Friday, October 23, 2009

Seasonal Nothingness

A Zen Saying

Sit quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.

Now is the time to allow for nothingness.

The sky seems to have lost some of its blue and is now a filtered, turbulent gray. Nature is gathering up all its resources as it prepares to go to sleep for the winter. Leaves are falling, falling, falling to become a colorful but momentary blanket for Mother Earth. Squirrels are fat, geese an overhead constant and the fickle warm-weather birds have fled for the south. I have put away the summer things, and possibly located where I sat the snow shovel last March. Gas is stabilized in now-still lawnmowers, motorcycles and boat motors. This world, our world, is quieting for the season.

High school football season is over for me. No playoff games this year, whistles will be put away earlier than I am used to. No one is even commenting on my blog entries despite the fact I know they are spending more time indoors glued to the Internet, video games and television.

My circadian rhythm is floundering, melatonin levels are spiking, serotonin levels are impaired.

It would take a chemist to figure me out. Lithium would help.

I am listening for what is being said by the cool wind. By the rains that sound more like a flowing brook or stream. By the air, that can be so cool and a sun so very warm. By the shadows, thrown by that sun, so long and eerily dancing across the ground.

It is calling for something, like my name or my soul or my being. What it is calling for I do not understand so I must continue to listen closely. I will let the chill speak to me of the grave, of the winter, of the frosty, cold eternity. It will help to remind me of the warmth of living, of life, of love.

I will heed the warnings of the white nothingness that surrounds me in the winter. I will find a way to remain warm and alive in my spirit. I will await the return of the green grasses, the renewal of natures promise. I will not surrender to despair.

This must be the onset of seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Pink Whistles

“This is our first duck derby ever. We decided on pink ducks because that is the color used for Breast Cancer Awareness.” --Cathy Day

Everywhere in October you seem to see pink in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Even had a pink pizza box this week. Half expected to see pink toppings on the thing. Maybe beets. It to me is a worthy and successful public relations effort, my own maternal Grandmother died from this very deadly disease in her early thirties. Here is a quick story about pink that happened to me.

Our crew was officiating at a 7th grade football game and the association we are members of has asked us to wear a pink whistle in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month for 2 weeks of games in October. We provided the press box announcer a script to read to highlight this and to inform the spectators of the reason for the hot pink whistles. Towards the end of a time out in the 2nd quarter of the game, the announcer read, “In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the officials of the Capital Area Officials Association will be wearing pink whistles for the game tonight.”

From my referee position I had the distinct advantage of looking at the defense, and at this time, specifically, a defensive linebacker (we will refer to him as blue #52).

At the end of the announcement, we locked eyes and I could see this big grin on his face. Then he loudly states to teammates and officials alike, “I like breasts!”

You never know what is going to come out of their mouths. I think he missed the "Cancer" part, all that his 13 year old adolescent developing mind heard was "BREAST."

Middle school boys, they just don’t get it. We really should separate them from our girls. Humor writer Dave Barry summed it up when he wrote, “Scientists now believe that the primary biological function of breasts is to make males stupid.”

'Nuff said.


Bottom photo: Me & the "Mother Tree" on our fall float down the Looking Glass River. Click on the photo and take a closer look at the tree, you can see where it gets its name. I will apologize for the blurriness of the photo, but the photographer was obviously discombobulated by the tree. Tree was named and photo was taken by my friend Bob, a much-older 13-year-old. (last name withheld till he lets me know it is OK to use)

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Living Truly is a Gift

“The proper function of man is to live–not to exist.”
–Jack London


I always love the stories that my Dad tells about his life growing up and the many characters – relatives, friends and neighbors – that peopled them. When I was young, the stories were told to others, with me a quiet listener. They were told in old trucks loaded with hounds on the way to or from a favorite rabbit, pheasant or raccoon hunting spot; at November evening deer camps; or with the background noise of a rattling John Boat, hurtling down some gravel road to a fishing hole. Being a hunter and fisherman father, he knew how to spin a tale and to capture his audience. With stories that were both colorful and tragic. They amazed me--how it must have been to live then--with so many colorful characters and crazy, wonderful, magical circumstances surrounding his life. Some of the comrades that left on fishing and hunting trips were as colorful as any found in a Jack London story of the early 20th century.

