Shadows and Light II - - The Power of the Written Word

 

Earlier in the day I noticed that on my wife’s laptop my blog piece on Shadows and Light was open. Normally I don’t share my posts before I put them up and thus she has to read them online like anyone else who cares. Given that my spouse is a writer and an editor I would be too intimidated to have her go over my piece in advance. While the readability quotient would go up, the fear of judgment would be too high.

Nothing was said about the piece. What I had intended the entry to be, was a piece about the early evening. What it ended up as was a call to action. We went shopping today. Purchased items included a green outdoor extension cord, a green staked extension cord with three sockets and a variety of other fix up the house items. As you can see the fountain is connected, the table has been set up properly and cleaned and a lovely little back yard vista has come to be. Oh yes the reel mower has been put to work and the lawn is cut.

Words have power. Words motivate action. The end result of words expressed is rarely what you think they will be.

The Evening has not yet Come.

At the bottom of this page is a musical link, click on it and then read on.

Long ago Joni Mitchell wrote a song called Shadows and Light. Superficially the song was about her focus on painting. She painted and perhaps still paints with a passion. The intensity of her colors especially in her oils seems to this observer to be as intense and ardent as the talent she more famously displays in words and music. Over the years her album covers have been populated with her art ranging from watercolors to oils. Some of the images I like very much. Some just leave me cold. But art for me is exactly that way, a take it or leave it proposition. I am not refined and I tend to like things that are more visually accessible. Many people would say that I am that way about life that I always desire of the easy answer, the quick fix. Maybe, but time will judge the merit of my solitary life lived among billions. Still Ms. Mitchell’s song comes back to me again and again.

Tonight as I write I am in my backyard. The air is warm and humid. A fountain I meant to set up last year sits near this discombobulated table at which I work. My market umbrella with its one moth hole is tilted to the west so that I can see the screen of the computer. Everywhere there are shadows and light. The fading sun’s rays stretch out long, long and gone. Bird song fills the air and a dog barks nearby. Most often this early twilight kind of light is described as golden or if the conditions are right amber. Neither of these words captures the sense filling essence of the light or how it plays splashing patterns across the verdant (and abundant) weeds that make up my small patch of lawn. The long weeds don’t matter to my mind, the glorious light does. The shadows do too.

Another bird trills in the distance calling, calling for connection. The birds will fall silent when the shadows win out and the reflected lawn green and warm light grow dark. But for now the balance between light and shadow is nearly perfect. This backyard it is my picture of all the good in this world, imperfect but good enough. This warm night is the gallery in which a unique picture hangs done up this way in shadows and light for a one time only exhibition. No matter how melancholy I may ever feel shadows and light on a shirt sleeve warm night connect me to something holy. It will not last but for right now it is good enough.

Do it for someone else

The most popular of 12 step recovery programs has as one of its later steps, (the 10th step to be exact) the following, “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it”. Of all the steps in the recovery canon this is the one that has drawn my attention again and again. Most likely is because as an outsider to active participation in these community based groups this step seems to be the most contradictory to the very nature of addiction. Hell, it is contradictory to the very nature of daily life without addiction.

By contradictory I mean something very concrete. My life is surrounded by addicts and addiction (and I have some issues of my own). The very nature of dependency as I see it day in and day out, the very nature of being an addict makes seriously working at this step a kind of passing through the eye of a needle endeavor. Dependent people are by the nature of their problem very self centered. Their actions primarily focus on the satisfaction of their own physiological or psychological needs with no ability to factor the impact on others into the equation of their action.

The 10th step almost requires an objective viewpoint by the person performing the task of how someone other than the actor is impacted. The concept of wrong means understanding the primacy of something beyond the skin of the person grappling with alcohol, cocaine or gambling. For someone focused inward by their cravings and compulsions the growth needed to reach this point of thinking and analyzing the world with third person objectivity requires a magnitude of growth. Of course the moral inventory is internal and subjective but coming to an awareness of a sense of wrong to others requires taking a step outside oneself. Doing that is difficult enough for a clean, sober and focused person.

In thinking on this I have been trying to comprehend why this step always shifts my mind to contemplating Spinoza’s Ethics. Over the past weeks I have been trying to get my mind around Spinoza’s conception of God as outlined in the Ethics. In one book I am reading I came upon these two quotes. I think they are salient here.

One can’t help being committed in a special way to one’s self. One’s special interest in, and concern for, the one thing that one happens to be is part and parcel of just being that thing. No one else can do for me what I am doing in being me. When there will be no one who has the same stake in my persisting, then there won’t be me.

R. Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza, p. 180

One will behave with what he call high mindedness-the desire “whereby every man endeavors solely under the dictates of reason to aid other men and to unite them to himself in friendship” –because having stood outside himself and having viewed the world as it is, un-warped by one’s identity in it, one will understand that there is nothing of special significance about one’s own endeavor to persist and flourish that doesn’t pertain to others’ same endeavor.

