Daily Archives: November 27, 2013

Family, Feelings

Kate

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Samhain                                                           Thanksgiving Moon

There is one.  One special thanksgiving.  It starts with the baroque or the classical, a little IMAG0998Mozart, some Hayden, Pachelbel.  An affiliation with the older music making traditions of public music in the West.  Enough so to encourage regular attendance.  Then divorces, seats given up, and two people, the remainders of the marriages, seated next to each other.

Yes, one night over coffee at the St. Paul Hotel after the last Chamber Orchestra concert of the season, this woman and I discovered we had each other figured wrong.  Me: a lawyer.  Her: a school teacher, maybe a college professor.

Later a three week trip through Europe, starting in Rome, following spring north in March, as far north as Inverness, capital of the Highlands.  After that, closing in on 24 years of supporting and loving each other, blending our families, raising and loving many dogs, growing food, sewing and writing, growing old happily.

Kate.  This is thanks for Kate.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Holidays

Be Glad You Exist

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Samhain                                                            Thanksgiving Moon

Thankful.  Grateful.  Still here.

Yes, that’s the  prerequisite to all that follows, my living presence to write these words. And, yes, damn it, I’m grateful to be alive.

When I visited Constanta, Romania a year and a half ago, I went there as a pilgrimage to the place of Ovid’s exile.  This is a city that has Roman (Romania!) roots.  Outside an excellent museum of Roman and Greek antiquities (it was a Greek trading port first.), there was a collection of grave markers.  On one of them was this line:  Be Glad You Exist.  That’s what I would call ur-gratitude.  Thankfulness for living.

It’s where I’ll start.  Beyond consciousness and good health in my own case I’m thankful for the same in Kate, the dogs, family, friends and even a few others.  Our home.  Our buddies and colleagues the bees, the soil and the plants which grow in it, those past and those to come.  The orchard and the trees in our woods.  All the critters, sleeping and active that call it home.

Extending all that in a generally cosmic direction, I am grateful for the physics that allow us to exist at all, the sun for its energy, the planet for its hospitable climate (sorry about that hot pack, Gaia) and the North American continent for its wildness and its cities and towns.  Yes, the suburbs, too.  Even Andover.

Language.  English.  Being able to communicate with each other, even through such a flawed and miraculous medium.  What would life be without language?  Western medicine.  Often maligned, but my fav.  Western civilization.  Also often maligned, but mine and yours.  At least most of you who read this.  And just as worthy a human artifice as anyone else’s.

Of course the internet.  Cyberspace.  What a wonder to an old man raised with bakelite phones, 6 digit phone numbers, a time before tv.  So much.  So much to say thank you for. More than can be expressed in any list, no matter how long.

How about, for example, oxygen?  Or the properties of water?  We are made of stardust, animated elements spun out so long ago at the birth not of our nation, not of our planet, not of our solar system, not of our galaxy, but of our universe.  And now they walk, talk, consider their origin.  How damned amazing is that?

So.  Thanks.

 

Humanities, Myth and Story, Science

We Are Like Fish Studying The Stars

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Samhain                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

Not often a letter to the editor makes me stop because of its literary quality. However, a letter by John Ball of Huntsville, Alabama to the Scientific American did.

Writing about the quantum world he said,  “We must remember that such representations (wave analogies among others) do not describe the true, alien reality of the quantum world.  We are like fish studying the stars.”

Such an important idea phrased in an arresting way.  The map is not the territory.  It applies, and we don’t often acknowledge this, to our knowledge of other people.  We see only a thin map of their on going narrative, a fluid process dynamic within them.  And we only see that through the filter of our senses and our understanding.

An interesting variant on this idea is our tendency to look for the real, the true nature of institutions with which we interact all the time.  Richard Rorty, an American pragmatist, said that the beginnings don’t matter.  What we perceive as the foundations don’t matter. What matters is how something works now.

Is the government making our lives better?  Then it’s a good government.  If not, it’s a bad government and needs to change.  Are the schools educating our kids?  Do businesses make our world safer, more secure?  If not, they need to change.  If so, let them do their, well, business.

Most interestingly you can run this same pragmatic test on religious institutions.  Does the church make our lives richer and fuller?  Then it’s a good church.  Does it make us guilty, self-doubting, naive?  Then it’s a bad church.  But notice the key move here.  The nature of the church’s foundations, that is, the Bible, its metaphysical claims about divinity and an afterlife, don’t matter.

In the world of religion we are like fish studying the stars.

 

General

Moving on

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Samhain                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

Been working with Dramatica, learning it through videos on the Storymind website and going through some of its suggested activities for new users.  Very powerful.  Strange.  Gonna be hugely helpful.  I’ll be ready to use it next week sometime.

Just tortured my brain with one sentence of Ovid. Looks simple but I can’t make it make sense.  I looked up the English version in the Loeb library.  Well.  I can see he couldn’t make sense of it either.  Gonna leave this one for Greg and move on.

 

Quotes

I’m keeping all of these. Don’t know why.

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“The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.” R.W. Emerson
“there are two tragedies in life.
one is to lose your heart’s desire.
the other is to gain it.”
— george bernard shaw

“Much Madness is divinest Sense —
To a discerning Eye —
Much Sense — the starkest Madness —
‘Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail —
Assent — and you are sane —
Demur — you’re straightway dangerous —
And handled with a Chain —”   Emily D.

 

“I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.”
— Vincent van Gogh

“Under the current ‘tyranny of slenderness’ women are forbidden to become large or massive; they must take up as little space as possible. The very contours a woman’s body takes on as she matures—the fuller breasts and rounded hips—have become distasteful. The body by which a woman feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh or substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed. The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilized face must accompany her infantilized body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men.”

— Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (via prayingbuddha)

“The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.”
— William Faulkner
“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.”
— Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

 

Family, Holidays

The Most Unusual Holiday

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Samhain                                                                    Thanksgiving Moon

In long ago still Christian days I sought advice from a spiritual director, a Jesuit nun whose name I have forgotten.  I have not forgotten her advice, however.  “Keep a gratitude journal.  All spirituality begins in gratitude.”

Thanksgiving has become a primary, if the not the primary, American holiday.  As such, it is one of the highlights of holiseason, a family focused festival celebrated across religious, class and ethnic lines.   Its emphasis on gratitude, now long unmoored from its ironic relationship to the natives of the East Coast,who reportedly provided the food for the “first Thanksgiving,” enhances it.

It is a holiday with a focus on thankfulness, not getfulness, and as such, might be the most unusual holiday of them all.  We come together with a desire to eat together, of course. Festive banqueting is an ancient way of honoring a god, a king or a queen, a birthday, a national or religious observance, but here that banquet instead honors the land, its fruits, and the relationships which matter to us. It may be  the central American holiday, one more evocative of an American civil spirituality than the guns and bluster 4th of July or even the more narrow celebrations of Labor Day and Memorial Day.  There will be no time in our common life when stopping for a day of thanks will be inappropriate.