A Christmas cold came to me three days ago. Nice present. On its way to other hosts now, still causing a bit of havoc here. My first one since April of 2014. I will get that nice post-illness bump in energy and joy just as we cross the shadow line into New Years.
Of course, this book metaphor is true every day, but somehow it feels truer right now. I’m looking forward to 2016, lots of plans, important events.
We’ve had single digit, below zero temps and look to have them for a while. We’re also snow covered, including much of our solar panels. They’re not switched on yet, but today around noon they should be. Golden Solar is redoing some electrical and hooking up our monitoring device. We’ll be able to read the output of each panel on our own solar internet page.
Ancientrails turns 11 in 2016. And turns out to have been the great writing project of my life. See you on the trail next year.
Today begins the five unlucky days at the end of the year. This is a Mayan idea and the basic path through them was to go quietly through, letting them slide past until the new year could be entered. I long ago took up this time as a period for research into a favorite topic, but the last few days have been so swirly and wonderful and strange that I forgot.
What to focus on? I will be checking my translation of Medea and Pelias against other English versions, then figuring out how and why we differ. In the off time I’m going to get the loft as close to finished as I can. This will involve reorganizing my books, getting what clutter is left moved and stored, more art hung and placed. This way I’ll get into the new year ready to work on my major projects: reimagining, a new or continued novel, learning about the West (probably through the Rocky Mountain Land Library) and something to do with art.
“Hello, darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.”
I’m writing this as the long night continues here on Shadow Mountain. Black Mountain is still invisible though it looms less than a mile away. These two great slabs of rock get their names from the dimming of the light. On them, this solstice night, we celebrate the darkness, our old friend.
An article I urge you to read, Why We Need The Winter Solstice, argues that darkness is the norm in the universe. “The stars are an anomaly in the face of it, the planets an accident.”
The tree we purchased in Evergreen yesterday and the lights that go on it are pagan reminders of eternal life and the hope that ancient humans required to make it through the apparent dying of the sun. Eternal life could stave off the encroaching darkness of death and the lights a world with no vegetation, which could seem inevitable as the nights of winter went on and on. The cold reminded our ancestors of what it would be like if the sun went down for the last time.
With our lamps and chandeliers, our bedside lights and even our candles we defy the daily change from light to dark. And lose something precious as we do. Darkness is fecund. It encourages an inward turn toward dreams and the deep wells of our souls. But when we turn on the TV, check our e-mail or texts, even when we open a book under our favorite light, we defend ourselves against the unsettling, Self challenging dark.
We don’t need to throw the switch on decades of artificial illumination, however. What we need is to restore at least some of the experience of the dark. Celebrating the Winter Solstice helps me stay in touch with the power, the spiritual nurture of darkness. Go outside in the night, hopefully away from city lights and look up at the stars. Then, in the way of appreciating sculpture, look not at the stars, but at the spaces between the stars, the much larger enveloping darkness, at the negative space of the universe itself.
Or, perhaps, turn off the lights in the living room every once in awhile and just sit there, in the darkness, neither doing anything or needing to do anything. Compost grows nutrient rich in the darkness. The decay and redistribution of organic matter in the forest happens in the dark. We grow in the wet darkness of the womb and return to the long night of death. The darkness is no aberration. It is the context of life, the mother of our light driven vitality. And this is its holiday.
“No matter what situation we find ourselves in, we can always set our compass to our highest intentions in the present moment. Perhaps it is nothing more than being in a heated conversation with another person and stopping to take a breath and ask yourself, “What is my highest intention in this moment?” If you can have enough awareness to take this small step, your heart will give you an answer that will take the conversation in a different, more positive direction. With simple steps like these, you can behave in ways that at least will not fuel your difficulties—or anyone else’s.
Whatever your difficulties—a devastated heart, financial loss, feeling assaulted by the conflicts around you, or a seemingly hopeless illness—you can always remember that you are free in every moment to set the compass of your heart to your highest intentions. In fact, the two things that you are always free to do—despite your circumstances—are to be present and to be willing to love.”
Holiseason. Well underway. Two important holiseason gifts with a day of each other. (see post above for the second.)
Tom Crane, who flies the skies a lot, used some frequent flier miles to come out to Evergreen for lunch with me yesterday. We ate at the Willow Creek restaurant across Upper Bearcreek Drive from Evergreen Lake. It was, of course, a great feeling to see this long time friend and his willingness to trade his Saturday for lunch 900 miles from home made it even more special.
