Category Archives: Aging

Aging, Humanities, Memories, Writing

Scribo, ergo sum.

Leave a comment

Spring                                           Awakening Moon

An outside day today.  Planting onions, garden planning and repair.  I’m itchy to get back to learning more Latin and translating the Metamorphoses, but the rhythm of nature waits for no one.

Writing is always an exercise in self-disclosure, no matter what kind of writing you do.  The subjects you pick, the ones you don’t, the style you use, the one you avoid, the words you choose, the ones you don’t know all reveal inner workings most folks prefer to keep to themselves.  Even with my modest public writing–this blog, sermons, the Sierra Club Blog last year for example, I’ve gotten the occasional emotional jolt that comes when the inside becomes the outside.

If you click on the comments about John Lampl, you’ll see an example of what I mean.  This comment came right out of left field, a comment about a post I’d written a year and a half ago about events in my life that happened, let’s see now, 36 years ago.  36 years.  What’s amazing about that is the rocket ride back to feelings of the past, that particular past, I went on when I read the post.

To gauge the difficulties of those years is like comparing a Caterpillar 73f to a Tonka Truck.  Today is a Tonka Truck life in terms of angst.  Those days I bled angst from every pore.  I married a wonderful young woman, Judy Merritt, at the height of the sixties, 1969.  We got married on an Indian mound in Anderson, Indiana, received two pounds of marijuana as a wedding present and recessed to I’m So Glad by the Cream.  Butterflies landed on my shoulder.  Really.  Five years later my alcoholism had grown worse–ironically during my time in seminary–and I pushed Judy away.  No wonder Johnnie was there to catch her.

There is, too, an inescapable amount of self-absorption in writing.  I’ve kept journals for years, I have three bookshelves lined with them.  The last five years I’ve kept much of my journal-type writing on line in this blog and its Frontpage predecessor.

This post made me wonder why I do this.  Not from an, oh my god why did I ever do this perspective, but from a Why do I do this point of view.   The easiest and probably the truest explanation is that it is just what I do.  I write.  I write about politics, about fantasy worlds I create, about my life, about thinking through the liberal faith tradition, about art.  My dad wrote.  I write.

Scribo, ergo sum.

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

En-Theos

Leave a comment

Spring                                      Awakening Moon

If you know me, you know I have enthusiasms.  Two or three years in astronomy.  Two years of close study of Jungian thought.    9 years of touring and two and a half years of education in art history.  A full years home study course in horticulture.  We’re now in our third year of converting our property to a permaculture environment for vegetables, fruits and nuts.  The most recent instance, though one of long standing in my thoughts, is Latin.

As I finished my first four lines of the Metamorphoses the other day, it struck me that art history and Latin suit me pretty well, better than politics and the church.  I said this out loud to Kate and she said, “Well, philosophy and anthropology were more masculine.”  I guess that’s true and I guess the same certainly goes for politics although that’s changed a lot since the 60’s.  The ministry is a more mushy profession gender wise, especially for liberal protestants, but since I always did politics and consulting, probably not so for me.

The thing is, I don’t think art history and Latin were options that were even visible to me.  It wasn’t, in other words, that I rejected them in favor of philosophy and anthropology.  Nothing much more to say about this than that I have them in my life now and I’m not about to let go.

I have wondered about political action, long my baseline activity, the self-authenticating act.  Has its time passed for me?  I’m not sure about that. Will take more thought.

Aging, Travel

Life Is a Cabaret

Leave a comment

Spring                                                         Awakening Moon

When we drove over to our financial consultant this morning, I looked up and saw a crescent Awakening moon tucked in behind three wispy rows of cirrus clouds.  The moon, faint and slightly out of place, added a moment of mystery.

It was an omen.  Ever had a really pleasant surprise?  I had one, Kate and I had one this morning.  We sat down with Ruth, our consultant, and began going over this and that as we always do.  She got caught up on matters personal and physical like Kate’s back surgery and asked questions about Kate’s impending retirement at the first of next year.  That was why we were there, to make sure about our resources after Kate leaves full time medicine.

