Daily Archives: February 23, 2010

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Writing

Gonna Take That Wild Last Ride

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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.

Family, Memories

Remembering Dad

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Imbolc                           Waxing Wild Moon

The year moves forward, sun higher in the sky, temperatures inching upward, some snow melting, though  piles of slowly melting hard pack, driven to curbs and driveway ends, darkens and begrimes the landscape.  A bright February sun catches a light snowfall, refracts it in mid-air, giving the day a sparkle, as if a glitter queen shook her hair in the heavens.

The winter olympics continues, too, with this sport and that.  I liked ski cross.  It looked fun.

Today is the anniversary of my father’s death in 2003.  The dead, to paraphrase somebody, are not in the past;  they’re not even dead.  No, nothing metaphysical here, I’m referring to the fact that those important to us take up lodging in our memories, in our inflections and in our perspectives.  We sometimes see the world literally through their eyes, hear things with their ears, interpret something with their sensibilities.  This happens during their lives, of course, but it also continues on past their temporal death.

(The Woolworth Building.  It opened twelve days after dad’s birth.  It was the tallest building in the world until 1930.)

If I see a  person with too much flab (me, these days, for instance), I can hear Dad say, “He likes his groceries.”  In quick train there is, too, his advise about weight loss, “Push-ups.  Push ups away from the table.”  I can feel his scowl when pictures from the sixties appear in the newspaper or on tv.  He didn’t think much of the politics or the movement persons of those days.  Unfortunately for our relationship, I was one.

When I sit down to write, especially here, I feel the ghost of my father, Curtis, hovering over my shoulder.  He is a benign angel in this case.  I fancy my writing style here takes a certain amount of its defnition from his frequent  column, “Small Town, USA.”  When I’m in the other room, working on the novel, I’m reminded of his ambition to charter a boat, sail the coast of Mexico, then write a book about the trip.  He never made it, WW II got in the way.  He never wrote a book either.

So, according to one school of Jungian thought, I write books to fulfill my father’s dream.

He was a man of his times, liberal in his  social politics, virulently anti-communist and suspicious of both patriotic zealots like the John Birch Society and the anti-patriots like myself of the 60’s and 70’s.  His father abandoned his family, Dad never did.  He was there, day in day out.

So, his body no longer walks the earth, but his mind, his dreams, his biases and his humor still does.