Daily Archives: May 31, 2012

Family, Humanities, Politics, Travel, World History

The Sunnier Side

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Beltane                                         Garlic Moon

OK. I may have tilted toward the darker side in the post below.  It’s here, all right, and dominant in much of what I’ve personally experienced of Romania this week.

However.  If this were a movie, the weather would have started rainy and cool, which it did.  We might say, the Romania I reported on in the post below.  Then, as the week went on, the rain would lift until a pleasant, sunny, mild day ended the visit.

The Romania which I saw, for example, as I took a walk around the hotel’s block.  There apartment buildings of modest heights, 3-6 stories, hide behind vine covered fences, a small pocket park has a shady place for children from the Mikos child care center.  Two backyards (all the backyards) have well-tended plantings and fountains.

A couple sat on their balcony four floors up, smoking, drinking morning coffee.  And, of course, there are homeless people on the streets and under the bridges of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

There is, too, the land, a beautiful land with mountains, picturesque villages, good train service and a friendly population.  And Bucharest has many, many trees and beautiful parks, wide streets and a safe feel so often not present in US cities.

This is a country, I believe, that awaits its vision of itself as a free people.  I can imagine one though.  It roots in millennia of settled history, linking this land to the greatest of early Western civilizations, Greek and Roman and makes the remains of those two a vital aspect of a new future.

The difficult period after the fall of Rome adds great texture to current Romania as Mongols, Magyars, Russian and Turks fought back and forth over this rich land at the nexus of so many ambitions. Those eras, though painful, also enliven a sense of Romania as a place desired by many; many who contributed cultural legacy to the present, like the Saxons around Brasov, the Slavs on the coastal regions of the Black Seas and the Hungarians in northwestern Romania.

The 19th and early 20th century had some stirrings of a free Romania, then world war II came and after that the fall of the iron curtain.

Now there is a country just waking up in its own home, a home with a past, and now one with a future.  I hope this is just the first visit for me.  Nicoleta’s brother and his wife have a baby on the way, naming ceremony in October.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

I’m So Glad

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Beltane                                     Garlic Moon

Be Glad You Exist, the Greek inscription I mentioned a few posts ago, got me thinking.  A persistent prod in American culture is the I’m not doing that well enough, or fast enough, or soon enough or with the right attitude.  Not studying enough, eating too much, not working enough, not working out enough, not relaxing, not being charitable enough or financially successful enough.

It’s an argument from lack that has as its premise that jockey metaphor I came up with a month or so ago.  In case you forgot, I did until just now, I suggested that many of us take on board, sometime in childhood, a jockey who rides us, rides us hard, always pushing us toward the next, the better, the hoped for, the not yet achieved.

This argument from lack is the jockey’s prod, his quirt that comes out when he senses flagging will or decreasing purpose.

But, what if Be Glad You Exist was the baseline?  Just that.

Then we might start not from a place of lack but from a place of adding, of completing, of maturing, of enriching.  Moving ourselves not with the lash, but with a model more like Maslow’s where the underpinning opens new possibilities, like the emergence of the butterfly, say, from the caterpillar.  A caterpillar is not a lesser butterfly, but its necessay precursor.

Orienting ourselves this way (I realize I’m writing about myself here, but maybe a bit about you, too.) does not require the scorched earth of bad diet, bad language skills, inadequacy of any kind; rather, it could have Be Glad You Exist as the ground of our being.  Sounds like a good thing to me.

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Beltane                                                   Garlic Moon

My crazed body has given up on time.  I wake up at 4 or 4:30 am and can’t go back to sleep.  Then, mid-afternoon I do finally get some sleep, so I’m awake for the evening.  I know this would equilibrate eventually, but I’m out of time one more time because I leave tomorrow.  Just in time, I imagine to start over again in Minnesota.

Been thinking about people like entertainers, military personnel, some business types who stay in this mode for days, weeks, even months at a time.  It’s easy to see  how chemical fixes would seem necessary and, even, how small cyclic changes in mood could become amplified by them, reaching pathologic levels.