Hats

"Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves." -- Rudyard Kipling

I take myself to seriously. That is one of the first things that I was aware of...my sensitivity to being teased. Though I have a great sense of humor and love to tell and hear jokes, funny stories and other peoples laughter, I have always been a bit uncomfortable when I was the one being played the fool.

That has gradually over time slowly faded away, similar to my hairline. But isn't that one of the great uses for hats--they hide what we may be losing--in this case my diminishing hair?

So how many different hats do I have? I have a hat that covers up the past that keeps winking at me. I can't see it wink at me till the hat slips or gets knocked off by little annoyances. I have another that is pulled down almost completely covering my eyes so it is difficult to see what is in front of me...or in other words the future. Maybe that's a good thing. It keeps me wondering what lays in wait for me. A tiger shining brightly or possibly a shadowy, camouflaged mystery. And I have a hat that I wear all the time, that is with me in the present. It is the one I like the best. It fits me the best. It covers what needs to be covered. It lets in my dreams. It even looks good on me, like wearing a grin.

I see it as a clown hat. Seriously. I am learning to laugh at myself.

No clown shoes though, they give me the creeps.

The Zen of the New Year

"There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence." -- Meister Eckhart

I think about this Meister Eckhart quote at the end of the year. For some mysterious reason, to humans an imaginary line is drawn through the time that is celebrated as New Years Eve. There is the granite-like sensation of past and future and we are really only fully aware for a brief moment of the present. And it often times reflects in our faces joyfully. Or sadly. What our consciousness is feeling at the moment of transition is what waves to the world. Similar to the Greek comedy and tragedy theatre masks--smiling when one mask is chosen and frowning when the other is used.

What mask will I wear when the clock strikes midnight?

When that clock does strikes twelve on New Years Eve, people kiss, hug, cheer, raise their glasses in toast, exchange presents, often even sharing these personal gestures fully with perfect strangers at that moment in time. That precise, present moment.

It is potentially the single greatest expression of a mass Zen-like moment that takes place all year. Though it may be at times and with certain people be fueled with alcohol, it still works.

The New Year may be all about resolutions and changes and promises to ourselves and to others, but it is really that moment that counts. When we recognize ourselves, captured in amber for that moment in time.

I want piles of amber moments to climb down from when my time is up. I have a couple handfuls already.

Feet

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.--Oliver Wendell Holmes

I sat down across the table from my wife after a grueling road-trip of meetings over the last couple of weeks which included a car-deer accident that resulted in a total loss to my vehicle. Away from home for the last 4 days and 3 nights, 30-plus hours in the car alone, suffering through a poor choice of a book on tape (Simon Schama's, A History of Britain, Volume III, Snore!), five meetings and Michigan's ever challenging upper peninsula weather--it was just good to have my butt in a familiar seat that wasn't hot or moving.

Contemplating what I thought of the new haircut she was sporting--I like it--we caught up on things that happened to each of us during our time away. I then remembered an interesting dream that I had had the night before I was to return, and shared it with her. I said, " I dreamt that you were on this extended trip--a month or so-- and that you kept sending me these pictures on my phone of your feet. Sometimes they were on the ground, propped up on things, left foot alone, right foot only, both feet together and even the occasional one with people touching them. And always at different locations, like you were traveling around all the time." She was grinning at me as I was telling this, obviously enjoying where this was going.

She interrupted me (not rudely I would add) with the obvious question on her mind, "Did I have nail polish on them?" I should have saw that question coming. She wanted to make sure those feet of hers looked good in my dream.

This is where it got interesting.

"Yes, you did, but different polish in every picture. Sometimes multiple colors on the toes with the occasional toenail sporting an intricate design or I even remember one resembling a face staring into the camera from your big toe." She must have spent a lot of time working on those toes during her travels. I have seen the process first-hand and seems to be time-intensive and smelly. Not the feet, the polish odor.

So how do I interpret such a dream--not that it is all that important to have a interpretation--to understand what my unconscious was doing that night?

I think I just missed my wife very much...her feet as well.

Life's Plane Trip

"Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." - Douglas Adams

My wife has been working very hard at understanding her person, the unique and special human being that she is. Why…I haven’t quite figured out. I find her already to be levels above me in emotional intelligence, intellectual intelligence and just simple goodness. If anyone should have an understanding of themselves I would have bet the bank it was her. Perhaps it is wrong to be the standard of measure for her. No, I know that is wrong and would be a self-centered attitude on my part to cultivate. But I believe it must come from the desire that lurks in our dark cellars that whispers that we are broken somehow and we need to be fixed.

It gives me a scratchy feeling that I am somehow wrong. Like a joke that might be a bit offensive (aren’t most jokes slightly offensive on some level?) and it leaves the teller or the listener a bit uncomfortable. That’s how life seems to strike me at times, strangely uncomfortable. Or leaves me feeling “comfortably numb” as the Pink Floyd song can be heard in the recesses of my mind. It makes me wonder what lies at the end of the universe; after all, doesn’t everything end? But in my mind that has only the five basic senses—touch, taste, sight, sound and smell—to process the reality that it faces, it withholds the greater mysteries that trouble me without answers.

When you roll a ball across a table, it reaches the edge, falls into a tangible space filled with air, till it strikes the ground. Then it may roll or bounce a bit until it comes to rest or encounters a wall or table leg where it will bounce off that or come to rest. Eventually when it has used all of its energy you will find it at rest against something substantial…in this example, the floor. There it will remain until a new force is added to it to begin moving again. Or, until it is picked up and set again on the table. Everything about it makes sense because it is processed by my available senses.

