A Fisherman of the Air

Recovering ...

2008-01-19T21:15:00.001-08:00

I just got home from the hospital a few days ago, where I was for a week. I thought I might have had a heart attack, but it turned out to be pericarditis, an inflamation of the lining of the heart, very painful but not as serious. It weakened my heart pretty good though, so I have to take it easy for a while till it repairs.

This really took me by surprise. I guess I'm a typical man that way, staying in pretty good health until all of a sudden I fall apart. And suddenly have to start taking massive quantities of pills and obsessing about my lifestyle and every little action I do. Weird.

I'm not sure, but I think the inflamation was brought on by the accumulated stress of some run-ins I had with this strange instructor I have for the distance-education course I'm taking. I'm not going to get into what happened (the last thing I need is to repeat it over in my mind in order to write it), but let's just say that she isn't exactly a role-model for the selfless kind of person us students are supposed to be in training for. And I guess it irritated me more than it should have. But I've come to see that she's simply an example of "those who can't do, teach". I've come out of the experience much more able to tolerate people's inadequacies, including my own.

Let's face it, all of us are full of holes. Yet we do manage to stumble on. And in the process we've managed to build up this amazing civilization. It's incredible when you think about it.

How big a change is this...

2007-12-24T20:39:00.000-08:00

I'm going from twenty years as a florist to being a community mental health worker! Try to put that together in your mind. Right now I'm about three quarters of the way through my course and can't wait to get started working.

After Linda and I retired from the florist business (and went to Hawaii), I've been very unsettled about what to do with my life. It was just sheer luck that I found out about this job. Too bad I hadn't twenty years ago, instead, but then again I think I was too immature for it until now. Fifty seven is about the right age for this kind of thing, I think.

Right now, it's Christmas Eve. I don't have time to write more about it now, and am also in a bit of a panic studying for my mid-term. (Can you imagine that at my age?) There's a heck of a lot more I could say about all this but it will have to wait a bit.

It's all very... Well, let's say interesting.

Just woke up

2006-10-09T18:25:00.000-07:00

, originally uploaded by burfield.

Just woke up.
Granola. Green tea.
Lap top in front of me...

I was hanging around the information desk at the hospital, knowing some of the people who work there. A guy came in to visit someone, asking directions. The desk was short-staffed at the time so I volunteered to help him. We walked off to some chairs and I pulled out my hospital map, showing him where the cafeteria was and so on. I asked what room the patient he was coming to see was in. He said it wasn't one patient, it was the girl's trumpet troop. I remembered hearing about them, that they had been involved in some horrific accident. I went back to the desk for their floor number. When I returned I had a big smile for the guy. I said that apparently there had been some remarkable recoveries among the girls.

As I talked to him I imagined the effect the happiness of the girls who recovered would have had on the girls who weren't recovering. It would probably make them even more depressed. I was thinking this as I was waking up. It was that kind of a dream - that so captured my imagination and my thought process that it blended right in with being awake. I was trying to think of what I could say to one of those girls to cheer her up. Well, first of all, maybe cheering her up wasn't what she needed. She had a right to be sad, just as the recovered girls had a good right to be happy. This is what gives a person's life its richness, I thought. But beyond the sadness, and depression, what could I tell the girl that would allow her to be positive about herself again, even though she was terribly debilitated. This was very important to me, that I come up with a good answer, even though I was now awake, staring up at the ceiling.

Here's what I would say: I would say, down into her deep sadness: "I have something very profound to tell you that you need to know in order to come out of this." Then I would tell her about the little man I had seen long ago on a TV show - I think it was the Guiness Book of Records show, or something like that. He was the shortest man in the world, less than two feet tall. The show had taken a camera crew to his home and had shown him sitting on a chair. It was shocking. He was mostly head, with what looked like a little sack of a body underneath, hidden inside some modified clothing. It wasn't much bigger than his head. He had no legs and just short, deformed arms. But I remember myself suddenly waking up inside somehow as the interviewer asked him the first question and he responded in a normal voice: It was so strange that, looking only at his face and hearing him talk, he could have been anybody. They asked him how he felt being so small, did it bother him, get him depressed. He said not at all. He lived a normal life. There were things he could do and things he couldn't do. He did what he could, and tried to find ways to do what he couldn't. Then he introduced his wife. She was a woman of normal height. Again I was shocked. Certainly she was a very homely woman, who no doubt married him feeling no one else would have her, but when they asked her how she liked being married to this little man, she beamed happily and said she loved him very much. And then they introduced their two children, a boy and a girl, both normal in all ways and very good looking, towering over their father, but responding to him in front of the camera just as any kids would to their father. And again I was shocked. The kids obviously liked and respected him, and didn't think about his size. I accepted that, but couldn't really see how it would be possible until he was asked about how he earned a living for his family. He said, come on, I'll show you. He hopped down from his chair onto the floor, walked himself with his hands and the stub of his body across to the door, went outside, got onto a board with wheels and showed the interviewer around his farm, which he had bought, had made a success of, and largely worked himself. Then he put his cowboy hat on, pulled himself up into the driver's seat of a one-tonne truck, waited for the interviewer and cameraman to get in beside him, and, with foot pedals that were modified for hand use, drove into town and waved proudly to all his friends and acquaintances who waved back from the sidewalk. End of story. He reminded me of my own father, who owned and operated a farm totally blind, which now seemed even a worse debility than the little man's. I thought I would tell the girl that the profound lesson here is that everyone has personal limits, that everyone's limits are different than everyone else's, andthat the essence of life is to find those limits, to accept them, and to thrive within them, and to be satisfied with the life that results. The short man, as opposed to being very unlucky, actually was one of the luckier ones. It had been very obvious to him right from the start, as a child, what his personal limits were, as opposed to those of others. So at a very young age he learned to accept them and to thrive within them. As I saw him on TV I was brought to tears by the seeming contradiction between the weakness of his body and the incredible strength of his person.

