Take a Chance

"I will study and get ready, and perhaps my chance will come."─Abraham Lincoln

Chance. When I think of chance as a part of human actions it applies poignantly when someone trusts someone else or their ability on purely intuitive assumptions. "I'll take a chance on you" or "there is a good chance your idea will work out" would be two statements that could illustrate actions based on "chance."

Recognizing the "chance" factor is crucial in developing powerful personal characteristics such as self-esteem or personal confidence. The old adage that you can give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day but if you teach a man to fish you will feed him for a lifetime" is in essence, taking a chance. Taking a chance that the person will take what you are offering and use it for betterment. Taking what you offer and planting it's seed to grow into a harvest that can be appreciated down the road.

Chance also goes hand-in-hand with trust. A level of trust needs to often be established before a chance will be granted. We tend to evaluate and judge who will be granted our "chances based on appearances, dispositions,  or other frankly personal preferences. I often think about how it seems to me that it is much easier to trust someone who is similar to me in ways that are applicable to the circumstances. They work in the same area, they have similar economic backgrounds, share my political or religious beliefs. A level of trust needs to be assumed to ask another to take a chance on "Me" as well. Haven't we all experienced those moments where something was offered to us but we were somehow unsure of the intentions behind the offer?

I am glad that people took a chance with me. I think of those moments before I make my decisions about people these days. It makes it far easier to exercise a generous and loving support of my fellow human. Maybe someday you or I will give a chance to someone as great as Mr. Lincoln. I like to think of that as a true possibility.

Impossibilities Lost

"Practice only impossibilities."
--John Lily

Impossibilities. How could you practice such things? They must be closely related to imagination. They are those things, those wonders, that lie outside the borders of what we know and understand.

There seems to be fewer of them--those things that are in the category of impossibilities--as we humans become more and more civilized and inoculated against wonder of any sort. Human beings have seem to have grown up, so to speak. We have went from living around a fire burning at the mouth of a cave surrounded by mysteries of the surrounding terrain, to what living is now. The noises, sights, and textures of being alive have become predictable and have been explained to us by wise and foolish men. Jean de La Fontaine summed up how mysteries are vanquished from the human experience when he explained that "Man is so made that when anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish. We sail oceans, travel at the speed of sound, dive in the deepest ocean, and travel across the vacuum of space. All things that would have seemed miraculous acts to the ancients. Especially those that sat around the ancient fires. Even fire to them of the past was an impossibility made possible. Trying to understand all this is what makes my weak soul stronger somehow.

But there remains many, many tiny fragments of wonder--and I would put forth impossibilities--that when you look closely at this world that we exist in, you can still find them. I was cleaning out a birdhouse and I came across what I thought was a bumble bee and upon closer examination I discovered it was a moth. It seems impossible to understand the evolutionary marvels of nature. Creation is a delightfully wondrous place. I am trying very hard to hold back trying to explain to myself everything and just to delight in it.

Below is the hummingbird moth. My lovely bride captured it magnificently on her phone's camera.
 

Words Written and the Ash that Remains

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."--Emily Dickinson

Someone like Miss Emily Dickinson writing about how brutal writing can seem is profound. She was able to write the most beautiful verse that has been imagined and to think that it made her feel that way makes me wonder why I try to write. Writing does feel that way to me at times. But then other things in my life can make it seem like the top of my head was taken off. Not only has it been taken off but it has been muddled with by meanness, touched by kindness, blessed with friendship, filled with surprise and wonder, stirred with desire, mixed with confusion and other universal tribulations that are part of the human experience. But I seem to always find laughter and love that repairs the soul that resides in my skull.

Leonard Cohen, one of my favorite singer/songwriters said "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash." Leonard is "write" about poetry, and art of any type that has that certain daemon inside of us wishing to express itself to others. A daemon that wants to burn our artistry to a beautiful ash. And I know also that what I write is just graffiti of my muddled mind, and writing it is a way to free my thoughts. Send them into the ether to dissolve among the other verses of the many, many other poets.

My poem for today:

I am fermenting

My mind, my spirit,

To try to hear the

Difference between

The sounds of

Trees and stones.

May the Sun, Moon, Rain, Breeze...

“May the sun bring you new energy by day,

May the moon softly restore you by night,

May the rain wash away your worries,

May the breeze blow new strength into your being,

May you walk gently through the world and know its beauty all the days of your life.” -- Apache blessing

The above blessing was shared with me as a gift. It is printed on a magnet that my wife gave me as a present for Christmas. This small token of love is special to me in that it importantly speaks to levels of my relationship with life, spirit, and personal connectiveness. Specifically, connectiveness is that sense of belonging, a component of relatedness, a new and powerful word in a modern life.

And these are not easy bonds to hold on to.

