• Category Archives Feelings

  • Not All Who Wander Are Lost

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                Bee Hiving Moon

    Feeling directionless.  Not down, just aside from forward motion.

    Spent the weekend hands in the garden, planting beets, leeks, shallots, green onions, yellow onions, moving plant matter pruned or dug up by Kate.  That all feels good, the growing season again, seeds again, the sun again, the sky and the clouds again.  Pressing the beet seeds into the ground, placing the leek transplants tenderly against the trenches side, pushing the yellow onion sets into the sides of our side trap, like cloves in an orange.  All good.

    Still.  The book.  Not done.  The Sierra Club.  Not finished.  Tours disappointing.  Reimagining faith on a furlow after the push to get the Groveland presentation done.  Work with photoshop and inDesign still potential.

    Summer’s come and gone already.  Now it’s fall.  Hard freeze tonight.  Maybe spring will return next week and summer come the week after that but right now the weather seems directionless, too.

    Thought I had another two weeks before the bees came, but now the word is that they’ll be here on Saturday.  That means work during the week that I’d planned to do on the weekend.  That sort of thing.

    A sort of malaise.

    Maybe it’s that damn jockey trying to reclaim his seat.

     


    Feelings Garden 📎and tagged

  • A Third Phase Entry: I Don’t Have Friends Who Knew Me When

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                           Bee Hiving Moon

    Sometimes realizations float up in conversation, product of a gestalt not possible without others.  That happened to me tonight at the Woolly regular first Monday meal.

    Gathered at the Woodfire Grill in St. Louis Park, we began to toss around the topic of change.  Woolly change.  Some of us express excitement about change; some want to explore change, but do not want to lose what’s still valuable to them

    At some point in the conversation I said, “Well, it’s not true for any of you, but for me, I didn’t go to high school here.  I don’t have those friends here who knew me when.  When I face down those final days, you’re those friends for me.”

    Without even realizing what I’d done, I had laid a vulnerable part of me on the table, not a fear exactly, but a concern.  I don’t want Kate to have all the responsibility.  Nor do I want to have all of it for her.  Most of it, sure.  But not all.

    Here then, was naked need.  A need for reassurance that these relationships will last.  Until death do us part.  That’s the realization.  I need to know that these guys will be there for me, as I will be for them.  It’s not often that an unexplored need strikes me, and rarely in public, but it happened tonight.

    Let me quickly say that I don’t doubt these relationships.  It’s just that I didn’t realize how important, crucial even, they are for me.


    Aging Faith and Spirituality Feelings Friends Retirement Third Phase Woolly Mammoths

  • Leave Taking

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                           Woodpecker Moon

    At the dentist this morning I told them Kate and I planned to use a dentist closer to our home here in Andover.  This was what got me thinking about leave taking.  We’ve been with Centennial Dental for over 22 years and making the change was not a trivial decision.

    In part we switched because our new dental insurance doesn’t include them, reason enough for sure; but, this was more a decision about not wanting a trip to the dentist to take three hours or so.  Centennial Dental is in Edina near the Macy’s Homestore.  They are great dentists.  That’s why we stayed so long.

    After that, a nap, and then off to Champlain High School and my third and last, for now, class on the Adobe Creative Suite.  This class is on Adobe InDesign. I’m cranking up to sell my books on Amazon, through the Kindle store.  InDesign will let me format my books myself and save them in a file congenial with the Kindle operating system, perhaps others, too.

    Then there’s the verdammt melancholy.  After the dentist I drove right at a car coming from my left.  I missed her, but my attention was not there.  Vacillating now between acting as if I’m fine and seeing if that will lift my spirits or biting the bullet, calling my old analyst John Desteian and my gp Tom Davis, take arms against this sky of clouds and by opposing them grow more cheerful.

     


    Aging Feelings Third Phase 📎and tagged

  • No Title

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                         Woodpecker Moon

    Felt some clouds lifting yesterday, but they drifted back in this morning.  Getting old.  Gonna have to try something.


    Feelings Format Aside

  • Melancholia

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                         Woodpecker Moon

    In what is, I suppose, a good sign, I’m getting fed up with this latest round of melancholy.  As I tried to do my Latin today, my ability to focus just wasn’t there.  The holding of one idea in my head while tracking down another seemed too hard.   I shook my head–ridding it of the annoyance I felt–and went upstairs for lunch.

    I have begun a look back and now find that my melancholic episodes probably started in high school and have continued, largely unnoticed, until now.  I say unnoticed because they were usually not incapacitating, though in one instance around 1975 I can recall sitting in a chair for days on end, unable to stop unraveling the patterns in the wallpaper.

    I believe I have experienced them as periods of slowing, waning interest or perhaps an unusual run of irritability, but not as episodes cycling through my life, a constant dysthymic hum, sometimes in the background and other times dominant, changing the course of things in my day to day world.

    Of course, these cycles interlaced with my drinking, my failed marriages, my occasional angry outbursts.  Perhaps they only reinforced these troubled times or, perhaps, they created some of them.  I don’t know.

    If this is right, and I’m pretty sure it is, it also means that I dealt with the death of my mother in 1964 influenced by these cycles.  It is my belief now that the charged, dark feelings of that difficult time still come along for the ride, packed in a baggage car as the melancholy train pulls into the station.

    These complicated threads make these cyclic turns difficult to sort out, place in perspective.  It also makes them difficult, as a direct result, to get any particular treatment for.

