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.

Death, Zevon and The Wind

Last night I was saying goodbye to a young man who was successfully completing treatment.  He had come back for help because he had begun injecting heroin and it was scaring the hell out of him.  He said he was losing his soul and I had been his counselor in the past and he said "we seemed to get along."  He attributed much of his success this time to a "spiritual awakening."  An inexplicable event that allowed him to stop struggling, accept, and move on.

After we did the final paperwork and shook hands he wished me well in my upcoming retirement.  I thanked him and smiled and then said "Yeah, but I'll still have to die."  I was trying to be funny but it stopped him in his tracks. He looked confused and upset, like "why the hell would you say that?"  The uncomfortable moment passed and he came back with "don't be so negative, these are your golden years..."  .I realized, again, that talking about death just isn't done very much and when it is it can be shocking and upsetting for people, especially young people. So, no offense, but death is a biggie for this sixty three year old man who is about to retire and it will most likely be a recurring theme of this blog if this blog continues and I don't kick the bucket.

Which leads to Warren Zevon and The Wind.  This is his last album recorded as he was dying of lung cancer. The cover picture is mesmerizing.   This is it.  No irony. No pretense.  Here I am dying and here's what I want to say while I have a chance. Straight ahead rock and roll. No bullshit.

One of the songs is

Please Stay.

Will you stay with me to the end?
When there is nothing left 
But you and me and the wind.
We'll never know till we try
To find the other side of goodbye


I read these words to Dorothy last night and broke down. We hugged and said reassuring words to each other.

That's a good, beautiful thing  and I refuse to be embarrassed by the tears or not tell about it because it may be difficult for others to hear.

Thank you Warren Zevon.

Green Island and Nature

Dorothy and I just came back from a walk through the wilds of Green Island.  Cool (10 degrees),  clear (bright sun), crunchy (lots of cold, cold snow underfoot) and crisp (not sure how to characterize crisp...maybe it's the pleasant, fresh feeling I get inside my nose when it's really cold).

 One of the highlights of the circuit we regularly walk is going to the River Park (home of the famous GIG Green Island Gazebo) which overlooks the Hudson River just below the Federal Dam in Troy.

Dorothy skiing through River Park, river and dam on the right

Looking south from park after an ice storm.

  This is a very interesting portion of the river for several reasons related to the dam.  The dam prevents most fish from going further upstream.  Some go through the lock but most are stopped.  This makes for great fishing in the spring when herring, striped bass and shad are on upstream mating runs.

Mother's Day fishing mayhem 

American Shad...fishing for this fish was called off last year because it's numbers are down.

The other thing the dam does is that it's turbulence keeps some water open during the coldest part of winter This attracts birds who feed on the fish and plants in the river (ducks) and birds that feed on fish and ducks (Bald Eagles).  It is thrilling to see Bald Eagles and we often do on this walk.  There is an active eagle nest on the north end of the Island.

I actually saw this pair copulating after taking this picture.

One of my favorite winter ducks that frequents the open water on the river is the Common Goldeneye. 

I didn't take this picture

We saw five males on one female today diving in the frigid Hudson. We also saw some Common Mergansers.

Three male and two female Common Mergansers in Hudson by River Park.  

Female's rusty red head  plumage is very cool (borrowed  image)

Both of these species are diving ducks and nest mainly in Canada.  They are welcome visitors in the heart of winter.

My special affection for the Goldeneye probably is because I was lucky enough to see several males wooing a female a couple of springs ago.  Here's a video of their dramatic courtship display. http://ibc.lynxeds.com/video/common-goldeneye-bucephala-clangula/male-courtship-display and if that's not enough excitement for you here's an "extreme closeup" of a pair copulating in Norway in 2009.  http://ibc.lynxeds.com/video/common-goldeneye-bucephala-clangula/pair-copulating-extreme-close

More bird porn in upcoming posts!

Stay warm!

Sickness, Friends and Teardrop Trailers

Hello faithful reader(s).  I know I've been remiss.  It's been far too long since my words of wisdom have graced the screen of your lap top.  You see, life's not easy.  Things happen.  Excuses abound.  I've been sick.  Lost interest in most things for the last two weeks of December. I had a cold that had me coughing so hard a pulled muscles in my side and then I spent two weeks trying to prevent gravity from making the sharp side pain worse. I ended up hooking two velcro based knee wraps together and wrapping them around my stomach.  Cheap and effective.  I'm pretty much back to normal now except for my ongoing struggle with obsessiveness.  My current obsession is the teardrop trailer Dorothy and I decided to buy.  It's a flashy little number custom made by a guy in Toledo.  We'll be driving out there to pick it up in April.

Pretty snazzy huh?  I sent a picture of it to my brother-in-law Jim and he called it a "pimp mobile."  I guess the chrome sides are a little over the top but I'm not sure I want my retirement years to be understated.  I wanna shine man!  

The friend's part of this blog has to do with the trailer.  Dorothy and I are planning on moving to Binghamton in May to be closer to our daughter Joanna and Dorothy's brother Jack and his wife Ellen.  I was initially resistant to the idea of moving because I've developed important friendships here, especially with the people I golf with.  So we came up with this plan to find a way for me to travel and live around Albany two or three days a week to golf and maintain relationships.  Hence the pimp mobile.  Just how it will all work is still being worked out but I'm excited about the options this trailer opens up above and beyond making a Binghamton move more palatble..  Adirondack campgrounds,  traveling south in the winter, etc.  Plus we'll pull it with our Sentra.  Cheap and effective.  Do you see a pattern here?

My daughter Katie and her husband Brian continue their world-wide jaunt.  You can keep track of their exploits at www.newlywedsabroad.blogspot.com   They seem to be having the time of their lives.  We've been having video chats via Skype. An amazing cheap and effective tool.

Next blog I'll try to get back to deeper stuff.  Right now I'm focusing on how I'm going to go to the bathroom and change my clothes in the teardrop.  C'est la vie.

Some poetry by T.S.Eliot I'm grateful I found

I'm sitting at home, sick as a dog,  feeling sorry for myself and Dorothy who has to put up with my sniffling and sniveling. I tried to go into work yesterday so I wouldn't get too far behind but I felt like an aching zombie inconsiderately exposing the still living to bad juju.  Besides that, my daughter Katie and her husband, Brian,  have left on their travels abroad.  They'll be gone at least six months and possibly a lot longer.  I'm thrilled for them but letting go is tough.  (Katie's keeping a blog, Leap and the Net Will Appear  where you can keep track of their exploits.)

So in this sick, disassociated, depressed frame of mind I came upon some poetry which helped me move closer to the positive side of the scale..  I'm grateful I found it and feel compelled to share it with my faithful readers.

The following are excerpts are from East Coker, one of Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.  He captures much of what I've been trying to say in this blog over the past month or so.  I find it exciting to find poetry that speaks so directly to me.  


I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

............And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.


Thank you Mr. Eliot.  The Wikipedia entry says that he considered the Four Quartets his greatest work and that it is what led to him being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

"The secret voices of the innermost truth"

The title of this post, which comes from the quote from Siddhartha in my last posting, is an intentional pushing on the boundary of what I think I should try to write about. In other words, "who am I to write about the "secret voices of the innermost truth?"  and. who am I not to write about it?.  How far should I go in a public forum trying to sort out the mysteries of life and my role in the drama?  I suppose it comes back to goals.  I am not doing this to teach or influence.  I am writing as a process of seeking clarity.  To find out, as Hesse says, what is necessary. For some inexplicable reason I'm finding it easier to examine these things by writing this blog.

But the question of how much I should expose myself to other souls is a significant one.  I have to admit, I love getting comments.  They make me feel less isolated and alone.  But there is always a feeling that I'm dropping my pants in public. That embarrassing feeling probably helps me to not get too personal but I don't like it and wonder how much it is limiting what I could be discovering.

In the last section of Siddhartha, Govinda asks Siddhartha, "Haven't you found certain thoughts, certain insights, which are your own and which help you live?  If you would like to tell me some of these, you would delight my heart."   Siddhartha's replies, "...There have been many thoughts, but it would be hard for me to convey them to you....I have found: wisdom cannot be passed on.  Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness....knowledge can be conveyed but not wisdom.  It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it,  but it cannot be expressed in words and thought."   Despite this statement Siddhartha presses on, perhaps trying to explain why words of wisdom become foolishness.

