What I'm For, or How To Discover Your Purpose In Life By Failing At Everything Else

When I was young, I wanted to grow up to be a scientist.

I spent several years on that, training in the sciences, especially the earth sciences. I pursued that goal all the way to college level classes in geology and chemistry. What stopped me was math studies. I placed in advanced math till the eighth grade, and then I got stuck. Later in life, my Mom said it was because of the math teacher. She had seen it at the time, but had not been able to change it, or talk to me about it; she thought there were psychological problems in play. I had really liked my math teacher at the time, for example he liked to play Beethoven's Sixth Symphony during class while we worked, but he did somehow derail my confidence in my math studies.

I'm not really sure how that happened. I only remember that after 8th grade math, I felt stupid rather than smart in math studies. I had little confidence in my own ability. When it came to college entry exams, I scored nearly perfectly in Language Arts, and only at 50 percent in Math on the SATs. This was after scoring in the top 1 percent in every test battery taken throughout my school years. I still somehow scored in the top 5 percent overall for college entry exams, and placed out of both English and Foreign Language requirements, by getting top marks in Advanced Placement classes for both. But not for math.

I was a gifted child who didn't want to be one. I was one of those child prodigies. But I was bullied for being smart, for being a teacher's pet, for being different. I wanted nothing more than to fit in, to be liked, to be accepted. Well, that never happened. I continued in the sciences, till college, and loved doing geology in the field, partly because I loved being outdoors, and then I realized something.

I wasn't meant to be a scientist.

Well, I was, and none of that work was wasted, but there was a thing in me that could never be suppressed or ignored or set aside. It just wasn't possible. It was too powerful to ignore. It's too much more of what I was, and supposed to be.

I wanted to be a scientist. But I was supposed to be a Maker.

I was born to make art. I'm a natural creative. It's the thing I do best. (Really. I can barely handle mundane tasks like managing money, by contrast.)

It took me a very long time to accept that I'm supposed to an artist, a composer, a worker, a person who makes things. New things. A MAker

I say this with neither pride nor humility. I am neither egotistical about it, or falsely humble about it. It's just a fact. Making things is what I do best.

It's really the only thing I'm any good at. I've tried a lot of other career paths in life, and mostly failed at them. I'm looking at a future of failure again, every time I try to fit in, or be accepted, or be like other people. Fitting in never worked in school, when I was being bullied, and it still never seems to work in my adult life. I seem to fated to always be "other." Again, that's just data, not ego.

In mid-college I changed majors from science to the arts. I switched from geology to music, and transferred to the Music School. Almost everyone tried to talk me out of it, including the Dean of the Music School. But the fact is, I had been playing music since I was 5 or 6 years old, singing as a boy soprano soloist. I began piano studies at age 7. (That was inevitable, as Mom was a concert pianist and music educator. Both my sister and I studied piano. I think it made us better thinkers overall, as later education studies seem to suggest.) Everyone wanted me to continue in science, get a good job, and continue to be an amateur musician. But I couldn't do it. In fact, I had been composing music, and had even had a few pieces played, since I was a young boy. I had won awards for short story fiction by age 16. I had gotten interested in photography at a young age, and got better with every year. Even when I was out studying geology in the field, all summer long in Wyoming, my very first college class, when I returned home I had already taken so many photos in the mountains that people started to notice them. I was a gifted child, and stood out, even though a lot of the time I just wanted to disappear.

After music school, my first job after graduation was ironically with Mathematical Reviews, a monthly review journal, where I got in on the ground floor of the desktop publishing revolution, and became a computer graphics expert, a digital type designer, and more. Working in corporate graphic design jobs was creative enough to be fulfilling for me, and I did it for many years, but it still wasn't enough. A book design company, one of the best places I ever worked for, allowed me to use their gear to teach myself Photoshop, and become even more of an expert. I also started to win awards for photography and digital art. I worked there till they corporately downsized. The book publishing business collapsed starting in 2000, and has radically changed since then. Nonetheless, I still have all those skills.

And corporate employment just never seems to work. I can never seem to make it work. It's like it's prevented. And then my life changed due to chronic illness. I suspect those corporate doors may be forever closed to me now.

So I've got no choice, now, but to go forward with no hope of success but with my only choice being to be what I am, a Maker. I make stuff. It's all I'm any good at. I don't know if it will be enough to sustain me. I guess it's time to do what I'm good at, and forget about the rest.

It's pretty scary, because I've developed trust issues. Really big ones. I guess the only thing I actually trust anymore is Making, in which I never seem to doubt myself, and in which I always have full self-confidence in my ability and need to make things.

I make art of some kind every day. (Well, some really bad days I can't. But that's a symptom of a dark day. I hate it, but I try to get past it.) Even if everything else falls apart, that's still true. ON good days I make things, on bad days I make things, I just make things. I guess that's how to tell that's what you're for: it's the thing that you never stop doing, even when all the rest has been taken away. So that's what you do. That's what you're for.

And that's all I can do. It's all that's left. Wish me luck.

Who Are We, and Where Are We Going

a Spiral Dance essay

It's pathetic, I suppose, that I'm now more comfortable in anonymous hotel rooms than anywhere I'm supposed to be living, I have a place to live in Madison, now, with a very positive and even supportive roommate, but sometimes I still prefer being alone. That's really why I stopped at a hotel last night. Too tired to deal with people. No spoons left for social graces. Too much effort to even talk to people I like and want to be with. I just wanted to be alone and silent. I don't know how to survive without silence and solitude, anymore. Happiest out there driving alone on the road, in the desert, or forest, or wherever there aren't many people, or any.

I've been kicked out of every group I've ever belonged to. It keeps happening. I should accept it by now, but I keep fighting it. Every group I've ever given my loyalty to, I've been forced to leave behind. I keep getting kicked out of the nest, before I'm ready to leave on my own. Either I've outgrown them, or the gods want me to move on, or it's time and I don't want to go, or fate moves the pieces on my board and I have to leave.

It keeps happening. It's happening again.

Madison, WI, isn't supposed to be where I live. During the crushing end of times in Beloit, when I was having to see everything I own, including my home, the only home I've ever owned, I dreamed that I could give Madison a chance. After all, I used to live there, and had and have many friends, and musician partners, and so on. I've given it a good try, but everything, literally everything, has told me not to make a hime there. No signs of inevitable placement. I've been prevented at every turn. That's the usual sign.

I went through the hell of trying to rent an apartment in Madison, only to be confronted by the unsolvable Catch-22 of: 1. You can't rent an apartment unless you have a job, or credit, or income source. 2. You can't get a job unless you have a street address of a place to live, like an apartment. That paradox is what me onto the road in early November, where I spent almost two months out West; two months, I must say, that were almost the only happy times I had in all of 2015. Everyone noticed. Everyone commented on it. I was happier out West than I had been all year. Less stressed. More positive.

Then I came back to Wisconsin. And the stress immediately got worse again. And then I got bullied, and had to flee a situation where I had been staying. And that pushed me back out on the road again. If only for more healing via travel.

Then I came back.

I'm exhausted, right now, because after two weeks on the road, to Ann Arbor then down to Tennessee and Kentucky to check out another possible living situation, which did not pan out, I had to immediately go back to Ann Arbor for a job interview. I sucked at the interview, and I don't think I'll get the job, but the more I thought about it the more clear it was: I am being invited to live anywhere except Madison. It's time to go.

I got really clear, driving back towards Madison, although stopping short at a hotel before getting there, that Wisconsin is hell for me now and I just need to leave it behind. I got really, really clear; it's so obvious that I should have seen it before, that all my remaining time spent in Madison will be about preparing to leave. It's true, there are details to finish up of this life. I won't rush, if the gods permit, and I know I won't be staying much longer. A few months, probably.

Wisconsin has been very hard on me for the past decade, and it's never going to emotionally neutral there. All that suffering will always leave an aura of sour apples behind. Maybe not in the greenwood per se, but everywhere there are people. So it's time to go. I have more Stuff to get rid of, from the storage locker, and I have time to say goodbye properly to some long term friends, but then I will be gone. These past few months were offered to me, in the words of a friend, as a Farewell Tour. And that's how I am treating them. I won't say de ice what kind of Farewell, just yet. It doesn't have to be that final one, although for awhile that too was in the cards. But it's definitely a Farewell to the life that used to be, that I have now outgrown, and need to put behind me, so I can actually live and thrive, elsewhere. That's the truth of this. That's also why hotels feel better than what used to be "home."

I've never been able to "go home again" in my life. (Cue Thomas Wolfe.) I've never really been able to go back, and stay, anywhere I used to live. I've always been required to live in a new place. I know that on some level that the gods park me in a new place, to be of service there, so that my frequency of light can be used to brighten up a dark place. I'm really tired of always being alone, of never finding a loving partner, although I accept this as part of my path. You're getting a lot more honesty from me, tonight, in this hotel, than anyone is probably prepare to deal with. Well, deal with it. This life path I am on is nomadic, is lonely, is demanding, and has its powerful rewards that sometimes make it all feel like it's been worth it, although not that often.

And I have to keep going.

Caroline Myss, one of my spiritual directors this lifetime, says: Loyalty is a beautiful tribal quality, especially when it is conscious loyalty, a commitment that serves the individual as well as the group. Extremes of loyalty that harm one's ability to protect oneself, however, qualify as a belief pattern from which one needs to free oneself.

That nails it on the head. When I first give my loyalty to a group, I am very conscious of it, and very aware that service is the key: serving others, we serve ourselves. Yet I tend to give my loyalty a bit too fiercely, and it does come back to bite me. Because I make the mistake of thinking that others also give their loyalty as I do. That's one reason I've been kicked out of the nest so many times. People change, and I find myself alone in where I gave my loyalty, with no reciprocation anymore.

