• Category Archives Third Phase

  • Changes

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                       Beltane Moon

    Received a second invitation to a going away party for two friends moving to Maine.  They’re part of the Woolly change, the moves and deaths, the losses that accrue as we head past 65.  They seem pretty energized by this move to a home in Robbinston, a spot near the Atlantic and New Brunswick.  And why not?

    Change can give us a fresh perspective, a place to begin again or to continue, but in a different direction.

    Over the last several years I’ve chosen to embrace change as a deepening process, crossing thresholds into the unknown in areas with which I have substantial familiarity:  literature, arts, gardening, politics, family, religion.

    In literature, for example, I moved into a different kind of book, a fantasy epic instead of the one off novels I’ve written up till now.  This change exhilarated me, made me stretch, thinking about the long arc rather than the shorter one handled in one volume.

    The Latin learning and translating I’m doing is in service of deepening, too.  Deepening my knowledge of Greek myth and Roman culture.  I have, also, now peaked behind the veil of translation, learned something about the kinds of choices translators have to make.

    In the arts I’ve chosen to focus most of my learning in Asian arts, probing deeper into Chinese history and the role of context for the art we have at the MIA.  This part year didn’t see as any Asian tours as in the past, but I’ve continued studying, reading Chinese literature and learning more history.

    My grasp of photography has increased considerably, too, as has my understanding of contemporary art.  Going deeper.

    As Kate and I have gotten wiser about our garden and how we actually use it, we’ve gone deeper into vegetable and fruit growing and preserving.  The bees increased our appreciation for the engagement of insects in the plant world.  And for honey, too.

    In religion I’ve stepped away from any organized groups or lines of thought, trying now to penetrate how changes underway across the world might demand a new way of faith.  This one’s proving difficult.  But, that’s where the juice is, right?

    Finally, I’m learning, still, how to be a grandparent with my two instructors, Gabe and Ruth.  Also, I’m learning the role of parent in children’s mid-life, where demands of work and family consume them.  Again, a deepening and a change.

    Emerson said long ago that we do not need to travel to Italy to see beauty.  Beauty is where we see it, not only, perhaps not even primarily, where others see it.

     


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Family Friends Retirement Third Phase Woolly Mammoths

  • Yet More Loss

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                              Beltane Moon

    Got back from the retreat about 12:30.  Took a shower, rested a bit, then hopped in the car for Moon’s reviewal at Washburn-McCreavy in Bloomington.

    The bulk of the mourners were Chinese, the Fong family, but there were friends of Scott and of Yin who, like me, are round eyes.   A bowl of red envelopes, take one please, sat next to cards of hand-written calligraphy and a second bowl of hard candy.  An order of service for the funeral the next day had a color photograph of Moon on the cover.

    Moon lay in a casket at the end of the first hall, hands crossed over her chest, fabric work and calligraphy with her.  Next to the coffin a video played, showing pictures from Moon’s life, including one with a curly headed Yin, young and beautiful.

    Mourners wore red bands to indicate celebration of Moon’s life, though a few wore black bands to indicate her centenary; while 97 at her death, Chinese custom adds four years, so her age according to Chinese tradition was 101.

    There were the usual clots of well-wishers gathered around person they know, wandering from board to board of photographs and watching, again, the video shown in two places in a hall separate from the reviewal room itself.

    I spoke to Yin, then to Scott, said we’d talk later and left.

    When I got home, I had an e-mail from Warren that his father, Wayne, whom he had put in hospice care only Wednesday, had completed his journey.  Warren’s phrase.  Warren, referencing the end of Longfellow’s Hiawatha, said he thought his Dad might last longer, but “he was in a faster canoe.”

    These are times of transition, of change, of loss, of gathering in the lessons of a lifetime and using them for this third, last phase of our own journeys.  We knew it before the retreat and now we have fresh and poignant evidence.

     


    Aging Health Retirement Third Phase Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • What Now?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                Beltane Moon

    Now what?  First draft put to bed.  In Kate’s hands now.

    Kate asked how I was doing this morning during our business meeting.  I’m not an immediate answer to that sort of question kind of guy.  So, I paused, reflected.

    “I always knew I would mature late,” I said.

    Long ago I read a monograph on the development of people in various fields.  The longest was the philosopher/theologian, somewhere in the 50’s.  Since I’ve battered my through more than one field, I figured I’d be later.

    “With Greg (Latin tutor) asking me to collaborate on the commentary (Ovid’s Metamporphoses) and the completion of Missing’s first draft, I’m feeling like I may be hitting my maturity at last.”