(Tom, on the far left, at an end of our 2015 retreat breakfast in Ely, Minnesota.)
It was, in the best sense, an ordinary lunch. We covered children, wives, parents, friends in the Woolly Mammoths and what Tom called an unusual number of infrastructure projects. This last referred to sleep studies, blood pressure measurement, a new furnace and a.c. unit at his house, a split pipe in the shower fixture, my prostate cancer, various arthritic ailments, hearing aids, our new boiler, kitchen and our still ongoing attempt to install the generator.
We’ve been friends now for over 25 years, meeting in the Woolly Mammoths where we’ve spent twice monthly meetings and annual retreats together over all that time. The nature of our meetings have been intimate and personally revealing, the length of our time together adding group history to personal history.
Both of us sense that we don’t have time to replicate that kind of intimacy with others, the third phase has its inexorability. It means we need to go the extra 900 miles to retain and maintain what we’ve created.
N.B.: a note from my Latin tutor in response to my question, what do I need to do now to make progress? I’m putting it here so I can find it again when I need it.
I think that you should do your translation and then check as many English translations as you have in comparison.
If they differ from each other and/or from yours you should gain an understanding as to how they came up with what they did and compare it to how you came up with what you did.
Social media. A possible explanation for its rapid rise and spread around the world. Thinking yesterday about Facebook, the app I know best, I realized that it had reconnected me with an outer tier of friends and acquaintances: former high school and college classmates, hometown folk, friends from various organizations with which I’ve worked over the years, random friends from other moments in life. People with whom I would have likely lost contact.
These are people who were at one time significant in my daily life and me in theirs. In the old regime of dial telephones, snail mail and the occasional reunion they would have faded away, not because they were unimportant, but rather because communicating them would have been difficult at best, impossible in most cases. Now I can hear daily from members of the Alexandria class of 1965, the Northstar chapter of the Sierra Club, fellow radicals from college.
This has the effect of expanding my social world, of allowing memory and today to coexist. I feel enriched by the experience.
It’s not such a good medium for close friends and family. We communicate by phone, by visits, by texts and e-mails, more dialogical than a scatter shot post can be.
What I’m saying is that Facebook, in our mobile culture, in this large nation and globe of ours, bridges the distance and makes friendships of the past available still. I suppose in this sense it serves a similar purpose to the small town or urban area where similar folks might have dispersed, but still be close enough for occasional visits. Now that small town can be 12,000 miles across.
I’ve been surprised at how much this means to me. And, gladdened.
A wire had slipped loose from one of my ethernet connections to the house. David and Ian fixed that, then, using a five position switch lit up all the ports in the loft. The desktop and the TV have hardwired connections rather than the fickle wi-fi. Much better.
That’s one project finished. Solid internet link, no more fussing about it.
While Dave and Ian worked, I continued the last stages of unpacking. Yesterday I put art supplies in the cabinets of the big work table. It still awaits a top that Jon is making from oak floorboards of recycled semi-trailers. With a year almost gone, the final shape of the loft is very close to realization: bookshelves, work out area, writing and research spot with computer, a chair for reading positioned on a large rug and overlooking Black Mountain, a small fridge and a large counter space for teaware and coffee presses, art positioned and hung.
The books, though in very large categories, still have to be organized within those categories, e.g. mythology and folklore and ancient history, Lake Superior and Minnesota, art, poetry, religion, travel, Colorado, Civil War, various literatures of the world.
A lot of work up here over the last year, close to the finish.
We saw the last of the Brother/Sister trilogy yesterday afternoon at Curious Theater, “No guts, no story.” Marcus, the Secret of Sweet. This trilogy, which used Yoruba mythology heavily in its first two plays, lightens up on that in the last one. It is a complex story, one I’d need to see the whole again to piece it together with any confidence, but the trilogy gives the background, both cultural and mythic, to the coming of age of a young gay black man in Louisiana.
Though uneven at times in the first two plays, this last play stays focused and gets at the multiple challenges of being different in a community already oppressed for difference. The trilogy is about outliers, about the challenges that face them in daily life, about the deep mythos that can ground them, but often doesn’t.
Sexuality is, at best, a confused and highly charged aspect of human life. And, that’s for the normative heterosexual experience. Move into the homoerotic and the layering of doubts, fears, joys, ecstasies increase. Place that in a southern Christian African-American community, a community with the history of enslavement as yet another force pushing sexuality to the margins and the burden on one young boy is immense.
If you get the chance to see these plays, this drama and this playwright will open your mind and your heart.
