Cohabitation.

So much is happening in my life (actually retiring, going to a retirement dinner where I was the uncomfortable but grateful center of attention, dealing with a panopoly of issues at the house in Endicott where we are moving on May 12, feeling myself suddenly becoming weirdly and wildly detached from many of my gravity anchors for the past 15 years and finding this sudden buoyancy scarily exhilarating as I struggle to tell up from down and forward from backward)  that I feel incapable of capturing via these words even the faintest faintly true reflection of the dizzying chain of events, thoughts and feelings that have been cohabiting my being for the past several weeks. Cohabiting? Interesting.  I guess I'm beginning to internalize the observer role the Eckhart Tolle talks about.  He describes a critical point in his spiritual awakening when heard himself saying. "I can't stand me."  or something like that.  He was struck by the duality of his statement.  Who was the me and who was the I?  When I meditate I am able, sometimes, to get to a point where I realize, feel, know that all of this business of living  that sucks me in and makes me crazy with roller coaster emotions is really not me or even a reflection of me.  It's important that  I deal with the life's challenges but I don't need to identify so deeply with them.  Cohabitation, yes, but I own the house and don't have to put up with unwanted visitors.  Life continues to amaze and baffle me.  I  remain extraordinarily grateful for all of the mixed blessings I have received.

Ruminations

A colleague gave me a copy of "The Essential Rumi" for a retirement gift. (my last day at my current job is this Thursday 4/21/2011)  I have had brief exposure to these writings in the past but tended to shy away from them mainly because the people who would refer to Rumi seemed alien to me.  Well I think I may be turning into one of those aliens. Either I've evolved or gotten desperate but most of what I've read have gone straight to my heart. (I'm also becoming a big Bryan Adams fan which I don't understand either, Okay that's Straight from the Heart... same difference.)

Every object, every being,
is a jar full of delight.
Be a connoisseur,
and taste with caution.
Any wine will get you high.
Judge like a king and choose the purest,
the ones unadulterated with fear,
or some urgency about "what's needed."
Drink the wine that moves you
as a camel moves when it's been untied,
and is just ambling about. 
(from The Many Wines, p.6)

and this from Burnt Kabob, p.8

But listen to me: for one moment,
quit being sad. Hear blessings
dropping their blossoms
around you. God.


I hope that today I will be able to hear and feel the blessings dropping around me.  I wish the same for you.

Wedding Wonders

We (why we and not I) (will the we get we-er or the I get bigger once retirement constant company kicks in?) went to my nephew's wedding this weekend. Both she and me found the experience emotionally challenging.  These family gatherings, especially funerals and weddings, are stark reminders of the accelerating passage of time and consequent impact of said passage on

- skin tone
- hair color
- posture
- dancing ability
- energy level
- contemporary music knowledge
- tolerance of loudness
-  need to leave early to get home to put jammies on and get to bed to read the book and be asleep my nine

Who the hell are all these old people?
Who are we/me?

To quote a great singer/songwriter

This train is moving too fast
I want this moment to last


Well at least the moment when I was watching the beautiful, young men and women dancing, and smiling and singing and thinking of how good life can be and is.

I am thinking more and more of Siddartha and his words to Govinda

"Time is not real, Govinda, I have experienced this often and often again.  And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception."


As I watched them dancing I honestly felt I was them and they were me and we were every dancer that ever laughed and twirled and hugged and cried and gave our heart away and had our heart broken.


To life!

Clinging/Suffering or getting out of the sand trap without losing too many strokes

I went to have dinner with some guys in my golf league last night. We met at five for the eight dollar dinner special at Burden Lake Country Club. Special is on Wed before 6. Great cheap meals. I had Mesquite chicken and shrimp. So this is not a restaurant review but I think it's a good place to go eat especially in the nice weather when you can sit on the deck.  Just don't sit too close to the cigar smoking golfers.   I went at four hoping to hit some golf balls on the range but that was still closed..So I ordered a Jameson and sat out on the deck in an Adirondack chair in the sun smoking a H.Uppman Camaroon cigar.  Very nice moment.