    I’m beginning to feel grown up, as if I’ve retrieved my birthright from the convoluted labyrinth of my life.  This is not, interestingly, about achievement, but about individuation, about becoming who I am and who I will be.

    “So,” I told Kate, “I’m feeling pretty good.  Not jump up and down, yippee good, I’m too northern European for that, but pretty good.”

    That’s how I am this morning.


    Aging Faith and Spirituality Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Third Phase Translating Metamorphoses Writing 📎and tagged

  • Moon Also Rises

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                           Beltane Moon

    The second rainy chilly day.  Perfect.  Tomorrow and Tuesday will be outside days again, planting and other things, but now I have my gas stove turned on, the study is warm and I’m going to have another day of writing, reading and watching movies.

    A friend’s mother-in-law, 97, lies at home, hospice care.  A Chinese national, born in Canton, she has created a long and active life, filled with calligraphy, gardening, cooking, writing, reading and family.

    Another friend went out and stayed the night with her yesterday.

    Moon’s decline underscores the transition for our men’s group.  Death and serious illness has become common, no longer stories of other’s lives.  Perhaps Moon, as well as any other,  shows a way to live into the Third Phase.

    She did not give up the things that made her who she was.  She stayed rooted in her tradition, yet took parts of it and made them her own and, in so doing, transformed them from things of yesterday into things of today and tomorrow.  Each of the Woolly’s have our names in Chinese courtesy of Moon.  She wrote poetry and a book of hers was published a couple of years ago by her family.

    Many were the meals at Scott’s house in which Moon added her touches to Yin’s work.  She had a quiet way, yet exuded a person who knew who she was, a person complete and whole, a real presence in the world.  No one’s cipher.

    Now Moon rises in the night sky.  She will not be forgotten.


    Aging Asia Friends Third Phase Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Go or Stay?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                     Bee Hiving Moon

    “Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it.”   Judy Blume, Tiger Eyes

    I have a friend, he knows who he is, who loves to pack up and go.  Stay a good while.  Then come back.  He has tales to tell, too.  That time in the Caribbean when he thought he was going to die in a bad storm.  Selling art in the Greek Islands to make money.  Learning Fiji and Hindi while in the Peace Corps.  Tai Chi while living in Shanghai.  Creating an exhibit on safe sex for Thai kids.  Tango in Buenos Aires.  Gunplay in Mexico.

    I don’t know about fear, but he sure loves change.  “Change is good,” he said, “I look forward to it.”

    Since he began the pick up and go live in a foreign city idea a few years back, I’ve often compared my life choices to his.  It goes like this.  Am I too timid?  Stuck in one place?

    I try to answer this question honestly because the answer matters to me.  Travel is part of my soul, too, and I love foreign travel most of all.  His choices seem to maximize the experience of being in another culture, being there long enough to sink into the culture, be part of it.  At least for a while, not just as wanderer from one place to another.

    My answer to these questions goes like this.  I moved so much after I left home at 17.  Off to college, to a different college, back home for a quarter, then out for good.   Continue reading → Post ID 14246


    Aging Family Retirement Third Phase Travel

  • 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

  • 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 14246


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

  • Woollies On the Move

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                    Woodpecker Moon

    My first Sports Show tour tomorrow.  1 pm.  This show, as one docent friend said, is “a different animal.”  It attracts a sporting audience for sure, whether it attracts the arts audience is not so clear.  At least those are the reports I’ve been getting from docents who’ve toured it already.

    I’m prepared, but in some ways I expect to wing it, since a sports focused group would be very different from an arts focused group.  I look forward to either one.  I like this show, as I’ve said before, so I’m interested to see how it works with museum goers.

    Wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine.  Only they’re not wedding bells, they’re post-retirement living arrangements.  Woolly Jim Johnson headed west to the plains of South Dakota several years ago.  He comes to the retreats and at least one meeting each year.

    Woolly Paul Strickland and his wife Sarah, friends of mine for over 30 years, have decided to shift their home to their property in Maine, close to the Bay of Fundy.  Woolly Charlie Haislet will begin to split his time between St. Paul (a new condo) and his cabin in Wisconsin.  Paul says he’ll be back for retreats, and I imagine he will, but all these moves will change the character of our group.

    Probably the more amazing story is that we’ve stayed essentially stable for 25 years.  None of these moves were unexpected, and for those making them, they signal an accomplishment.  More third phase stuff at work.


    Art and Culture Sport Third Phase Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged