Daily Archives: February 17, 2013

Aging, Art and Culture, Family, Third Phase

Wow. You’re Really Old Grandma

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Imbolc                                                               Valentine Moon

Over half done with the move.  I can feel the new shape already fitting round my shoulders as I work.  Volumes ready to hand.  Ideas jumping from one to another with just a scan.  A good feeling.

A bit achy but that seems to come with the 66th birthday.  Talked to grandson Gabe, 4 and  1/2 tonight.  He asked Kate how old she was.  68, she said.  Wow.  That’s really old Grandma.  Oh, yeah.  From the mouth’s of babes.

(Old Man with Beard, Rembrandt)

How old?  So old that we’re going to a meeting tomorrow to talk with a women who is, as her book title says, New at Being Old.  Us, too.  This is a Woolly Mammoth gathering and we’re all of a certain age.  Just which we’re not certain, but a certain age of that we’re sure.

When it comes to life, though, I feel gathered, present, neither old nor young, just here, ready to go, still.  Epictetus had a depressing way to think of it:   “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.”  Still, the soul or the self continues to grow and mature as the mansion begins to sag at the corners, a window or two popping out, new paint needed on the doors, tuck pointing here and there.

So, I feel as engaged, if not more, with my life and work as I have ever.

Art and Culture, Writing

Bibliomotion

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

The move continues.  The garden study has begun to take on its new shape, a place for art making and art scholarship.  One bookshelf is almost full with reference works like the Grove Dictionary of Art, Oxford Dictionary of Art, four different art history texts, a reference work on materials and techniques as well as my collection of texts on Asian art.

The other emptied shelf has other books, all my pre-Raphaelite books, texts on contemporary art, books devoted to individual artists:  Malevich, Munch, Titian, Picasso, Caravaggio.  Soon all the art books will be out of the writing study and the freed up space will allow the books have piled up on the floor over the last couple of years to finally find shelf space.  Oh blessed day.

Don’t think I’m gonna get to the files today.  This involves moving all my art object files to the horizontal file folder in the garden study after I remove all the files related to my history of Lake Superior into banker’s boxes for temporary storage.  Then, in the file cabinet here in the writing room, I’ll put all the files related to short stories, novels, markets, Latin plus material on the Enlightenment, Modernism, Romanticism and world religions, especially of the ancient variety.  These are the subjects that have held my attention over the years.

I don’t like doing this.  But, I’ll like the finished result.  A lot.  So.  Carry on.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Travel

Ghosts

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Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

Today, a bit tired due to early rising, moving books put a weight on my shoulders.  It was the past and its tangled feelings.  Found my first passport and saw a young man with a full head of dark brown hair and a beard that matched.  Surprised me, so long have I seen his gray descendant in the mirror.

(arrestedmotion.com 2012 10 upcoming aron wiesenfeld new paintings arcadia-gallery)

That was my passport for Colombia, the trip to check out a bank for the poorest of the poor.  Carolyn Levy was in my life at that point, between my divorce from Raeone and meeting Kate a year plus later.  A hard time, raising a 6 year old boy, working night and day between church meetings and organizing.  A hard time, too, since the future had grown unclear.  Something big had happened or was about to happen, but its outlines in my life were not yet clear.

Then I moved out the books related to shifting my ordination to the Unitarian-Universalist movement.   Again, a time when the future had become unclear.  Writing had not shown the promise it offered when Kate and I agreed I should leave the Presbytery.  Frustrated there, I regressed, headed back to the trade that I knew.  More lack of clarity.

Poor decisions.  I chose Unity UU over First Unitarian for my internship.  An error.   The humanist congregation would have fit me much better.  Then, at the end of an interesting year, I accepted a job as minister of development.  Chief fund raiser.   OMG.  One of the really boneheaded decisions in my life.  Not the only one, for sure, and not the worst one, but dumbest?  Probably.  Kate saw it coming. I ignored her.  Sigh.

(Vincenzo Foppa The Young Cicero Reading 1464)

Those books were the heaviest to move because I’ve traveled out of the UU circle, too.  A solo practitioner am I, as the Wiccans say.  In that vein though I retained many of my books on spirituality, works on natural theology and those commentaries I mentioned on the Torah and the book of Revelation.

Heavy, especially with lack of sleep thrown in.  Ghosts.  They’re real and they live in the closets, basements and attics of our mind.