• Tag Archives life

  • Life

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                     Waning Bee Hiving Moon

    I have a much more plastic week ahead, one with more time here at home, space to plant vegetables, care for the newly hived bees.   Weeks with a lot of activity like last week wear me out, I begin to feel frazzled, as much from too much people exposure as physical weariness.  Without weeks like that, though, I feel disconnected from day to day life, so I need them, but it’s nice to have a more leisurely pace the next week.

    Translating Ovid gets left behind in those weeks since it requires a block of time for concentrated effort.  The same thing is true with Missing.  I have allowed my life, again, to become ragged in its rhythms, often a sign of vitality in my docent, Sierra Club, Woolly world, but a sure barrier to the creative work of writing and the detailed focused work of translation.

    Mark and I were coming back from getting the bees and he asked me if I had any regrets.  Up until a couple/three years ago I would have said, “Yes, I didn’t get a Ph.D.”  Now though I have let that go, a part of my past, not regretted, not celebrated.  Just a part of my past.

    What good are regrets?  They chain you now to things you didn’t do or wish you had done differently in the past.  There’s no going back there to change them, no way to erase or re-do.  Instead, I have the life I have, one I’ve chosen, sometimes with sound, well thought out choices, sometimes with impulsive, creative choices and sometimes with stupid, petty choices.  It is though, my life, and it is the synergy among all those choices that makes me who I am.  So, no, since I do not regret who I am, I cannot regret.

    Have I lived a perfect life?  Far from it.  Two divorces, a struggle with alcoholism, estranged from my father, not the hallmarks of a perfect life by any means, yet at this point it’s the life I have, complete with mistakes, bloopers and bone-headed errors.   Gotta say I’m fine with it.  A life I’m proud of at this point and that I hope to extend as long as the flesh is willing.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging 📎and tagged

  • This is life.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                            Waning Bridgit Moon

    Sunday night Kate and I went to St. Anthony Main, overlooking the Mississippi and St. Anthony Falls, for a Roots Music festival put on by KBEM, a local jazz station.  While we ate at the Aster Cafe and listened to a small group, Kate looked up at me and said, “Ah, the life of the retiree.”

    I understood what she meant.  Free at last.  But….

    I had another reaction too, “Yes, I know what you mean.  But, really.  This is life.  Not retired life, but life itself.”

    In that moment I realized the category mistake everyone makes when speaking of retirement.  It is seen as special, different, unique, something to be fussed over and transitioned into when really it’s just life, life continuing.  Not different, not special, not unique, not to be fussed over.

    Or, to say the same thing another way.  It is different, special, unique, to be fussed over because it is your life, your life, your one and only special and true life.  We have to want our life and lead our life before we work, while we work and after we work.  We do vacate the workplace, but we do not retire from our lives.

    In fact, the fuss is too often that we’ve left our lives up to others.  Our boss, our clients, our patients, our corporation or agency.  The past times and activities that seem so necessary, but are really only the ideas of others.

    So, the problem and the promise lies not within the change in our work, but with the change in ourselves.  If we have known what our life is, if  we have chosen activities and friends for their intrinsic value not their external rewards, well, then, on with your life.  If not, the issue is not the transition, but the need for self-examination, for honesty with the you that you bring to life as  you grow older.  No one else can do this work for you.  It’s up to you.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Faith and Spirituality Health Humanities Retirement 📎and tagged

  • Emergence

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                            Waxing Plating Moon

    Her crate is cleaned.  Her body taken for cremation.  The bowl in which I fed her has joined the other big bowls, no longer needed for our smaller whippets.  Emma was a big girl, tall and ropy muscled in her prime.  There is still, or do I imagine it, a faint odor of death, a sweet sick smell, not decay.   Hilo and Kona, who’ve known only life with Emma, appear subdued, but it’s never clear to me how much dogs grieve, although I know they do.

    Driving back from the vets this  morning, I realized, as I have before, but never quite like this time, that the moments of life are precious and fleeting.  When life ends, whatever, if anything (and I doubt it) happens, happens in a manner  out of conjunction with this reality.

    I resolved to get out in the beautiful Anoka County parks more, to wander the back roads and wild areas here as I have in the past, but have largely given up.  Not sure why.  Emma may not have been human, but she was loved and loving, a mammal, warm blooded, feeling, a thinker, conscious of her own life, and her death reminds me of these gifts, the true and miraculous, the precious, and yes, the sacred gifts of life itself.

    A thinker I’m becoming more acquainted with wants to redefine sacred as the emergent properties in the world.  Life is emergence at its most complex, its most mysterious, its most wonderful.  What is emergence?  It is the remarkable, unexpected something more when the sum of our body’s chemical components come together as a vital organism.  We’re not worth much, broken down into our chemical constituents, but with life we become a treasure, a unique contribution to the ongoing fabric of the universe.

    To that understanding of the sacred I say, “Namaste.”


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged