New Flannel Sheets

There are few places where I feel more uncomfortable than Bed Bath & Beyond, but sometimes a guy has to do what a guy has to do; I needed two soup bowls, a dinner plate and more than one wine glass. From previous forays I know what I want, where it is located, the passageway to and from that location; plain white, open stock tableware; similarly with glasses. As I was escaping to the checkout counter I was confronted by a bin of clearance items: sitting on top was a set of twin sheets, full cotton flannel, $15; so last night I went to bed in comfort reminiscent of being a kid in an Ontario winter. There was no timely reason to get out of bed this morning, I don’t go to work until mid-afternoon; the temperature outside was below freezing, the apartment has poor insulation; I lay in bed until about ten; flannel sheets are a wonderful invention, everyone should know of and use flannel sheets; perhaps they do, it has been a while since I was familiar with someone else’s sheets.

What to do for the few hours I was awake, or sometimes awake? I have mindfulness exercises that fit well into that situation, I practiced them for a while; but then I thought about writing a post, this post, what would I write?

I saw the Sean Penn movie last night Into the Wild: Glenn at the video store told me that he found it better than he thought it would be, that was good enough recommendation; I watched it in two parts, the first was on the edge of boring and predictable, almost to the point where I would leave it unfinished, later I did watch the balance, found it haunting. The defining of a life.

It is difficult for me to be comfortable with a paradox that I know: Being in itself is meaningless—-It is necessary for each being to have meaning. That’s the thing that tugs at me, has made me uncomfortable for some time now.

When life here ends there will not be a tear shed by any Master Mechanic of the Universe; before we became aware God was irrelevant, after we are gone God will be irrelevant once more. The divine is what separates us from trout and cows, divinity is what makes us unlike any other being. What that divinity or divine is is the source of countless descriptions and arguments, and should be because it is at the boundary of our understanding. It is what art is about.

Having writ that I look at that modern predicament of an absence of meaning; the signs of the void are most clearly seen in the young: youth lasting for decades, so much attention and value are put into the shallow and the superficial, that universities are now vocational training institutes, that children are trained to be good corporate citizens. It is not anyone’s fault that this happens, it is just the way things are; there is no Great Depression to survive, no Great War in which to fight against clear enemies, no Great Recovery and re-building, etcetera. We need a foe in order to define what and who we become; right now there ain’t one.

So that is what I pondered on and off for a few hours inside my brand new flannel sheets; the daydreams of the young or the old, the observations of someone who has had his foe, has found his pattern, who learned the necessity of meeting what was preventing me from being myself, and going on from there.

The icebreaker

A few sparrows work on the last of the seed in the feeder, to find what might be edible, blowing snow of the last few days has made the bottom inch or so wet, then frozen, then thawed, not much is fit food; I need to clean the bin thoroughly, then blast it with the hair drier to make sure that all moisture is gone before refilling and hanging in the apple tree.

Yesterday was a grueling one; the seventeen mile drive in from O’Hare took two hours; my passenger, a minor television celebrity, as beautiful as a china doll, with a clear, modulated voice continuously chattering on her mobile phone, as shallow as a sheet of People magazine; every comment was a worn one, a repertoire of two emotions, neither of which worth remembering And not a ‘thank-you’ at the end of the two hours; perhaps we were both grateful that the trip was over. Sartre said that hell is other people, occasionally he was correct.

My next passenger is a heart surgeon with whom I had the conversation that we have had for each of the last seven years; he asks my opinion on a particular liberal, then he goes on for twenty minutes how this person is the devil in present form……….

That’s the end of my bitching, I needed to get that off my chest, needed to bitch, to vent.

The reason for my bitching is that I am in pain, on the subjective scale from 0 to 10 I am at 7 approaching 8. The medicine that I use to stop the pain ain’t working today, and there you are.

I remember a documentary film about an icebreaker, one of those powerful, sturdy, vessels that drive through the north, making way for others, bringing supplies to a few.

