Category Archives: Aging

Aging, Politics, Weather +Climate

The lustre of mid-day

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Winter                                             Full Cold Moon

The full cold moon now has -5 temps under its light.  When there’s snow on the ground and a full moon in the sky, I always think of Twas’ The Night Before Christmas:  And the moon on the new fallen snow gave a lustre of midday to objects below.  Writing that reminded me of a performance I gave of that poem with our high school concert band in the background.  Scared me to death and I didn’t like it.  Acting I loved, but performing to music–not at all.

I surprised my 3 year old granddaughter last week with the news that Grandpa did modern dance in college, performing in front of an audience several times.  My mind says yes I did, my body insists it could never have done that.  It was fun.

Obama.  Our government.  I have known for decades now, as have many of my contemporaries that our system of government broke down long ago.  There are many reasons:  money, lobbyists, an archaic method of representing voters wishes, an apathetic citizenry, the practice of the big lie.  In the past I subscribed to the idea of radical change, a dramatic overhaul of our system, one that would replace it with, say, democratic socialism or a scheme in which the whole of Amerika broke down into smaller regional states.

With the passing years I have lost my faith in radical change in two ways.  One, I doubt the chance of creating it.  Two, and more fundamentally, I’m not convinced that my radical change would not morph into something terrible, perhaps in a different way, but still terrible.  I suppose this could lead to despair or reasoned apathy, but I’m not cut from that cloth.  In a bad situation you use the tools you have and  work for the best change you can expect.

It may be that within the remaining years of my lifetime that  the stars will align  and dramatic change will be possible.  I doubt it, but it could happen.  If it does, I’m there.  Even so, I’m not sanguine about a better world.

This world, this one world, the only world we have must always be enough and not even close to enough.  We must live in it as if it is enough; we must work for it as if it’s not even close.

Aging, Humanities, Letters, Politics

Tires, Novels, Latin

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Winter                                       Waxing Cold Moon

A productive day.  Moved forward on the novel.  Removed the tire, took it in to Carlson, discovered it would require a new tire.   Over to the pharmacy to pick up meds.  Pharmacist recommended 40 mg pills instead of 20’s.  Cuts our co-pay in half for an expensive med.  Lipitor.  Good deal.  The kind of things that will help us once we’re both on medicare.

Finished up the translation section of the Latin chapter.  We’ll see, but it seemed straightforward to me.  Fun.

Work out and tonight at 7:00 pm the first Legcom conference call.    Rock and roll.

Aging, Dreams, Writing

Living in Alien Land

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Winter                                        Waxing Cold Moon

The NFC championship game  is today.  You know where I’ll be.  Yup.  Right there in the chair, cheering on the Vikes.  After dispassionately reading all the match-up analysis and carefully considering all the key information, I still believe the Vikes win a close one.  Adrian Peterson dominates the running game.  We keep Drew Brees and his high flyers off the field.  Favre connects with Rice twice, Shiancoe once, Berrian once and Peterson goes in for one.  Jared Allen and Ray Edwards keep Brees out of his rhythm and don’t allow deep balls.  Vikes 35.  Saints 28.

I had a strange dream last night.  Somehow I got a job working in a financial company, investment company, something like that.  Our financial planner, RJ Devick, worked there.  I did some work that needed to be turned in by a specific time, but couldn’t find either a phone or the work.  Borrowed RJ’s phone, still couldn’t find the work.

All the while Izzy, the famous Hawai’ian singer, sang background music, “Living in an alien land.”  This was to the tune of his protest song, “Living in a sovereign Land.”

I went out for a while, came back to the office (music still playing) and I had red rock dust on a sweatshirt and I realized I had way under dressed for work.  I couldn’t go back in.  I went out to get the Celica and it had one of those tiny spares on it–though in this case it was very large and shredded.

I’m still working on this one.  Guess I recalled it after my Jung tribute.

Might have been related to some reading I did in a journal from 1991, written as I separated from the Presbytery and started writing.  Some of it made my teeth clench.  I planned and planned, struggled this way and that, but had trouble finding a new  way, even though what I wrote there made clear the ministry had never been the way.  A hard time even though I was breaking free, or, maybe, a hard time because I was breaking free.  There would be another ten years of on again off again angst as I wrote, got rejected, failed to market my work, felt like a failure, was a failure.

Then, somewhere in my 50’s I began to realize I had broken through into the life this Self came into the world to live.  It’s not a flashy or big life–as I wanted at times before–it’s a life devoted to family, beauty, the earth, creativity and knowledge.

