Daily Archives: May 21, 2013

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Travel

About Time

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Beltane                                                                              Early Growth Moon

I have stood on the shore of time itself, looking out on the broad sea that laps upon its sand, the vast space ocean, touching all, then circling back, once more to the beach where time rests, gay umbrellas stuck here and there, the men and women in bathing suits, swim suits, bikinis, nothing at all.  No children, just the adults of this one tribe, homo sapiens, from this one lonely outpost, away there in a long arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, nothing special as things universal and cosmic go, just conglobulated star dust.

They watch, as I do, the darkness and the many lights, those stars, those other suns, in other galaxies and those we can see only a tiny, tiny fraction of the whole though we strain these eyes of ours, a gift from the home planet and its billions of years of effort to create one who could see it back.

We watch, the ape that walks and talks, thinks, sees, laughs and cries.  The arms and the legs and the mind and the heart of this universe, allowed here on the beach so we can act out our purpose, seeing the rest, looking for all this, back at all this, born of star dust and doomed or fated or blessed to return.

I have stood on the shore of time itself.  And so have you.

Garden, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

The Wall

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Beltane                                                                          Early Growth Moon

I’ve hit some kind of wall.  All this straight at it time, working on Missing and translating Ovid, reading about the numinous and researching Edward Hopper, modernism and romanticism, all fun, all core to what I’m about in this phase of my life, but the weather and the constant intellectual push has me wanting some relief.  The garden often provides that balance for me, but the rain has kept us out of there and it looks like it might for the next couple of days, too.

Those tomatoes and peppers are in some UPS warehouse, supposed to be here today.  Kate bought annuals, laid in some root stimulator to support the transplants after they move from pot to ground.  So we have planting to do.  She also found a possible source of garden help for us while shopping at the Green Barn.  That would be nice.  We could do much more if we had an extra hand for the heavy and tedious stuff.

These walls come.  Then they go.  Right now I’m feeling over-stimulated, I think, too much going in and not enough going out.  Rewriting is no help in that it involves a lot of analyzing, decision making, recrafting.  Doesn’t have the same juice as writing from scratch.

Aging, Woolly Mammoths

Minute Men

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We sat, the four of us, old and getting older by the minute men, at a round table just like the one from Arthur’s court, poorly lit but filled with food and drink. (water)  The conversation ranged from a recent retiree wondering if he should be working on what he should do next or should he wait until the summer thinking deadline (self-imposed) had passed to the possible toxic effects of too much boron in the soil.

(Caspar David Friedrich, Stages of Life, 1835)

The herd goes its separate ways, especially in the summer months, so our monthly restaurant meetings are sometimes sparsely attended.  This one had Scott, Bill, Warren and me to carry on the conversation, now exceeding 25 years in length about our lives, our feelings, what’s showing up for us right now.

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Health, Music, Woolly Mammoths

It Won’t Be Long Now

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Beltane                                                                        Early Growth Moon

A poignant and salient answer to how to live the third phase came from an 18 year old Minnesotan, Zach Sobiech, who died yesterday of bone cancer.  Not much of a conversationalist or a letter writer, Zach’s Mom told him he needed to do something, something that would let people know he was here and leave them memories of him.  Diagnosed with osteosarcoma when he was 14, the cancer did not prevent him from writing and singing songs of his own.

He became an internet viral celebrity with the song, Clouds, downloaded over 3 million times.

Those of us in the third phase understand the challenge Zach faced.  Death was no longer an abstraction, but a certain visitor.  As he says in this song, it won’t be long now.  Oh, we may have 20 years or 30 years, compared to his 4, but the link is the moment when you come to know this life ends.  For good and for ever.

(Alphonse Osbert – Les chants de la nuit.)

How did he respond?  He dug into the riches of his Self, shrugged off the self-pity and depression, and turned those feelings into art.  This is the best and healthiest way to greet the coming of the Sickle Bearer.  Find out who you are.  Find out what best expresses your journey, the ancientrail that has been, is, your life.  Then open up that expression, put it outside yourself for the rest of us to learn from, to cherish, to embrace.  Because it won’t be long now.