I don't really want to die, anymore. I'm not really suicidal. But I do still have days when I just don't care, when I'm too tired to care, and don't want to go on. Lots of honesty, here. Days I can't face anything normal or socially typical. When I'd rather be out there talking to the Green Man God of the Woods than any human. When Dionysus has my love, and you don't. Days I just can't deal with the superficiality, the inanity, the shallow self-regard. Days when I could cheerfully be a hermit in the desert, and talk to the coyotes more than people. I'm half wild as it is, I guess I always was. Maybe that's why I keep getting kicked out of every nest I've ever tried to build. It's happening again, right now. Let me just pull the knife out of my back, before I continue. There. That's better.

The last year has been about getting rid of or being forced to let go of everything I owened, everything left to me by my parents, all my money, my condo, my belongings, my whole life here. Another nest just taken away. Apparently I'm just a drama queen for ever mentioning it, or for it affecting my mood, or for being so exhausted that I'm not perky or cheerful enough, for it giving me a "bad attitude." I guess that's true. Never mind that it's been the most horrific decade of my entire life, beginning with the deaths of my parents more or less in my arms, passing through almost dying from chronic illness, and finally culminating in the Year I Lost Everything.

Well, so what.

Time to move on. Time to start over somewhere else. Time to go back out to the desert, or the woods, and start over elsewhere, with a lot less baggage, including the physical. Since that seems to be the pattern of my life, I might as well embrace it. I don't know if I will ever live with people anymore, I'll just drop in for a visit. A good visit. With some people, a very good visit. But love and sex? Probably never going to be a permanent thing, for me. Always moving on. I can accept that, too. It doesn't hurt too much, tonight, to embrace that. After all, being pansexual or an omnisexual mystic means I've had sex with the sky and the mountains as often or more than sex with people, men or women or both.

I like people. I really do. I just can't build permanent love relationships with them. I mean, other than as family of choice, which I do love and am grateful for. I just seem to be the wanderer, the warrior, doomed to be homeless, rootless, and so on. That's not self pity talking, that's just acknowledging the archetypes that rule a life.

So, here I go, again. Writing this out in a hotel in the middle of the night after collapsing into sleep upon arrival. That's why you get so much honesty, at the moment, no point in lying to myself. No need to pretend anything other than what it is. And we go on.

Gratitudes Thanksgiving 2015

I made it a practice to write Gratitudes instead of New Year's resolutions beginning several years ago. I find this practice very challenging this year, after a year in which I pretty much lost everything. Literally. I won't bore you with a list; the highlights include losing my home and most of what I used to own; leave it at that for now. Suffice to say, I feel challenged this year to be grateful. Writing Gratitudes cannot be easy: while it's easy to be grateful when you're at a feast, it's far more difficult to find gratitude when you have nothing. But that's when it really counts.

So.

The list of my circle of close friends who have helped me immensely in this past year—in multiple ways on multiple fronts, some big, some small, every little piece adding up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts—is a long list full of wonderful people. I'm challenged to make a full list, because I don't want to leave any names off accidentally. So please, all of you, accept my profound and eternal thanks. Thank you. THANK YOU.

I'm grateful to have what I have left, for what I have now, every little piece of it. I have a vardo, a nomad's wagon to live in, and destinations to go and visit, and a road to travel. If the folk in one town start to be a problem, there's always another town own the road.

I had a really good Thanksgiving here in CA with best friend and best friend's family and circle of friends. Not merely a great food feast, but good conviviality and lots of excellent moments of laughter and music. Thank you.

There are people I think of as family. My family-of-choice. Most of them know who they are. I'm grateful you're in my life. Thank you.

I'm grateful simply to be alive. There have been several occasions in recent years when that was no sure thing. There have been a few times in this past, difficult year, when I've come close to that edge. My mental and physical health have been fragile, or, to be blunt, on some occasions this past summer, outright broken. I've spent time these past few weeks on the road rebuilding the equilibrium and stamina lost to several months of trauma that, to be blunt, not everyone I know could have survived. Nor could I have, without immense support from my closest friends. Thank you.

I'm still here. I want to be here. The future is no more certain now that it has been. I have no answers. Life is lived very much day to day. Don't ask for more than that. And thank you.

Nothing is resolved. The road is not closed. I will have no truck with false or toxic hope. I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, and I've become a hardcore realist. I wait and see what develops. I will not pretend to embrace optimistic resolutions I do not feel, or believe, or have any faith in. Neither will I close myself to grace. I am always open to grace, and I have received many, many gifts. I am still here.

Thank you.

Thanksgiving Day Gratitudes 2013

Almost ten years ago I began writing Gratitudes instead of New Year's Resolutions. I find New Year's Resolutions to be incredibly toxic, since most people habitually set up unreasonable expectations and goals for themselves, which they can never meet, then beat themselves up when they don't live up to them. It can all seem rather masochistic. There are a few things in life which I am most definitely not: sentimental; nostalgic; masochistic. What I definitely value is honesty, and clarity, and accuracy.

I was asked by some friends, some of whom have now taken up the practice of Gratitudes themselves, to write down how it works. So here's a little "how to" essay I wrote to answer that request: Writing Gratitudes.

Now here we are near the end of another calendar year. Northern hemisphere Winter is creeping up to slap us down again. There's snow on the ground, I've just spent Thanksgiving Day alone at home, mostly resting after overdoing it for the past few weeks, and so I watched a bit of a movie marathon (I do not give a tinker's damn about televised sports events). I am sitting in a mostly darkened home, candles burning here and there, a fire in the fireplace, sipping another mug of good hot tea. I'm enjoying the near silence of a cold winter late night. The fireplace makes a dance of light and soft sounds.

I'm genuinely happy for all my friends who had big joyous wonderful family dinner reunion feasts for Thanksgiving Day. Bless all of you, and best wishes to you.

And my own head is in a different place, this year. I spent Thanksgiving Day alone today. That was mostly by my own choice. No one (well, almost no one) invited me to celebrate with them today, to join their family or family-of-friends feasts. I chose not to reach out and ask to join anyone for the day, as if you have to ask you can never be certain that an invitation is sincere or made out of guilt. I am not unhappy about that, nor do I feel lonely or whatever. I realized a few days ago that I've been burning the candle at both ends for awhile, and I've been feeling overstimulated, and wasn't sure that I had the strength to spend the day with a wonderfully loud group of fantastically convivial friends—in other words, to be even more overstimulated. We introverts need our silence and solitary times with which to recharge. I would have liked to spend the day with a small group of two or three friends, that would have been fun, but it didn't work out that way, and I don't mind. And most of the people I would have chosen to spend the day with are all at least an hour's drive away from me, if not clear across the country. No regrets.

I began the practice of Gratitudes several years ago, and it has been a good practice. And I'm really struggling with it right now. I'm not feeling very grateful, or thankful. And I'm not going to pretend to be what I'm not, just to please others. I know I keep talking about how almost dying a couple of times really has changed my perspective on many things in life, and that's really true: life is just too short to waste time and energy on things that don't matter. One of those things that doesn't matter anymore is editing myself to please you: you can count on me for continuous honesty from here on out. Not that I've ever been known for anything but blunt honesty. It's true that I value honesty and openness more than almost anything else, now more than ever. And I am actually very good at diplomacy and tact; I just prefer to use them when it's appropriate, rather than by default.

I know I have many things to be grateful for, and I am genuinely grateful for them. A small circle of best friends, who are equally honest with me. A larger circle of friends who are not as close to me, perhaps, as my inner circle, and who I nevertheless am very glad are in my life. I have a roof over my head for now, enough food to eat, and enough money to pay most of my bills. I'm not afraid of the same things that many others are, because life has taught me that I can survive those, because in many cases I already have.

And yet I am still struggling with Gratitudes this year.

Because, to be honest, I feel really dumped. The past ten years have been a continuous saga of feeling like I've been ratfuck pissass bullshit orogenically dumped on by the Powers That Be. I've been homeless in the desert, I've lost both parents, I've lost more than one close friend, I've been through some medical hell including almost dying twice, I am now apparently permanently disabled, and I remain under the threat of losing everything I own and spending all of my remaining savings on paying off medical bills. It just keeps going on and going on, and even though there have been amazing wonderful awesome great positive moments in all of this shitstorm, it's really wearing me down.

The fact is, I'm tired. It's been an uphill struggle for a very long time now, and I still am nowhere near the end of it. I've been hard on the "positive thinkers" lately, even when I agree with their basic message, which I often do, because what I need now isn't cheerful platitudes but genuine support. I still need help with getting through all of this, but it seems I still have to get through all of it on my own. Which is an exhausting thought when I've been working hard to overcome it for so long, battling uphill into a headwind, when I've been dealing with surviving a chronic illness that stole all of my endurance, strength, and stamina, and that may never all come back. I'm doing better, but I'm not well yet, I'm not healed yet, and I'm still exhausted easily. It just gets overwhelming. Everything still takes me much longer to get accomplished than anyone imagines. It can take me four days to have enough energy to get finished tasks that those have never been sick think nothing of getting done in a single afternoon. I still have to rest more than exert, most days. I do have good days, when I have almost the same energy available to me as is daily available to someone of my age who has never been chronically ill. I can even have two or three of those kinds of days in a row now—but then I have to rest almost as many days afterwards.

And yet I can't really talk to most people about it any more. They don't want to hear it, they can't deal with it, and they don't know what to do about it. I don't blame them for that. Well, actually, sometimes I do, a little, although I tend to squash that impulse and not tell anyone about it—expect that I promised to be honest herein. It's all too easy to feel like no one really gives a shit. After awhile you stop asking for help.

And after enough of this endless cycle of feeling held back every time you make even a little bit of forward progress, your sense of being grateful can get lost in the overall static. There's a lot of noise covering the signal. (If you think I'm so unaware of my own self that i don't know that the source of most of the noise is internal, you're wrong.)

i get really pissed off, sometimes, at the shallowness of some people, who seem to think that platitudes alone will cheer me up enough, or that somehow all it takes to fix everything and overcome all your problems is an act of sufficient willpower. Two problems with that: one, if all it ever took was an act of will, no one would ever get stuck, but we all do, so clearly willpower alone is not sufficient; and two, what makes you think that sufficient strength of will can be generated by someone who was sick for twenty-five with an illness whose main effect was chronic exhaustion and a depressed immune system? What's offensive is how clueless people can be about that very thing. Well, I don't take it personally anymore, and neither do I feel any need to tolerate it patiently. Recently, I've run into numerous examples of people who seem to think that, because I'm no longer being dragged further down the drain by an ongoing illness, I am suddenly "all better now" and available to take care of their needs as well as my own. Seriously. Is it that they don't understand, or don't want to? The fact of the matter is, I have a strong, very well-trained, very determined will—and it still wasn't enough.

