Monthly Archives: February 2014

General

The Undiscovered Country

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Valentine’s Day  (Imbolc)                                                 Valentine Moon

…The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveler returns… Hamlet, Act III

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.                          Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

(Shakespeare’s funerary monument, Holy Trinity Church, Stratford Upon Avon, England)

On the days when we celebrate our birth it seems apt to consider death.  Just as we mark the point of emergence into the light, so will we be marked later by the date of our departure from it.

I quote Shakespeare twice here to underscore the changed meaning of the classics as we age.  In some long ago speech competition I performed the Macbeth soliloquy in the oral interpretation.  I have no idea how I did, but I can still hear the timbre of my seventeen year old voice giving shape and force to these words.  I remember the repetition of the tomorrows, a pleasing force on the tongue.  Petty sticks up high in my memory, something about the petty pace.

Life as a poor player struck me as an interesting, even arresting image, and I loved the closing line, delivering it with vigor and passion.  A tale told by an idiot.  Signifying nothing.

Two years later I would be reading Camus and Sartre, my mother would be dead and suddenly Shakespeare had a bite.  46 years old.  That was my mother’s age at her death. Brief candle.

Death holds its secrets.  What happens then is, ironically or perhaps inevitably, one of life’s great mysteries.  As an undiscovered country, death has its share, probably more than its share, of speculative visits.  Religionists go there in their imagination, often becoming quite specific in what they find. But they are no different from Macbeth. Death is still a bourn (destination) from which no traveler has returned.

(Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky,Nietzsche, Sartre) my heroes

Macbeth was such a traveler, too:  “To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come…”

No matter how many miles around the sun, whether we go on our knees or at a run or a deliberate careful walk, our journey ends.  As for me, I choose this life and all its joy and pain for as long as I can have it.  Yet, I do not fear the other, much longer ancientrail.  Who knows where it may lead, what dreams may come.

 

Dogs

Whole Cathedrals of Touching and Loving

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Imbolc                                                                                Valentine Moon

Dogs.  A friend wondered why we keep so many.  And have done so for so long.  Not an 101easy question to answer on the page.  Much easier to answer on the couch or in the bed during our nap or outside working in the yard or when we come home and hear the baying the kitchen, the dogs having heard the garage door and the Rav4.

Dogs are not surrogate children.  We don’t own them, even if we buy them.  Dogs are fellow travelers, pilgrims on the journey.  We love them, feed them, care for them, play with them, and grieve for their loss.

They are companions.  Companions with a full and complete space of their own.  As dogs.  Not as replacements for something else, but as what they are, mammals like us, individuals like us, with a life to live, like us.  They agree in their big hearts to share their journey with us.

We keep at least two dogs, preferably litter mates, for a simple reason.  We believe dogs need canine companionship and who better than a brother or a sister?  Actually, we know dogs need canine companionship.  That’s the definition of a pack.  It takes a pack to raise a puppy.

Our days and our nights interlace, interweave.  I have my writing and my Latin.  Vega and Vega Kona 2012 1000Rigel have holes to dig, rabbits to run to ground, each other to chase.  Gertie rolls in the snow, plays with stuffed gorillas and squirrels and cows, searches for food to steal.

Their outside world is largely opaque to us.  We let them out and they run, always run, to the sheds to look for critters.  Down the fenceline to greet or respond to other dogs.  Into the woods to find opossums or groundhogs or raccoons or, as twice this last summer, turtles.  We do human things inside.  They do dog things.

We come together for meals, for naps, for time on the couch or individual time.  We all seem to need it, from each other.  And, this is part of the magic of dogs, we seek it out 2010 04 27_0410from each other.  A house with many dogs is a house filled with interaction, with a pat or a nuzzle or a lean or playful nip or a crisp bark that signals a need to go outside or a readiness to go to bed.  The web of these interactions, often brief, would make a thick matrix on any given day, horizontal pillars on any given week and, over the years, whole cathedrals of touching and loving.  Come to think of it, I think this is why we keep dogs.  And so many.  And have done for such a long time.

Aging, Humanities, Third Phase

Passing Another Mile Post: 39,195,000,001

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Imbolc                                                                Valentine Moon

Tomorrow night Kate and I head over to the Heartland Restaurant, a place I’ve wanted to IMAG1288try for some time.  The occasion is my 67th birthday.  The odometer clicks over then to 39,195,000,000 miles. Getting to be a high mileage vehicle.  Won’t get much at trade-in.

(aging man shoots selfie.  kicked off facebook.)

When I posted about Sid Caesar’s death yesterday, I referenced live black and white television as a generational barrier.  Made me wonder what others I’m on the other side of.  Dial telephones.  Telephones with wires.  Telephone poles, too, I suppose.  Gas prices under twenty-five cents.  In loco parentis.  The draft.  Legally segregated schools.  Cars without air bags, computers, cruise control.  Organic food.  Genetically Modified Crops.  Round Up.  The moon landing.  Kennedy, King and Malcolm X.  Drive-in movies. Available abortions.  Housewives.  Small town newspapers.  A total closet for gays.  Pre Super Bowl. Home milk delivery. I’m sure any of you could add more.

And yet.  There is still infancy, childhood, adulthood and old age.  We still breathe and procreate and eat, just as humans have done since the first homo sapiens emerged from the hominid line.  We still love, experience joy, delight, anger.  Injustice frustrates us, just as it has humans in community in all times.

The most essential, the most fundamental parts of our humanity remain regardless of time or culture.  Yes, their expression and their understanding have particular nuances shaped by era and culture, but the fundamentals remain.  In no time have we been immortal, remained children or been passionless.

We have never lived in any but the present moment.  We have never been other than on our own in our inner lives.  We have never been able to know the real inner life of another, so our lives have always included depth and mystery.  We have never been other than a part of the natural world and we have never been other than dependent on it.

So my birthday, any birthday, wraps all this up and celebrates it, one person at a time.  I’m almost past the 39,195,000,000 mile post and tomorrow morning at 9:30 am or so, I’ll tick over to 39,195,000,001.

 

Health, Our Land and Home, Third Phase

Handy, Man

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Imbolc                                                                 Valentine Moon

Looks like we’ve found a good handyman.  Dave Scott’s going to do several things: fix a cabinet door busted out by fighting dogs, rejigger the doors on two others, fix a lock on our sliding doors to the back, remount some curtains with a new oak fixture and, most germane for me, install my Studbar pullup bar.  I know, Studbar.

While researching this piece of equipment, I found a review of it on the Walmart website. The reviewer, a guy, referred readers of his review to the company’s website:  www.studbar.com.  Imagine my surprise, and probably everyone else’s who used the link, in finding this leads to The Studbar, a Montreal bar for men who love men.  The correct link is www.studbarpullup.com.

As long we’re on the subject of masculinity, we may as well talk about my initial uneasiness with hiring a handyman.  A totally irrational uneasiness.  That being, gee, I should be able to do these things and if I can’t I’m not a man.  Irrational, maybe, but there nonetheless.  It’s irrational because if I followed out this logic nothing would ever get fixed since, as I’ve often said, I learned all my father knew about fix-it matters.  Nothing.

(see, I found this image of the four primal male archetypes.  the handyman is not on there. So, I’m a lumberjack and I’m ok.)

This sort of failure cum shame hit me pretty hard the first time Dave came over to fix a door Kate and I could not get back on its hinges.  I didn’t expect it, like many unpleasant things it just showed up and took over.  So, yesterday when he came, I made sure I met him and walked through the tasks with Kate and him.

A nice guy.  A dog lover.  A mechanical engineer and a contractor in addition to handyman work.  He’s here working today and I feel fine.  Progress.

I know.  Studbar.  Geez.

Cinema and Television, Health, Third Phase

A Plan

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Imbolc                                                      Valentine Moon

Put together a plan.  I’m going to rest until the pain subsides and while it subsides I’m going to take nsaids and do some gentle exercises.  With a plan I don’t feel creaky; I feel proactive.  Knocking back the pain reduces the aversive conditioning, resting helps the injury heal as do the anti-inflammatories.  The gentle exercises keep the stiffness down and promote flexibility.  There.

So many deaths recently.  Shirley Temple.  Sid Caesar.  Seymour Hoffman.  Maximilian Schell. Which of course is a nonsense statement.  So many deaths always.  What it means is so many deaths of people of whom I had awareness.  I remember Shirley Temple as Heidi, but I remember not her specifically from that film but her grandfather.  Sid Caesar I remember from television’s live black and white days, another generational divide I’d not realized I belonged on one side of.  Seymour Hoffman I remember in so many roles, always in the complexity of the character, often a character of ambiguous morality. Maximilian Schell, not for any movie, but for a square jawed Teutonic presence.

These are the generation ahead of me, with the exception of Hoffman, and as such are, in a sense, my parent’s generation though they’re younger than my parents would have been. What I mean is that I can still distance myself from them by saying, oh, was he still alive? But that gambit won’t work much longer.  Soon, I’ll say.  Oh, yes.  Of my generation.

Just noticed the segue here.  Probably not coincidental.

 

 

Aging, Health, Third Phase

Injured

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Imbolc                                                                 Valentine Moon

Been feeling like a creaky old man.  The fall I took last Saturday produced a first class large bruise on my inner left elbow which I believe took, for a moment, all of my weight. The resulting motion wrenched my left arm away from my body, tearing or pulling something where muscles insert to my sternum.  I mention this not to be gruesome, but to explain why I’ve been feeling creaky.

It matters.  I don’t mind being an old man, not one bit.  Older is what I am.  What I am is ok.  Except.  My chest hurts, up high around the sternum.  Each time I lift anything aversive conditioning sets in.  The pain itself is not such a big deal, definitely manageable as pain.  But the pain, and this is why I’m writing this, erodes my sense of myself as a healthy, fit old man.  That makes me anxious.  I wonder, what else is wrong?