Now shoot a beam of light into space. It will travel through the distantness of that space…forever. Will it ever encounter the end of anything? The end of everything? And how can it reach the end of everything? At the end of everything is there something else? Einstein said something like it will eventually circle back and pass itself in time. In what I see—what I can process—there is always something following the last thing. When I was a kid, I repeatedly had a troubling dream about this stumbling question of forever. Infinity. That and another dream of a huge dinosaur coming towards my house with thundering footsteps of destruction. Oh, and then there was the dream of the shifting desert sands…

So my guess is that my wife is just learning how to land her plane better. I could use some help with that as well. Flying it better would also help. It seems to always land but some of the landings are rougher than others. And someday the flight may not have any ground under it and what a mystery will then unfold, more than likely opening up to a new sense that my human mind cannot comprehend on my human time of existence.

Buried Deeply Away Till It is Gone, Yet Is Forever

We bury love,
Forgetfulness grows over it like grass;
That is a thing to weep for,
not the dead.
-- Alexander Smith (no relation)

I want to break down a poem, a verse, a thoughtful assemblage of words that are working to express emotion. That emotion can be painful to the mind and be of a torturous nature.

“We bury love,”
Love can be buried, yes, but can it ever go completely away from our thoughts? Quietly we bury the pain caused by loss. Perhaps it is a loss that was only a dream inside our heads, a fantasy, a world of our creation that was a dimension that is unknown to nature. We try to say goodbye to love in an effort to preserve integrity of our memories. Why else do we hold on to people who cause only pain in our lives? We grasp on to the love that existed before the pain, before the betrayal, before the self-destruction.

”Forgetfulness grows over it like grass;”
How green are our cemeteries, jutting with marble headstones. Proclaiming the departed’s name, statistics of birth date, day of passing from this plane and perhaps a brief verse of significant fact to try and explain the body beneath the sod. Or perhaps a stone with significant artwork to ferment the viewers mind with some thought of wonderment. But as the grass covers the shovels work, the forgetting begins, the bad memories begin to fade and the green covering makes one stare inside their head at the powerful memories of meaningful joy that were shared. Flowers may even rise among the grass and add a bit of color.

“That is a thing to weep for,”
I remember the first time I thought of my Grandmother some time after her passing. I had a memory as I drove by her house but I could not remember what her face looked like easily. Concentration on this only seemed to make it fuzzier. It took a digging out of a recent photograph of her to implant a picture to my memories of her. It happens now with all my relatives that have passed on. They seem to have the appearance of the last photograph that I viewed of them. I wonder if this is normal. What did people do before the advent of photography? Is this why people first began to have portraits painted and hung in their dwellings? Reminders to their heirs of what was gone, a visual record of sorts? Forgetting what someone looks like that we loved is enough to make you weep over it.

“not the dead.”
I will refuse to cry over the dead anymore. But I will weep for the forgetting that happens at the same time as I try to remember everything—good and bad as hell memories--before I have my own carpet of grass.

Sh*tMyHusbandSays

“We may with advantage forget what we know.”—Publilius Syrus

I finished a phone call with my daughter the other evening and went about the business that I was doing before she called me, watching my fish and snails in the aquarium and packing away my football officiating gear for the season. I will preface this with the fact that she (my daughter who lives about 50 miles from where I live) was going to be in my neighborhood for a week in the near future doing training for her job, and she wanted to know if she could come over for dinner one evening. A simple conversation, no?

Well, apparently not when it involves me communicating with other people. My wife, loading the washing machine, said to me as I was walking by to get a drink of water, “Do you know what you told Georgia?”

I thought I had remembered. I was the one doing the conversing. But I was apparently going to find out from her what I thought I already knew. Maybe I should get a beer instead? 2 beers.

My wife said, “You told her “Call me next week and tell me when I will be around and we can get together.”

Really I thought—then—“really”, I said to my wife.

“You do that all the time”, was her unemotional reply.

Really? I talk and make no sense? How long have I been doing this?

“She knew what you meant”, she added, “we always do.”

We? Not just her, but the all-inclusive "we" of friends, family, and strangers I am prone to talk with.

Was I really forgetting how to talk and was making others understand me in a nonsensical way?

I told her she should start keeping track of these things, maybe start a website like the guy at http://www.shitmydadsays.com/. Maybe call it Sh*tMyHusbandSays.com.

Just a thought.

Note: Publilius Syrus, was a Latin writer of maxims, from the 1st century BC. He was a Syrian who was brought as a slave to Italy, but by his wit and talent, won his master’s favor and was freed and educated by him.

Leave Me Alone!

"Speak the truth, but leave immediately after." ~Slovenian Proverb

I am beginning to suffer frustration at the hands of this blog. I start out with an idea and it seems like it may be a positive effort but then it always ends up coated with mud and slime. Angst seems to be taking over my typing fingers, independent of where I want to go. Subconscious directions are leading me around like I have a ring in my nose. I want to gore something but that damn ring keeps getting yanked and I end up on the other side of the barn. Mad and hurt at the same time.

Maybe it is election season doing this to me.

Every direction I turn there is someone out there—on billboards, radio, TV and lawn signs—telling me about why they should be trusted with my vote. And this year it seems to mostly want to save me money on taxes, healthcare and other “essential” services that our government provides. Actually these services are funded by me as a taxpayer. Then I look at the ones already in office--the ones that are shaking my hand with one hand and have their other hand inside my wallet—and I realize how foolish it is to trust any of them. Have any of these Yo-Yo’s balanced a checkbook? Worked at a real job at some point in their life?

See, my typing fingers are doing it again.

I try to think happy thoughts. Take baby steps. Breathe.

SCREAM!