• Tag Archives melancholy

  • Rain

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                  Waning Planting Moon

    Today I looked up at the sky while weeding.  Gray clouds covered it all and rain drops had begun to splash on the brim of my hat.  The sky and I, it felt, were sad and crying, both of us, on this June summer morning.

    It was an odd sensation that did not last.  As the day has gone on, I’ve had a nap and feel refreshed, but  the rain continues.  A soaking rain, a kind we’ve had too little of of late.  Now we often get thunder, lightning and torrents, often producing more erosion than watering.

    All the dogs have been subdued yesterday and today, adjusting to Emma’s absence.  Marking her passing.  Me, too.


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

  • Flat

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                         Waning Planting Moon

    Leeks and potatoes both need mounding around their growing plants, the potatoes to have more underground room in which to develop their tubers and the leeks to blanch the lower part of the stalk into the familiar white of the leek you see in the grocery store.  Did that.  At the same time I planted bush beans between the rows of the potatoes.  They help ward off bugs and provide something to eat.  A good deal.

    Feeling flat today.  Negative.  Grief, probably.  I know I want Kate home.  I want to share the home here again.  She’s been gone almost two weeks.

    You ever have that moment where you realize things have slowed down, inside?  Movement becomes a tad   more sluggish, thought a bit more difficult, like slogging through a marshland.  Sighing.  That’s me.  Overcast weather gets some credit, too.  Multiple vectors today, arrows pointing down.


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

  • Better…And Not

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                   Waning Planting Moon

    I’m still deep in the The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, following the exploits of Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei among many, many others.  Still not a third of the way done with it.

    Tomorrow, weather permitting, I’ll do more weeding. Weeding and pruning.  Those are the main tasks at this point in the gardening year.  That and finding some weedless straw for mulch.  It’s hard to find.

    A week and a half past my colds onset I feel pretty good, back to normal with the exception of  remaining sludge.  I feel like an engine in need of an oil change.  I even went back to the ramped up work outs  today and had no repeat of the dizziness and nausea I experience a couple of weeks ago, the last time I did this workout at the new pace.

    Feeling a bit of a let down, not sure why.  Maybe it’s just the push, push of garden, Latin, dogs, food or, more likely, it’s just a cycling through of a bit of melancholy.  Whatever it is sleep will help.


    📂This entry was posted in Asia Garden Health Humanities 📎and tagged

  • Still sinking.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                    Full Dyan Moon

    Kate can tell when I begin to submerge, move below the surface of day to day contact.  I become short, irritable.  She gets the feeling of walking on egg shells.  By the time this happens I’m not in touch with my effect on the outside world.  Distraction and self-absorption reign.

    She brings it up.  We talk.  Today I said, “I’ve moved into melancholy.”  The distance between closed.  We both know this journey and its dark side.  I ate my chirashi and she her teryaki bento box.

    “What precipitated it?”

    “I have no idea.  Chemicals, I think.”

    “No. Wait.  It began, I think on Hilton Head.  Maybe it was the weather.  I now that sounds absurd, but then, I know it happens, too.  Gloomy outside, gloomy inside.”

    “I love you.”  Said with the grasp of both the condition and the afflicted.  Therapy in their own right.

    Otherwise, the day had bees and money.

    Mark Nordeen came over and we popped the top on the second hive.  Lotsa bees.  Took a long while to get the smoker going.  The smoke calms them down.  They stop flying, go back into the hive.

    The top hive had brood on several frames and the number of bees has tripled at least.  There were three queen cups and I got to see exactly what they looked like.

    “If you ever see a queen cup that has a queen in it, don’t knock it off.  That means they’re about to swarm and you’ll need the second queen for those who stay behind.”

    We moved the bottom hive on top because there had not been as much work done down there and we wanted to encourage more frames filled with brood.

    Later in the morning we saw our cash-flow adviser.  We’ve done very well and continue to  do so, but as we move to retirement she says there is a big trick to moving from paid employment to retirement income.  In the case of Kate we’ve been lucky to have her producing large quarterly bonuses which have enabled us to do many different things:  dogs, permaculture, long trips.  After retirement, those kinds of bumps in income will disappear and we have to decide how to deal with that.  Turns out cash is the primary tool, having lots of it in liquid investments like CD’s, bonds or money market.

    The moral here is that no matter how you feel, life goes on.  Decisions have to be made.  Bees need care.  The garden goes through its season.  There is something reassuring to the constancy and permanence of natural change.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Bees Faith and Spirituality Family 📎and tagged

  • Two Colorful People Together

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                  Full Seed Moon

    Yes, we need no appraisal, we need no appraisal today.  Our bank, Wells Fargo, decided we do not need an appraisal to refinance our loan.  Something about our loan balance, equity and that it would be a roll-over instead of a brand new loan.  OK.  That means we can refinance sometime next week.  A good thing.

    The last week and a half, since the root canal, has had dealing with the infected jaw, then one organ after another taking up my mornings.  All important to my long term health, but it has left me tired and with a sense of little accomplished.

    This need to accomplish, to achieve continues as a backdrop.  Kate says when she retires she’s ready to rest on her laurels, sit back and reflect on her life.  “We can just be two colorful people together,” she said.  I’m not sure I can give up the hope of something over the horizon, a realization, a book, a political action a defining event for this stage of my life.  If not, I may find the last two decades or so of life a struggle. Or, I suppose, they might be very productive.

