Fortunate Son

God's dice always have a lucky roll. -- Sophocles

I am amazed at how fortunate that I am to be alive. An alive, observant, living and engaged participant in the ether surrounding my flesh. Not just at this moment in the slipstream of time, but an aware and sentient being, able to process the universe surrounding me. I spend time decoding the patterns of life that I encounter moment upon moment of my life.

I see stars in the night sky and wonder why they choose to share their perfection with us, with me. How sensuous a rain drop feels when it dances across the skin on a hot and humid day. How butterflies can stay adrift with the way their wings move still baffles me. I could look it up and get a scientific explanation, but it wouldn’t take away the amazement seeing them offers me.

Just the other night a brutal thunderstorm raged over my house and filled me with wonder and fear and surprise. The lighting was so close you couldn’t see the bolt, just the blinding white of the savaging electricity. The thunder rolled and struck and shook the window frames that I leaned on as I watched. The rain fell less like drops and more like when you stand under a waterfall. It was a fury. I sensed it wanted to kill me. It was seeking a victim and grabbing at the ground and the trees and the electrified air. How lucky I felt to be surrounded by my house, grounded against the nasty ranting of the tempest.

But this night I was lucky. I was safe and was protected to consider another day.

Others have not lived as long or shared a banquet of life like I have. Sudden deaths. Lingering illness. Random, violent taking of life. War. Genocide. Disease. These things razor away the opportunities for beings to be lucky to live and see to their fullest the great mysteries surrounding us.

I have escaped so far what have ended many a soul’s existence. I don’t say that because I feel special, it is more an observation of how unique each of our experience of time here on earth is felt.

So maybe a roll of the dice by God is why I ended up where I am. A lucky roll. A fortunate son of God. So far. And I won't  measure my luck by how I end, but how I got there.

To Trust

“Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.” -- Arthur Miller

I was contemplating betrayal the other day. It seems to be a consistent presence in our lives. It carries about no discernable pattern to its form. People betray other people, regardless of whether or not they love them. Friends betray friends for all sorts of reasons. Our government betrays our trust for many reasons. We betray our instincts and march headlong into disastrous situations, situations that cost momentous amounts of money and loss of human life and tragic suffering.

What is truly lost through betrayals is trust. Who, what, why are all questionable factors now in putting that one foot in front of the next.

Maybe that is one of the reasons that so many people get such gratifying satisfaction from their pets. They can trust them without the possibility of betrayal. Though even after 13 years I still don’t trust the cat. I still often start blindly down the basement stairs only to almost step on it--lazily stretched out on the steps-- and almost take a possible life-threatening tumble. I believe she has been plotting my demise for a long time. The cat is eerily colored to blend in with the carpet. I am sure my wife didn’t consider that when she picked out the pattern. But I always trusted my dogs.

So I ask myself to keep taking the risk of continuing seeking trust.

It is too energy draining to look behind every act, word and supposition to look for the possible betrayal that may or may not lurk there about.

Dad

“My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.” --Aldous Huxley

My dad was not one you would find sitting still very often. In fact, the first time I remember him truly motionless for any length of time was when his back gave out, a victim of his strength not meeting the demands of the task. It must have been a huge task that did him in, as I remember the lean, tremendous physical strength that he possessed.

That strength--at least in part--came from his love of the outdoors and all that it involved. And working a day job pushed him to find things to do that were evening or nighttime activities.

When he hunted raccoons with dogs, it was a physical act. You waded through swamps. He traveled through pitch-black woods guided only by the sounds of the dogs. He lugged 30-pound animals out of the woods back through those same swamps and dark woods dragging a couple hounds as well. Then at the end of the night with dawn approaching, he skinned, stretched hides and maybe grabbed a couple hours sleep before it was time to get up and work the auto mechanic job that was his profession.

Or he spent his evenings floating rivers, spearing or pole-fishing for catfish, carp or gar. Hauling the flat-bottom boat and equipment from beds of pick-up trucks or off the roof of a family’s car to launch and reversing the process at the end of the float fishing excursion.

Trapping was another sport he squeezed into his evenings and mornings scheduled around work. Traps would be set and checked and the harvested animals prepared for the fur market. He hauled a basket of steel traps and the trapped animals, down edges of creeks, around lakes in his waders and edges of forests and field, breathing in the life of the active outdoorsman.

Most of the time when I woke in the morning, the only proof of my Dad’s existence was what he had harvested during the time he was away. Animals and fish mysteriously deposited for processing or the families consumption.

I remember my first pheasant hunting trip with my Dad. I was 12. We went all day and we went at his pace. I knew that was expected and it was also what I expected of myself. At the end of that day, I could barely finish walking out of the fields. My gun felt like I was carrying a military field piece of huge caliber. I honestly had never been more exhausted in my entire life. I also knew that what I had experienced was a beautiful look inside the mystery that was inside of my father. For probably the first time, I shared an exact experience on his terms of what it was that he did when he was doing.

He was evangelizing me--challenging me--to experience living the outdoor life from his view of life. And I was saved.