I am not rehearsing grievances by going over this once again. I am not a victim, amateur or professional. All I am doing is laying how difficult things remain for me. There are still many challenges. It could all still fall apart again. And so I find it hard, in all of this, to find Gratitudes.

So here I am.

On a holiday of giving thanks, when everyone is supposed to gather in family groups and have a feast of gratitude and convivial argument over cultural affairs, I find myself confronted with not wanting to do any of that. I actually chose, by default, and by not being asked to join anyone else's celebrations, to spend this holiday alone. In part to rest, because I needed to, and in part because when I am this tired I find big groups even more exhausting than usual. So call it self-defense.

And there's more. I'm finding it hard to be grateful, when what I see all around me as thanks-giving seems somehow phony. I mean no offense to anyone who might read this. it's just that, once again because almost dying changed my perspectives, I have become allergic to expectations about what we are "supposed" to do on holidays, especially when the rituals and expectations actively distract us from the original, deep meaning and purpose of the holiday. We have accrued all this baggage around the holiday, and I feel that many of us have lost our way towards genuine gratitude.

It's supposed to profound. It's supposed to come from deep within the self and soul. It's originally meant to be simple, and plain, and honest.

It's easy to be grateful when you're at a feast. Yet if you can find something to be grateful for when there's a famine instead of a feast, that's when it really counts, and counts for something more. I am scrounging for things to be thankful for, right now, because I know that if I can come up with even one or two, they do count. It's hard work, and I don't feel like I'm doing a very good job.

I don't want to set aside just one designated day to be grateful, and have that be an excuse to forget about it the rest of the year.

I am struggling with Gratitude in general right now. It's not that I have nothing to be thankful for, it's that it can be overwhelmed by not having time to reflect.

I've been living from crisis to crisis (some of them literally life-threatening) for far too long, and it has worn me down. I wanted to take this holiday of giving thanks to reflect, mostly on my own rather than in a big room full of terrific yet loud people. I want to recapture recall what it is that I am genuinely grateful for. This holiday is a chance to rediscover the real purpose of Gratitudes, and not be easy, superficial, or "supposed to" about any of it.

•

Infinite gratitudes for the small group of friends and family who never left my side during this long descent into near-death and the long return, and who never pushed me away, or took themselves away, because they could not deal with it anymore. I know I'm not the only one who got burned out by these past ten years of actual continuous crises. Some of my friends still have no real idea. I am grateful that some of them will never have to know any more than the little I've told them.

Infinite gratitudes for the tears that cleanse, for the release and healing of weeping, when I can't go on any more, i can't cope even one more day, and I just can't see any end to any of this. I have been scrapped raw of most of the armor one acquires during a lifetime of learning to cope with a sometimes-hostile world and not become too wounded or jaded. My emotions are if anything more free-flowing and available than ever before. So I do sometimes let myself weep over a stupid feel-good movie, even one with a predictable cathartic plotline I saw coming by the second act, just because the release is good.

Infinite gratitudes even for the shitty days. This is bottom-basement lowest-level gratitude, it's nothing remotely worth being proud of oneself for. Because it looks like this: even on my worst days now, I am still grateful to be alive rather than dead. Even when it sucks to be alive, I'm grateful for it. (Why don't more people get this one? It's so incredibly clear. Well, maybe you have to come close to death to learn how to really value your life.) I did almost die. I have a powerful and unignorable awareness of my own personal mortality now. I have an incredible amount of things I still want to do in this lifetime, and I know better than anyone that our time here is limited. So even on the days I wake up feeling shitty, and sick, and weak, and not at all like I can cope with even one more thing, I still somehow manage to be grateful that I woke up at all.

Infinite gratitudes for the lessons learned about human nature that have come from this entire experience of high medical drama in my life over the past ten years. I include what I learned from my parents dying, from being their live-in caregiver, and then from myself being diagnosed with a chronic illness that had been there a long time, unknown and unlabeled.

Infinite gratitudes for the eventual diagnosis of my chronic illness, and the post-surgical confirmation of it being ulcerative colitis. Because for the first time in over 25 years I could comprehend that my life wasn't all my own fault; that I wasn't just a lazy slacker who lacked ambition; that I wasn't an aimless wanderer through life; that in fact many of the problems I'd had in not being able to sustain a career over recent years was not because I was incompetent, but because I was sick. I was SICK, you sons of bitches. Father, you never thought I was competent to handle finances or deal with life, you always thought I was weak and lazy and fucked up—but in fact, father, I was SICK. Getting the diagnosis of my long-term illness took an enormous weight off my back: a weight of guilt, of self-doubt, of poor self-esteem and confusion and suffering. I am still recovering from the psychological impact of years of being labeled a failure, even though I know that it wasn't all my fault, I really was SICK all that time. So fuck you if you still want to blame me for any of that.

Infinite gratitudes for finally being forced by illness and recovery to sort through all the mental drama and psychological bullshit, so that I could realize anew what I had known as a child, but which I let my birth-tribe's anxieties and neuroses about survival beat out of me: that, in fact, the reason I was put here in this lifetime is to make art. To be an artist. To Make, in all the creative modes that I know how to do, and in those modes new to me that I keep discovering and trying out. I was put here to be creative, to be an explosion of creativity. Everything else is secondary. Making art is what I am best at doing, and it's what I'm FOR. The Goddess made me for this. I regret spending so many years believing otherwise. And I do my best to let go of that regret as quickly as it arises.

Infinite gratitudes for also finally understanding that making art is what I'm best at doing, and I'm really not very good at doing anything else. I'm a good composer of good music. I no longer doubt my purpose in life, and I no longer lack self-confidence about it. I know I can do good work, sometimes even great work. It's what I'm good at, and it's what I'm for. And I'm really not very good at doing anything. And that's good enough. That's okay.

Infinite gratitudes for the soul-deepening and self-expanding that these years of hard pain and suffering have made happen in my Self. It has often sucked, and sometimes it still hurts, and a shallow person I am not. I'm still working on being patient and tolerant with shallowness and stupidity when i encounter it—but I'm not working that hard on being patient, because sometimes what people really need is a kick and a slap. This is why the Zen master slaps you with the stick when you start to fall off your meditation cushion.

Infinite gratitudes for that truth that, having been myself through the crucible, the refiner's fire, the forge of making, I can recognize it when I see it in others, and know what to say to them when they need encouragement or direction, should they come to me for that. I am grateful for the insights into people that have been given me, learned the hard way, by going through all that myself—even though sometimes people are afraid of me, or intimidated by my being able to see right through their bullshit to their truest selves.

Infinite gratitudes for somehow having received a push to force myself to do this writing, tonight, when it would have been so much not to. Procrastination, thy name is avoidance. I know it goes on and on, I'm just dumping it all out because I promised to be honest, and clear, and accurate.

Infinite gratitudes for wine and sex and song. Not to be indulged in to the limits of dissipation, but as the things in life that bring us together and make us feel alive and give us reason to go on.

Infinite gratitudes to Perfect harmony Men's Chorus for singing all of the music that has been pouring out of me and written down over the past few years. I am incredibly lucky to be "playing in a band" again where I get to write new music, and hear it performed. Music is the core of my life. Destroy everything else, and there remains an unkillable song. A melody that rises out of the Void, unquenchable, unending, as fluid and continuous a line of music as the vines that grow from the Greening each spring. Where such music is rooted in the Greening of veriditas, it is undying, endless, renewed.

Infinite gratitude for the exaltation and ekstasis of kenosis, kronos, and kairos. The process of emptying that leaves a void in you which can only be filled by the One. "If the only prayer you ever said in your life was "Thank You," that would suffice." —Meister Eckhart

Infinite endless gratitude for this unending creative force that flows through my life like an underground river of sparkling black water that rises up to endlessly fill and overflow the wells and springs of my life with music, art, poetry, and every blend and mix and remix of creativity that is, as I have remembered, my purpose in this life. The black water that fills me, that sustains me, that is the power under life, that which holds me up and gives me reason to go on, always. To go on, even when I don't want to, when I'm exhausted and unable and want only to sleep the long sleep, to go on anyway. "I can't go on, I must go on, I'll go on." —Beckett

And so it goes. We begin in despair, and somehow we work our way around to ecstasy, to remembered joy. Because life is nothing if not the quest to remember the joy and light from before we were born, and to which we must all someday return.

his long sleep in black wells of ink

(for my father)

particular performance
limbo of flowered time
purple and white wounded morning

long past the hour when all good ends pass into dusk
severed conduits of the fruit of life, blind passage
into cool, long nights, long since skipping required roads
this stack this smoke of knowledge kindled into gross
habitation stone solidity flesh and blurred sinew, a fact
of ravens, simple digression into horror's shame and brute surmise
where each stem thorns and blooms burst night-wild
and winsome into quilted garden rows bedecked with solace

you've long since ghosted past into perfected end
where shape means so much less than sorrow

Canticles for Robert Espindola

In the past few weeks, my favorite aunt and two friends have all been found to have cancer, some quite virulently, and all three are dealing with cancer in the neck and throat areas of the body. I don't know what it means, if indeed it means anything; I just note the compelling synchronicity. I wish all of them the best during their medical journeys, I will be keeping good thoughts for them, keeping them in my prayers, and hoping for the best possible outcomes in every case.

