Circling Along a Straight Line

"My heart leaps up when I behold...A rainbow in the sky."--William Wordsworth

I seem to be encountering circles in my life and they seem to be helping me to un-straighten the path that I have been traveling. Now you may feel that the straight path would be the one that seems to be the right one to follow, I am beginning to think that I find more to love on the little circle detours that I find myself on. They are like miniature surprises and fill me with wonder.

It got me thinking about circles.

A circle in the form of a ring is the symbol of eternity an such has been adopted since Roman times as an outward sign of betrothal and marriage. The halo is symbolic of holiness and is found in pictures throughout the Renaissance, the sculpted and carved and painted beings of great sacredness; Jesus, Mary and the Saints being just a few examples. Infinity can be represented by the geometrical fact that a circle has no end and no beginning.

We find ourselves huddled around campfire rings at night and the legendary knights of King Arthur assembled around the "Round Table." Ezekiel in the Old Testament of the Bible saw the first flying saucer, spoked wheels within wheels that rose from the earth towards the heavens.

The teachings of Buddha are symbolized by the eight-spoked "Wheel of Dharma", and like a moving wheel, the wisdom of the Buddha continue to spread. And how can you not look at the circle of Stonehenge and not wonder what powerful messages were heard by the builders of that monument.

Rainbows in the sky link the heavens to the earth, appearing so large we can only see a half for the other half is obstructed by the massive body of the Earth. Only staying with us for brief moments at a time and seen often by a chance glance to the horizon. I still breathlessly proclaim the sight of them to whoever is around me at the time.

So even though I am trying to follow a path to a invisible point on the horizon, I think I have one leg a bit shorter than the other. I travel and travel and surprise, I find myself looking back down at the footprints I left in the past. Traveling a circle through life. Involuntary backward time travel.

Fear Is a Stomach Ache in Disguise

In a recent issue of the Nature Conservancy's magazine, Sanjayan, a lead scientist for them, was asked by David Letterman about the fate of our planet. During the course of the interview, Sanjayan came to the conclusion that the environmental movement had "...done a spectacular job of demoralizing and depressing people." And depressed people are paralyzed people. They begin to feel the hopelessness and the uselessness of even trying.

And that is where I believe we begin to let go of the control of the personal freedoms that we should jealously guard . We know that the truth has to lie somewhere between the voices on the right and the voices on the left. Especially when they start to shout to be heard. When that happens, you should automatically stop listening. Maybe even, run.

What I believe drives people more than any other emotion is fear. I was told that jealousy was really anger disguised and when I look back all my anger was really merely fear. Different fears at different times under different circumstances. Even when people are angry, what underlies that anger is "don't hurt me."

Example of the right not wanting to be hurt: "Don't let me live in fear without my guns and freedom of religion and gas guzzling cars."

Example of the left: "I'm afraid to live with your guns and your religious freedom and your gas guzzling cars."

How about the middle: "I can live with your guns if you keep them safely and use them for hunting and personal protection. Practice the religion you wish and I will choose mine, and I will treat it with respect if you respect mine. I may need a large vehicle for work or to pull a trailer to earn a living or enjoy my free time. I may also have a fuel efficient car in the garage that I use whenever I can. Face it, I don't like the high gas prices either."

So I'm not going to let them scare me anymore. Tell me only the truth and not all the loud rhetoric. Let me form my own unique opinions and work for what is right. For fear has done nothing but corrupt and destroy the world around us.

Fear of a prophesy that his son would overthrow him and be king, the Greek titan Cronos (or Roman god Saturn), the god of time and ages, would swallow each of his children when they were born. Eventually, he was tricked by his wife and made to disgorge the children by his son Zeus, who had been hidden from him. His actions based on his fears resulted only in a bad stomach ache and changed nothing.

What prophesies do you fear? Better yet, what will you do when you no longer fear?

Living as a Question?

I'm not sure that we are seeking answers or a higher being when we are trying to find our way through our lives. I wonder if others feel as I do? This desire to know and the fear of finding out.

A Poem:

I know you, God

Your touch on my cheek

As you brush by,

Smelling of cedar.

And when I stare

At a blazing sunrise,

Burning through winter fog,

With warmth and light.

When I embrace

My beloved ones

I understand why

I long for an eternity.

But how can I truly

Grasp the vastness,

Of the majesty

Your arms wrap around.

An embrace that

Sparks both life’s beginning

And the long, slow

Plunge to our earthy end.

Do you stand and wait

For our return?

To answer the questions,

That our life proposed?

Or is eternity filled

With the same distant

Gathering of the eons of

Wicked and confused souls.

Life would not be much,

If we were to know,

The answers to the questions,

That just living seeks.

