Daily Archives: July 13, 2008

Cinema and Television, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family

Where We Are Is Where We Will Become Who We Are

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63  bar rises 29.78  0mph W  dew-point 54  Summer night, cool

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

Travelers and Magicians is a Bhutanese movie, the first one I’ve seen.  It’s theme spoke to the question, “What is your dream for this stage of your life?”  A Bhutanese official, newly appointed to work in a small mountain village, has an opportunity to go to America.  He considers himself modern, hip and wants very much to go.  On the road he meets many travelers, one a monk who tells him a tale of a young man who studied to be a magician.  There is a Canterburyesque flavor to the movie, a pilgrimage story of a sort.

It reminded me most of Emerson, who spoke of the futility of going to Italy to see beautiful things, when beauty is a notion within each of us.  The young official also meets a beautiful girl on the road, one he learns plans to return to her village to help her aging father.  By the end of the movie it is clear that he will return to the village.

A strong and persistent strain of my thinking in the last few years has focused on just this notion.  Where we are is where we will become who we are.  This is  true, for me, I believe.  Here in Andover, removed from the urban thrum, the constant action of political and religious life diminished by distance, is where I will become an old man, an elder.

My dream for this stage of my life is not yet as focused as the other three dreams I mentioned:  revolution, children and writing.  Even so, its outlines seem clear.   As I have until now, I will continue to support and nourish the dreams I have for political change, a healthy nuclear and extended family and writing.  The nesting or embedded nature of these dreams will remain, not get left behind.

Here are the emerging elements of my dream for this stage.  Kate and I will, together, create a paradigm for optimal living on suburban and exurban lots of 1+ acres.  We will focus our home and energy on supporting creative activity.  Somewhere in the mix, I believe, is Kate’s commitment to medical services for the poor.

Or not.  I don’t know.  This next phase hasn’t gelled in my thinking.  It may be that I don’t need a dream for this stage, that I’m already living it.

Faith and Spirituality, World History

After the Wind, After the Earthquake, After the Fire

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77  bar steady 29.75  5mph E  dew-point 49  Summer, breezy and pleasant

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

“The only tyrant I accept in this world is the ‘still small voice’ within me.” – Mohandas K. Gandhi

“And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the
rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake,
but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the
fire; and after the fire a still small voice.” 1 KINGS 19:11-12

After this wonderful passage, Elijah descends to the valley floor from his mountain cave and passes on the mantle of prophecy to his successor, Elisha.  God loves Elijah, but could not countenance his suspicion of the chosen people, so He calls Elijah up into heaven in a whirlwind, forcing him to give up his role on earth.

Elijah is an incredibly important figure in Judaism.  At the Seder a  cup is set for him at the table, in anticipation of his coming to announce the messiah.  During the bris the patron (me in Gabe’s case) sits in the Elijah seat while the mohel performs the circumcision.  When asked about the Elijah seat, Jay Federer, rabbi and jeweler and mohel, told me this story.  “It is in the Talmud that Elijah, for doubting the chosen people’s willingness to keep the covenant, is required by G-d to witness all the instances in which the people maintain the covenant.”  The seder and the bris are two important moments. “This can be seen,” Jay said, “As a blessing or a curse.”

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Great Work, Woolly Mammoths

Undercurrents and Subtext

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74  bar steady 29.75 3mph W dew-point 49  Summer, sunny and pleasant

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

A party.  Kate and I are not party people.  We both prefer a night at home or the theater or classical music, but we’re headed out tonight because of Paul Strickland’s kids.   Kate Strickland, oldest, heads out in two weeks for Japan.  She’s going to Kyoto prefecture to teach English as part of the JET program, a government sponsored ESL that places applicants in the Japanese school system.

The backyard party at their 4900 block Colfax Avenue home in Minneapolis had many people we did not know, but Stefan Helgeson and Lonnie were there.  Stefan, Paul and I represented the Woolly Mammoths.

Such parties have, like family reunions, undercurrents and subtext.  The lines of relationship, for example, the casual observer would assume ran strongest among Paul, Stefan, and me.  Only partly true.  Lonnie and Sarah (Strickland) were friends of mine for a couple of years before their husbands pulled me into the orbit of the Woolly Mammoths.

There was Kate Strickland’s closing of this chapter in her New York life.  Why?  Unsaid.  There was Lonnie’s recovery, less than a month along, from cancer surgery.  A rare great outcome.  No chemo or radiation needed because they caught the uterine cancer at its earliest stage.  Paul’s work, entangled with his across the alley neighbor, is in uncertain times.  Stefan has had a come to Jesus moment with Lonnie’s cancer surgery, “I find it difficult now to not do the things I want to do.”

Overhanging the whole is the generational tide sweeping those of us over 60 toward years of a new time while our kids go to Japan, have their own children, become 2d Lts in the Air Force, head off to college, or graduate from college.

This event was in no way unusual in these subtexts and undercurrents and I’m confident there were more, perhaps darker ones, about which I know nothing.   Any time we human beings gather we bring with us the scent of our current life and the trail on which we have walked to get there.  As social creatures our scents intermingle creating a perfumed community while our paths (ancientrails) intersect and deflect, generating paths of a slightly different direction than the one we were on before.  This is life as we live it, as we must live it.

Running through my mind today has been a bumper sticker I saw years ago during the controversy over the Boundary Waters.  I was in Ely and noticed a local pickup truck.   Plastered on the gate the bumper sticker read:  Sierra Club, kiss my axe.  That was redolent of a real debate, an actual conflict between parties with drastically different visions.  Politics and its cousin the law are the arenas in which, in a democracy, we slug out conflicts without, hopefully, violence.  I like conflict and the clash of ideas, the taking up of the sword in defense of an ideal, a vision.  Being back on the battlefield brings sparks to my eyes.  Fun.