We tossed ideas around and looked at a 2011 budget Kate and I did last week.  It was,  in my view, tight but manageable.   Ruth made a comment about the amount of money we had coming in from social security and pensions and then how much more we needed from money in Kate’s retirement account.  Wait?  What was that?

We add the money from the retirement account to the social security and the pension?  My mind went blank for a minute as parts of me processed what this meant.  It meant I’d viewed our post-retirement budget from a very restricted perspective.  I had, for reasons I no longer understand, folded the our social security and pension payments into the total from the retirement account rather than adding them all together.  This means our available cash after Kate retires just went up by about 50%!  50% is a big number.  That means our budget goes from being adequate to pretty damned good.

A pleasant surprise, indeed.

Afterward, we ate lunch at Spoonriver, Brenda Langston’s place by the Guthrie.  I saw Brenda there and complimented her on her class and the restaurant.  It was a great, healthy and damned expensive lunch.  But, what the hell?  We can afford it.

Aging, Cooking, Health

Class A Brenda

Leave a comment

Spring                                        Awakening Moon

Another Brenda Langston class under my belt literally and figuratively.  Literally:  we had a smoothie (it had brown rice in it.), an egg and kale and rice dish.  Breakfast.  Next, for lunch we had a red lentil soup with some whole grain bread.  Dinner was salmon with nutty crust and walleye with sesame seed topping, a leek/broccoli steamed veggies and a brown rice patty on a nori fold.  Tapioca showed up last as dessert.

Brenda was in good form tonight.  The kind of person you’d want to take home to mom and say, Brenda is my friend.  She’s funny, passionate, expert, opinionated in the gentlest of ways.  Her approach is tricky because she has done what zealots always decry; she has discovered the good in many, maybe all cuisines and says the best thing is to quit worrying, start making better choices and enjoy healthy food.  Makes sense to me.

Aging, Family, Garden, Great Work

This Day, So Far

Leave a comment

Spring                                       Awakening Moon

As the awakening moon wanes, its work done, life has begun to take on its growing season rhythms here at 7 oaks.  I’m hunting for weed free straw, leek transplants and onion sets.  Gotta lay down some bulb fertilizer because bulbs need extra help as they blossom.

It’s been a productive day.  Kate and I finished our budget work for 2011–retirement budget.  It has lots of unfamiliar factors in it:  COBRA for me,  Medicare part B for Kate, shifting to checks from our retirement account, social security.  Some unknowns.  But, we look pretty good right now.

We had lunch.  Now.  A nap.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality

Being YourSelf

Leave a comment

Spring                                       Full Awakening Moon

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.” – e.e cummings

This has always been top of the list for me, remain me.  I’ve had my skirmishes with great levelers like alcohol, tobacco, marriage for no discernible reason, the cloak of ecclesiastics. Even after these resolved or faded into the background, I continued to struggle with that greatest beast of all for men, ambition.  Fame.  Honor.  Wondering just when my gifts would finally gain recognition, the recognition they deserved.  Didn’t occur to me until much later that they probably already had.  Gained the recognition they deserved.

The drive to live into your true Self rather than plump up your persona, polish the ego is a strong one, but it often gets subducted, like a continental tectonic plate meeting another.  This kind of movement, pushing the true Self far down, further into the dark center of Self, only increases the tremors when it finally becomes untenable, when the true self must out.

We can ever tell for ourselves how well we’re doing on this score because the persona and the ego set the original tender traps, honey pots of positive stroking, so our self evaluator is too often compromised.  Analysis helps.  So does a loving partner who will be honest while being kind.  Friends of the same kind, help too.

Today though, as I live into my 63rd year, 63 long trips around the sun, it feels to me as if I generally live as my self,  not as others would have me be, but as my own conscience guides.  Hallelujah.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Politics

Fall Out?