Arctic seas go on and on, without definition greater than that chunk straight ahead; there is ice, and there is more ice, occasionally a lacuna appears before the bow, the ship sprints through it, and then there is more ice.

When an icebreaker encounters ice that is too thick to be broken and shoved aside by the bow, it rams directly onto it, forces its thick steel belly up on the ice, letting its weight breaking through. The ship breaks by being heavy, by being forceful, by being persistent, and by using whatever of these several methods is appropriate.

It is a noisy business breaking through arctic ice; it is cracked by the prow, it grinds the entire length of the waterline, hour after hour, day after day. Behind is the path of fractured pans, of black water filling the gaps; further back, perhaps as long as an hour the ice has frozen, the seam is fused; there would be signs that one could discern, but there is no continuous passage, nothing permanent coming from all that banging and crashing, all the expenditure of thousands of horsepower. An Inuit would be able to show you how the ship had gone, an aerial observer would notice the linear pattern in the white mass; but there is no permanently open route.

The icebreaker bursts another yard, another mile, another day; and will do so tomorrow; going towards a position on a chart, following an internal gyro course; when I watched the movie I saw that the port is no different than any other, the direction temporarily relevant, important perhaps to someone but not for long, what is important is that the ship keeps going, doesn’t stop and so be locked in place for the winter. Icebreakers are powerful and sturdy, and they keep moving .

I have squeezed two large navel oranges for juice this morning, two glasses of juice, with all of the pulp, the kind of juice that requires some chewing to get down.

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The coffee and juice are finished, the pain medicine taken in full, the feeder is clean, dry and filled, this post is done; it is time to rest from the fatigue made by the pain of being today.

The old battle once again

Yesterday I traded messages with a friend who was beating herself up over something or other or nothing at all, it turned out to be the latter; that somehow it is imprinted in her that if she is she is flawed, the bell rings and the dog drools.

A while back I was driving a psychiatrist in town for a meeting, I don’t know if the fact that he was an Indian Hindu had anything to do with his attitude, it really shouldn’t; we were talking about something or other, perhaps it was a political event, he made the comment that we are all flawed one way or another.

That comment stuck in my craw we are all flawed one way or another is just plain wrong: it is wrong logically, it is wrong philosophically, and it certainly is a bad attitude for someone whose job it is is to treat the mentally ill. To say that we are all flawed one way or another says that there is a standard, and that I don’t meet it. That there is a standard, and that I will never meet it. That there is a standard, and that he is aware of it.

It is wrong in that some sort of human perfection is what we are all about, that is a mundane attitude that needs to be transcended.

It is wrong to judge me even before you know me, what does that say about you and our relationship?

Within each one there is the knowledge that we are, and that knowledge is above and beyond any act that we do, it transcends the mundane and is the basis of our spiritual side. It is why Luther could state that each person is equal before God, that Jesus could say that whatever we need we already have. It is what stuck in my craw when this healer assumed that I am flawed.

You are acceptable, as is.

You always were, always will be; it is inherent with your being.

It is clear that accepting this notion requires courage, the courage that it would take to look at a bright light. Earlier on I had mis-connected the idea that my progress along this trail of life was related to something deeper within me, that my mundane activities reflected upon my being as such. I was wrong, and it took a lot of work to rid myself of this erro

I see this same error of connection in others, and that is why I am writing about this same idea again, and will probably repeat it in future.

Accept that you are acceptable, and then get on with whatever it is that you are about.

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Condensed steam is drifting, white against the blue, from chimneys, ambling towards the northeast, sometimes to the east. There isn’t much push to the cold air this morning, there will be activity later as the warmth comes in, they predict a rise of 20 degrees today, something more than that tomorrow, that’ll bring higher wind and some snow.

The bird that I earlier called a kestrel certainly ain’t one, I finally found a picture of a kestrel instead of the written description. I don’t know what kind of bird mine is, my description is limited because each time I’ve seen it it was backlit, I saw mostly contrasts; it is larger than a kestrel, the size of a large crow is what I would guess.