I have great memories of post golf good times on that deck.  And that's where I'm going with this.  Nostalgia vs. reality.  The whiskey, cigar, chair and sun were all very nice.  And I was happy being by myself.  I'm confused about how much the pleasure of that moment was tied to the memories I have of other moments in the same place.  If I'd been at a totally new locatiion would it have been much different?

 This comes into play because of the pending move to Binghamton and my plan to drive back to this golf course every week($40 in gas alone) so I can continue have time with a group of men I've come to consider friends. And to be at a place I feel connected to.  Both the people and the place are big in my memory bank.  The problem is I'm starting to wonder if my plan will work. As I sat eating my meal with five of the guys I felt a new, disturbing distance from them.  I think I realized that I'm  on an irreversible path away from them.  Conversation felt hollow.  I left early, full of sadness.  This idea of life being a series of losses  sucks.  So now I'm thinkin maybe it'd be better not to come back at all after I move. But that's too big of a loss to face in the middle of all the other changes.

Wait a second

I was scaling the side of a cliff once when I was about twenty five and a friend of mine was climbing above me.  He lost his grip and went flying by. At the moment he passed by he looked at me calmly and said, "Wait a second."  Obviously in deep denial of the power of gravity. It was not a very long fall and he only ended up slightly bruised.  The weird thing is how funny this event was,  and still is when I think of it.   Uh, just give me a moment and I'll think of someway to deal with this. Why is it so funny to me?  I think it may be because it captures the absurdity of the human predicament.  We're all careening toward the bottom but we calmly look at each other and think we can avoid the crash if we have enough time to figure something out.  We're often not sure what we're trying to figure out but it's better than just falling without a plan.  A plan?  You're falling asshole! There's no Hollywood dumpster full of soft empty boxes at the bottom.

I think this blogs recurrent theme of dealing with the ultimate, inevitable fall is a bit like saying "Wait a second."  But my friend wasn't hurt that much. So what's the point?  It's a lot like the "so far so good" joke about the guy falling off of the Empire State building and somebody asks him how he's doing as he flies by.  Where is all this leading? I don't know.  I haven't a clue what's at the bottom of it all.

Are all of the philosophical strategies tools for living or distractions from the Fall?

My traveling daughter recently went through a health scare where she was facing the possibility of dying a painful,  much sooner than expected death.   She compared the process of dealing with this to purgatory. Fascinating idea.  In the Catholicism of my youth purgatory was a place you had to go to to suffer for your sins before you could go to heaven and see God.  You would go to purgatory if you died with venial sins.  If you died with a mortal sin on your soul you'd go to hell and never have a chance of seeing God and you'd suffer excruciating pain forever and ever.  I remember the nun asking us seven year old second graders to remember what it felt like if we'd ever burnt our hand and to imagine feeling that pain forever. Holy shit!

I think this is another important spiritual principle that was initially a helpful and insightful idea that got seriously twisted by human beings trying to use the spiritual power to contro others.  I, in fact, believe that we have to go through a painful passage of acceptance before we can enter into holy communion.  I'm clearly in the middle of that passage now re my mortality but I'm encouraged by some of the brief visions of redemption that have surfaced.  For me using tools to minimize ego and maximize acceptance are an important part of this journey.

So, I haven't written lately because of extreme anxiety and concern re all the changes that have been going on in my life and the great suffering going on in Japan and other parts of  the world.  I'm feeling well enough to write now.  Maybe life is a series of purgatories where we suffer and then we, hopefully, find a way to accept and carry on with hope and joy.

Forgiveness, Catholicism and the Holocaust

Okay, I haven't written lately.  I'm afraid my small cadre of loyal readers may be fading away.  I keep on waiting to get inspired to write but nothing seems to be happening.  I'm trying to avoid blame (retirement, tough winter, seasonal affective disorder, moving, aging, buying a house, cabin fever, no golf) and guilt (laziness, self-indulgence, lack of discipline, general worthlessness, superficiality, self absorption, indecent thoughts)   Okay maybe I can live with indecent thoughts once in awhile.  I will continue to type to see what might surface. Stream of gibberish? Brilliant blithering? What difference does it make?  It's fun trying to make something happen.