Leave a comment

Spring                                             Waxing Awakening Moon

The awakening moon has a quarter lit up tonight (though it’s half of the side we always see).  Orion rests below it, sinking down below the horizon earlier and earlier now that spring has come.  He’s a winter time friend, the opposite of a snow bird.  I hope you’ve had a chance to consider the thinks in your life that need a little extra nudge as they grow, parts of you that need encouragement to awaken.  Maybe it’s that painting you’ve always wanted to start.  Buy some canvas.  A garden?  Get a shovel and a seed catalog.  Meditating?  Clear out a comfortable spot and buy a comfortable chair or big pillow.  Whatever it is spring and the awakening moon will push you along.

In my life it’s Latin, the novel, the Sierra Club’s legislative agenda and the new gardening year plus, of course, the bees.

This health care vote will not lose the Democratic party congress or the Whitehouse for the next two generations.  I’ve heard people make comparisons to LBJ’s famous observation about passage of the Civil Rights Act.  He was right.  Passing the Civil Rights Act upended the solid South and kick started the rise of the moral majority.  The result was 40 years of conservative politics from which it will take us a long time to recover.

(The Democrats will not need a fallout shelter.  The party of no will.)

Health care is in no way similar.  The opposition to it is smoke, driven by the disinformation and fear mongering of right wing shock jocks and the little old lady from Stillwater with the big hair and the desire to smooch the Bushmaster.  There is no comparable bloc of votes lost by providing health care to all in the richest country in the world.  Are there mad people, some foaming at the mouth, tea drooling out of every orifice?  Yes, I guess there such people.  They are the party of no we can’t.  Now, at least for this brief shining moment, the Democrats have awakened (see what I mean?) to the principles that used to inform Democratic platforms, principles that demanded a fair shake for the poorest of the poor and made sure that workers got fair wages and decent benefits.

Aging, Politics

OH, Yeah!

Leave a comment

Spring                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

You’re traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead: your next stop: deciphering Medicare!  I’m not kidding here.  Kate and I have given this day to determining a post retirement budget and one of the most difficult things to understand is not the cost of medicare, but just what goes with what.  If the explanatory booklet that simplifies Medicare, from a local senior citizen organization, is any indication of what health care reform promises, God help us.

On the other hand this is an exciting time for both of us, investigating life when Kate no longer has work demands, figuring out the wonders of budgeting when such terms as dissaving begin to make sense.  Dissaving is, you guessed it, spending money you’ve saved.  That’s the basic idea in retirement unless you’re stuck behind the counter at Mac and Don’s with a silly hat and the smell of grease in your gray hair.

After a while we gave up and went to lunch.  Then a nap.  Now we’re refreshed and ready to get back at the budget process.

Say, did I mention that I’m proud of the Democrats?  Damn.  Gutsy politics.  The last time we had truly historic reform came under a former senator, Lyndon Baines Johnson who gave us Model Cities and Civil Rights.  Remember the Great Society?  I do.  Except for that pesky war in Vietnam Johnson was a great one.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on the news, Health, Politics, US History

President Shoots the Moon

Leave a comment

Spring                                                 Waxing Awakening Moon

Moon viewing.  We don’t do it much here, except as a casual thing, a walk outside, look up, oh a nice moon tonight or shine on harvest moon for me and my gal then on to the drive in or what’s on your play list dude? In Japan they take the moon viewing a step further, ok, a whole nighttime stroll longer.  They build moon viewing platforms, have parties, and produce some wonderful art that features the moon.  Tonight the waxing awakening moon hung just above the trees in the west, behind a scrim of clouds, a faint glow surrounding the upturned crescent.  It is a moon to remember.

This crescent awakening moon will now memorialize for me the day the Democratic party got some balls.  Obama wanted to pass health care reform.  I saw a representative, I don’t know his name, with silver hair, looked about my age, get up and say, “Before we were born, reform of the health care system was begun, just waiting for this day.”

