarifier of scientific language.  What exactly do we mean by cold?  Hot?  Solid?  Gas?  Not unimportant question in a techn0-scientific age, but hardly inspiring.  At least to me.

I finished out my philosophy major, but added one in anthropology because my passion for it, once lit, did not go out.  This was all a long, long time ago.  I graduated from Ball State in 1969, so that’s, what?  41 years and another millennium in the past.

What is truth?  Justice?  Beauty?  How do we know what we know?  What is a sound argument?  What is a weak one?  Why?  How have ideas about these big questions changed over time?  And why?  What do they matter now, in our world?  This was what interested me and the logical positivists had nothing to teach me in regard to them.  Perhaps it’s not surprising that I ended up in Seminary, where those questions still matter and where there are answers and the history of the answers.

Ironically, of course, I have come to inhabit the flattened, anti-metaphysical world of the logical positivists, but not from the perspective of clarification and rejection of metaphysics, but from the standpoint of existentialism.  In this new world, which I’ve inhabited since 1991 or so, gnothi seauton, know thyself,  inscribed over the door within the Temple of Apollo at Delphi that lead to the Oracle, has been my holy writ.  Rather than books full of poetry, creation myths, messiahs and anti-Christs, I have two words.  They’re enough for me, though.  More than enough.

Aging, Health, Politics

Getting Over the Pain

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Samhain                                             Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Well.  A good night’s sleep, little swelling this morning and no discernible pain.  So far this recovery has had no bite other than fatigue and disorientation, some of which continues this morning.  Still taking the ibuprofen but I only used one of the vicodin.

The new political reality has us all shuffling from meeting to meeting, trying to figure out what comes next.  Tomorrow afternoon I’ll attend a meeting of Minnesota progressives (leftists) to discuss the impact on a wider progressive agenda.  It’s not good, at least not in the short run.  If we can use the next two years to define and energize those who would benefit, we could find ourselves stronger in 2012 than we were 2010.  That’s a big if and it will take considerable work to make it happen.

Aging, Health

Here Comes the Pain

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Samhain                                                 Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

The gauze is out and the long acting anesthetic still has control of the pain.  Cold packs on my right every half hour, ibuprofen and vicodin for bedtime.  Should be ok, though tomorrow could be worse than today.  Cheer up, things could be worse.  I cheered up and, sure enough, things got worse.

Right now I’m thinking this recovery will proceed pretty smoothly and I’m happy about that.

Kate sat out in the waiting room, tense, because she knows the things that can go wrong.  Meanwhile, I floated softly as a cloud among the daffodils.

Though I do try to avoid the medical world as much as possible, I am glad we have their work available.  It makes life easier and, often, even possible.

As I’ve written this, the analgesic from the procedure has begun to wear off and my jaw has a touch of ache to it.   It probably will not stay subsided for long now.  Have to roll out the heavier meds.  Not much more clear thinking now.  Adios.

Aging, Health

Apres Versid

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Samhain                                           Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Woke up on a blue plastic couch, a bit chilly.  A woman filled a syringe, I could see her through a small window.  There was a slight fog in my perception, a kind of garbling to my thought, courtesy of the versid and fentanyl.  Took me a moment to orient myself, feel the gauze on my right, filling up my mouth, giving me an overfull sensation.  A bit later a nurse took my blood pressure, put me in a wheel chair and wheeled me to the elevator then down to Kate who waited in the truck.

Back home now with pain meds.  The teeth came out smoothly which lessens the risk of complications.  A good thing.  Vicodin and ibuprofen for the rest of the day, a bit hazy as the day progresses.

Glad it’s over with and will be even gladder when the healing process finishes.

Aging, Health, Retirement

The Better Part of Wisdom?

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Samhain                                               Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

 

Wisdom teeth.  Well, I still have a couple.  A while back I had the first two yanked out, but the ensuing weekend and week made me hold off on the other two.  Until now.  Faced with the imminent loss of dental insurance, or at least a changed plan, I asked my dentist what he thought I could do now to help my dental health long term.  The wisdom teeth, he said, out.

So, this morning out they come.  I woke up early this morning, a bit nervous I guess.  My goal, in general, is to stay away from the medical profession (except for my lovely wife), but once in a while it’s unavoidable.  Like today.

Wondering about wisdom teeth, I took a quick poke around the web and found a dentistry site that identified wisdom teeth as vestigial.  Interesting.  Seems at one point our diet consisted of much more abrasive material which needed the third molar to help grind it down.  Back then we didn’t need extra fiber in the diet, I’m guessing.  Now jaws stay fuller*, our diet’s smoother and we don’t create space by losing permanent teeth, thanks to modern dentistry.

Around 9:15 the procedure begins.  Oh, boy.

*Until quite recently, our diet included mostly very coarse food, as well as impurities such as dirt and sand. This coarseness would abrade teeth so significantly that they would take up less space in the jaw.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

The Self

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Samhain                                                   Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Woollies at Stefan’s house tonight.  Bill, Frank, Warren, Stefan, Scott, Tom, Mark, me.  Paul was there for a bit before he left to have dinner with his daughter Clare.