When I gave up my own life (and faltering corporate design career) to move back in with my father to be his full-time live-in caregiver following his diagnosis with colon cancer, caring for him for the last year of his life; when I then took care of my mother till she died less than a year later of complications brought on by Alzheimer's; and when, in between my parents' deaths, I was diagnosed with a serious chronic illness that had already decimated my health and well-being for probably two decades before it was recognized; and when, while still ill and weak with illness, I had to close down my parents' house, buy my own, and try to live my own life again; and, soon after, when my own chronic illness worsened to a severity that almost killed me, caused my health to be utterly destroyed, and which led to a journey of multiple surgeries to first cure my chronic illness, and eventually (I still hope) reverse some of the damages done to me—when all of these dovetailing journeys of cancer, death, multiple hospital and clinic and doctor's visits, when all of these things happened to my family and in my own life, I learned many lessons about endurance, about survival, about refusing to give in to illness and death, and about just getting through the bad days, nothing more, nothing less. When I had the first surgery, last year, I was promised my health would eventually recover, and I would get my life back. That still hasn't happened, not yet. I am still on my own medical journey. I'm nowhere near finished with my journey. I'm not "all over it" yet. I know the needles, the smells of medical care, the scars, the radiation burns, the weakness, the suffering, both personally, and through watching my loved ones go through it, and I know these only too well.

I know only too well that some journeys don't end, you just learn to be a traveler. You do what you have to. You go on. You get through it, however best you can. One day at a time.

So I feel a huge swell of empathy for my aunt and friends on their current journeys, both minor and major. The echoes in my own life of recent years are too loud to articulate—except in art, poetry, music—and sometimes all I can do is pray, meditate, hope, wish the best for those I love. I make art about all this as a way of coping with it. I write poems about surgery as a way of dealing with its aftermath. I make visual art directly involving the numerous blood transfusions and surgery as a way of owning it. I wrote numerous poems about my father's chemotherapy and treatments as a way of not going crazy with being his live-in caregiver. And this all feeds into my music, too.

It can make you feel utterly helpless to do anything, when people you care about are suffering, and you can't wave a magic wand and just "fix" it—at which point you have to learn even deeper lessons about acceptance of what is, just simple acceptance with clear vision and no filters blocking it, and go on from there. Life will go on, even after we die. It's what we do with our lives, with our brief time in eternity, right here, right now, that matters. Start where you are. The journey can begin in no other place.

And so, after hearing about Robert Espindola's probably major, even radical cancer surgery journey to come, I was moved to write the poem below. As it happens, it was one of those poems that came to me at white heat, with no warning, that wrote itself in the space of an hour, and which needed little revision. I will let it stand.

It's terribly presumptuous of me, I know.

Robert and I know each other only as acquaintances who meet on occasion. Each time we have spent time together, we have gotten along well, and I for one have always enjoyed his company, but I'm hardly a close friend in the inner circle. Yet he, as a poet and lyricist, and his partner, Robert Seeley, as a composer, have been a tremendous influence on me, inspiring me to throw my hat in the ring to write new music for LGBT choral groups. Last year I was commissioned to do just that, and that new music will be performed less than a month from now. "The Roberts," as we who have worked with them, and know them familiarly, call them with affection, have been responsible for creating some great new works for LGBT choruses, with many commissions, such as Metamorphosis and Naked Man, that are now standard repertoire in GALA choral circles. Personally, I would be content to follow in their remarkable footsteps, write lots of music for GALA choruses, and enjoy every moment of doing so. That's how they have been an example to me, and it's in the spirit of gratitude for their gifts to all of us, and hope for Robert's medical journey, that I wrote this poem.

It's presumptuous of me to write this poem, equally so to share it. Yet I say: we're all survivors. Sometimes we all need to vent, to scream, to get the horror and rage and anger out of our bodies. Even if we are voiceless because cancer has taken our very ability to speak, our throats, our lungs (as my favorite uncle's lungs were taken, also by cancer), we can still cry on each others' shoulders. Be well, regardless. No matter what.

•

Canticles for Robert

i.

Orpheus of cancer
a journey to the underworld and back
of needles, disinfectant, hospital stink
sterile gauze, and protons flung
at tissue till it melts

Melts into airy dream
and feathers fall as though
unleashed by the magus
back into elemental formlessness
where books are drowned

Wings quiver on the lips of cliffs
where voices cascade into seas
much broader than we imagined
we in our little worlds
that had given up singing

All a poet can do today is warm
to find a fire in words that conjure worlds
you pull the fabric to the mirror
that concealed what could be seen
and make of it a mystery

Voices melt as throats row into heat
a canvas made of charism
a proteus of doubt
some needle made of dissonance
that melts a lover's hearth

ii.

My father melted into silence
further down this same journey
you now find yourself enroute
I too have known the needle jab
and copper stink of blood
the chemical fear and torment
of the unknown and unremarked

I am no great shepherd of
the matters of the world
I can only wish for you my dying father's
behest, which came to me an hour
after he had passed: he smothered me
in joy and laughed that it all
was so much better than he'd dreamed

but still myself walking the world with you
still scarred and scared and myself melting
still on an unfinished journey
where at last I've found my voice—

my perfect voice of love and melting
anger not irresolute
nor uncomplicated by a quest
not unlike yours, to make the world
a finer place through song—

my central wish for you is: more life
more life, much more, and dignity

take heart to know, no matter what:
mage, your song will remain heard
in the infinite ears of ocean, of desert
fragrant storm that ripples
out to every melody and merges:
that song itself can give its voice
that breath itself sustain us

Digitizing Vinyl

The past few days, I finally got started on a long-intended project: recording some of my old vinyl LP records into digital audio files on one of my computers. I connected a turntable up to my previous laptop (retired when I got the new one, but still useful for this), wiped a lot of data off the old drive to make room, and started recording. I've transcribed about a half dozen favorite old LPs that I have not listened to for at least ten years, and haven't really had the physical means to listen to for half that time. The past few years when I've been on the road a lot, carrying heavy stereo equipment has been abandoned in favor of portable gear like an iPod, a laptop computer, a case of CDs, and a set of computer speakers.

When I closed down my parents' home after they died, I kept my father's old stereo equipment, which at one point in time had been very high-end. My father and my uncle were both audiophiles. They both were willing to invest a lot of time and money into their sound equipment. For example, a Nakamichi 700 cassette tape deck; a Phase Linear 4000 receiver; really good AR speakers, etc. I grew up around high-end audio gear, and also reading my father's monthly audiophile magazines, like High Fidelity. I learned a great deal about recording and reproduction technology before I was in college; later in life, I've spent a lot of time in the recording studio, both as an engineer and as a recording artist. In high school, I got involved with the audio-visual department. I made videos with the other students, and recorded tapes for radio. I was part of the team that read the daily announcements on the school's PA system, a daily five-minute "radio" broadcast of sorts. Not long after I graduated from high school and started college, I got my FCC Radiooperator's License, which I still have, and got involved with programming and hosting community radio. I viewed radio as another means of performance, and with a collaborator or two made several experimental radiopieces that ranged from very avant-grade live performances to mixups of LPs and cassettes and reel to reel tapes that were composed for radio. I have most of that material on cassette, recorded live off the broadcast feed. And I have a high-end cassette player also hooked up to the studio computer, and am digitizing those cassettes, as well.

One of these radiopieces was Bottle Music, made with my regular music partner Stuart Hinds. (Follow the link for a couple of excerpts to listen to.)

Another was a piece I made entirely in the radio station production rooms, and in the University of Michigan's Electronic Music Studio, a stone flute. This piece consisted of poetic texts with soundscape, inspired in part by my reading of Jerome Rothenberg's seminal anthologies of what came to be called ethnopoetics, Shaking the Pumpkin and These anthologies for the first time ever treated the oral poetries and songs of indigenous peoples from many cultures as legitimate poetic traditions, equal artistically and literarily to our own Euro-American fine art literature. Rothenberg has continued this interest over the years, and remains one of our most important editors of large poetry anthologies.

Here is a stone flute in its entirety (about half an hour long), if you care to listen:

a stone flute    

Stuart Hinds, reader; AD, soundscapes, processing, production

Some of the vinyl LPs I am digitizing first are ones I want to listen to again, after not having heard them for many years. Others are more abstract music, and avant-garde music, that likewise I hadn't heard for awhile, but also were sources I used as elements for some of those radiopieces. It's been fun to listen to them, again, as I record them into the old laptop. It brings back memories of the live on-air mixing we sometimes had to do in complex ways, in order to combine sources into our live-broadcast radiopieces.

A lot of my favorite LPs have never been re-released on CD. This is true of much of the avant-garde music I acquired over the years on LP. But it's also true of some classical performances (although these are more likely to be reissued than are other genres), some jazz, some folk music, and a lot of rare recordings of ethnic music. Smithsonian/Folkways has reissued on CD a number of the old Nonesuch Explorer series of recordings of folk music from around the world—recordings I treasured all through college and grad school—but not all of them. Some are only reissued in excerpts, some not at all.

So digitizing a lot of my rare and unusual vinyl is a project that will be ongoing for some time. I will be digging into it all winter, as I will be sorting and organizing other materials, for a proposed major garage sale next spring. After I've digitized many of these old LPs, I will be letting go of the actual physical LP; there are antiquarian collectors and enthusiasts who no doubt will be interested in some of these.

But in digitizing some of those favorite LPs over the past few days I realized as well that I do want to keep some of them. The most important to me; the most rare and unusual. This will be a small minority of the overall collection, maybe only one or two racks. But these few LPs remain valuable to me, personally, as works of music, of unusual sounds, of rare recordings. Once digitized, I might not listen to the LP directly any more, but the liner notes, the included booklets, the multi-media materials that some artists explored in the 70s and 80s: those will be worth keeping, to consult for notes, and to continue to use for future inspiration.

•

(Further examples of my own original music can be listened to via the Music page of my website.)

The Sorting

Those who once were kind to you
now avoid you and give you no succor
when most you need it:
these are not my friends.

Those who once claimed to care for you
and, when you needed that shoulder
that you so often offered, disappeared:
these are not my friends.

