Lughnasa                                                      Waxing Back to School Moon

In the company of old men.  A surprising event occurred tonight among the Woolly Mammoths.  We had an evening of delight.  Warren raised this interesting topic and as it went round the room in our usual whoever wants to talk jump in and do so style, a congruence began to emerge.  Each of us reported more awareness of delights or miracles (see below) in our lives.  They ranged from grandchildren, whose every action delights us, to fly fishing and feeling the water around the legs, working on the Mississippi for twelve hours a day, dogs thumping and jumping when we come home, poetry, not having to perform anymore, just playing the music, sex, bees and honey and the Landscape Arboretum.  As we each offered up those things that delight us, it became apparent that most of us (all of us?) have entered a phase of life where external success has become a muted to extinguished need and instead we find ourselves driven by the inner life, by receptivity and acceptance.

Though it was, in one sense, comforting and even encouraging to hear this more relaxed, old folks with their feet up on the cracker barrel sort of ambiance, it seemed a bit too happy, a bit distanced from pain.  Just as this thought crossed my mind the conversation shifted to cremation, to place, in part spurred by one of us who talked about visits to West Virginia, to the hill top church where his grandfather had served his first and his last pastorate, a place where he’s buried and other members of the family, too.  This physical location, this place on a hill top in West Virginia, felt rooted, felt his, helped him feel grounded.

The cremation conversation moved along wondering about rootedness, about sense of place, about visits, though occasional, to parents burial plots.  Where will those who want to remember us go?  I mentioned green cemeteries and natural burial.  We will probably revisit this discussion.  It has an interesting relationship to something that intrigues me, something University of Wisconsin Madison geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, called Topophilia.  All of this dovetails into a taoist perspective, or at least a taoist perspective as I understand it.