"The opposite of every truth is just as true! That's like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided.  Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it's all one-sided, all just one half , all lacks completeness, roundness, oneness....But the world itself, what exists around us and inside of us, is never one-sided....a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.  It does really seem like this because we are subject to deception, as if time were something real.  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."

So when does foolishness end and truth begin.  The answer becomes,  at the same time.   The fool and the sage are the same.

Vision of faith

I was on  a retreat in a lodge nestled in Ponderosa pine trees outside of  Prescott Arizona in about 1988.  The priest leading the retreat asked us all to lay down on the floor, on our back, and get into a comfortable position using pillows and blankets. He then started a guided meditation asking us to imagine a restful place, etc.  I eventually stopped hearing his words and found myself lost in a corn field.  It must have been late summer because the stalks seemed twice as tall as me.  Initially I felt fairly calm. Isn't this interesting.  Nothing but cornstalks everywhere I looked.  Then I realized I had no idea where I was and no idea what direction to move.  This grew into sheer panic.  Pure fear.  Then it happened. An event which is in many ways beyond words but still fills my heart.  I looked up and exactly the same moment I was looking down at myself. Zap! I was floating above the cornfield and my eyes locked with the eyes of the small lost boy I saw below. A boy who was me at about the age of eight. At the same time I was the boy below looking up at the floating boy in the air.  We were the same but separated.  There was instant peace, tranquility, calmness, joy.  From above I could see the way I needed to walk.  I also could see a path beyond the cornfield that led up a mountain with a setting sun behind it.  The boy took a deep breath and walked confidently forward.

This vision remains important to me. It strengthens me. It reminds me that the answer to "what is necessary?" is always waiting inside as long as I don't let fear block out the signal.  It is the inner light of the Quakers, the secret voice of Hesse.  It is real and it is good.

Siddhartha, Hesse and What's Necessary

Herman Hesse was my guru when I was twenty years old.  Maybe he'll be my guru again.

I was standing behind the library at Union College in late 1968 when I met up with Neil Gordan.  We were both seniors but had not really talked since we were freshmen.  He asked me how I was doing and I said not very well.  The Vietnam War  was was raging and leaders were being killed and I was afraid of being drafted and I was depressed and I hadn't been going to classes and hadn't washed or shaved and generally felt lost. He smiled and said read Demian and walked away with a smile on his face.  I'm not sure what the smile meant but perhaps he had an inkling of what I was in for.

I ended up reading the book and not going to class for a week in its aftermath. It had a profound effect on me. It's difficult to understand it's power this far down the road.  I recently tried to reread it and it didn't click at all.  Back in '68 it was a different story. I think it's because gave me a new frame of reference to hang my confused craziness on. His novel depicting Abraxas, a divinity of both good and evil, gave me a rudimentary foundation for looking, again, at spirituality.

 I entered Union as a serious Catholic who vowed not to "lose my faith" among the liberal secularists.  It took about three months. Reading The Martyred by Richard Kim put the biggest nail in the coffin.   It asked a simple question.  How can an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God allow the slaughter of millions of innocents in war? Hmmm. So I ended up in this dead end alley and Herman Hesse helped me begin to find my way out.

As I was saying, maybe he will again.

I'm rereading Siddhartha which appears to be based on Hindu's first three stages of life. (the Wikipedia link is very interesting)  At one point shortly after Siddhartha had met the Buddha and decided not to become a follower he had the following thoughts.

"Both, the thoughts as well as the senses were pretty things, the ultimate meaning was hidden behind both of them, both had to be listened to, both had to be played with, neither had to be scorned nor overestimated, from both the secret voices of the innermost truth had to be attentively perceived.  He wanted to strive for nothing , except for what the voice commanded him to strive for, dwell on nothing, except where the voice would advise him to do so. ...to obey like this, not to an external command, only to the voice, to be ready like this, this was good, this was necessary, nothing else was necessary."


Next post - "Locus of Salvation" or "what I hope works for me when the shit hits the fan."