Those who once claimed you as part
of their foundation stone and tribe
who now ignore you when you're dying:
these are not my friends.

Those who once were grateful when
you entered the rooms of hospitality
who now do not turn their heads to greet:
these are not my friends.

Do those who know you now become
the places armed with refuge
and sit across the silent table:
make these your friends.

Those who answer on the first ring
at three in the morning of a winter night
when winds howl outside and in:
make these your friends.

Those who do not judge or condemn
you for who you are or what you've done
much less what you have survived:
make these your friends.

Those who empty out their beds
when cold rain nights bring you
to the doorstep forlorn and still:
make these your friends.

And, lastly, those who know you in and out
who do not care if you have failed or lost
who do not mind when you can't cope
who help you cope those nights you can't
who find a room in heart and hearth
when other shelters come to naught:
these are your friends.

Grateful be to true friends.
So mote it be.

•

Looking through old photographs and memories tonight, looking at the recent past, the shit I've been through this past year, having been sick unto death for a year now, almost dying from it, not yet well, not well for a long time to come, worried about what will happen next, not willing to trust, faith is an alien presence because I don't trust it, surrender I can do because surrender means unknowing, and not knowing, and I don't know any of it.

Thinking through the list of people who I once counted as friends, and watching that list diminish to near null, partly by attrition, partly by people leaving because of their own lives, their own crises they must deal with, all everybody ever lives through is their own drama, and wondering when it will ever be my turn. I'm always putting out and taking care of them. Where are they when I need it in return?

And the two or three friends who I can call at 3am, when the darkest part of the night steps up, I can't sleep for being unable to stop worrying or thinking or just fidgeting, and everything seems like just another night of endurance with no end ever in sight, those two or three I can call still do answer. Somehow. I try not to call too often. I also try to call when I'm feeling good, not just when I need a shoulder.

Going down and down, auguring in, for so long, it's impossible to believe anymore that that could ever turn around. Even the tiniest setback brings out the worst of fears, the worst of worry. Hard to find much gratitude for what you have, when you're certain it's all going to be lost.

Try letting go, try emptying out, tonglen, breath in and down, settle, move the one-point hara to the center of the earth, ground, come to center and extent. Every trick and formulation you know, and none of it works anymore well enough to end the evidence of ending. What do you expect?

Today I just gave up. I can't figure it out. I'm not in control. Very much I have no idea what's next, which person I care about is going to suffer or die next, it probably won't be me, I seem to be wyrded to outlive everyone I've ever loved, and end up sick and alone.

So what? Who cares? No one, really. Don't tell anyone. Keep it to yourself. No one really gives a shit, and even if they could they disappear on you because they feel helpless to do anything to help you.

So you end up staring at the inky waters again, in the middle of the night, near freezing, the moon shattered on restless wavelets as you look down. If you say you've never been here before, feet toeing the abyss, you lie.

You lie. You lie and lie. You pretend all's well that isn't. All's well that won't end well. Who cares why. Who cares if it's the curse of karma, you must have been a motherfucking asshole in a previous life to have to up with so much of the opposite of peace and success this time around. What frakking sacred contract did you sign to make up this sordid narrative? You lie and never tell anyone the inside of this truth. It's too much honesty. They'll all flee. They'll all want to believe the lie that it's okay.

The exit of the ice. Your father's gun in the dresser drawer. The longing for it to stop. Just stop. The alien cousin of the isolated boy who lonely wept into his pillow because they killed his lover and his friend. Now watch him die. On the doorstep in front of you. Now watch him die. Dragging the body of the boy out of the lake right in front of you at the end of the afternoon, silent except for the yelling of the lifeguards and the wheeling gulls. His little sister standing looking like her world just ended. Now watch him die. Old man just stopping breathing, in the hospital bed in the living room after a week home after a month in the hospital, just stopped breathing, you hear the silence on the other end of the baby monitor next to your bedroll downstairs, you were sleeping underneath him on the floor, an hour ago coming out of the background there was the sound of buffeting wings around you, a joyous boy in a sunny place yelling at you how wonderful it all is and how he understands everything now, go upstairs and sit at his bedside for an hour in the middle of the night till the funeral people finally come, and you get back to your bedroll in the blue hour of predawn, the blue hour which is that eternal moment when the world pauses in its breath, and the night birds stop singing and there is silence for a long moment before the morning chorus of other birds starts up their greeting to the dawn.

And you can't run away anymore. You can't run away from it anymore. It just explodes again and again in front of you, continuous, impoverishing, the angel stepping into the air from a hole in the light a continuous explosion of silent white fire. It just explodes in you again and again. Till you just want it to stop. And you find yourself by the ink dark water again, in the middle of the night. When no one will answer the phone when you call, when you need them most. When you need them most, they're never there. And no one cares. And if they say they do care if you ask them then you can't believe them because they weren't spontaneous with it, you had to prompt them to it, and if you had to prompt them to it you can never be sure if they really mean it or they're just doing it out of guilt because they think they should. Should, the most habitual and heartless word in the world, should.

Indian Scarves

I had an idea for a promotional poster for an upcoming concert, based on a concept of images of weaving.

So I dug into my collection of silk scarves and woven fabrics brought home to the USA by my parents from our home in India. These exquisite fabrics were worn traditionally in some cases by men, and in other cases by women. Some are women's sari scarves; others are men's dhoti scarves. I have family photos of my parents in Indian dress, including one of my father wearing a dhoti that I have kept, and still have in a drawer. My sister has my mother's saris, including one or two seen in these family photos.



Silk threads, metallic threads, woven into cotton and linen matrices. Pure silk scarves. Mixed-thread fabrics. Woven art, exquisite in every detail.

To make these photos, I set up a photo shoot in my basement studio, taking many images of these scarves. I set them up individually, and in layers, against a dark silk background. I enjoy looking at the way the colors layer up, with the more opaque and more translucent layers of woven material. Exquisite to the touch. Sensual colors, sensual on the skin. I love the way the colors shimmer in these photos. I've made a whole series of images; these are just a few of them. I like to make stock photos sometimes, building up libraries of elements to be used in other projects later.



I didn't end up using any of this images for the concert poster, in the end; for that purpose, I ended up using a heavy woolen white scarf. But this was a fun project, and brought back many good memories of my childhood in India.

Rose Shadows

Having completed the rose ritual of a year and a day, a ritual in remembrance of my parents, I was free to put the roses away. I took some photos before doing so. I haven't been able to bring myself to dispose of the roses themselves, and in truth I see no need to. So they're now in a storage cabinet along with some other family goods and decorative items. Meanwhile, these shadows of these roses, making lines and lights on the floor.




Rose Shadows

Shades of Red

O my luve's like a red, red rose.
That's newly sprung in June;
O my luve's like a melodie
That's sweetly play'd in tune.
—Robert Burns

Along the northern coast,
Just back from the rock-bound shore and the caves,
In the saline air from the sea in the Mendocino country,
With the surge for base and accompaniment low and
hoarse,
With crackling blows of axes sounding musically driven
by strong arms,
Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes, there in
the redwood forest dense,
I heard the mighty tree its death-chant chanting.
—Walt Whitman, from Song of the Redwood Tree

•

Red was my father's favorite color. The red flowers that I grow in my garden are partly in homage to him, and to his life-long love of gardening. I grow several kinds of tulips, and lilies, and roses. The daffodils and tulips are already done this year, along with most of the other early bulbs, the grape hyacinth, the crocus. Dad liked solid red tulips, bright spots of red you can see a hundred yards away in contrast to the surrounding green. I like variegated, unusual varieties of tulips. I've planted some exotics, which did well this year, with all the early and sustained rain; the red and white striped tulips, and the tall thin purple, were especially lovely. The tulips are done, the bleeding hearts are in full bloom now. The lilies are growing tall, but not yet ready to bloom. I planted several new lilies last year, which did well; now I see that most of them have split their bulbs over the winter, and in many places where I had planted one lily, there are now two or three. Gradually, given time, the garden beds will become thicker and richer, as each year the perennials return, having split or multiplied or cast new seeds. The garden beds will thicken and the colors unfold throughout the summer and autumn, so that there will always be something in bloom, something providing color, rich spots of bright color amidst the green.

Chopin Filling the House

In this bicentennial year of composer-pianist Frederic Chopin's birth, there will of course be several celebrations. Chopin was one of the great composers for solo piano; unlike what came before, and unlike what followed. Concert pianist Byron Janis has reminisced about the composer, the man, and his legacy.

I remember my mother, the concert pianist and piano teacher, always playing Chopin. He was her favorite. There would be times when she would sit down at the piano in the living room and a series of Chopin Preludes or Nocturnes would fill the house. I might be in the basement, or in my room, or I might be sitting reading at the breakfast nook table, and music would fill the air. This is one of my fondest memories of my youth. My mother's playing would pull at me, and I would stop what I was doing to listen. Sometimes, because I have an apparently innate talent for stealth, I would sneak into the living room without her noticing, curl up on the couch behind her, and listen. She would play on while I listened; inevitably she would startle when she finally realized I was there, and pretend to be mad at me for sneaking up on her (again).

Once or twice when I was very young, I remember lying under the piano itself while she played: really in some ways the best way to listen, because you become fully immersed in the sound.



Of course, since my mother was a piano teacher, she insisted that my older sister and I both study piano. I started piano lessons when I was six years old, and continued through college. I'm not a concert pianist, or even a great pianist of any kind. I know my way around the keyboard, though, more than well enough to be able to compose, or play some easy jazz. I play a diverse array of musical instruments now; yet piano is still "home plate," in a way, and when I sit down at the keyboard, there is a sense of familiarity and known territory unlike anything else. It feels indeed like returning to my musical home.

And of course I learned to play some Chopin. I can still work my way through some of the Preludes, although Chopin's most challenging pieces such as the Ballades remain beyond me, and I never really mastered them. As a pianist, I was always more interested in the avant-garde of 20th C. music (Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, Alan Hovhaness, John Cage, etc.). But Chopin was avant-garde: his music was very original, very different, for its time. And his way of playing, by many reports—which combined classical restraint with emotional power, never letting sentiment cross the line into sentimentality—is an attitude I deeply appreciate. Of the early Romantic composers, I felt closer to Chopin than many others, and played more of his pieces than any other. So of course I once wrote a piano etude of my own, in honor of Chopin's memory.