Approaching an intersection

This street ahead changes and is no longer the one I should be on, I see the caution light where a number of alternates branch away; I can’t see any highway or street signs or speed limits, if I look over my shoulder I can see that all the streets behind me have names, but knowing the names of streets passed doesn’t help my drive this morning.

I could pull over and stop, like the idling cars I have been passing, but I have too much momentum, I have never driven in the curb lane, I need to make a decision without losing speed; where do I look and who do I ask?

There is a fellow who became famous for touting that he went down the less busy fork, and that was fine for him, but choosing a route based upon who else goes down it or not doesn’t make much sense to me.

What I do know is that I have become a pretty good driver, and that whatever route I travel I’ll probably not run off the road and into the ditch.

Walking the empty street

In my dream this morning I was walking down a city street, much like Lincoln Avenue in Chicago, there were stores and there were vacancies, the stores had replaced previous ones, had nailed their facades over the previous facades; there are gaps between the sheets of glossy black panels and the old, worn bricks to which the panels were fastened, strips of glossy metal laid meaninglessly over black sheets and around expanses of glass. I go into store after store, , the stores have random assortments of goods; there is a stuffed armchair with chromed strips around and down to the floor, the butter colored leather is overstuffed with feathers or foam, it is partially covered in the plastic the manufacturer used for shipping, there is nothing worth buying–I can think of no place I would put such a chair, no way I would sit in such a chair, no reason to show interest or to buy.

Another store, another group of things for sale, gadgets, doodads, accessories; a saleswoman approaches, she is hair color ‘blond #3′, lips ‘injection mk.4′, other paints and glued on bits, she says ‘you can fuck me if you wish’, I thank her and walk on.

The aisle I am walking comes to an end, there is another parallel to it, and to cross from where I am to the parallel one requires that I use a moving walkway four feet long, I step on because that is the only way, the next aisle continues past stacks of stuff; why was one aisle now the other one, what is the difference, why is there a moving walkway four feet long?

I walk through one store and then another, down the street past places with signs ‘for rent’, ‘for sale’, ‘will modify to suit tenant’. Why? For what reason are any of these stores open? Why would I want to fuck a woman who has no features of her own, who is shaven and waxed and plucked and sprayed? Wouldn’t it be nice to hold someone’s hand, return a quiet smile, walk together? Wouldn’t that be nice? And isn’t that the fantasy that is most difficult to reject?

This is the dream I had early this morning, I lay in bed for nearly an hour looking at my dream, memorizing the parts that are important; then I got up to start walking my day, I squeezed the juice from two large navel oranges, left the filter off of the juice machine so that all the pulp would come through with the juice. Today I want to chew and swallow, taste and smell, extract all that a couple of good oranges have within them. Five scoops of beans go into the grinder, warm the coffee pot and the mug with boiling water from the kettle; coffee and very hot water stirred together, the grains swelling , the brew is deepest brown and opaque; it tastes as good as it smells as good as I imagined before throwing the covers off and getting up.

The dream? That this is a meaningless journey; things, places and people that I look to for comfort, for permanence are neither.

What is permanent is the walk, be satisfied putting one foot in front of the other, doing it again, breathing one breath after another, going from one shop to another, cease looking to make an accessory become a permanent piece of who I am.

Mary Tyler Moore did a commentary for a show about television comedy; the person on camera was injected, tightened, spray painted, tufted with unnatural fibers, lashes glued and tinted. A grotesque sight. Why do this? Why appear like this? Is that all there is to that person? Is she nothing but facade? And through the interview I remembered how she and others in her apartment building objected to falcons nesting, spoiling the facade of their building. Is it all just fucking facade for her? Is there a her under all that facade?

My dream was not about despair, emptiness and meaninglessness, it is about the walk; it is about how difficult it is to turn away from what is offered out there, that what is offered isn’t important or interesting. There is the walk. And it is done alone, no matter how much I wish it were otherwise, it is done alone. I don’t understand just why, but there is real joy in doing the walk.