Honor

Favor and honor sometimes fall more fitly on those who do not desire them. --Titus Livius

Statues of great people always appear to me to be blind. True representation of the image of death of the person, their fleet departure of the soul from the physical body it once inhabited. The eyes of alabaster and marble and bronze are unable to capture the emotion of sight and vision of men. Images that transpose to thought, wisdom, daring deeds and appreciation of beauty. Empty but for their past.

But I am always trapped into staring...captured in the concrete moment of monuments.

So, though the statues never could see, only their creators vision is seen, we see them and remember the deeds and the gifts that the representations hold before us. We carve entire mountains into the lions of our country, Mt. Rushmore, the Crazy Horse monument as well as the carvings of confederate heroes on Stone Mountain in Georgia. Town squares are built around great men and women crying out from stone and metal to remember them. We strike out and topple and deface them when the glory they represented fades. Deny by destroying the creations of our past.

Who are these people of the monuments. I do believe that there are people out there that do set out for great glory and that is their goal and where all their passions run. I do not want monuments to that type of glorious self indulgent purpose. I have more belief that happenstance and duty to a purpose or cause is what ultimately bestows greatness. And should be immortalized.

There will be always statues...but to me, the ones that are obscure, of people whose deeds were great but destiny delivered them to their glory, are the statues that speak the loudest. They represent those moments of surprise, of honorable conduct.

The Vietnam memorial in San Antonio is an example of one of the most poignant capturing of honor that I have ever born witness to. I remember the total loss of words that deadened my being.

Titus Livius (59 BC -AD17) Was a roman historian who wrote about Rome and the Roman people.

Looking Ahead Backwards

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past. --Percy Bysshe Shelley

I think that I have figured out something that has been bothering the grey matter that lies between my ears. I will try now to synthesize it coherently, which will not be easy. It is how to predict what lies ahead--our future. I don't want to predict it, just anticipate it, try to somehow prepare myself gently for what is laid out before me.

I have read some of the thinkers of the world, not overly in-depth or anything like it. Some psychologists, philosophers and some sociologists, seeking to come to some conclusions on living. Most of what has been written regarding living tends to view what has happened in the past is the cause of the way we function as we do now. Freud blamed it on love or lack-of-love by and for our moms. Jung on our dreams and the concepts of paired opposites...good/bad, love/hate, past/future. Nietzsche on everything and nothing at the same time, the tragedy as an affirmation of life as it eternally reoccurs.

But I digress.

To know our future is to take all of the surprise out of living. I discovered during a long road trip across Michigan's upper peninsula this fall, that all that I saw, the whole entire trip, was the past. What I saw, the trees, the landscape, the waves on the lake along the roadside was not at those moments even real. I was zooming past the future, time traveling backwards. By the time it took the mind to gather and process those images, the were already over. In the past. Like viewing the stars. Radiated light thrown from millions of light years away, from suns of distant solar systems that may already have gone cold. They may not even cast forth light now. What we see is the visual messages that are thrown out of the past. We only believe it is now because our mind is tricking us to see it that way. Even the words I type, by the time I look at them, are part of the great vanishing everything.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, "Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward. But how to understand, to see the "what" that may lie ahead? The future must be, behind me instead. It must be creeping up on me over my shoulder, ducking constantly away from the edges of my peripheral vision. So what is left is but the need to try and comprehend the future by what I can see in the past. I shall never catch it, the future, but I will surely continue to chase my desire to understand it.

The Demands of Dreaming

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.”

– Carl Sandburg

When I was young I remember having recurring dreams. There are two that I still occasionally have and one that vanished and never returned during my teen years. But even the recurring dream that no longer visits my nights was so poignant that I have a vivid memory of it. Night after night these dreams would capture my sleep and reenact the same drama from beginning to end. It was the same feeling to return to the familiar setting and subject of the dreams that you would experience by returning to some sacred yet secret home. They would start like a black theatre curtain rising at a play you have seen multiple times.

Images, thoughts, emotions and even sounds of dreams of the unconscious mind, will not be fully understood. Maybe that makes them close to divine revelations.

I have been plagued in the past with periods where I experienced bad dreams, suffering in the night, visited by known and unknown personal fears, longings and doubts. Feelings that all I know cannot be true and should by now have been vanquished from my soul and mind. Yet, in the night, they visited me and tormented and taunted me, causing me to wake with a sense of hopelessness. With a dry, chalky mouth.

I do not remember the dreams, only the way that I am left to feel. Sometimes I believe I must have a dream catcher living at the edge of my waking world. At my first waking, the bad dreams caught in the webbing, are turned to dust, with only a vague recollection of feelings of distress remaining. When I look to reasons why I would have such dreams, I believe that they usually meant that there was something in my life that I was not acknowledging, something causing stress and needing correcting. I relate it also to small traumas that I was dealing with.