Artur Rubinstein was my mother's favorite pianist, of his generation. She left me, when she died, Rubinstein's autobiography and dozens of recordings. (The complete Rubinstein Chopin solo piano recordings have been reissued as a huge boxed set.) I still listen to the Rubinstein recordings of Chopin I have on CD; I play them so that the music can fill the house once again. As I listen, I remember my childhood, my mother playing piano, my own playing, many hours filled with the joy and sorrow of music.

In the Garden of Memory

My mother died two years ago today. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't affected: in truth, it's been an emotional day, more emotional than usual. I've also been more tired today than all week, physically and mentally. I'm sure these are all related events. I'm feeling emotional, as I said, so I probably am not coherent to write anything that isn't a ramble or random walk, and I probably shouldn't, and I'm going to anyway.

My mother's death began the process, in earnest, of getting to where I am now. First there was six months of going through the house, through 30 years of accumulated belongings, very disorganized because my mother had had Alzheimer's for at least a dozen years at that point. There was the funeral, almost exactly seven months after my father's. There was the vast amount of bank paperwork and inheritance details. There was my need to buy my own home, and move into it, while still clearing out the old belongings from the old house. There was the need to sort through what I was going to keep, during the move. There was moving day itself, and the disruption of that; there are still a few prized possessions and books that I cannot find anywhere, and have given up for lost. During all that there was the diagnosis of and initial recovery period from my chronic illness, ulcerative colitis; which looking back through my life, I can see that I had had at least one or two undiagnosed episodes in the 1990s. There was a lot more to deal with.

And that was only 2008.



The following year, 2009, turned out to be even worse. It was the worst year I've survived recently, even worse than the preceding three or four years, during which I had given up my own life and career to take care of my parents, to move in with them and be the live-in caregiver, and make all the medical decisions. I'm able to be clinical, and I'm able to understand the technical aspects of medicine, having been around it my whole life, so I was usually the family member that the doctors and nurses liked to talk to, because they didn't have to dumb it down. That was a mixed blessing, for me.

It seems that almost everyone I know and care about had a bad year in 2009. Sure, some of that was the global socioeconomic climate of recession, unemployment, and financial and political crises. But there was more to it than that. There was something on the global level that was like the whole human race was struggling, was fighting for its survival, mostly against itself. Perhaps this is species-level adolescent turbulent. Perhaps it's the lingering Millenarian vibes from the Big Calendar Change at the year 2000, with all the attendant apocalyptic visions and fears and desires. Now the apocalypse rhetoric is all focused on 2012, when the Mayan Calendar changes over from the Fifth World to the Sixth World. (I have to say, it's one of the more stupidly misunderstood apocalypses of late, because most of the people fearing it don't even realize that it was never prophesied as be the end of this world, but as the beginning of the next. But then, most people seem to want to see that glass as half-empty rather than half-full; or are addicted to the drama of being in fight-or-flight mode all the time.)

Although I know there's no apocalypse, it's still an uphill battle to to fight against it. Too many people want it. You can see it in the national discourse whenever there's a new terrorist threat, or even an evaded event: the dumbing down happens, the rhetoric turns hateful and emotionally-driven, it becomes very Tribal with the usual "you're either with us or you're against us" rhetoric. Nuance and balanced thoughtfulness get trodden upon. Words become insults on a whole new level, words like "socialist" or "PC"—both of which have become swear-words like "Commie" or "faggot" were forty or fifty years ago. It's all about having a scapegoat to hate—anything but looking in the mirror and seeing what we don't want to see about ourselves. And we seem to be so impatient that we don't even allow time for wise solutions to be developed; everyone demands fixes Now, and never gets them, and then we turn on each other in blame and revenge. It's all so very kindergarten.

I know there's no apocalypse. i have faith in apocatastasis, which I know to be more true, always.



So why was 2009 so horrible? It's hard to say, exactly. I did feel like I was fighting an uphill battle all year long. 2009 was also the year my uncle died, after a long protected illness, and my aunt was pretty much taken over by her dementia. Probably Alzheimer's, but it's undiagnosed because she hates and fears doctors and won't deal with them or listen to any advice. I drove out to Connecticut to help them out, for awhile, and the stress and anxiety of that trip were bad enough to trigger a relapse of my chronic illness. That was October, and I've been in full relapse, feeling sick and tired ever since; and I'm not well yet. I might be recovering, finally, but I'm still having symptoms, and still tired all the time. That's the truth of a chronic illness: you don't just "get over it."

When your parents die, you don't just "get over it." I've had to break off contact with some people I used to care about a lot, because they were acting as if, by now, I should have just "gotten over it," and resumed my life at full speed. Well, you know, I was just about ready to do that—when October happened, Connecticut happened, and I got sick again. I felt like I was just beginning to get back on track—and then I got derailed again. That led to some serious depression—let's call it situational depression rather than chronic—and for now, I'm doing what I need to do to recover from that, as well.

You don't just "get over it," when so many blows happen in such a short time. It can take years to recover. There have been times when the suffering was so bad, I didn't care if I lived or died anymore. I spent a lot of time burning out what little energy I had, in 2009, struggling to find a reason to go on living. And I was also drained by some of my friends, who have also been in crisis, dragging me into their soap-operas, or needing a shoulder to cry on. Well, I'm happy to offer a shoulder to cry on, but my own diminished resources have forced me to withdraw from those friends who never offered a shoulder in return; in other words, reciprocity, which is what real friendship is all about.



In 2009, therefore, I've learned to marshall my energy, and be more "selfish" about where I spend it. I've learned to keep to myself when I find other people draining; even people I like can be draining. That's why it's a chronic illness, that's why it's depression, that's even why it's grieving: you don't just "get over it." You have to own up to it, and admit that sometimes you just plain feel like shit, and be honest about how you feel every single day, and then decide what to do next. And when you energy budget has been reduced, you start to prioritize. You do get a little impatient with the apparently clueless, but you also discover in yourself a lot more patience for your own process of recovery than you ever imagined was available to you. And so it's been: I've learned patience with my own process, and that some days I really just genuinely have to sit there and Do Nothing. That wasn't always an easy lesson to learn; but the physical limits imposed on you by a chronic illness force you to Pay Attention, and slow down.

In 2009, I learned to understand and share my father's lifelong love of gardening as a form of personal therapy. I spent a lot of time in the garden this summer; it's a small garden, and I've focused mostly on flowers and perennials, that need little care, when I'm traveling. I planted several new rosebushes, many lilies. This fall I planted a lot more bulbs for spring, and made a few new landscape art sculptures in parts of the garden. It was a big part of my return to life—and will continue to be, in future.



I’ve spent a lot of time this holiday season Doing Nothing: napping, watching some movies, a little reading and writing, okay a lot of reading, and taking it quiet and mostly easy. I haven’t gone out of my way to overdo things, and I’ve been taking extra naps, sleeping in late, storing up energy and trying to recover my strength. The past week or so my stomach has been upset and touchy, but overall I’m feeling okay, neutral or slightly better. I haven’t been trying too hard. I’ve been waiting. Waiting for the calendar year to change, for the holidays to be over, for my health to rebuild itself (assisted by lots of Reiki, etc.), waiting for life to come back to me. It feels possible, now, this deep cold winter night. It was full moon on New Year’s Eve, a blue moon. The sky was clear and bright, and the moon was beautiful. Now, a few days later, after more fresh snowfall, the snow is still blue and cold and bright under the waning moon, the air still and cold and clear, and filled with stars.

I don't do New Year's resolutions, for two reasons: I think it's stupid ritual that most people use masochistically; and I celebrate the new year on Samhain, by the old calendar. A few years ago I started doing annual Gratitudes instead of resolutions.

I’m having a great deal of trouble writing my annual Gratitudes this year. I haven't been able to do it. The glass has felt half-empty for so many months, it's hard to remember things to be grateful about. 2009 was a terrible year; in some ways, it was even worse than the bad years just in front of it. It’s been hard to find things to feel grateful about. I’ve had no problems making a list of troubles that happened in 2009, which I’m grateful to put behind me, but for which themselves I can’t generate much gratitude. I want to keep to this annual self-invented discipline of writing Gratitudes alive, and active; it’s a good discipline, and a good annual clearing and releasing. I may have to work into it even more gradually than before, however. I am really struggling against all those black crab thoughts trying to pull you back down into the bucket. It’s been a deep bucket this fall, really a black hole, and climbing out of it has taken more than I had to give. Assistance has been required. And even then, the outcome is not certain.

There are some lessons learned in the past year, things I’m grateful to have learned, though each came out of a process painful and difficult and ongoing. Some of these lessons have rooted themselves in new changes in my life, probably permanent changes of direction and attitude; although changing an attitude is a matter of changing a bad old habit into a new good one, and takes practice and repetition. Some of these don’t translate easily into words; and even those that do would require too much background to make much sense of, to anyone but me. And not everything need be told. Some things need to be kept silent, and private, for releasing them into the town square dilutes and diminishes their power.