When You Can't Stop Thinking

“It’s surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.”—Barbara Kingsolver

  Have you ever taken the time to try and observe the raw pictures of your memory? Take a memory--any memory--and grab you brains camera and take a quick, static shot of it. Now take a minute and concentrate on what you see once you have stopped the flowing aspect of memory.
  It is difficult.
  When I try to stop the movement of thought it vanishes like smoke dissipating in the air. When I try to make it freeze, it blows away. Or flows away like a river.
  It is like lifting the needle off the record on a turntable. The sound of the music just vanishes. Return the needle…joy. At least for those who still remember or own a turntable and vinyl record albums.
  So I have tried to stop focusing on the specifics of memory and more on the emotional qualities of them. How did I feel? What was the real point of saving that particular event? And I must admit that I notice things about my past that were unnoticed as Ms. Kingsolver points out.
  This allows me to discard or devalue some things and to embrace and be joyful of other things. Now when some memory is triggered in me, I am more able to justify the discomfort or happiness that accompanies them.
Perhaps this will lead me to laugh and cry more truly with my many ghosts.

Giving Up To Live

“Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.” ~ John Steinbeck

This saying by Steinbeck could be descriptive of the evolution of my being, my philosophy for living. I tried to control so much of where my life was going that the sole purpose seems to have been the ability to master, to control the outcomes of the situations that I encountered. I tried to control my emotions. I tried to fix people who were broken. Fix them even when they didn’t wish to be fixed. I looked at the way that I wished things to be. I was the anti-Zen master.

That way of driving through life just left me tired and also left me without laying down any type of foundation for my own happiness. It was like I was drinking the poison meant for other people, keeping them safe from the poisons that they desired. I would drink the hemlock for the good of all, regardless if I wanted it or not. Much of my young adult life was throwing life vests to people who only desired to drown in their behavior, their lifestyles. I didn’t realize that there were certain people who didn’t care if they hurt the ones that they said they loved. A whole period of my life seems to have been grayed out somehow, just a shadowy part of my lifetime.

But there came a point where I had to root out that way of being or I would have just been devoured by it. I gave up on having any effect on the world around me. Now that may sound bad, but when I did this transformation, the opposite happened. It was almost as if I was in a dark room thinking that the light was on when in actuality I was bumping around in the blackness of my life. When I grew tired of all the misery that people were bashing me in the head with, the lights came on. I quit betraying myself to the will of others.

And once the lights came on for me, it was extraordinarily easy to look around and hunt down those personal shadows that were trailing me. For shadows have no place to hide in the light.

Mom vs. Dad

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. -- James Joyce

Moms are the epitome of unconditional love. I see it with my own wife and her daughter. I truly believe that she feels her daughters physical pain and would take it upon herself in a flash if she could. Pulling the daughters wisdom teeth was pretty much the equivalent of the dentist pulling four of her own teeth. Plus possibly a hard kick to the ribs thrown in with it.

Moms appear to weigh in at just the right time to answer a question or offer suggestions. Me, being a man, seem to quit listening way to soon. Trying to formulate an answer to a question that I thought might be coming, but might never end up being asked. Then I get confused and anxious. Worthless to a child for any concrete wisdom. Most of the time it ends up that a daughter just wants to be heard, to know that someone is sharing her hardship by listening. Moms know this deep down in their souls. They don't even have to practice it, they're naturals. 

Men on the other hand (Dads for example), can be great mentors on how to do things as long as it involves the kids mostly watching demonstrations and learning. I don't believe those of us that were not trained at the university level should be allowed to teach some subjects, even to their own kids. We are way better at playing catch with a baseball or riding next to them on a bike than the skill of talking about things. We should lead good lives and try as we might to do the right things and hope the small ones are watching us men and learning by example. And also keep telling them to "Ask their Mother" for the final answer. Moms, you are the checks and balances of our children.

And we need to definitely listen to our wives, and wives need to not give up on us men. I truly believe it is through a woman's love, and it starts with a mother's love, that men mentally leave their boyhood behind to become a man. And the same mothers love shapes the daughters into the soul of humankind which we men seem incapable of properly understanding.

How else can wars be explained?

Earth Day...or Maybe Gravity Day

Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects.--Dave Barry

What on Earth are you doing? I can't tell you how many times as a kid I heard this from adults in my life. How many times have I said this to my own children? How often is this phrase used throughout the world on any given day?

These are the types of wonders that cloud thinking for me.

I guess the answer is that anything done on this Earth is what you are doing. The potential of any given act is a force on whatever surrounds it. I think of all the many sayings in the world that reflect this.
Get the ball rolling.
Jump into the fire.
Go for it.
Just do it.
Don't look back.
Watch this.

Crash!

So really when I think of Earth Day, it tends to really be the force of gravity that I seem to be celebrating. What goes up, must come down so to speak. And I have certainly had my share of crashes. I remember my Dad telling me one time that I fell off my bike in the time before children wore helmets, and he described the sound that my head made when it hit the pavement to be similar to a pumpkin smashing. I always wondered about that, such a hollow sound, and how fortunate I wasn't permanently injured or even killed. Sometimes I use it as an excuse to myself when I do something bone-headed, I tell myself in my inaudible voice that I am certainly "brain-damaged."

So this Earth Day, along with celebrating all the energy efficient lights in my house, recycling that our family does and my serious effort to reduce our carbon footprint (though I wish the Chinese nation would celebrate some Earth Day efforts), I am rejoicing at the many times I have suffered the effects of gravity and the Earth offered just enough "softness" to make my landings survivable.