Struggling to make sense of things seems to turn my thoughts inward and that can be a shadowy place at times. So to be reminded that the sun is there and to try to obtain new energy from it is a great stimulant to shed those shadows. To know that there is still light, even in the darkest night or mood, if only from the faint glow of a lunar globe, there also, seems hope. Rain can cleanse the earth and can wash what is covered with dust, grime and other hiders of what lies beneath them. A breeze can massage the skin with the fact that an invisible force still has physical sensations attached to it.

And the best part of the saying is the last wish for the reader, what my wife saw in the words that she felt strongly that I would wish to read. How it would be to walk gently through the world, among the many changing seasons and life stages, knowing the joy surrounding you.

Help me to recognize and celebrate them, away from the constant shadows.

Not Such A Bad...Year In Review

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."--Voltaire

I was thinking about all those Christmas brag letters tucked inside Christmas cards that begin to flood the mailbox this festive season. I never had the desire to do one and mail out to people, but on the other hand, I never really minded reading about the happenings of those I care about. Bits and pieces of their lives that can surprise and enlighten are to be found in the words they contain. Tucked into them are messages they are trying to express: such as happiness, loss, joy, pride.

So following (if interested) is my 2013:

January 1^st, employed with 401K, health insurance and good job. January 2^nd, unemployed minus all that other stuff previously mentioned (see quote above by Voltaire). No murder committed despite this occurrence. Begin the stages of grief over this loss, also begin job hunt. Job hunt reveals experience seems to mean little compared to not finishing that Bachelors Degree in the 80’s. “Too old to Rock and roll, too young to die” to quote a Jethro Tull song from my youth. Look into degree completion opportunities at local universities. Damn…found out that college classes expire after three decades and don’t easily transfer. Still working through those stages of grief. Actually stuck on #1: anger. Sign up for group to help me deal with these issues. Especially issue #1. Start sociology class in college. Remain grateful to my friends and family who are standing by me and offer support. Seriously good medicine is true friendship. Interview for jobs…keep coming in second. Try a $10 per hour job to kill time and realize I have no tolerance for "fill in the blank here." Especially when they are your boss. Especially at $10 an hour. Didn't I learn this already? Gain new appreciation of those workers making minimum wage. Learn how underrated sleep is and how badly I want to sleep well again. Don't sleep at all some nights. Generic sleeping pills are a blessed thing. Love my college class and begin to feel hopeful. Grateful that my wife is awesome and understands. Continue to get up and get dressed every morning even when I don’t have a reason. Group therapy is going well. Learn from a psychologist about people with personality disorders. Realization: That it is what was wrong with them  and it wasn’t me after all. Wife reminds me that she has been telling me that all along. Wise wife! Must learn to stop blaming myself. Sign up for more college classes, including psychology, as I need more information. Get an opportunity to do some freelance work and I love it. Get to see western Iowa, Illinois, and eastern Pennsylvania. Meet outstanding people that I can count as friends. Learn a new computer program and keep exercising my old brain. Starting to relax about nine months into this.  Discover there is nothing affordable about the Affordable Care Act. What can you do? 10 ½ months in, I get a call for a job if I want it. Hell yes. Can still do the freelance work and still attend my college and work for people that are AWESOME and NOT CRAZY!

Madi and Me

And I didn’t forget the best news, I just saved it for last.

Madilynn Paige. Granddaughter. Born November 30^th.

What a great year of discovery it has been.

To Get My Feet Wet, or Not?

"To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float." -- Alan Watts

The symbolism of the water's edge helps me navigate my way through life. It gives me clear boundaries to my physical existence that mark where I can proceed and where I need to stop or get wet or get out of the boat and step on shore. These boundaries--these shores, beaches, riverbanks--exist both when I am on dry land or floating upon the water. We can transition between the medium easily enough, but not without some skills or mechanisms to allow us to survive for long. Especially if moving from dry to wet. We need protection from hypothermia, drowning and now bull sharks swimming up our freshwater rivers. Bull sharks, I kid you not. A thousand miles up the Mississippi River caught in Illinois. Saw it on "River Monsters" on the television so it must be true. Probably trying to make it to Chicago's Shedd Aquarium.

I am often envious of animals such as the waterfowl and shore birds. They can transition an additional medium when they take flight and wing through the sky. To be able to fly without a ton of steel and plastic and jet fuel would be outstanding. 

I use the transition symbolism in tackling other aspects of my life, which lately consists in what I am going to spend the remainder of my working career doing. Right now, not unlike many other people in the past, present and probably the future, I am standing on the shore and trying to decide what stroke to swim, or what boat to paddle or even if this canal needs to be crossed. At least I need to decide when to cross it and what I hope to find when I reach the other shore. 

I believe it must depend on the means I use to cross it, and like Alan Watts said, "relax and float" may beach me where I was meant to be.