Meaning & Acceptance, the Great Jigsaw Puzzle

A few months ago when I began writing a weblog I wondered why I was doing this, why anyone would do this? As I began to find my voice I understood that I was beginning to see clearer than I had; to put down words that any other person in the world can read is as different from diary writing as masturbation is from conceiving a child.

As a kid there was a period when I loved doing jigsaw puzzles, starting with those of a dozen pieces, each as large as a cookie, to the monsters with a thousand pieces of blue sky. I went through that time of forcing a piece where it didn’t belong, feeling the wrongness before anyone else saw it; there was one time when a piece was broken, and so fit, almost; then came that period when I knew the shapes that were common to all the puzzles, each manufacturer had only a fixed number, there was the big square piece with a large lug on each side, the long rectangle with asymmetric lugs, those that had divots on all sides, and the various other chunks. That was the beginning of the end of fascination, I knew the pieces, there were no more surprises. A lesson I learned and have not forgotten is the feeling I had when I snapped the right piece into place, the color was right, the notches and voids aligned exactly, the feeling was right.

What I am doing with a weblog is to assemble my puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle with a difference: no piece that I have picked up along the way resemble any other piece, each piece is true in its own way, each truth has to be aligned with every other or it won’t feel right,  I know the right feeling. I am assembling in the dark, my eyes are blind, it is all done by feel. The pieces are slippery,  sliding over one another and away from my fingers as I try to pick them up and put them in place. I don’t know what picture I am supposed to be making with these pieces of life, but I know instinctively  that I have to make my complete panorama.

When I rail against those who assume that there is a universal plan of life, when I make fun of those who believe the unbelievable it is as I would laugh at someone who is trying to put the wrong piece into the puzzle, who believes without question that that piece must go there even though it makes no sense at all. The Ten Commandments were the solution for the situation Moses had at that time and place, that the rules are not wrong today does not mean that we still are nomads in a dessert.

I needed to go out for forty days and forty nights in order to understand my situation  and what I will make of it. The pieces that I am placing on the table, fitting as I can, are those that I have, that may or may not be relevant to yours. There is no universal plan, and that is unsettling, makes me anxious.  But there is something, something that can’t be doubted, something about existence, about my being and being aware.

I don’t know what causes my need to put my life pieces together in a way that feels right, a need that began with that first child’s jigsaw puzzle; as I look around I see that almost everyone else is making an effort to solve a puzzle together, or that they have announced that they are leaving the table to be a conservative.

When I see that each person has a puzzle to solve I am not ignoring the commonality, I still know that it isn’t a good thing to steal my neighbor’s goat, fuck his wife, make a lying statement; those are common in a gross way, now I look at the fine points.

I don’t think that I have put down here anything new or worth returning to, but I do know that I needed to put these notions down in order that I can look at the next ones.

I accept all that I have written, just as I accept myself as I am, without using the terms perfect or complete, I am as I am, I am doing as I will do, and that is all I need say about that.

Letting go of meaning

For the last day I knew that I had to put down here what follows, it comes from saying goodbye to a new old friend, from the understanding that I am starting a new epoch, from that special insight that sets us apart from everything else that is alive. Any embarrassment I feel about writing this comes from my inability to put down just the right words that express what I know, what every one of us knows within.

My path led me to find meaning for who I was and what I must be about, “what will you be when you grow up?”, the route that took me everywhere but to peace. I don’t know why I never questioned the mission, never followed the clues that pointed to a wrong end; I searched and searched for the thing that would make me valid. Depression and terrible anxiety were all that I found.

There is being and knowing, that I am, everything is built upon this. Out of this came, comes, the knowledge of the mystical that I first experienced when Lydia Aello loved me and I loved her in return. Various experiences were of the mystical nature, mostly they happened when hearing a certain piece of music, looking at a picture, that kind of thing; most intense was when I believed that I was about to die, when I could see the deep black of the edge. It was from that intensity that came my daily exploration of the Spirit, the presence, etc.