    Anyhow, out there, tomorrow or maybe the next day or if not then soon, the heaviness will lift and I’ll be able to get back to the incredible lightness of being.


    Feelings Memories Third Phase 📎and tagged

  • The Argument Culture

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                            Woodpecker Moon

    Deborah Tannen was on NPR yesterday.  She has a new book out called The Argument Culture.  I listened to most of her presentation as I did my rounds to pick up the sub-woofer and learn more about the Great Scanning Project.  I just bought the book.

    She made me stop and examine my own complicity in this culture.  Too often, she said, we escalate our arguments with war metaphors or dualistic thinking, seeing only one side of an argument or, at best, two sides when, in fact, some arguments only have one side and most have many.

    As an example of an argument with only side, she cited the rage of holocaust denial that surfaced in the US a decade or so ago.  It happened, in large part, she said, because we believe every argument has two-sides and needs balance.  Especially journalists hold this view.  In this case established history leaves no room for doubt, no room for deniers, so there is, in fact, only side to this question.  The reality of the holocaust.  It distorts the reality of holocaust to have it “balanced” by the views of those who deny it happened.

    Another example of an argument with only side, she said, is climate change.  I cheered here.  When 98% of scientists agree and the 2% are on the fringe, there is no argument to be had.

    Here’s my admitted complicity.  When I enter the argumentative space, I set out to win.  Not to listen.  Not to consider the other point of view, but to beat it down, defeat it, send it limping, head-hung out of the arena.   Continue reading → Post ID 13794


    Aging Feelings Politics Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Third Phase 📎and tagged

  • Shadow Line Approaching

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                 Woodpecker Moon

    Not sure how serious, but I can feel the clouds rolling in, a definite darkening of the inner horizon.  Missed a call tonight for the Sierra Club legislative committee through some technological foul up.  Maybe on my part.

    Sorting through my fear about exposing my writing to the light of day.  I know this needs to change and change can trigger a melancholic episode, too.

    Doesn’t have to be reasons when the light begins to dim.  I feel heavy, slow, molasses on the floor, thick curtains to push through.  Could be the unseasonable weather.  I know it seems weird, but I really like the cold and the gradual procession of seasons.  This tempering and sudden switching feels somehow wrong to me.

    As I said the other day, I know I can’t change the weather, so adapting to it makes sense.  Enjoy the beautiful day!  Sunshine and warm weather.  What’s not to like?  But a part of me, a strong part, wants March back in late winter.

    Or, maybe, I feel this way because I’m becoming melancholic.

    The melancholy is a family thing, a genetic inheritance.  The bipolar gene runs in my family, I’ve said it before here.  I’m not bipolar, but I have these melancholic episodes from time to time, sometimes with little or no trigger.

     


    Aging Faith and Spirituality Feelings 📎and tagged

  • Fun? Bah, Humbug

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                   Woodpecker Moon

    OK, so maybe having the ex on your facebook friends list is odd, but we do share a son and besides, hey we gitta along.  Anyhow she posts a facebook photo of her with her latest guy–who lives, weirdly enough, in Andover not far from us.  She’s dressed as Cher, he’s dressed as Bono.

    She looks like she’s having fun.  Then I think, in one of those places it’s not wise to go but who tells the mind what paths it can travel, what do I do for fun?  Ooops.  OK.  Can’t think of anything.  I asked Kate last night what we do for fun.  She couldn’t think of anything either.

    OMG.  Dreary northern europeans celebrating the winter solstice with a candle.  That sort of thing.

    As I’m wont to do when perplexed, I picked up my bible, my word bible that is, the Oxford English Dictionary (literally the best dollar I ever spent since I got this two volume complete version back when the History Book Club sold them as comeons for new customers) and look up fun.

    Once in a while things turn out really well.  There are two entries, one for a noun and one for a verb.  In both cases the 1st, therefore dominant (and occasionally obsolete) definition is:  a cheat, a hoax, a trick.  The other definitions aren’t much better.  2. n.  diversion, amusement, sport jocularity, drollery.  and 2. to make fun or sport, to indulge in fun, to joke. Not much to worry about not having much of, I decided.

    Still, I wondered, what about enjoyment or delight?  They’re different.  Delight:  pleasure, joy or gratification felt in a high degree.  Enjoy:  to be in joy or in a joyous state, to manifest joy, exult, rejoice.

    Then came the light bulb:  joy 2.b  to experience pleasure, be happy now chiefly to find pleasure in an occasion of festivity or social intercourse.

    There’s the smoking gun of extroversion–now chiefly to find pleasure in an occasion of festivity or social intercourse.

    In this youth drenched, extroversion drunk country of ours, it’s possible for those of us introverts to lose sight of what delights us, what we enjoy. (admission:  Kate wondered whether we should look at what we enjoy.)

    Yes, it’s weird, but Latin delights me.  After a struggle with a verse or a grammatical construction, at that moment when the obfuscation clears, delight.  Planting in the spring.  Caring for the bees.  Travel.  Writing.  Being with the grandkids.  Seeing our kids.  Reading. Playing with and taking care of the dogs and each other.  Art, cinema, jazz.  Quiet moments.

    Sounds like a blurb for E-Romance doesn’t it?  So, I’m happy, no delighted, to tell you that Kate and I enjoy many, many things.  But fun isn’t one of them.

     


    Aging Faith and Spirituality Family Feelings 📎and tagged