And, at least for this evening–the Vikings.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story

Jung

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Winter                                 Waxing Cold Moon

“The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.” – Carl Jung

Jung has been central to my later life and this quote shows one reason.  He recognized the indescribable complexity of the lived experience and never tried to simplify it.  We live into problems, rather than roll over them or change them.  If we’re lucky, we make the problems part of our lives, otherwise they eat away at our lives.

Life from 17 to about 37 was difficult for me.  Sometimes in the extreme.  When Mom died, though I couldn’t see at the time, my world fell apart.  It didn’t have to, but I let it.  I internalized my grief, took up drinking and smoking and completely screwed the pooch when it came to making use of a pretty good academic career.  I ended up in the ministry, a place I should probably have never been and it took me 20 years  to extricate myself from that.  Along the way I got married twice, to women for whom I was a bad fit and who were a bad fit for me.  I drank myself into alcoholism, got cleaned up, but didn’t get better until I realized my second marriage was a bad one.

In that process I found John Desteian, a Jungian analyst.  He guided me on a journey of self-exploration and honest self-reexamination.  Much of what I learned about myself was painful, some of it exhilarating.  In the end, I left the ministry, started writing, found Kate and got myself headed off in a direction that fit who I was then and am now.

Jung’s metaphysics may be wrong, who knows?  The collective unconscious has no falsifiable reality.  The Self, as Jung understands it, stretches into neo-platonic realms.  Could be wrong.  His naming of complexes and archetypes likewise have no tangible referents. Doesn’t matter.

What does matter is this.  The blend of thought that Jung put forward encourages me to take mySelf seriously, yet to do so lightly.  It acknowledges the essentially messy and chaotic nature of both inner and outer life, yet makes clear that the only through it is eyes open, heart open, with forgiveness for yourself and others as humans struggling together.  That worked for me, works for me, and will see me through to the end of my life.

Thanks, Carl Jung.  I needed what you offered.

Aging

So Cold I Forgot to Post This

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Winter                              Waning Moon of Long Nights                   -18

Since it is -18 now, at 11:15 p.m. it will get cold by morning.  Don’t know whether it will reach -25 as it did this a.m., but it would not surprise me.

Kate has been reading and reading and reading.  Ever since we got her a Kindle for her birthday back in August, she’s used it a lot.  Over the last few days she’s gone on a real tear.

I’ve been reading a good bit, too.  Current book, The Glass Devil, by Helen Tursten, a Swedish mystery writer.  Almost done.  A bleak book in many ways.  Put alongside the Girl Who Played With Fire and the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, however, it paints a consistent picture of Sweden.   Clean, minimalist, family oriented with a certain sexual candor.  Educated, but somewhat insular.  (peninsular?) Also heir to all the vices that plague us all:  sex, drugs, violence, gangs, family dysfunction.

Well, ok.  I’m also reading Descarte’s Bones, a great read from Mark Odegard.  A Short History of Daoism.  Those are my main efforts right now.

Aging, Great Work, Health, Politics

The Year We Make Contact

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Winter                                     Full Moon of Long Nights

Hmmm.  You know you’re getting old when the sequels to movies, one’s you saw when they came out, are now getting passed by the actual dates.

The year we make contact.  Indeed.

What will the next 10 years be like?  On an equally geezerly note the end of this new decade, Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise, will find me 72 years old.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve known people that were 72 but I wouldn’t let my daughter marry one.  Of course, I don’t have a daughter, so that makes that easy.

My sense, my hope is, that in this coming decade, the teen years of this century, we will come to grips with climate change and in a way that will have a lasting, positive impact.  We won’t have completed the Great Work, the movement to a benign human presence on the earth, but we will have made substantial strides.

Terrorism will decline as a front-burner issue, though it will remain with us, if for no other reason than the continuing disparity between rich and poor countries, disparities exacerbated over the next ten years by the continued growth of India and China.

The Millennium generation will push us further toward a race neutral or race positive world.  It may be that we will develop the strength to see difference as a possibility for enrichment.  Or, maybe not.  I hope the tension begins to move in such a way that the fulcrum tips toward embracing pluralism.

At the end of this decade the grandkids will be ten years older:  Ruthie 13 and Gabe 11.  Yikes.

By the end of this decade I hope Kate and I have got this gardening thing well integrated into our lives.

I hope for, I want a move toward, as one foundation puts, “a more just, verdant and peaceful world.”

Aging, Cinema and Television, Family, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays

A Quiet New Year

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Winter                            Full Moon of Long Nights

We have gained back a few minutes since the Winter Solstice, so the New Year will arrive, as it does every year, with a bit more daylight than the grimmer days of mid-winter.

The neighbors have begun to shoot off fireworks.  They are a restrained lot for the most part, but when they perceive an excuse for celebration:  holiday, birthday, new year, they always bring out the fireworks.