This is not a victory for Democrats, however, it is a victory for the American people, a victory for those who have lived their lives in fear of a cough, a broken leg, a child’s fever.  In this country, which can bail out billionaires and support subsidies to bank robbers, that is, banks that rob, to have 32 million people with no health insurance has been a crime of long standing, a crime that has produced serial deaths over and over with no fear of prosecution.

It is my hope that Republicans will understand that many of the folks who swallow the tea party line are the very people who will wake up some time soon with health insurance, health insurance they have never had. If you don’t believe me, just look at the Gallup map below and consider it with an overlay of the Bush and McCain presidential votes.

Obama has won a victory here, a hard fought victory and he should get his props.  He should also get more credit for calming the Great Recession and ushering in a period of up ticking economic news.  I imagine we will see more such substantive wins for him as his presidency continues.

Hurray for the red, white and blue!

Now a moment on partisan politics and post-partisan politics, the so-called third way.  Yes, our politics have become so polarized that it is difficult to recall the times when it wasn’t.  Yes, there is acrimony and ill will and yes, it does make governance more difficult than it needs to be.  Here’s the thing, though.  In the end it is politics.  This clumsy, broken, dysfunctional process is the way we have chosen, and keep choosing, to mediate our substantive differences.  I read a very compelling argument for changing the system of representation in the Senate where 10% of the states have 90% of the population, but have only a tenth of the votes.  The author of the argument went on to say that fixing this dysfunction was not possible and that we needed to work with the system we have.

It’s not ideal, but there is no system for managing the affairs of human societies that is and ours is better than most.  This vote proves it.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Writing

Gonna Take That Wild Last Ride

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                         Waxing Wild Moon

Back at the novel today, 1,800 words.  There’s an uphill struggle to get back in the groove when I let a week or so slip by with no work on it.  Like navigating the turns in the fast luge track at Whistler, I get stuck at the start, but once the momentum picks up, I can dive into a chicane with confidence.  Back at it now headed down the track.

Self confidence is so fragile, at least for me, and I expect for many of us.  If I could graph mine’s rise and fall even in the course of a day, it would mimic a wild stock ride, selling up at one moment, then a run and a price in sudden decline.  And then the reverse.  Again.  Even now.

Example.  I came downstairs feeling pretty good about getting back to the novel.  Granted I skipped exercise tonight to keep on writing, but overall that felt good.  Then I went on Amazon’s website to check out an author Mark Odegard recommended, Dan Simmons.  Sure enough, he’s doing stuff enough like what I’m trying to do to make me nervous.  He’s already sold a lot.  I haven’t.

Now there’s a steadier core that chugs alone just underneath all this oscillation–the ego worried about its reception in the world–and that core is the one that, walking the garbage and recycling out tonight under a gorgeous waxing wild moon, reflected that no matter how gifted and accomplished, we all die, then sink away into oblivion.  Yes, a few don’t–Homer, Socrates, Qin Shi Huangdi, Confucius, Emily Dickinson, Boadicea, Teresea of Avila, Pancho Villa, Montezuma, Geronimo, Einstein, Chopin, Bach, Da Vinci for example–but the bulk of us, the 99.999999% of all who have ever lived, live in the best way we can, then slowly fade, first in body, then in memory, then we’re gone.

This one knows that the best life is the one we live on our own terms, not on borrowed hopes and dreams and not judged by externalities.  At 63 the core has become stronger and stronger, often balancing the ego’s surges and falls before they happen, but it is not yet dominant, at least not all of the time.  The devil of expectations still sticks a pitchfork into my ego every once and a while.  Predictably, my ego squeals.

If you have a chance tomorrow night, go outside and look at the moon around 9:00 pm if the night is clear.  The moon sat up there in the sky tonight, Orion off to its southeast, other stars around it like diamonds around a fat, lustrous pearl.  A work of art that needs no hand, but satisfies the eye.