I am a patriot

So I took a trip to downtown Binghamton last night to hang out with the Occupiers for awhile. The scene appeared surprisingly more stable and organized than the last time I was there. I had assumed the recent cold weather would be taking its toll. There are now two portapotties and there is a covered performance area with a killer sound system run by generators.  Tents completely filled the small grassy area in the park.  I did notice a distinct unwashed body odor that seemed to be coming from the tent area and there were some people who seemed to be struggling with mental health issues.  But overall the thirty to forty people there were relaxed, smiling and engaged. I was offered a flyer "We Are the 99%" which gave a brief, clear description of some of the movements guiding principles. Ages varied but most seemed young/college aged.  A few business men in suits standing on the border. Open mic was a gas.  The first several "acts" were young people of color who rapped without any music or percussion.  One woman with a F*ck Capitalism t-shirt seemed to be completely improvising. It was fascinating listening and watching her try to the words to express her very intense thoughts and feelings.  Very raw and real.  Another young woman read from Allen Ginsburg's Howl.  Right on! I brought my guitar and sang "I Am A Patriot" to the gathered throngs. Lots of people sang along and it felt great.  I was surprised by how moved I was.  After finishing singing I blurted out a thanks to everyone for being there and encouraged them to stay the course. Overall a very positive, uplifting experience.  I will go back.

What would Warren do?

Okay, I apologize.  It's been a long time.  I know that my faithful reader/s has/have been checking this blog over and over again trying to get another hit of Ferd's pithy pronouncements. Well here I go.  Another attempt at trying to capture a "fistful of rain".

Warren Zevon continues to play in and with my head.




I feel like I still need to figure something out that he is telling me.  This is the second time I've posted this picture.  He's dying and he makes an album about it and puts this picture on the cover.  How raw can you get?  Talk about raw, listen to Zevon and Springsteen do Disorder in the House on The Wind.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siqJq-8Sr6U  The guitar is incredible. The song is fucking incredible. It makes me want to scream, laugh, cry, kiss my wife, run around, jump up and down.  Fuck it. We're all dying but we can still be ALIVE! and KICKING!  Okay, I'll calm down.  I love that song.  Keep Me In Your Heart from the same album has a 180 degree different tone but  is still righteous and alive. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMTKb-pgxGI   What a sadly, beautiful song.

So what have I been doing since May 4th.  I doubt if you really give a shit.  It's not very interesting and I have no interest at all in going over the details. The theme is the same. Trying to stay alive. Trying to keep my heart and soul from freezing up.  I've been retired since April. and frankly often feel lost and emotionally flat.  It's probably the main reason I stopped writing this blog.  A feeling of being at sea.  Not wanting to further bore any reader with my relentless failure to punch my way out of the paper bag.  I think that is why I think I keep coming back to Zevon. When he was on the Letterman show for the last time he talks about appreciating every sandwich. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hl9Tw2GzvA Well, I obviously still don't know how to make the gratitude in my head live in my heart instead of just visiting every now and then.. I hold the sandwich in my hand and I'm glad I have it but... I keep hoping it doesn't take a diagnosis of terminal illness to find the redemption I'm looking for. Why not ask for more god dammit. I don't want to settle for the glimpses I find or forge from time to time.  I keep thinking Warren may have some sort of key.

A person I love very much told me that maybe I'm being too vertical and that perhaps I should consider being more horizontal.  (she was being very tactful)  I think she was saying I've been too focused on spiritual issues and neglecting relationship work. There may be something to that.  My main interests have been and remain very self-centered. I used to blame this on being a counselor who spent all of his "horizontal" energy at work.  That line of thinkng doesn't fly anymore.  Nevertheless I remain powerfully drawn to meditation and solitude. I have a vision of living alone in Mexico that I can't shake.  Maybe its time to get outside of my own head and start being a better husband, father, friend and citizen. I don't know. What would Warren do?

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.