(Methuselah Grove
The Methuselah Grove with the world’s oldest living things. The oldest living tree at 4,723 years, Methuselah, is not identified for its own protection.)

Kate and I have clinked glasses of champagne (her) and Fre (me), wished each other a happy new year and not shot off a single firecracker.  We did watch Jules and Julia, a middling movie in my judgment, though it had some interesting observations about cooking.  We also watched a great Nature program on the rise of the dog.  Apparently a Swedish geneticist has pinpointed eastern Asia as the origin of all dogs.

Kate’s neck has begun to bother her again this week and her left hip is now  worse than it was before the operation.  The back, though, has improved markedly.   A day at a time.

Well, a happy new year to you, whoever you are.  Back at you next year.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Friends, Humanities, Letters, Sport

AncientTrails Visits All Continents

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Samhain                                         Waning Wolf Moon

“Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me. It is an uncomfortable doctrine which the true ethics whisper into my ear. You are happy, they say; therefore you are called upon to give much.” – Albert Schweitzer

Schweitzer was a theologian with unusual views and a favorite of my Mom and Dad.   His “reverence for life” played an important part in their thinking about politics and the world.  Though I’ve never considered it before, I imagine his perspective had a role in shaping mine, too.  Reverence for life was a pre-abortion hoo-ha concept and not meant to be part of that debate.

Just reviewed Google Analytics for AncienTrails.  Thanks to the wonder of the internet (and google) this website has received visits from all 7 continents and 46 of the 50 states in the last month.  Only Nevada, North Dakota, Delaware and Connecticut recorded no hits from November 7th to December 5th.  I find this very strange, perhaps unexplainable, but somehow pleasing, too.  Anyhow, if you’re one of those readers from other parts of the world, please add a comment or two from time to time.  It would be fun to get a conversation going.

Kate and I just took the first two segments of the 55 Alive online driver safety course.  It reminds you that reaction time slows down as you age.   Drinking and driving?  No.  That prescription and non-prescription drugs affect our driving.  Mostly stuff you know, but good reminders so far.  Sobering statistics about driving after age 75, too.  Crashes and fatalities go up considerably with people in those age ranges having the same accident rate of drivers from 16-24 with more deaths.  Gotta factor that into retirement planning.

The Vikes vs. Cardinals game got moved to the higher ratings slot of Sunday night football.  That means the day time is more free than usual at this point on Sunday.

I visited Big Brain Comics yesterday and picked up two graphic novels, both, believe it or not, on advice from reviews in the New York Times.  Strike Force is an anti-war novel set in Iraq and LogiComix, very improbably, is a biography of Bertrand Russell and his work on the Principia Mathematica.  Last night Strike Force kept me up past midnight.

Aging, Dogs, Weather +Climate

Had a Wreck Lately?

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Samhain                            Waxing Wolf Moon

Well, Tiger Woods had a wreck.  Why?  What could have been going at 2:30 a.m. to cause him to drive into a fire hydrant near his home?  Why would I care?  Nobody but the insurance company cares when I have a wreck.  Not saying I have had one, though, and, also not saying what the circumstances were under which I may or may not have had a wreck.  Anybody want to interview me about the wreck I might have or might not have  had?  Didn’t think so.

Emma has come from the vets minus one hemangioma and much cleaner teeth.  Not a serious deal and our 78 year old dog (in human years) did not seem fazed at all.  She would not pee at the vets, but proceeded to do so as soon as we got home.  They were worried about this.  Emma has had a long life and it looks to extend a bit longer.  Good for her.

Colder weather coming.  Highs in mid-20’s, lows in the teens.  About time.  Now we need some snow.

Aging, Family, Friends, Great Work, Health, Politics

Gettin’ Ready

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Samhain                              Waxing Wolf Moon

Let the scramble for the unfinished and the not yet purchased begin.  Thanksgiving day is tomorrow.  We decided to purchase a turkey from Williams-Sonoma since we didn’t see ourselves doing the whole meal.  They gave us a call last night to tell us that the turkey will be delivered today.  Reassuring.

We go this morning to Kate’s physical medicine and rehab doc, Dr. Bewin.  He’s her medical home for the issues related to her back.  He’ll evaluate her pain management regimen and discuss the surgical results so far.  He’ll also weigh in on rehab, physical therapy.

Lois, our housecleaner is here today, doing that before holiday buffing up, though frankly with five dogs we don’t maintain an Architectural Digest home under the very best of circumstances, this even though Kate spends many happy hours watching HGTV.

The latest Wired has an article that gives a very gloomy outlook for global warming, using phrases like “we’re toast.”  It goes on to imagine the techno-geek fixes that we’ll come up with to save the day.

Ooohhh…the turkey has come, I think!