Two years ago my mother died. It was a bad death. It was not a planned-for and peaceful slipping-away like my father's dying, in which he was in charge, had time to say goodbye and tell people what he wanted, and be watched over by Hospice for his last few days. Two weeks before she died, my mother had been taken by ambulance to the hospital from the Alzheimer's residential facility where he had had to move two years before, when my father could no longer take care of her by himself at home. She had a urinary infection, which is why she went to the hospital, but it was discovered when she was there that he had developed old-age diabetes. That was sudden; it had probably come to fruition only weeks before; my mother had been physically healthy her entire life, almost never needing any serious form of treatment. But here was the dilemma: she was now too confused to understand that the doctors were trying to help her, and she thought they were trying to kill her. She screamed in the Emergency Room when they were trying to examine her; her screaming filled the entire ward, and turned heads; it took about six nurses and doctors to hold her down, eventually; i was there to hold her hand, but I had to step out of the cubicle when they were examining her, and that's when the screaming began; those screams coming from my distraught mother's heart tore scars open in my heart that will never heal; I will never forget them; but I can bear all that because I'm grateful than none of my family or friends heard her like that. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

They kept her in the hospital overnight, but they couldn't treat her, because she thought the insulin they tried to give her was poison. She wouldn't eat, or accept anything, and she wouldn't settle down. I stayed as late as I could stand, then I went home and spent a sleepless night staring into the fireplace and crying. They gave her new pills to take, and the nurses at the Alzheimer's home tried everything they knew to get her to take them; but she wouldn't. Since my father had died, it had been hard; he was the one person she still would do anything he asked her to do, and trusted. She didn't fight, she wasn't mean or vicious, she just wouldn't do it.

The Alzheimers had brought out, most days, an inner childlike cheerfulness and happiness in her. Most days, when I went to visit, she was in a good mood, and liked everybody. She didn't like anybody on the days they cleaned her room, or made her take a shower. Mom was always very independent, and never liked being told what to do. She was always headstrong. She could be hard to get along with, as a person; but as she began to revert to childhood in old age, she became often quite a bit sunnier than she'd ever been when she was of sound mind.

There was one day, the autumn before she died, before her last illness, that I will always be grateful for. It was a sunny autumn day, and for once she was lucid and talkative and present. She remembered my name, she remembered that I was a musician, like her, and we talked about music and life for a few hours. I felt for the first time in years that I had my Mom back, the person I'd always gone to talk thing over with, the person who shared my love of music and art and writing, who was my friend as well as my parent. For that one lucid day, I had my Mom back. She was never that lucid or clear-minded again, but I remain grateful for that one day. It was so good for me to have had that, so healing of my own grief. You see, you start grieving for a parent with Alzheimer's even before they've died: because they themselves, what made them who they are, is gone long before their body dies. Alzheimer's is torture on the families and other survivors; "torture" is not too strong a word for it.

At the end, a few days after going back to the Alzheimer's home, she was back in the hospital. it was clear that she was failing, that they couldn't treat her, mostly because she wouldn't let them, and she was therefore on her last legs. I went to see her in her hospital room that afternoon. She was in a coma already, and I talked to her for awhile, and held her hand, but she didn't respond. That afternoon we took her back to the home in the care of Hospice. That night, she died, in the early morning, alone in her room. We all went over there, long before dawn, to say goodbye. I wept over her body, unable to stop crying. I took her loss harder than I had my Dad's; perhaps because it was the second loss of a parent so soon in time; perhaps because I'd always been closer to her, the way sons are to the their mothers; perhaps because I was already exhausted and sick myself at this point, and just felt completely lost.

I was grateful that she had died when she did, though, because I had been afraid that her funeral would have to be held on my birthday. Instead, it was exactly a week before my birthday. Try "getting over" that one: your Mom dies between the Christmas holiday and your birthday, and misses her funeral being actually on your birthday by a mere week. How would you have felt? I'm just grateful, as I said, for the near miss.

I loved her; there are no words to say how much. Tonight, the second anniversary of the night she died, I miss her. Again, there are no words.

Her death began the year of moving, sorting, buying a house, and so forth. I was just starting to think I might be able to get past all that, in 2009. Life had other plans.

I need to pause. I want to get to my Gratitudes, eventually, and say more about what lessons I've learned from 2009. I want to say more about my mother and father, while they're in my memory, on this sort of anniversary. And it will have to wait awhile. I need to stop for awhile—because I'm tired, not because I'm upset; and because I feel finished for the moment. I'll get back to this writing when I can.

Images are from my garden, June 2009.

Rose Ritual: Completion

My parents' grave marker, Muskegon, MI. Their ashes are buried approximately 20 yards away from where my mother's parents' are also buried.

A Rose Ritual, a Year and a Day

Last weekend was the anniversary of my mother's birthday. Just over a year ago, I undertook a ritual of remembrance, for a year and a day, for my parents. I bought some yellow roses for my mother's birthday, then red roses for my father's. I also bought roses on the anniversaries of their deaths. I've spent a year and a day on this private, personal, invented ritual, not knowing where it would lead. After each group of roses dried out, I added them to a glass bowl kept on my mantlepiece, next to the tall vases of dried roses from my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary, and a rose each I had kept from their funeral bouquets.

Now I've completed the year and a day, and feel complete with the ritual. I don't need to extend it, or repeat it. It has served its purposes. I may celebrate my parents' lives by remembering them on their anniversaries, and it no longer needs to be in this ritual form. I now release all forms and contents of these rituals. It is accomplished.

To complete the ritual, I did something a little different, to both end the cycle, and to open it out into infinite future time. Trusting my intuition, I went to the florist on the day they were having a sale, and so I purchased a full dozen roses, now opening broadly in two vases on my table. Today is the first sunny day we've had in a week, so the rose blooms have been subdued in the gray daylight. Today, they're exploding with color and scent, already beginning to fade a little. For these dozen roses, I bought even numbers of yellow, red, and white roses. I will eventually dry them, and add them to the bowl on my mantle above the fireplace.



And I also bought myself a more enduring plant: something to sustain the life-brining aspects of having living things in one's home. I'd been thinking that my home needed some indoor greenery, as well as the garden surrounding. My home especially needed a living plant to nurture me through the cold white months of winter. So I brought home a christmas cactus, already in bloom. My parents used to have a christmas cactus in their home, which I had to give to a friend during the moving-out process, as I was too overwhelmed at that time to deal with houseplants on top of everything else. That cactus had bloomed on Christmas Day at least three times in my memory, over the dozen and more years it resided in my parents' living room. This is the first indoor plant I've bought for my new home. It's low-maintenance, which is just what I need, and brings green and color into my rooms. I look forward to spending time together, and sharing our breath.

•



To complete the ritual of a year and a day, which I have been writing about as it proceeded, here is the complete series in chronological order:

Yellow Roses

Yellow Roses 2

Yellow Roses 3

A Rose Ramble, a Rose Rent

Red Roses

Red Roses 2

In the Garden

Red Roses 3

Red Roses 4: Shadows and Light

My Father's Roses

A Rose Ritual, A Year and a Day

Rose Ritual: Completion

In the Garden of Memory

I'm grateful for this project, this ritual, this process, and grateful to its completion. I will no doubt post once or twice more in this series, as the roses dry out and I add them to the bowl.

Returning from Elsewhere: Recoveries

Blur of a thousand phone calls from the hospital. Your uncle needs to go to ICU. But nothing works. It's futile to prolong his suffering any further. He wants to let go. Letting go of life is harder than any other striving. All they can do for him is make him comfortable. Ravaged cancerous flesh. He asks for morphine in a lucid moment. He breathes soon his last. His hand is held as he goes by your aunt, in one of her few moments of personal calm in these days of her own hell-wrapped isolation and dementia.

Blur of a thousand windblown leaves streaming across the mouth of the river. The only peace achieved on this forlorn roadtrip is those few hours beyond cellphone range, at the mouth of the river, lost in the deepwoods, by the lake far into the national forest, hearing loons, seeing a loon flap over a cove across the lake, a white dot of wings against the deep indigo of distant jack pine. Old growth, new growth. These woods are second growth, slowing replacing themselves again with climactic hardwoods.

Set out to recover yourself, your Self, from the wrack and wreckage of the dying and mad. We will see each other again; but not yet, not yet. Set out to find a way back to self, to home, to rekindling. Everywhere all around burning leaves cover the earth, some still unfallen. But you can't run away from anything you carry with you. Along the trails, what is discarded remains. A walking staff, thick cedar thigh, left by the trail's long stairs, taken up in hand, brought home through woodland paths splendid with tricolor maples.

Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Strong desire to feel desire, weak will against feeling ill. It all comes back. Bleeding out over the leaves of winter's mouth. Here's a hole in cedar driftwood. Here are patterns of foam on water, stretched out, marbled paper bookends. Here are cairns of stones laid flat on flat, rising up till wave or wind knocks them over. Here is the knife, the sawblade, the photograph. Here the wind in aspen on a windless day. Here the polished stone of farewell. Water cascading brown and cold across steps of light.

Nothing can be run away from. Nothing is returned that meant to leave. The long falling into light. The long falling, the long light. Begins.

My Grandfather's Rocking Chair

One good thing that came out of last week's mad trip to Connecticut and back was that I returned home with my grandfather's rocking chair. I had in the past expressed interest in inheriting this rocking chair, and in a moment of generosity my aunt decided that it would travel home with me now. I had already inherited an ottoman from my grandparents, which now I'll keep together with the chair.

I have many memories of my grandfather sitting in this rocking chair. I remember siiting in it as a boy, too, when we would go to visit. The chair itself is probably around 150 years old, and it's still in good shape. The wood's a little dry, as the chair's been in de facto storage in Connecticut for some years.



What I know of the chair's history is this: When they had not been married very long, my mother's mother and father were given this chair, either by my grandmother's sister or her mother. It was already a family heirloom. At that time, my grandfather recaned the back of the chair, and my grandmother made the needlepoint seat cushion cover that it still on the chair. (I believe she also recovered the ottoman I mentioned above.) It's a spring-steel seat on the chair rather than a foam support seat. I know my grandfather recaned the chair at least two more times over the years; what's on there now is not caning he actually wove, as he had done before, but some of that newfangled premade caning that you cut and fit into place, which he did.



The chair itself is probably well over a hundred years old, I'm guessing at least 150, but I can't be absolutely sure. The steel springs in the cushion were the type I've seen used in Victorian furniture at the height of the Industrial Revolution. They may be a more modern replacement, put in when Grandma redid the cushion; so the entire cushion assembly may be new, meaning it's still circa the 1920s. The wood frame is definitely 150 or more years old, however; it's made out of hard fruitwood, dense and heavy with a very fine grain as is typical of fruitwoods, so the chair is sturdier than it looks. I don't know which variety of fruitwood was used, and there is a finishing stain on the wood that I don't want to mar or restore, partly because it's beautiful as is, and partly because one doesn't do such things to antiques. I am not an antique collector, I only have a few pieces inherited from my parents and grandparents which I keep because they're beautiful and because they contain many memories; but even I know not to "restore" antiques. Some of their beauty comes from having been lovingly used these many years.