When I was a child Catholic I had to go to confession and tell the priest my sins.(I think the indecent thoughts comment kicked this stuff up)  I remember once confessing masturbation and the priest sitting behind the black curtain asking me for details.  When did I masturbate? What did I think of?  (I didn't remember this until just now) I remember wondering why he needed those details before he could forgive my transgressions and keep me from going to Hell.

My ongoing struggle with trying to accept myself is deeply tied to the twisted reality I passed through as a Catholic child.  Always guilty, always sinning, me being me was being bad.  I never, ever was good enough.  I was always praying to be forgiven for being me.  Sick, sick twisted shit.

I want to feel that I've somehow been able to rise above and beyond that early conditioning but I know I will never be able to completely leave it behind.  When I read about priests abusing children it becomes symbolic of the deep abuse of the soul I and countless others suffered.

Recently a local court convicted a priest of raping young boys.  As he was being led from the court he broke into I wide grin.  I can find no compassion for this man. I find myself unable to forgive him and the deep system of abuse of body and soul he symbolizes to me.

I just finished watching the epic BBC documentary World at War.  Many of the later episodes focused on film footage of death camps and interviews with death camp survivors.  Seeing the horror and hearing the survivors detail their suffering left me feeling like I was surrounded by a black, ominous cloud I didn't know how to escape from.  I'm saying this now because it's almost the same feeling that surfaced, and lingers, as I was just writing about Catholic abuse.  I'm not trying to equate the two.  I'm trying to understand how to somehow free myself from the darkness that both breed in my soul.

How do I forgive but still honor truth, suffering and justice. Is forgiving the right thing to do or is it a selfish desire to be free myself from pain at the expense of forgetting the deep injustice and the need to work to prevent it from being repeated?

 I want to age and die happy and at peace.  What price am I willing to pay?  Can I forgive but not forget? Work for justice but not be consumed by the responsibility? How do you look evil in the face without letting it seep into your bones and twist you into a reflection of blackness?

I know it's wrong to let go of these questions completely but I also know there is a very strong force pulling me towards a place where they will be in the background or maybe not there at all. Hermit or hobbit? Progress or regression? I'm still not sure.

Home

In a prior post I tried to explain how the idea of home became a powerful force in my life when I moved  to Arizona thirty years ago.  I deeply missed most everything about the northeast.  When we moved back to upstate New York in 1999 it felt right and it still does.  I felt home.  It is a deep, satisfying feeling that I believe doesn't surface fully until after an extended period of separation.

One of the huge downsides of moving back here from Arizona, where I lived for twenty years, was leaving friends.  I had been deeply involved in political struggles in Arizona and the relationships developed through that work were very important to me. When I moved back East I vowed to try to keep these ties intact.  It worked for awhile.  Emails and occasional visits back to Phoenix helped but eventually these all faded away.  It's sad to think about and I usually try to counter this sadness by gratefully remembering the rich, wonderful times I shared with these people.

These thoughts and feelings are surfacing now because because we spent the last couple of weekends looking for a house in the Binghamton area. On Saturday we found a wonderful place and we will move there in May when Dorothy and I retire.

The wheels of change are spinning very fast. I want to keep the realtionships I've made around here. I plan on coming back to Albany area to golf with friends several days per week.  The teardrop trailer is part of this plan. Still....

Letting go, not clinging, living in the moment, being grateful are very much a work in progress for me.  I slip and slide on melancholy.  I long for ghosts.  Trying to grab a "fistful of rain" (Zevon song).  It's a fools game.  Whenever I'm not in a funk about the things I've lost or am in the process of losing, life is wonderful.  There is beauty everywhere.  It's like I have a choice to be in a state of grace or have my soul masked by a false sense of entitlement. Really, It's just the way it is.  You move, you get old, you get sick, you die.  Duh.  It's like a continual struggle to shake off the shit that life leaves on my skin and keeps me from being fully awake and alive.

The thing is I know where my true home is.  I just have to remember.  It's a place that has nothing to do with where I've been. It's here. Right now.