This is not a conscious process.  It took a couple of conversations with Kate to get it.  The pain changes my self-image and that changed image chips away at my self-confidence.  Yes, sure, in time I’d get used to this, if it were permanent.  I’d compensate, as I imagine many of you have had to do at one point or another.

This post is about getting it out in plain sight, claiming what I’m doing and telling myself that, as Kate said, I’m injured and injuries heal.  True that.

I already feel better psychically, just from realizing what I was doing as I reacted to the pain.  Now I want to shed the anxiety and let it be.

Old man, yes.  Injured old man, yes.  Creaky old man?  Not right now.  Not yet.

 

Family, Travel

It’s A Big World After All

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

It’s so easy to sit here, exurban house with woods, center of North America, a long string of way below zero nights and three feet of snow on the ground, it’s so easy to sit here and not see the rest of the world.

Case in point.  My brother writes from Muhayil, Saudi Arabia.  It’s in the southern third of Asir province, red on this map.  You can see that Asir borders Yemen, right where the red touches the gray.

He received a warning from the American embassy today about terrorism.  The embassy does not allow their staff within 50 miles of Yemen. He’s 100 miles. That’s not far as the shrike flies.  In the same e-mail he talks about a man crucified nearby for practicing witchcraft.  That was 2011.  He says the Saudi government can and does publicly behead criminals, then flys their body around attached to a helicopter.

That’s terrorism, witchcraft, beheading and public display of a body by helicopter.  True, we have Michelle Bachman, crack houses, pick-up trucks on the lakes and snowmobiles but we can’t touch that four.

 

 

Travel

Da Fish Shack

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Imbolc                                                           Valentine Moon

On the north shore of Kaua’i there is a small cabin, no air conditioning, set right on the beach.  The shore is outside.  It’s called Da Fish Shack.  If you go there, you’ll find entries in its book from two Woolly Mammoths, Mark Odegard and me.  Mark’s are beautiful images drawn in his immediately recognizable style, mine carved in my cursive, also, unfortunately, immediately recognizable.

(Na Pali coast)

It’s a treasure at $90 a day (now $99, I discovered.), a place to sink into the island and the ocean.  Today it is on my mind.  Instead of looking at the weather console reading -17 earlier this morning, I could look out on just another day in paradise.  The Pacific would be there, waters and weather streaming down from Alaska and the Bering Sea, but tempered by the more southerly ocean. Not far away lies Hanalei and the Na’pali coastline.  The Limahuli gardens, too.

The pace is slow.  from a February 26th, 2008 entry:  “4:45PM 75.  Cloudy.  Ocean breeze.  Languid is the word.  Da Fish Shack has a languid atmosphere right now; I feel enervated by the languidness of it all.  Or something.”

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Enough. Almost.

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Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

Reimagining my faith, as I understand now, lies in the synthesis of the work here on the vegetable garden, the orchard, the flowers, the woods, the bees and the Great Work.  The work set out by Thomas Berry in his book of that name.  The great work for our generation is to create a sustainable path for human presence on the planet.  The carbon loading information alone makes this both true and necessary.

Placing my faith in the praxis of work at home and in the political world means it is incarnational and immanent in nature, key for me.  Incarnational means the sacred has no meaning apart from the corporal, the material world. Immanent means it is not about the transcendent, but about the here and now.

And that’s enough.  Almost.  There are though the mystical, the emotional aspects of the life of faith.  They were once deeply important for me.  And I miss them.  Liturgical music, contemplative prayer, the sense of mystery and profound depth.  Not transcendence, never a God or a power above, but the calm strength of the Ave Maria or a session of lectio divina or a quiet meditation sinking into the inner chapel.  The emotional resonance of these familiar, ancient practices still speak to my soul, but the metaphysical structure which validated them has crumbled and fallen away.

(Thomas Cole, Expulsion From the Garden)

Just noting this, not sure what to do with it, as I have not been for the last 20 some years. Perhaps a new path will open for me that includes these things.  Or, perhaps I will have to create one of my own.  Might be part of the task of reimagining faith.

 

Holidays, Memories, Myth and Story

Heart Shaped Cakes

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

Back in the far away long ago my mother used to bake heart shaped cakes, devil’s food, for my birthday.  This Valentine holiday birthday has always been one of the semi-secret joys of my life.  I get to celebrate my annual pilgrimage, my odometer turns over, on a day now celebrated for love; special enough to remember, not so special that it overpowers my birthday, like I always imagine Christmas would or July 4th.

It did make those elementary school rituals, often laden with important messages not quite understood, hoped for, but more often missed than received, even more fraught.

Now that I know it’s the mid-day of the ides of February, 13-15th, and that Lupercalia followed it in Roman times, it makes this whole approaching time more special.  February was the Roman December, the last month of the year and the ides, those mid-month days sacred to Jupiter, usually had festivals and celebrations.  On this last month of the Roman year the Romans took care to purify themselves and offer sacrifices to absolve themselves of whatever needed to be left behind in the old year.

We could approach Valentine’s Day as a day for clearing up any uncertainties or unpleasantnesses built up over the previous year.  Seek a way to resolve them, then go out for a meal to seal them off, leave them behind.