Id., pp184-185

Stay with me here because I know this stuff isn’t easy; thinking about it makes my brain hurt. If I get this correctly Spinoza acknowledges that we are of our very nature, being neither in control of how we come into this world or how we go out of it, consumed with the selfish focus on maintaining our lives for our own interest. This is our natural state, without us we perceive no further universe. However Spinoza seems to believe that if we can force ourselves to understand that this is the core element of our existence then we can the next step. Once we realize that nature directs inward, and directs everyone inward then we can move if we act objectively outside the shackles of our selfish native state to a more open understanding of the lives of all humanity. By knowing ourselves as limited and finite beings we can open ourselves up the needs of a world of finite beings existing in an ongoing nature. It is when we acknowledge what we are, and move out of that space acknowledging that we and everyone else is in the same state, that we can act for the betterment of all humanity, of all nature.

After a moment of the moral introspection of self awareness we need to take ourselves outside into the world beyond our limitations, admit the failings occasioned by our limitations and then make our world better. I think this is congruent with the 1th step.

Wheee!

Last night I went to the rink with my child. He was going to try out for a hockey team that he in most likelihood will not make. He knew that, I knew that but we both agreed the experience would be good.

Memories of the ages now gone haunt you when you are doing something like this in. When he was little I would put him in the wagon and drag him about. One of the biggest games we had in those days was the one where you lift him from the ground to above your head quickly and say wheeeeeee!!!!. I would laugh, he would laugh. Life was simple and pleasure was very direct.

When my child was measured at the tryout the coach yelled out his height, “six foot something”. When Primus stepped on the scale the coach read off his weight, "201 pounds." Gosh, I guess this means no more games of wheeeeee!!!!

Trees

The passage in my book of Thomas Merton’s writings left me baffled this morning. It was a piece about the appropriateness of using enough or more than enough. To me it seemed his musing was a writing of its time, the early 1960s when the future for the American empire seemed endless and filled with possibility. Because it did not connect with me I went elsewhere.

What I found was a meditation on topiary by an Irish monk. The outrage at the act of topiary did not find resonance with me but some of what he said about the untouched trees struck me as very beautiful. Adapted here it is. The link to the original piece is http://goodnews.ie/jacobswellapril2010.shtml

How well trees keep themselves. They stand like great and lesser heroes, assuring us of some noble triumph far above our heads. Their full majesty appeared to us in a simple glance. How vulnerable trees are. How easy it is to love them: they are splendid beings, rapt in silence, and yet totally vulnerable, because they are alive. They show us, in some way, the heart of existence.

And how well they hold their secret! Their roots search deeply into the earth, a world of darkness, stillness and silence; no one has ever seen all their roots, no one is capable of following their infinite search. And how discreetly they reveal the secret! They raise their powerful bodies and intricate arms into the sky, intertwining the world below with the world above, giving form and meaning to what is formless: the darkness underground, too terrible to contemplate, they transform, without destroying it, into a hundred colours and shades; the rigidity of the earth they soften into an easy motion; its silence they interpret into music with the wind. When we come to die we can say: I have seen wonderful trees, in every season.

Don’t we all wish that our roots ran that deep?

What Vision Should We Trust?

Much of the real germinating action in this world, the true catalytic momentum, arises from people without passports, without social capital, without credit cards and expense accounts. Paradigmatic change comes from within the minds of those without access to travel or the bully pulpit of mass media. Meaningful reflection, thought and analysis often comes from contemplation of the harsh realities of the world as seen in microcosm by outsiders to the world’s social and political systems, a perspective that can open up the mind to the full expanse of the universe.

Based on Merton

The Fen

Evanescent, fading and ephemeral, the distant sunset hardly matters anymore. We simply turn on our lights, way too many lights and we drive the coming darkness away. We blot out the fact that the world and all of its creatures are supposed to slow down and rest at some point in the 24 plus or minus hours of a day.

Humanity is both fragile and brutal. We are the stain on the earth. Our acts are the melanoma that seems to be eating away at the supple skin of this place. We have no respect for the interrelationship of things because we believe we have a mandate from God to treat the world as our tool. Usufruct, that is the word isn’t it? We place ourselves above the natural and routine rhythms of life. But as we struggle, clutch and scrabble to hold the world in our control we kill that which we need to survive.

Maybe it is time to take a couple of minutes and go walk out into the fen and observe. Maybe it is time to move our mental image of where we stand in nature’s hierarchy down a couple notches, just saying. It is not just that I am thinking about the collapse of the world’s fisheries or what BP has done to the gulf. It is that I am extrapolating, what I have done to the gulf by living my middle class life.

ASD or Just a Teenager?

Today I called my son at the end of the school day to see if he had arrived home and to ascertain if there had been events during the day of note. Upon reaching my oldest son I am able to elicit from his sparse conversational style that he had gotten an 85% on his biology test. This is a victory grades have been a challenge in this course all year long.

We had previously butted heads about studying for the biology test. ASD kids obviously don't like to do anything twice. I however had been riding him to go back and reread and then to review all of the section’s review questions. Grudgingly he had gone over the material maybe twice.

Well anyway having been informed of the grade I told him that studying seemed to have made a difference and that had he gone over the material one more time the extra review would have helped him get an A. He replied no it wouldn't. When I asked why not he told me it was because he had studied the wrong section.

My suggestion was that he had to use his planner next time. He replied he had used his planner. Per Primus "Dad my planner said study for biology test, it just didn't say what section to study.”

As God is my witness this is a true account of the conversation. I think I need a drink.