Boomlee and a Sunny March Day

My approaching birthday has me flummoxed.  Yes I know it is only a number.  Yes I know that my life is defined by how I live it and not how old I am.  But I also know that the time remaining is shorter that the time past.  I want to stay vibrant.  My goal is to be living to the fullest in the face of the winds of life that erode us to nothing.  

As I write this I am at my office working.  It is Sunday morning and I am way behind on my work.  I have committed to come in today for about three hours so that I get much closer to where I need to be on my backlog of cases.  Hopefully after I finish up this note I will get some real solid writing done.  We shall see now shall we not?

Yesterday I discovered my Fitbit™ had died.  Turned out the charger was not assembled correctly.  I had gotten none of my activity from Friday recorded.  Well I fixed the charger and I then spent time walking all over my neighborhood. We need to get our 10,000 steps in don’t we? As the walk progressed it was clear there are some lovely early blooms coming out.  For a few moments I slowed my pace and took photographs with my phone.  Of course I had to color correct them with my phone’s software for better pictures.  Reality is never quite captured by a phone camera no matter how good that camera is.

Scattered wandering finally led me to the EL Public Library.  My thought had been to get a book on philosophy to read; maybe I would get something about the Age of Reason.  When I got just inside the front door I ran into a librarian who is a casual friend.  She and I travel in some of the same circles because we both have autistic sons.  Talking for a few minutes we gabbed and gabbed.  She had a victory with one of her children.  It was good to find someone who has similar battles to fight.  Warm conversations always make me feel better.

The conversation cut down on the time I had to look for philosophy books and so I ended up just getting some movies.  One of the films I picked up was a Thai movie with subtitles. 

The film was called Boomlee Who Can Remember His Past Lives.   It was a slow paced film.  It was about a man dying from kidney failure who is confronted with the ghosts of his wife and son. Some magical realism is found in the film for the ghosts interact with other living people in the film besides the dying man and nobody seems weirded out by the presence of these long dead spirits.

Confrontation is not really the word either for the interaction between the dying man and the spirits.  His wife’s ghost has come as sort of a spiritual guide across the threshold to the next plain of existence.  His son who is a large spirit ape with glowing eyes has come to protect him from malicious spirits who might interfere with his journey.

The man who is dying says it is karma that things are playing out this way because he is dying relatively young.  He is very clearly Buddhist.  He talks about killing communists and about spraying bugs with pesticides and the karma from that burdening him.  His spirit wife inquires of him as to what was in his heart.  Was he acting with good intentions?  When he asks whether his actions in this world will prevent him from reaching heaven his ghost wife says, “Heaven is over rated.” I smiled at this.

My family commenced watching a rerun of one of the Bourne movies after this finished.  I love the Bourne films but I was just not in the mood.  At that point I went upstairs and continued reading Dreamland, the book about America and opiates. What I read about was the rise in pain medications for palliative care in the early 1980s and about the “Farm”. The Farm was the federal government’s drug treatment prison cum opiate teaching hospital, up until about 1990.  The Farm conducted most of the research into the mechanics of addiction was conducted pre-1990. MS-Contin was researched there for those will long term pain.

The Farm was shut down because as governments are often wont to do, they used its facilities off book. The Farm is where people conducted the so ill advised experiments on hallucinogenic drugs that later came to light.  You know they gave LSD to people for the CIA to see if there was any counterintelligence value to the drug. People went bat shit crazy because of the quantities administered.

And then I fell asleep.  Some days are just full and action packed now aren’t they?

Temporary Art and Temporary Life

In the years of early awareness we are aware only of the external world.  Our senses fill with scent of the flowers of spring and the chill that touching snow with the naked hand provides.  We are keenly aware of the hours of light and the hours of dark.  If it is light every bit of our internal energy wants us to be doing something.  We live on a clock that says so long as it is light we should be exploring and doing.

