Monthly Archives: December 2012

Health

My Body, My Ancientrail

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Samhain                                                        Moon of the Winter Solstice

Like many folks I’ve walked my annual physical slowly toward December 31st.  Only paid for once a year and it has to fall on or after the last one.  Don’t recall how long it took, but I’m now up to December 17th.

The result.  I get my physical and my lab tests back just before the New Year.  So.  I read them.  They’re like an empirical astrological chart.  In their patterns lie the future.  Of my body.  I can see the faint outlines now of the hammer that will probably deliver the fate of the gods.  And it’s not what I imagined.

Each time I get the feedback from my physical I have to give up, at least for an hour or a day or a week, that magical sense we all have that, despite substantial evidence to the contrary, we will be the one, the first one, yes, but the one, that will just skate on out of here alive.

The data from my physical proves that I am flesh and blood, heir to all the flaws and weaknesses of the body.  And more.  That I am not someone else, not some free floating life form, skimming just above the small hooks and lines the world throws out to hold us down. No. I have a high glucose reading.  My cretanine is up.  But the cholesterol numbers?  Wow.  Blood pressure?  Fine.  There are other little ticks and creaks in the fabric of my vehicle.

You know that right?  Each Hindu god or goddess has a vehicle.  Their feet never touch the earth.  They do skim above the hooks and lines carried by Nandi or Garuda.  I suppose, back to the incarnation post of a week or so ago, that we might each be gods, carried above the surface of samsara by this fleshly vehicle. [I should say that this is the exact opposite reading of samsara from Hinduism and Buddhism.  In these belief systems the bodies senses are the hooks and tethers that keep us chained to this world.] Riding on it like Vishnu on Garuda.  In this case, maybe I will float on, wash away from here and into the Brahma or into the heavens or perhaps crawl back on the wheel for one more ride in one more vehicle.

I suppose it could be.

But I can tell now that this one has fatal flaws.  Turns out it’s just like everybody else’s.

Final thought.  When my physical finally gets scheduled for December 31st, is my time up?

Dogs, Family, Feelings, Politics

Lalalalala

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Samhain                                                    Moon of the Winter Solstice

Earlier this summer I went outside and found holes dug under the orchard fence.  Vega and Rigel had figured out a new way inside.  Once in they dug up the earth around three of our apple trees, in one case exposing about half the close in root system to the air.  When I saw this latest breach of our attempts to lead two live, dog owners and gardeners, I froze.  Something just crumpled.  I couldn’t deal with another one.  Not again.  This was one time too many, the straw…well, you know how it goes.

I told Kate how I felt.  She said she understood since it was the way she had felt the last couple of years working for Allina.  That got me.  What I experienced was almost disgust, a visceral abhorrence and she had felt that toward her employers.  Wow.

Later on, after the feeling waned, I once again repaired the breach, came up with a new system of entrance denial, which Vega and Rigel promptly conquered.  So, I went at it again, then winter came.  We’re on hiatus now till spring with the ground frozen.

When I flipped on NPR today, as I drove over the pharmacy to pick up my drugs, there was a debate beginning on gun control.  When I heard the opposing arguments, I had that same reaction.  Disgust.  Ultimate weariness.  A not again feeling.  I turned it off immediately.  This is not the first time I’ve had this feeling about political discourse.

Each time I have it I turn off the radio, put down the newspaper.  Put my fingers in my ears and go lalalalalala.  Then, I think about all the years when I didn’t react like this.  When, instead, I joined with others of like mind and took political action.

Each time I turn my head away from a political debate, I feel a frisson of guilt.  If folks like me don’t stand up, then who will?  And, the only necessity for the advancement of evil is for good men to do nothing.  I know this.  I believe it.  I even realize the self-righteousness trap in this logic and know it must not defeat action.  Still, at times, like yesterday, I turn away.

Am I certainly right?  Of course not.  Is my opinion as important and as valid as anyone else’s?  Of course it is.  And I’m not alone.  Yet, at times, my feeling is that the political world has moved past me.  That I’m too old, too short term, too distant, too something to do anything.  At some point, I know, as with Vega and Rigel, I’ll lean in again, listen, parse, perhaps even organize.

Right now though.  It’s lalalalalala all the way.

 

Woolly Mammoths

Four Woollies Walked Into a Restaurant

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Samhain                                                            Moon of the Winter Solstice

At the woodfire grill.  Tom, Stefan, Warren.  A Woolly four for dinner.  Warren’s retiring and planning.  Feeling good.  We discussed living out the dreams of our fathers.  Mine wanted to travel the Gulf of Mexico and write a book about his adventures.  Tom’s was an engineer who died young.  Warren’s dad wanted to be a journalist.

Friendship.  We’ve discussed it as a possible topic for our next retreat.  After 25 years together, we can finally broach the issue.  Guys.

Chasing Ice got rave reviews from Tom.  A must see.  After seeing it, he bought a Chevy Volt.  Plans to leave the Lexus gunboat in the garage for the most part.  He’s also going to pass it around his company, to various employees, to get some hard data on its efficiency.  He’s an engineer.

Mostly we saw each other.  Listened.  Spoke.  Friends.  Ya’ know.

I asked Stefan to read my manuscript after Lonnie’s done.  He agreed and said, “Congratulations.”

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality

Out of the Corner of Your Eye

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Samhain                                                          Moon of the Winter Solstice

Ever have a fleeting moment of intense interest in something?  Say, military planning or the Tang dynasty or who was Zoroaster anyway?  Intense here means wanting to stop that moment and pick up a book on the Roman epic poem then another then another then Roman epic poems or the reverse order.  Just intense longing to know, to scratch an intellectual itch because you. need.  to. know.