I felt the need to put all of that down here again while we are at this new place, this beginning, this New Year. Intuitively I know that this direction is unlike the others, the goal a better one.

And I know that I have spent enough time analyzing and writing this: And that the bird feeder is empty, that the rent check needs to be delivered, that there is a cable for the new television that needs to be exchanged for the on that will do the job. And so it goes.

A man from Darfur

I met a man from Darfur; it was an early evening in August, I was walking in the livery staging area at O’Hare. The lot can hold about 200 livery cars and over 300 taxi cabs, a lively place to be on a pleasant evening. I doing what exercise I do, he the same, we walked and talked together for a while, I never saw him again.

The man told me that he had just returned from Darfur, that he had grown up in that area, emigrated to the U. S., had just returned from a visit. He described holding a child as it died, knowing there were other children in the village who were about to die, so many had died in the place he had grown up, so many more would die in the future. There was nothing he could do about it. He was sad, angry, confused, frustrated, and had to come back from that place.

He told me that he was a Muslim, but not a practicing one, that the religion based destruction and killing kept him from the rituals and ceremonies that he had learned growing up. They were responsible for the death of this child, the other child, and all of the others, they who were supposed to be his spiritual guides.

His angry argument against the religious authorities was familiar, I don’t imagine that there is anyone growing up in our culture who has not gone through the argument and history of religion based cruelty, it is something that we start in high school and keep through the early years of college: examples and blame, the frustration of not having a spiritual organization with clean hands. That there is no religious group that has not killed and injured. I don’t need to go through this old harangue, there isn’t anything new about it.

I suggested that he should temporarily lift the words from this business, Allah, Muslim, whatever the nouns are they should be set aside for now. Don’t throw them away, keep them close to hand, within sight and reach. Then go to how he had once felt, what feeling that the practice had given him, just the feeling experience. Stay with just that for a while. He understood what I was offering, agreed that it felt good, was a comfort against his frustration.

All of the words of a Spiritual life carry baggage, so much of it that it is almost impossible to grow from under that weight. Put aside God, Jesus, Christianity, Jehovah, Allah and whatever words, and let whatever it is that is behind those words rise to the surface. There is, always has been, something that needs to be felt, that can’t be ignored, it is the basis for all religions and cults. Just go to that place within, relive the feeling that that you find.

This is nothing more difficult than doing this, nothing takes more courage, and it is the most wonderful. Leave the safe words passed down from your father and mother, the authoritarian laws and directions that were to give lifelong guidance; set them aside, for a short time, be courageous.

The symbols, ceremonies, laws will always be there, they can be picked up and carried at any time—-but for just this short time set them beside me, when I come back to them they will have even more power than previous.

This piece has been the most difficult to complete, has taken nearly a week to get this far. It is far from complete, is disjointed, the words not exact. Writing about this is like engraving smoke. I feel as if I had done too much exercising, I am sore and creaky, and I have a headache; all for those couple of paragraphs. I’ll post this today, will come back to it again, and then once more.

Accept Meaninglessness

If it is that accepting meaninglessness requires the greatest courage, and I can’t come up with something that requires more, then what are the rewards of doing so?

To accept meaningless takes a long time, the roots for the idea of ‘the meaning of life’ are many and deep; but as almost everyone dimly realizes, the plant they feed bears no fruit. The various meanings that people try evaporate, they give no sustenance, are both shallow and superficial; to accept meaninglessness leads to anxiety and a loss of direction, or does i?

There is that scintilla of a notion that accepting meaningless is right, and it is. The courage to follow this notion, to admit that the patent recipes for Truth and God that bombard us from the fundamentalists are all puffballs, tests and then strengthens one’s own being. And then one is on the other side, transcending the mundane.

I will try to write about this again.