• Tag Archives delight
  • Fun? Bah, Humbug

    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.

     


  • Delighted

    Lughnasa                                                      Waxing Back to School Moon

    In the company of old men.  A surprising event occurred tonight among the Woolly Mammoths.  We had an evening of delight.  Warren raised this interesting topic and as it went round the room in our usual whoever wants to talk jump in and do so style, a congruence began to emerge.  Each of us reported more awareness of delights or miracles (see below) in our lives.  They ranged from grandchildren, whose every action delights us, to fly fishing and feeling the water around the legs, working on the Mississippi for twelve hours a day, dogs thumping and jumping when we come home, poetry, not having to perform anymore, just playing the music, sex, bees and honey and the Landscape Arboretum.  As we each offered up those things that delight us, it became apparent that most of us (all of us?) have entered a phase of life where external success has become a muted to extinguished need and instead we find ourselves driven by the inner life, by receptivity and acceptance.

    Though it was, in one sense, comforting and even encouraging to hear this more relaxed, old folks with their feet up on the cracker barrel sort of ambiance, it seemed a bit too happy, a bit distanced from pain.  Just as this thought crossed my mind the conversation shifted to cremation, to place, in part spurred by one of us who talked about visits to West Virginia, to the hill top church where his grandfather had served his first and his last pastorate, a place where he’s buried and other members of the family, too.  This physical location, this place on a hill top in West Virginia, felt rooted, felt his, helped him feel grounded.

    The cremation conversation moved along wondering about rootedness, about sense of place, about visits, though occasional, to parents burial plots.  Where will those who want to remember us go?  I mentioned green cemeteries and natural burial.  We will probably revisit this discussion.  It has an interesting relationship to something that intrigues me, something University of Wisconsin Madison geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, called Topophilia.  All of this dovetails into a taoist perspective, or at least a taoist perspective as I understand it.