Topic tonight was what role a higher power plays in your life, if any.  We wandered here and there, but came back to a few themes:  some found matters of this sort best expressed through loss of the ego, others found the idea of a higher power important for their journey.  A few of us focused on the self, the authentic self or the integrated self or the deep self, a self that is sufficient to itself for worth, but eager to belong:  to belong to the earth, to each other, to a past, to a family, but in that belonging still the self remains what it is, validated and grounded in an accidental combination of genes that is unique and separate, yet also a part while remaining apart.  The key element to this perspective then becomes personal responsibility, willingness to make choices and accept their consequences.

We touched on the notion of the sacred as a created sense of belonging, of a self located in a context, a place, a family, a cemetery, a house.

Some found this perspective a product of aging, of graceful self-acceptance, of knowing who we are, warts and all, and loving that self, not an ideal self that others or external systems would have us mold ourselves toward.

We have different toe holds on our reality, on what we need to feel whole and authentic, but we agreed long ago to take this journey together, and we’ve accepted responsibility for the ride.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

The Value of Increasing Darkness

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Samhain                                         Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

The daylight is gone, twilight has fallen and night is on its way.  Now that we have entered the season of Samhain, the leaves have vanished from the trees and the clouds, like tonight, often hang gray in the sky.  Samhain means the end of summer and in the old Celtic calendar was the half of the year when the fields went fallow while the temperature turned cool, then cold, hope returning around the first of February, Imbolc, when the ewes would freshen and milk would once again be part of the diet as new life promised spring.

In between Imbolc and Samhain lies the Winter Solstice.  The early darkness presages the long twilight; it lasts from now until late December as we move into the increasing night until daylight becomes only a third of the day.  This has been, for many years, my favorite time of year.  I like the brave festivals when lights show up on homes and music whirs up, making us all hope we can dance away our fear.

The Yamatanka mandala at the Minnesota Institute of Art gives a meditator in the Tantric disciplines of Tibetan Buddhism a cosmic map, brightly displaying the way to Yamatanka’s palace grounds.  In the middle of the palace grounds, represented here by a blue field with a vajra (sacred thunderbolt) Yamantaka awaits our presence.

In the Great Wheel as I have come to know it, we visit Yamantaka on the night of the Winter Solstice, that extended darkness that gives us a foretaste of death.  Our death.  On that night we can sit with ourselves, calm and quiet, imagining our body laid out on a bed, eyes closed, mouth quiet, a peaceful expression on our lifeless face.

We can do that, not in suicidal fantasy, but in recognition of our mortality, our finite time upon the wheel of life, awaiting our turn as the wheel turns under the heavens carrying us away from this veil of samsara.  If we can do that, we can then open ourselves to the thin sliver of light that becomes more and more, as the solstice marks the turning back of the darkness and brings us once again to life.

When we can visit Yamantaka’s palace, sup with him in this throne room and see death as he, the conqueror of death sees it, we are finally free.

Aging, Family, Retirement

Getting Closer

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Samhain                                          Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Kate spent 3+ hours at a sewing workshop, creating place mats.  They’re beautiful.  She’s done a lot recently to kick her sewing up another notch, learning how to use the embroidery module on her Bernina, assembling her machine quilter, making more difficult quilts, turning out purses of her own design, going to classes, joining a quilting guild and signing up for road trips to various quilt shops.  She sews a lot, disappearing into her sewing room and working for hours at a stretch, often oblivious to time.  She gets in flow.

She’s a bare month and half + a few days from retirement and she’s ready.  Her casual time will be only 4 work units or so a month with plenty of flexibility.

Our day-to-day lives will probably change little, except Kate won’t be leaving for work at any point during the day.  Once she’s retired, I plan to drive the truck in the winter and let the red car ride out the icy season in the garage.  It’s not the best on snow and ice.  That sort of thing, otherwise we’ll cook, tend the garden, do our creative work, travel some, volunteer here and there.

Living, not retiring.

Aging, Family, Humanities, Literature, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

Heavy, Man, Heavy

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Samhain                                           Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

File under the things we do for love.  Kate asked me, as a big favor, if I would clear the sidewalk and a path to the mailbox.  I agreed albeit reluctantly. Never again.  This type of snow, laden with water, dense and prone to packing tight when moved, is just too hard for me to clear.  It clogs up the snowblower, so the snowblower’s out.  Lifting it is beyond my frame’s capacity.  I knew it, but I did it anyhow.  Ouch.

The snow took off the top of the cedar tree’s other trunk, too, so the whole thing will need to come down.  That means the chain saw, sometime soon.  That, I can do.

After pushing some snow around, I harvested the last of the leeks, fine looking vegetables.  The greens, kale and chard in particular, will continue growing until the ground freezes, so I’ll probably have one more harvest from them, too.

Most of the morning I tried to pack in some material not too different from the heavy snow:  Latin participles.  As participles, they share in the attributes of both the adjective–meaning declensions–and verbs–meaning tense and voice.  In addition the participles tense does not follow the verbs because the participle can cue action either concurrent, before or after the action of the verb.  In addition, just to confuse things, the present tense and the passive future tense use the verbs present tense stem to form the participle while the future tense and the passive perfect tense use the participle stem.  Yikes.

I know, I know.  I’m doing this on purpose.  I’m just venting.