Only later in life, when a child begins to see more than the obvious facts, did I realize that there were underlying, terrible sets of circumstances that he lived with. The stories that made us laugh and sigh with wonder must have been no less than horror stories in his mind. He grew up with alcoholism in his family, the end of the depression era, uncles that were POW’s in Germany during WWII, a rare-at-the-times mother that worked, and even 2 older sisters (which when he was a kid was probably YUCK, as we only appreciate fully sisters when we are older). Despite all that he still laughed and smiled mischievously to his family. He never stood still, was a constant moving being. He worked like a madman to give us the best he was capable of achieving through hard work, discipline and guidance.

His childhood, as he told us with his recollections, were filled with boyish adventure in a time when simple living gave simple pleasures. Where you could walk out your backdoor and start pheasant hunting (if you could afford a shell, and I mean a single or pair of shells). When you thought that the greatest thing you owned was your BB gun or slingshot or the best cur hunting dog in the neighborhood. Where impossible chores had to be completed, with shovels, axes and bare knuckles (like new outhouses to be dug or slaughtering the pig). Unexpected things happened to him along railroad tracks, in surrounding fields or even inside his ram-shackled house.

I remember Dad being gone an awful lot, but I never felt neglected. More often I was jealous, for he was truly living and breathing in his time on earth and experiencing everything, fully. I was stuck in school being denied a real life.

I understand the gift he must have gave his friends during his sporting ventures with them. As I got older my time with him, sharing the things he loved doing, increased. And I understood him more. He is the perfect companion if you just want silent company. But around a campfire or alone with him in a fishing boat, be prepared to listen if he wants to talk—listen to the stories he has inside him.

He gives me a role model for embracing living and experiencing every gift of our breaths of time. A lesson I am still trying to completely learn, if I ever totally will.


Photo: Dad with his redbone and redtick coonhounds, Bones, Smokey and Shane, who shared many nights with him. He is standing in the basement of the addition he built to our previously 1 bedroom house, so it could accommodate 4 kids.

Monday, October 12, 2009

The Golem

"If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past."
–Benedict Spinoza, Dutch philosopher

Studying the past is different than dwelling in the past. When you dig down inside your psyche, and mine the stored memories it holds, enlightenment may follow.

Have you ever stopped doing something because you had a feeling that it was wrong? Not the moral equivalent of right from wrong, but the not-wanting-to-repeat a mistake kind of tingling sensation? That is how the past signals to you that it can aid in the shaping of the present. Error prevention. Like dashboard warning lights on a car. How many times do you touch a hot stove before you realize not too? Only takes once for most of us, though I keep banging my head on the rear-lift door on my Jeep on the cold days when the hydraulic lifts don’t take it all the way up. Physical pain may be more poignant about teaching us certain behaviors than other sensations. And maybe I shouldn't have such a hard head so I so easily forget.

Creativity may also be the benefit from stored memories. Some people believe that to truly be creative requires a brand new spark, a unique vision of the present. On the contrary, the best of the creative world uses history--global as well as personal--to conjure up its imagery, sounds and vision. Van Gogh was constantly redoing his paintings, revisiting the same places and trying to capture a certain madness that was embedded in his mind which he wanted to paint. Canvas after canvas were covered with the same fields and people, yet every one was unique. His colors meant nothing to the realism, yet everything to his present feelings.

Every news story out there has some similar relation to the news of the past. Health care as a topical example has been dealt with by just about every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Everyone working on it now is trying to avoid the pitfalls of past attempts at it by carefully crafting a plan that will somehow work. They are trying to shape a program that won’t end up an enormous and uncooperative golem, that to try and fix piecemeal would be a difficult and dangerous endeavor.

We need to adopt the lessons from the past but we cannot let it crumble upon and crush the present.

Footnote: Jewish tradition holds that the golem is a creature created by magic, often to serve its creator. Some mystics believe the creation of a golem has symbolic meaning only, like a spiritual experience following a religious rite. A golem can became enormous and uncooperative and the creator may have to use trickery to deactivate it. The creators hubris may bring them down as well as the golem when this is attempted. Think Dr. Frankenstein and the monster or Social Security.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Mathmatical Thinking

The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God. ~Euclid

I am fermenting my mind, my spirit, to try to hear the difference between the sounds of the trees and the sounds of the stones.