Grandpa was a master carpenter, a builder, a contractor, and a foreman, in Muskegon, MI. (He was born north of the Arctic Circle in Norway, and came to the US while still young.) He was the foreman and his brother was the general contractor for building Our Savior's Lutheran Church in Muskegon, where my aunt and uncle were married.



Grandpa also built the two-story house on Dale St. in Muskegon where my mom and aunt grew up, and where my aunt was actually born. The house is still there, and looking good. (The upstairs floor was built as a separate apartment to be rented out; so even during the Great Depression they had some steady income from it.) I have lots of memories from my childhood of visiting my grandparents in this house; and its living room is where I remember the rocking chair always being placed. On an afternoon in summer, Grandpa would sit in the rocker, and even nap there, while we children played, or lay on the floor and drew pictures, or likewise napped. Often the radio would be tuned to classical music.



After he retired, my grandfather kept a workshop in the basement for the many crafts he took up as hobbies. He taught himself how to make candles, and later he taught me, when I was still a boy. He also taught me the basics of carpentry, and I now have his old handmade wooden toolbox, which he built for his construction work, and many of his tools. I have mounted his antique pull saw and scythe on my garage wall, as a display. Most of the tools in the toolbox are also old, but most are still in good working order.

I'm very happy to have Granpda's rocking chair in my own home, now. For the moment I'm keeping it in the living room, just to look at and enjoy. It's sitting next to my own modern rocking chair, which I sometimes sit in by the fireplace on cold winter nights.

Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings: An Appreciation

At the Goodwill retail thrift store in Delavan yesterday—a place I often find good stuff, especially good books—I found an old hardcover edition of Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld (trans. from the Swedish by Leif Sjöberg and W.H. Auden). (I also found new copies of Zen & Zen Classics, a redaction of R.H. Blyth's multi-volume work edited and with drawings by Frederick Franck; and Thomas Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.)



(I pause here to add that I think this is a beautifully designed and printed edition of this work. As a book it's been brought back into print several times, but the trade paperback editions most commonly available today do not have the solidity, heft, textured paper, or beautiful typeface used in this early hardcover edition, which I believe to be a later printing of the first edition. I photographed the cover, above, and a few pages from inside the book, below, to make this point more obvious.)

Hammaskjöld was one of those great minds of the first half of the 20th C., thinkers and writers who my parents revered. Growing up, there were always books around by Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, and Hammarskjöld's one famous book, published after his death. Many people of my parents' generation universally knew and admired all of these great men, as much for their social work as their scientific or artistic work. I grew up in a household where this thinking was available to me whenever I sought it out. The first time I read Markings I must have been in my teens; I remember liking it, but mostly intellectually. It was when I re-read it, probably just after college, when I was going through a personal crisis, that Markings first left a deep mark on me: I recognized in it a kindred spirit who was asking the same questions as I, and thus helped shepherd me towards some of my own answers.

Markings is an aphoristic journal, essentially a record of a man's spiritual progress. It contains almost no references to his daily life; it is an inward journal, a record of what he had learned that stayed with him as wisdom. This book remains a classic of 20th C. spiritual literature, appealing to non-religious New Agers and more conventionally religious thinkers alike. Hammarskjöld was a true ecumen. He described his book, which he had written for himself over many years, as a sort of white book concerning my negotiations with myself—and with God.

Dag Hammarskjöld was a Swedish national who spent his career as a public servant, first gaining prominence on the board of the directors of the Bank of Sweden. But he is best known for being a two-term Secretary-General of the United Nations, beginning in 1953. He was a Secretary-General who was widely admired and respected, and he was present for several important historical occasions and crises, which he participated in resolving. He died in 1961, in a plane crash in Africa, on his way to negotiate a cease-fire between UN and regional militia forces.

My family was in India at that time; we often received the news quite late, for example, Time magazine would get to us, sent by family, but months late. I have a young boy's memory of my parents being upset by the death of this man, when the news reached us finally

In re-reading Markings again, what strikes me now, this time, in the wake of my own life's major changes these past few years, is how very Zen-like Hammarskjöld's words can be. In this book, he is engaged with his inner "negotiations" and the outer world is barely mentioned. Death and life, and the wrestling with them to create meaning, are confronted again and again. But he also knew the still, calm center that one arrives at through meditation, through enlightenment experiences, or through contemplative prayer. He writes:

We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence.

One of his short almost-poems in Markings reads:

Tomorrow we shall meet,
Death and I—
And he shall thrust his sword
Into one who is wide awake.

That could stand as a Zen master's death-poem, in the Japanese tradition of a final poem being dictated to one's disciple's from one's death-bed. It contains a warrior's stance, but also a spiritual master's stance. Both are true, in Hammarskjöld, both alive and awake. And in fact, he did die while engaged in his work as a spiritual warrior, journeying to engage in negotiations for peace. In the book, the line appears: In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action. That is a prophet's dictum, or a warrior-saint's.

There are hints in Markings that the writer was a visionary, hints that he may have had oceanic or mystical experience. Opening to a page almost at random, I find:

Now you know. When the worries over your work loosen their grip, then this experience of light, warmth, and power. From without—a sustaining element, like air to the glider or water to the swimmer. An intellectual hesitation which demands proofs and logical demonstration prevents me from "believing"—in this, too. Prevents me from expressing and interpreting this reality in intellectual terms. Yet, through me there flashes this vision of a magnetic field in the soul, created in a timeless present by unknown multitudes, living in holy obedience, whose words and actions are a timeless prayer.

I want to respond to this again, now, and I find I can only paraphrase. Yet this passage, among others, made me feel, during that aforementioned re-read of this book during my own difficult times, connected and less alone in my experiences. I may own a bit of my enduring sanity to Dag, simply because he validated me at a time I needed validation.

I have often opined that, at the core of every spiritual tradition or world organized religion, there originally lay a mystical experience of Union with the Divine. All the rest is local interpretation: we put things into words based on what we know, and often must use analogy or metaphor, or parable, to describe the Union. This is why so much poetic wisdom sounds the same, coming from so many different sources.

Hammarskjöld, who saw the universal in the individually human many times, affirms this insight:

The ultimate experience is the same for all.



He goes on to point out where Meister Eckhart, and the Taoists and Confucianists all same similar things. Elsewhere he re-frames this question as a swipe at the tendency in us, like the Pharisees, that seems to always want to ossify our morals into rigid codes:

Jesus' "lack of moral principles." He sat at table with publicans and sinners, he consorted with harlots. Did he do this to obtain their votes? Or did he think that, perhaps, he could convert them by such "appeasement"? Of was his humanity rich and deep enough to make contact, even in them, with that in human nature which is common to all men, indestructible, and upon which the future has to be built?

I hear so many echoes in this of other wise minds of this past century: Frederick Franck; Thomas Merton; Albert Schwietzer; and many more. No matter what tradition of faith these minds were raised in, they all went past the parochial and achieved the universal, fully human. (Indeed, Franck explicitly discusses this process and goal in many of his books.)

Yet part of Hammarskjöld's complete humanity lies in his encounters, again and again, with the darker aspects of humanity; with the shadow; with pain and suffering. This is strongly reflected in Markings. A few sections pulled out of the book, again at semi-random:

That piece of pagan anthropomorphism: the belief that in order to educate us, God wishes us to suffer. How far from this is the assent to suffering when it strikes us because we have obeyed what we have seen to be God's will.



The pure, simple self at the hour of waking—and the first thing it sees—its grotesque image in the mirror of yesterday.

•

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

A mere sampling: there are many other such passages, and others even darker, full of doubt and crisis. To be fully human means to live fully in the shadow as well as the light. You cannot strip part of the self and remain whole.

How am I to find the strength to live as a free man, detached from all that was unjust in my past and all that is petty in my person, and so, daily, to forgive myself?

Life will judge me by the measure of the love I myself am capable of, and with patience according to the measure of my honesty in attempting to meet its demands, and with an equity before which the feeble explanations and excuses of self-importance carry no weight whatsoever.

Yet he does not revel in such awareness of his own limits:

Not to brood over my pettiness with masochistic self-disgust, nor to take pride in admitting it—but to recognize it as a threat to my integrity of action, the moment I let it out of my sight.

This is the self-awareness of the spiritual warrior, one who knows both his strengths and limits, and monitors his self not out of obsessive self-regard but as a captain watches her troops. In order to maintain integrity of action, to act out of integrity, in a manner internally consistent with one's ethics and moral compass.

I'll end with one last quote from Markings, one that to me represents both the author's doubts about his purpose, and my own. This is a question I often find myself asking of myself. Hammarskjöld speaks to egoless action here, to right action, in a manner that again reminds me of Zen. He also reminds me of why I write my own journals and notes, and helps me remember the best, most natural way to accomplish that writing: not for glory, but as a way of remembering, and marking, the Way. I am humbled when I read this again, and reminded to keep in check my own tendencies towards spiritual pride and literary ambition, neither of which I really want to feed. I have not chosen to take Hammarskjöld's extreme option of waiting till after my death to let anyone read my writings—although there are a few in that category—yet I do share his urge towards egolessness of expression and away from vanity.

You ask yourself if these notes are not, after all, false to the very Way they are intended to mark.

These notes?—They were signposts you began to set up after you had reached a point where you needed them, a fixed point that was on no account to be lost sight of. And so they have remained. But your life has changed, and now you reckon with possible readers, even, perhaps, hope for them. Still, perhaps it may be of interest to somebody to learn about a path about which the traveler who was committed to it did not wish to speak while he was alive. Perhaps—but only if what you write has an honesty with no trace of vanity or self-regard.