 

When you are 6 or 8 colors make such a large impression.  The brighter the color the better it is.  Sidewalk chalk and tempera paints give us a chance to take the color we have seen and processed in the rudimentary structure of a mind we have at that age and put it back out there for comparison to and appreciation by the world.  We are all innate artists with a desire to make something to do something.

 

I think what I like most about this photo is the hand prints up in the corner.  These palms and digits expressed in chalk on concrete are shouting, “This is me. I am part of this great glorious world.  Notice me you passerby”. I saw this handprints and I notices.  It gave me joy to know one or two young people had joy on a sunny day. 

Writing Later Chapters

Thomas Merton struggled with the limits of his intellect.  He struggled with the limits of his faith.  He struggled with the limits of mortal life.

In a piece I read this morning (he wrote it in 1956) he mused on living his life as being the equivalent of writing a book he. Merton stated he did not want to write a book about everything.  Instead the devout man’s book was to be a book into which everything could go in.  His life was to contain everything that would fit.  The contents of his would come from everything around him.

Merton’s worlds are simple, but in their simplicity stand the most profound of commentary.  Sometimes I am regretful of things I have not done and achievements I had not attained. When I reflect in regret I am forgetting what my life actually contains. 

Each day as I set out to do my daily chores from cleaning up a stream of dried cat hork (this morning’s pile was a pretty accurate depiction of the Hawaiian Islands chain) to poking apart the lies that someone has constructed to tell a better story of their life to me, I am writing my book. Every person I call to say hello to is a paragraph on a page of my life.  Everything I learn about the heroin explosion in America from the book I am reading each night becomes part of my everything. Every time I clink a glass and say “slainte” another line writes itself.

My guess is here that I should be choosing my text carefully and doing it with clear vision.  My eyes should be open to all the wonders of daily life. My hope is that the remaining pages are rich and absorbing. 

Another Page in the Book of Life

“Perhaps the book of life, in the end, is the book of what one has lived, and if one has lived nothing, one is not in the book of life.” –Thomas Merton

 

Wow.  I mean really that is all I can say about this quote from the quiet monastic voice of Merton.  Short and sweet his phrasing is nothing short of an exhortation to live fully and to live engaged in all that surrounds you. 

 

This may seem to be a contradiction these words coming from a hermit but the exhortation to live, really live is no paradox.  Merton was engaged in the natural world that surrounded him, every single day.  With unyielding constancy Merton was engaged fully in the deepest pursuit of the holy. His was a mind never at rest.  From his hermitage he lived so far beyond the limitations of most of our minds.

 

What is my book about?  What pages have I written?  Is my book something that anyone else would want to read?  Good questions all.

Wistful

 

Tonight the students are running amok because it is Saint Patrick’s Day.  Only in recent years has this holiday grown to be such a bacchanalia. Scantily dressed women, girls really, and young men/boys in wife beaters dyed green and bearing a shamrock screen-print stagger from bar to bar. Having waiting for hours this morning in a line several hundred deep they crowded into bars. The taps are places with names like Dublin Square and PT O’Malley’s. Tonight they have been drinking their fill. 

Green beer or traditional Irish brews like Guinness, Smithwick’s and Harp it doesn’t matter.  Dram after dram is quaffed. A shot of Jameson’s is raised by these temporarily immortals.  To you, to me, to sex acts, to the Spartans they toast them all. By night’s end they will either be back in bed unconscious but not really sleeping.  Or they will be committing acts that tomorrow through their meat cleaver headaches will cause them worry about pregnancies, STDs or criminal charges. One or two of them may pass off this mortal coil to the regret and wailing of loving families.  This is rare but once every two or four years it happens.

No this is not a warning.  No this is not a longing to be among the bustle and hustle that is tonight’s scrum.  There are no hangovers that are fondly remembered.  What this is can best be called a wistful moment of memory of that short space where you taste the joy of endless time. To them as they walk from bar to bar grabbing ass and talking trash, savor this night as much as you will hate making the call on the big porcelain phone tomorrow.