Perhaps you see a scene on a TV show that reminds you of a movie that suddenly you have to see.  Or, maybe a scene in a movie inspires a trip to somewhere, say New York City in the summer of 1968 or a slide in an art history lecture about the churning of the sea of milk finds you tickets in hand for Siem Reap, Cambodia on the next plane out of Bangkok.

An artifact or a magazine photo makes the four corners area and its pueblo dwellings, the mystery of the Anasazi the focus of your next vacation.

A painting hanging here says we must hold fast to the dream that reason will prevail.  That seems off.  What will prevail are these momentary infatuations, these long lost loves of places and people and books.  Reason has had its shot.  Heard round the world.  Now let dreams themselves have a chance to prevail.

Reason works in pounding engines and the quiet electronic transfers within computers great and small, but when dreams float into the mind.  Well, then.  The dream sweeps reason into a corner, where it well might do something productive, but not because anyone cares. At least not at that moment.

We must that dreams and their reasons will prevail.  That a dream filled with temples shot through with roots of the Kapok tree can merge with Times Square when the ball is about to drop and make a world chained to the past and open to the future.

 

Friends, Health

And Back Again

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Samhain                                                      Moon of the Winter Solstice

Home again, home again.  Back from the doctor, back from the lunch.  Home again.

I’ve seen Tom Davis now for several years.  He’s thorough and personable, helpful, too.  When my labs come through, I’ll find out more news, but right now, I’m looking good.  No new maladies or ailments or dysfunctions.  Good news though what I expected.  I don’t anticipate any bad news on the labs either.

Lunch with Margaret Levin, executive director of the Northstar Chapter, Sierra Club.  She’s become a friend though I no longer volunteer there.  She and her partner hope to start a family and we talked about kids.  My writing, too.  Organizational matters with the Sierra Club.  All normal stuff, but frustrating.

Woollies tonight. I’m blessed with good friends, diverse friends.  Makes the holidays meaningful for me.

Health

Going to the Doc

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Samhain                                                            Moon of the Winter Solstice

Physical this morning.  Annual for many years.  In one sense it’s like a test you take and take and take until you fail.  Then, it’s not important anymore.

Memories, News of the Strange

You Must Have One

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Samhain                                                               Moon of the Winter Solstice

You must have one of these incidents in your past.  The chestnut from my past was the time I picked up a tube of Brylcreem and proceeded to brush my teeth.  My teeth stood up nice and straight.  And no, I don’t know why I had the Brylcreem.

So now I have another one.  I use soy milk on cereal.  When soy milk sits for a while, it becomes thick, but doesn’t taste bad.  This morning–I should stipulate that I’m not at my most conscious early in the morning–I got up, put cereal in the bowl, blueberries on top, grabbed the soy milk and poured it over them.  It was a little thick, but I thought, oh, hell with it.  I’ll try it.

I ate it.  About half.  It was terrible.  I had to throw out the remaining cereal and blueberries.  When I went in the refrigerator to throw out the curdled soy milk, I discovered I had put eggnog on my cereal.

Yep. It’s my new one.  The morning I put eggnog on my cereal.

Commentary on Religion

The End Is (not) Near

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Samhain                                                            Moon of the Winter Solstice

A week from tomorrow, December 22nd, was to be a day of unusual properties for many people. Still is for a few.  One last winter solstice, then with a sigh or a bang or, as Eliot suggested, with a whimper, the world would end.  Fade to black.  Close the book.  Turn off the I-Pod.  Cue the dramatic finale.

Except.  All that will end is one era of Mayan time, albeit a long one.  21 December 2012 is regarded as the end-date of a 5125-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.

Folks have been ending the world, I imagine, since we could consider the end of it all.  It’s practically a hobby amongst adherents to religions as different as Buddhism and Pentecostal Christianity.  There’s a certain frisson to imagining a point beyond which no imagination is necessary, or, possible.

And we have multiple personal instances of the end of all things.  Each death is an apocalypse, an eschatological moment when a whole universe dies.  So the experience of ultimate endings is very much part of the human experience, yet it does not transfer, at least not with the same inevitability to existence itself.

Yes, the sun will burn out.  And, yes, some astrophysicists say the universe will. finally.  slow.  down.  no motion.  no heat.  done.  But these experiences are so far away in time and so completely other from our human lives that they make little sense as talk of the end times.

See you on the other side.  Of the Mayan long count.  I’ll be smiling.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story

Considering the Massacre of the Innocents

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Samhain                                                                Moon of the Winter Solstice

Since Christmas is a festival of the incarnation, a festival of a great God becoming human in the form of a baby, we can take this wonderful mythic idea and use it, especially now, as a filter for the news around us.

(Egon Schiele, Death and the Maiden)

Think of it.  Each baby born a potential or an actual god.  Each one.  How might we know?  Who’s to say?  A great God, an omnipotent God, could conceivably inhabit as many babies as ever are born.  So, it’s possible we might be wrong if we judge a child to be not a God.  We might even misjudge ourselves.

How would this perspective change your life?  Have you ever considered that you might be a god or a goddess?  How would you know?  Not sure.  The baby we’re talking about grew up to be a guy, a carpenter, then the ruling authorities arrested him as a troublemaker and executed him.  If that’s the profile, it might fit a good many of us, even those of us not fortunate to be so threatening to the status quo that we go through life with no fear of arrest or execution.

It seems we ought to err on the side of caution.  That is, each person born, each infant is not a child of god, but a god themselves.  We could then practice the Indian namaste, roughly, the god in me bows to the god in you.  How about that for a holiday ritual?

Looking for the gods and goddesses in your lives and acknowledging them with folded hands, a slight bow and namaste.  Might be good.

Then, of course, we have to parse out the killing of all the children.  How could we do that?