    Drifting right now.  The melancholy at bay, but not too far away, ready to bring a tear or a heaviness to my now.  Feels empty.


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

  • Feelin’ Glum

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring              Full Seed Moon

    Today was the second organ day in a row.  Yesterday, eyes.  Today, skin.  Tomorrow, ears.  Doing fine on all counts so far.  Even so, I find visits to the doctor a bit stressful.  The waiting room.  The waiting for the doctor.  Their evaluation/assessment.  I have a good relationship with all of my doctors and intend to keep it that way.  Bill Schmidt and I had lunch today and I told him I view doctors as health consultants.  I’m responsible for my health, but they help me stay healthy and intervene if something gets out of whack.

    After seeing Dr. Pakzad I came home and had a sit down with Kate.  I’ve been feeling glum, an unusual state for this time of year and unusual in intensity for me over the last couple of years.  It’s a little difficult to sort things out.  In part the Sierra Club work may be more of a challenge than I anticipated.  In part I found myself counting up all the little insults that make me realize my age, no, not really my age, but my sense of competence.  Do I have it anymore?  A tough question to answer from the inside and one always colored by mood.

    Kate thinks that may be the wrong question.  I’ve prodded her several times over the last year about retirement and whether she’s ready for it.  She turned the question around on me, “I wonder you’re ready for retirement?  To let go of the need to have to have it?”

    Hmmm.  Projection isn’t just a machine in a movie theater.  She may well be right.  Pondering this pushed me to wonder about the last regression I had where I got credentialed for the UU ministry.  I did that during a time when I was down about the writing.  But, John Desteian said, in a regression, you always go back to pick up something left behind, or unresolved.  Stuff to bounce around.  Enough for a coup contrecoup injury.

    Good lunch with Bill Schmidt.  We covered a lot of ground from genetic modification of seeds and nuclear energy to motorcycles and dealing with difficult personalities.  I came away still opposed to nuclear energy, but willing to hear arguments about how to handle the waste.


    📂This entry was posted in Friends Great Work Health Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Happiness is …

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    -1  bar falls 30.19  0mph  NW  windchill -1   Samhain

    Full Moon of Long Nights     Day 8hr 46m

    “Take anything and everything seriously except yourselves.” – Rudyard Kipling

    As I get ready for two tours today, Kipling strikes a note I need to hear more often.  With all the news about happy people spreading the love out three degrees of separation I wondered about those of us who go through life somewhere in the muddle.  Yes, muddle.

    Happiness comes to me only rarely, then for brief moments.  I’m not usually gloomy, but I’m not usually sunny either.  I come from a family with manic-depression, so a tendency toward the melancholy probably came with the helix.  Melancholy is an old friend, in fact, some of my best writing ideas and creative work comes when he pays a visit.

    In fact, I distrust happy people to some extent.  It always seems to me that they willfully ignore a large part of what goes on the world.  Spoken, I know, like a guy who takes himself and his world too seriously.

    I am one, I am many.  Whitman and I have our melancholy, but we also have our quiet joys, raucous moments, times of abandon.

    Well, this is a bit of a downer, but I’m gonna leave it in anyhow.  How I felt this morning.


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

  • A Certain Inner Doldrum

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    68  bar steady 29.98 0mph SE  dew-point 56  Sunrise 5:48  Sunset 8:50PM  Summer

    Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

    Thump.  Thump.  Pause.  Thump.  Thump.  Thrudda Thrudda Thump.  Bang.  Thump.  Thump.  Most of the time it is quiet here.  At night the quiet becomes complete, with the exception of tonight.  One of the neighbors must have had left overs from the 4th.  Strange sounds at night make you wanna know what’s going on.  Kate went out back and I went out front.  Saw nothing.  Either of us.  Both of us concluded fireworks.  A suburban July nighttime mystery.

    The tone of my last few posts has trended down.  My inner barometer falls, not steeply, but it does fall.  Why?  Midsummer blahs.  The whole weight thing.  A certain inner doldrum.  Maybe a change in my spiritual life.  This is the realm of melancholy, not depression, and it usually precedes a creative period.  As I fall deeper into my interior, it is as if my gifts and energy fall with me, not in a negative sense, but as preliminary to a harvest.  When I pull inward, my outer affect often declines, but the interior feeling is that of gathering my resources, marshaling them into a coherent whole.

    The weather in Minneola, Texas has 97 and sunny as a theme for the three days we will be there.  97 is cooler than past reunions.  The last time I headed to Oklahoma for an Ellis reunion it was 107 the whole time I was there.  That’s hot.  We’ve gotten notes about what to bring to help defray the cost of food for 36 adults and a gaggle of kids.  Charles Paul, that’s me, gets a pass, but Kate and I will pick up something once we get there.

    It just dawned on me yesterday why my name was Charles Paul or CP on both sides of the family.  My dad’s brother was my Uncle Charles and my grandfather Keaton was Charles Keaton.  A diplomatic choice of names by mom and dad, but it left each side with a need to differentiate between two of us.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family Our Land and Home Travel 📎and tagged