Monthly Archives: January 2011

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Health

Pain

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Winter                                                                 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

When a friend is in pain, the pain travels.  In its journey from one friend to another, the pain may not lessen, but its burden may grow lighter.  Such a journey is underway now with a friend whose wife has received distressing news, the kind of news we know about yet still hope will never be heard among the people we know and love.  Cancer.  It has such a brutal, dangerous, threatening aura.  Black.  Shot through with jagged points.  Hearing the word in the mouth of a friend sets the inner self back.  Creates a sense of fear and loss, loss even before any loss, a type of loss that may be the final stage of innocence, the end game of our immortality.

Then there is turning to face the truth, to talk to the doctors, to sort out the words, the feelings, the possibilities, the dangers.  And choosing, choosing about matters of life and death. Decisions no amount of prayer or meditation or forethought prepare us for, decisions about our own life, its length, its end.  Or, worse, the life of a loved one.  Hope?  Of course, hope always has a role, a horse in the race.  But there are other horses, too.

My heart has been heavy ever since I learned this news, an existential dread, the kind always there, under the surface, the knowing, the knowing about predatory nature.  Yes, she is our mother; yes, in all ways, yes; but, like Coatlicue of whom I wrote a few days ago, she not only gives life, but she takes it back.

Cancer is not evil.  It has no intention.  It is.  It is a force majeur, an act of blind fate.  And yet.  We can, sometimes, turn it back.  Cancer’s aura has gotten a bit dimmer of late, a degree of lethal certainty has leaked away as drugs and drug regimens, research and surgery have chipped away at its powers.

So, I invite you to do the kind of thing in which you believe for my friend’s wife.  A kind and generous universe will know how to direct your message.  We all need love, love from places we know and places we don’t.

Aging, Family, Health, Retirement

The Last Week

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Winter                                                          Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Kate’s last week of work began with a 7:30 am drive to the gastroenterologist.  Good news from the colonoscopy.  So, she enters her last week of work and the first year of her 400_honey-extraction_0239retirement with good news on the intestinal tract.  She also three crowns going in a couple of weeks from now, new glasses (several) and the new hip (August) and the l-4 l-5 fusion last March.  She’s ready to hit the new year sewing and cooking and visiting the grandkids, all parts intact and functioning, more or less.  A big shout out to Kate as she starts her last week of full time work.

Aging, Memories, Politics, US History, Writing

1967

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Winter                                                                 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

1967.  Anastasia Pydych, a docent friend, has done a movie on 1968 which has a relevance to her father that I can’t recall right now.  A friend of hers, a writer for Rolling Stone, has a book underway about 1967.

When told her I was a sophomore in college that year, she said, “Oh, that’s perfect.  That would have been the perfect time.”  It reminded me of a comment made by one of the interviewees for the Sierra Club policy position, “I wish it could be like in the 70’s, when people had passion.”

We didn’t know it was historic, that year, we were living it.  It was a confusing, wonderful, chaotic, astonishingly hopeful, colorful, drugfull, penetrating, unafraid time.  Long ago, I don’t recall where now, I read that the 60’s happened because there was so many young adults than mature adults, that we, in effect, socialized ourselves.  That still seems like the most cogent explanation I’ve heard for the extraordinary sense of freedom and possibility that swept through my corner of the world, central Indiana.  As people passed through town, Muncie, and as some of us hitchiked around and saw other campuses in other states, we knew personally that it was not just us.  A crazy, heady wind had begun to blow, and the times, as Dylan said, were obviously changin’.

It was in ’67 when the draft became a big issue, right across the country.  And, yes, there is an obvious class bias involved in draft deferments, since those of us in college could get one and those who weren’t couldn’t.  Yes, again, there were many baby boomers, probably most, whose lives went on as they would have anyhow, taking a factory job, going into the military, learning a trade, trying out different jobs, getting married, settling down and raising kids.

That wasn’t the way it felt at the time, however.  In those years we believed, as I still believe, that US adventurism and a naive anti-Communism had caused us to insert ourselves in a civil war centuries old, a war in which we had no self-interest and chose our allies only because they identified themselves as the anti-communists.   Most of us men in college then, at least those of us on the left, saw the draft as a form of indentured servitude, only with a cruel twist, in this case the slaves had to die or kill.  Not a great choice.  Many of us, like me, were selective objectors, that is we opposed the Vietnam War as a stupid meat-grinder conceived in Washington and held in place by machismo gone wild, but we were not conscientious objectors, that is, we did not object to all wars.

That sense of being at odds with the ultimate power of the land, the Federal Government, was a powerful glue.  It stuck us together.  We were more disparate than unitary in our objections to the draft, but we were at one in our objection to the war.

This sense of overagainstness,  a feeling bordering on outlaw, made us courageous and reckless.  It made the days, the hours, we lived focus on experimentation, on analysis, on argument, on planning, yes, but also on relationships, parties, drugs and acid rock.  If the man didn’t understand us, we’d understand ourselves.  And boy we worked at it.

If you’re going to San Francisco…  I missed the Summer of Love and Woodstock, though I did make it to two hot years of the Cincinnati Jazz Festival.  I wish I could get the words to say how it felt then.  We felt free, even called, to challenge anything and everything:  our parents, their values, college administrations and their ridiculous in loco parentis, the draft boards, day-to-day reality, sexual limits, congress, the President, the military.  All of it, each day, every minute.  The times were so intense, so charged, so electric.

Well, here’s the thing.  Kate has a colonoscopy in the morning and I have to drive her.  I’m drawing Social Security and so is she.  This next week is her last week of full time work.  1967 is a long time ago is what I’m saying.  But, boy am I glad I was part of it.  It was quite a ride.

Cinema and Television, Dreams, Family

Dream a Little Dream of

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Winter                                                             Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Inception.  Kate and I watched this last night here at Artemis Cinema.  Kate, who doesn’t tolerate much fiddle-faddle when it comes to movies, said early and often that it wasn’t clear.  Later on, perhaps around the time they’re navigating a well-defended ego, complete with snow camouflaged Hummers with tank tracks in place of tires, snow mobiles and white clad gunmen protecting a concrete gray fortress, we both decided that we had something of a grip on things.

A Russian nesting doll movie with plotlines and concepts connected but difficult to unravel, determining what was real or not became a challenge.  Which was, I suppose, the whole point.  Mol, Decaprio’s wife, kills herself because he convinced her the world they shared inside a dream was not real.  She carries with her, back into waking life, the idea that the world she is in is a dream, an illusion, and that killing herself will cause her to wake up and be with her real husband and her real kids.

This is, of course, a neat cinematic version of solipsism turned inside out.  A solipsistic thinker believes the world to be a creation of their own imagination.  In this case the solipsist believes the world cannot be her creation and therefore must not be real.

This is a movie more about epistemology, how do we know what we know, than it is about psychology or ontology.  In the end we’re left hanging, not sure whether the world Decaprio’s character has returned to is in fact the real world or only a figment of a dream, “A slight disorder of the stomach… You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” Scrooge faced the same epistemological problem with a strong dose of skepticism.

We’ll watch inception again.  See how it fares on a second pass.

Aging, Family, Memories, Travel, Writing

Warp and Weft

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Winter                                                                            Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Other blogs seem to have a slant, a bias, a thing.  I suppose I do too in a general way, the idea of ancientrails, the Great Wheel, the garden, a po-mo pagan sensibility, but what I’m doing is more like an online journal.  On a bookshelf I have two rows of journals kept in various forms since 1971, many erratic in the entries, then, as life moved on, I became more regular.  At one point I had several journals.  A diary like one in which I wrote short entries about my day, a spiritual journey one in which I recorded my experiences of meditation, lection divina, contemplative prayer, scripture study, another in which I took reading notes while I studied Islam, the year after 9/11, several more with reading notes from a year + when I gave up writing and took to reading the classics:  Divine Comedy, Faust, Metamorphosis, works of that nature.  During the year I studied Islam I read the Koran twice, once just to see what it said and another time during the month of Ramadan as I fasted and read enough to finish the entire Koran in thirty days, as many Muslims do.  Yet other blank books contain notes on art history, taken over many years of continuing education at the MIA, ideas for novels, short stories, about writing.

Writing is the thread, the weft I have chosen to weave the tapestry of my life.  The warp threads, stronger by far, developed in body and mind, feelings and thoughts as this Self has moved through life since birth.  The stuff of my daily existence has been the weft when shuttled through with the language I learned at my mother’s knee and my father’s typewriter.

So, this blog is just another pattern,  a particular tartan for this phase of my life.  It may pass away at some point, I certainly will, but, as I wrote the other day, the Web may have granted us bloggers a type of immortality.

When Kate I and were on our honeymoon, in late March or early April of 1990, the last phase of our trip which started a block from the Spanish Steps in Rome, we took the train from Edinburgh to Inverness.  Inverness is the capitol of Celtic Scotland, the northern reaches of the Picts.  The river Ness, from the storied Loch Ness, runs right through town.  On a stroll one afternoon, Kate and I made our way to a tartan mill, a place where tourists could go in and watch tartans being woven.

That day, the master weaver changed over from one tartan to another.  What this involved has stuck me indelibly since then.  The master weaver carries in his head the particular combination of colors, of large spools of yarn, that make, say, the tartan of the clan Sinclair.  He achieves that  particular combination of colors and patterns not by computer, not by telling weavers what to do, but by placing, on a huge rack of iron hooks, individual spools of yarn.  The number of hooks across the top of the hook rack, maybe 25 or 25, below each hook came at least 20 more, maybe 25 more hooks creating a large frame of individual hooks slanted up.  By his placement of the spools the master weaver achieved his design for the yarn from these spools fed precisely into the looms which clicked and clacked behind them.

Later than night, after we had finished our meal at the Station Hotel, Kate and I walked along the river Ness, tendrils of mist floating up from it, weaving themselves forever into our memory.

Dogs

Sortia and Me

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Winter                                                             Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Dogs we have loved still live in my memories.  Today while the shoveling the walk I thought of Sortia, our Russian witch, a big Irish Wolfhound bitch, black with white socks, incredibly strong and a hunter of legend.  Before our breeders gave Sortia to us, her first placement hadn’t worked out, she took down a deer all by herself and guarded it with that combination of pride and territoriality only those who have an animal who kills will understand.  She brought back woodchucks, raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, mice, anything that moved on four legs.  Including, unfortunately, the occasional neighborhood cat that strayed inside our fences.

One New Year’s, maybe the second or third after we moved up here to Andover, I put Sortia in the Four-Runner and drove up to Lake George, about 15 miles north of us on Round Lake Blvd, the highway that runs north and south about a block from our house.  With an acre and a half of fenced yard and woods we don’t take our dogs for walks very often, but this morning I felt drawn to take Sortia out on the frozen lake.

We drove in, parked in the lot  and I hopped out, Sortia’s leash in my hand.  She jumped down and her nose began quivering.  New scents.  New place.  Pretty exciting.  We walked out onto the lake and made a tour of the many ice-fishing houses, all abandoned at 8 AM on January 1st, 10 degrees below zero.  We walked a half an hour, this elegant huntress and me, alone on a large body of ice.  I felt close to her then, closer than I had before.  We shared something that morning and it was a good way to start the year, just Sortia and me.