This may sound deep, but it is more of a challenge to the way that my mind has always been trained to think than anything else. We are schooled mathematically to problem solve by our educational system. I myself have taken all the highest math classes in college that were offered at Ferris State in the early 80’s. Not always receiving the best grades, but participating in the effort to learn. Dean Schlicter of the University of Wisconsin seems to imply this when he said “Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.” Early scholars actually thought that God, Heaven and Hell could all be proven with the right mathematical equation(s). They also used math equations to prove that the world was flat, round and the universe revolved around the earth. Math was manipulation by the powerful in charge.

Leaving behind math will be difficult for me. I still love to balance the checkbook to the penny and feel like doing an NFL type touchdown celebration every month at the completion of this task. Sometimes I just play with the calculator. I like to measure. Length. Width. Volume. When I get a chance to do math in my head, my mind jumps to the opportunity, calculating the sums and differences. I like figuring sales tax in my head on the stuff I buy (although I don’t like paying it). I seem to be held in bondage by math. It seems to be the dictator of my mind.

That is why I want to hear the tree and not look at its height and width and age. Same with the stone, I want to hold it and feel its whispers. The sound of them is what the universe bounces off them that my ears and eyes and nose detect--the warmth of the sun, the touch of the rain, the scent of the breeze.

Then maybe, I will be able to capture the reason and believe again.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Dinosaur Bones


I remember staring at dinosaur bones in Chicago's Field Museum a few years back. Once great animal flesh, now fossilized bones of rock. Before they were dug up, they lay under the ground, unknown to those who trod upon them-- man, beasts, nature, seasons, wind, rain, ancient seas, glaciers, eons. They would still lie beneath the layers of time if curious humans (humans like me and yet so unlike me) had not the ability to question and seek reasons regarding their place on the earth.

Their place in the universe.

Why do you suppose we look for the ancient before? Hold on to heirlooms, memories? I believe we may do it seeking the eternal that lies ahead. How else can you explain the vast amount of time that lies ahead of us if we cannot recognize the same millennial passage that has already occurred? How do we ever hope to understand a hundred years let alone a billion years? A hundred-billion years?

I will only live a minuscule fraction or time relative to forever, a grain of sand in an eternal hourglass—one holding billions and billions of grains.

My grain will become like dinosaur bones and I wonder, will anyone even care to dig them up and gaze with fear and wonder at them. I kind of hope so. Like I look at dinosaurs and woolly mammoth. Re-assembled, fossilized, human-dinosaur bones. With amazed wonder.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Log Jams

Searching for metaphors, I found one in a recent project I volunteered to help with. It also signaled another return to my hometown.

The “Friends of the Looking Glass River Watershed Council.” had their annual “LogJamBee”. Basically, it was a clean up of trees that had fallen across the river and created impassible blockages for canoes and kayaks.

They needed bodies and chainsaws. Rope. Block and tackles. An ATV with a winch. We would be fed and watered. We would sweat and labor, dodging spiders and leeches and sawdust and muck. Our job was to open the rivers so others could float the tranquil waters without troublesome (and sometimes dangerous) portages around the log jams.

Plus it gave me a chance to break out the chainsaw.

While we worked though, what came out of me were a lot of personal blockages. The cut logs reminded me of how I relieved stress cutting and splitting ash trees while I was working my way through a divorce. The fall air reminded me of an unpleasant personal memory that seems easily triggered by the smell of wet, fallen leaves. The water of the river reminded me of how I would retreat and escape to this very river as a youth, and where I could actually hide from the real world within the steep banks that flowed through the town where I lived. Hide from people who did not understand or care. Did not see the world the way I wanted to see it.

And I began to let go of the doubt and pain that somehow still sparked in me when I was in contact with the place of my past. I was reminded of how I came to love nature by exploring and haunting these very same riverbanks. I exchanged the pain with the pleasurable outcomes of my lives adventures. To realize that good things came from what were bad situations at the time. My job was to re-focus, clear the log jams of my mind. Realize that the “beatings” would cease when the minds “complaining” quit.

So as the river began to once again flow its natural course, I began to stream ahead, no longer impeded by memories that clogged its way.
Photo by Curtis Remington