Despite having bad dreams, I do not fear the nights. I feel that I am doing battle there in my subconscious, and maybe winning the battle one night at a time. The dreams dangle me from branches over dark recesses of the psyche. But I seem to always have the strength to hold on till the morning arrives, even if it makes the morning arrive before the alarm goes off. Dreams allow me to look my demons in the eye, my mind’s eye. Are they trying to convey a message to me? Prodding me to understand something about my life? My purpose? Recognizing the demands on my unconscious that the dreams are whispering will help me make some practical progress in my life’s condition.

I have heard of some people that believe that bad dreams can overtake their night if they consume certain food or drink before sleeping. I even read a theory that dreams are like the minds version of a computer program, and it is “cleaning” the junk out of our memories. I kind of like this explanation.

Judaism has a rite through which dreams that are disturbing can be reinterpreted to give them a positive spin. I need to find out how to do this ritual and then I will start performing the “hatavat halom” ceremony personally and make my dreams all good ones.

Share your dreams in the comments on this blog. It can be therapeutic and I will perform the “hatavat halom” ceremony for you when I learn it.

One of the best dreams written down can be found in the bible. The “Jacobs Ladder” dream is found in Genesis 28:11—19. This painting is “Landscape with the Dream of Jacob” by Michael Willmann (1630-1706)

Tear Down The Wall

The hardest thing that I have grappled with over the course of my adult life is the struggle to remain open-minded. I idealised living a certain way, but at the same time, thinking and wondering in many directions. Some kind of purposeful wanderer. But always pretty closed-minded to other directions once I was on a path. Long-term focus not being my strong suit. A lot of blurred living came about with the changes in direction that occurred during the early course of my life. But I was rarely open-minded for long periods of time.

1980 changed all of that. Or more exactly, I embraced closed-mindedness on a single path.

I remember the first time I was able to vote in a presidential election in 1980. I voted for the Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. I did it mostly in reaction to how Jimmy Carter’s diplomacy went south during the Iran hostage crisis. I remember vividly the daily news reports with their continuous countdown of how many days the hostages had been in captivity. 1, 2, 3, 4,…444 days. Then the botched rescue attempt, Operation Eagle Claw (or Operation Evening Light) that attempted to rescue the hostages from the U.S. Embassy on April 24th of 1980. The attempt was aborted when three helicopters were damaged or forced to return to the USS Nimitz by a sandstorm. Eight American servicemen died. How could this backwards country like Iran, hold this great country of ours in check? Ronald Reagan seemed to be the glimmer of hope that was needed to make us proud of our country again. Move us past the shame of the Nixon Watergate scandal, the Viet Nam conflict and disco music.

I was a converted Republican.

I had a daughter and a son during the Reagan administration that I wanted to be raised with the protection and the safety and the morals that the Republican’s represented to me at that time. They offered me a message of hope. It felt like the world was finally stabilizing. It seemed defined when Ronald Regan stood in front of the Berlin Wall, and proclaimed his beliefs, our countries beliefs, that "This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality … for it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.” The “wall” seemed much more than just the Berlin Wall. It was the symbolic destruction of the terrible thought that we were on the verge of blowing the world apart. I could feel the pull of hope on my life.

We have heard a lot about hope lately, and I reflect on how powerful a pull that wishing for that can have on the soul. It also causes me to reflect on a lot of the pain that came with that hope during the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush eras. We shut out the mentally ill in our society and turned them out in the streets. We judged and looked away from many of the society that needed the most help. We thought we could bully bad parents into caring for their children. We bullied the world. Greed was king and we created a selfish "Me" generation.

I was remember feeling actually devastated when George H. W. Bush lost the election to Bill Clinton. It was beyond belief to me that people would accept that type of character to lead this country. I believed what Phil Gramm, a Senator from Texas said when asked what would result if Clinton's proposals were passed. "People will be hunting Democrats with dogs by the end of the century."

Where are the "Clinton-hounds, the Bill-dogs?"

But, in hindsight, the world didn’t end. Short of a confusing new definition for “is”, Clinton left the country pretty well off. The second Bush, I believe tried, but he held such a narrow ideology, he was doomed to fail, especially, with building any kind of cooperation across this diverse country of ours.

What the second Bush left me with--gratefully--was a freedom to think as an independent. To "tear down the walls" of closed-mindedness. 30 years coming, I now question everything like a 2-year-old.

I still love this exchange:
"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement....Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true." --Bill Clinton at his deposition.