 

On Oxford at Twilight Hours

 

With smoke low in the chill air

 Hanging as a gentle reminder

 To say the season of cold has not given up yet on us.

Seeping under poorly sealed windows and laying outside is a thick ocean of chill ether

Biting and bracing it reminds us of the reality of the north in March.

 

I long for warmth as much as

 I long for clarity.

 I long for a predictable season as much as I long

For a predictable life.

 

 I snap a photograph of coming night

 Maybe in the overly hot days of August the blue dark image remind me of the coolness of spring

 And the wonderful smell of smoke

 Lights are on now

This walk is done.

Success

Soon I will reach a birthday with a zero in it.  I will be sixty.  It seems so fast that the years have sped by.  As I approach this milestone someone asked me if I had been a success.  The question left me scratching my head.  Was I a success at anything?  Did I feel like a success?

 

How do you define success?  A dictionary (Encarta) provides several options to wit, “Success is the achievement of something planned or attempted.  It is also defined as impressive achievement, especially the attainment of fame, wealth, or power.”  Quote sites are all over the place with things like the following from Vince Lombardi, “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.”  For me I think if you combined the impressive achievement part together with hard work and dedication component despite the world’s view of whether you are winning or losing that is pretty close to a good definition of success.

 

Me personally I don’t have any great achievements.  I have not done well with money.  I have not climbed the corporate ladder.  I have not done something that has gained me positive notice that will last for any period of time. I have simply lived. I have tried to live in a manner that reflected what I really was inside, a goofy, joyful person with a sense of wonder.  

 

Success is not breeding so please don’t go down the “but you have a wonderful family” line of discussion.  I helped create kids with my participation in a biological act.  They are growing in a world that is only defined by me in the most minimal of ways.  They will be who they are.  I hope they are good people and I hope their faults are minor but most of that resides in DNA and the conditioning the world has imposed on them.

 

A few years back I ran for public office.  I won by 1% of the vote.  You could call that a success.  But I did that out of duty, not for the sake of winning.  I would have felt the same way whether I won or lost.  If you don’t care about the outcome in a race or a game I don’t think prevailing qualifies as success.

 

16 years ago I applied for a job I didn’t really want. I went in for the interview with a smart ass attitude. Really my only desire was to get some interview experience under my belt and nothing more.  Here I am 16 years later in the job I didn’t care if I got.  Maybe that was a success.  Moving from private practice to government work was fine; it felt good to be out from under the pressures of a small private practice law office. Still it didn’t resolve any deep ache in my soul.  This is just another job.

 

What I actually view as my success sounds silly.  My success is writing. Until I was in my late thirties I was afraid of writing.  Grammar and spelling do not come easy to me.  Seems odd for a person of words to be afraid to put them onto paper does it not?

 

However about 10 or 12 years ago I started to journal. Constantly I scrawled notes about every stray thought that crossed my mind.  Every day before I got on the bus to my office I found that I had about 10 minutes of dead time.  My choice was to get a notebook and to write as I stood at the stop.  Over several years I poured out my heart and soul into a series of spiral bound notebooks.  I was honest.  I was brutal.  I waxed poetic.  I ruminated on God and existentialism.  I focused my thoughts and I carried on page after page with daily consistency.

 

One day a friend said to me she thought I had enough stories to write a blog.  While this blog has been dormant of late I took that idea and ran with it. On this silly electronic medium I have set out over 600 posts.  Some were just photographs.  Some were long meditations.  But this blog is me talking and shouting and cleansing my soul.  I am dedicated to writing.  I am determined to get some of what is in me out.  

 

Yeah success is writing for me.  It isn’t anything else really that I can point to.  Writers exist for the glorification of words and ideas and it is not vice versa. Singers exist to glorify the song and again not vice versa.  To the extent I have glorified the words Ifeel I have succeeded.