As I completely woke up, looking at the ceiling, still thinking about the girl - that I would tell her this profound truth, that in the end a deep appreciation of it was all she needed for happiness - I began to think about my own life. Ever since Linda and I sold our flower shop I have had a difficult time. A very difficult time. I've found myself lost in distraction for months on end. During the brief instances when I managed to get myself to think about myself seriously, I realized that I had lost track of my life's journey, that I no longer knew who I was. When I was young there was a definite course forward in my mind, not one anyone else would recognize maybe, not a course through society or the outer world in any way, but a kind of searching course. There were things I was searching for, and slowly making progress in finding, that involved my idea of the world, the universe, and who and where I was in it. Each little step on the way thrilled me. I would have had a very difficult time describing most of them to others, but I recognized them clearly and they were major campsites along my way. Then I got married, to a woman I loved, and still do, and that was both another campsite and a distraction as well. Then together we opened a flower shop and it was yet another campsite and yet another distraction. As time wore on, along with the responsibility of it all, and of dealing with flowers, which were not the kind of things my essential self knew or cared about, I began to feel like I was drastically off course, and was losing my course, and was losing my self. Too much time wore on. Finally Linda and I got rid of the store, and moved to this island, and I practically became immobile here, unable to find myself, or to a large degree even to remember myself. I started reading pulp novels, for the first time in my life, and just passed time. As you may have noticed, I even stopped writing in this blog. Luckily, Linda kept loving me, and the overwhelming beauty of this island supported me somewhat, as did the fact that we were making friends here amongst our neighbours - the first time I've experienced that in my life. Slowly little bubbles of myself began popping unexpectedly to the surface. Maybe once or twice a week lately I would get a glimpse of my real life, and would either reel back into distraction or smile about it and then promptly forget it.

And then this morning I woke inside this dream of being in a hospital, and of trying to help someone, who of course was myself, who wanted to help these girl trumpeters (also of course myself) to overcome their disabilities so they could begin again letting loose those long high notes of joy.

As you can imagine, I'm relieved to be told that not all my feelings are irrevocably damaged, that some have survived and even recovered. I can feel it's true. So now I'm thinking of my limits, of what I'm good at and what I'm not. And of how good and how not. And I can see that to find those limits and to begin to live within them is to live in the present, not in past ideas and dreams and disappointments. This blurb is the first action I've taken in the direction of my self for some time. It feels good. And right, once again.

Down from the clouds

2006-05-14T14:08:00.000-07:00

Picture 245, originally uploaded by Stan2.

Most of the travels I've gone on have been very personal journeys, directed as much inward as outward. It's a habit I've formed, so that when Linda and I went to Hawaii recently, even though we were in a land dense with tourists, I was always anticipating some personal revelation to show itself, even there amongst all those middle managers and their families in their Hawaiian t-shirts and artificial leias.

Well, when you have your eyes open for something you just might see it.

This one came in three parts, and actually began before we left for Hawaii, maybe a month before, one morning as I woke from a strange dream. During the last second of the dream I was plunging down through the air, at breakneck speed, towards jungle, which suddenly appeared in great closeup detail below me. I wasn't in a panic, but, of course, when my eyes popped open, just in the nick of time, I assumed I must have been crashing. And as I thought about it that day, all I could imagine was that it had been a prescient dream of an airplane crash. One that I was in, of course. And that killed me. I mentioned it in a comment on this blog (we were talking about dreams), and a certain Ms Black was kind enough, and astute enough, to replace my interpretation with a much more palatable one. She said the dream may have been prescient alright, but not of my death. Rather, it was more likely symbolic of "coming down to earth after a very long bout of stress and uncertainty. You're finally getting some relief." And of course, down to earth means essentially back to reality, away from my habitual mental life, which is no doubt the source of the endless cycles of stress and uncertainty, and into a more practical, real kind of life. By way of this trip to Hawaii.

When we boarded the plane, I clung onto this interpretation, reciting it to myself at appropriate moments. Actually I wasn't that anxious, but of course I didn't have to be until we approached the jungle around the airport in Maui. En route, I pulled out a magazine I had bought to read, one which you can only find in the bigger magazine racks, one of my favourites. It's called Parabola, subtitled The Search for Meaning. Each issue (it's a quarterly) focuses on a different aspect of that search. And the cover photo or painting reflects the theme. Well, this issue had just hit the stands before our trip, and I was amazed, and shocked, by the incredible painting on the cover. Was this just coincidence or what? It was of a jungle - very high, dense, beautiful jungle trees - looking at them from a meadow's space away, a meadow on a hill, with the trees climbing into the sky as they began to drop down the hillside ahead. In the middle there was an opening in the trees, as of a cutline going through them down the hillside, with the canopy of the trees coming together high above it. And down on the grass, just where the opening began, sat, crosslegged, a man, gazing in meditation down through those incredible, very peaceful trees.

This scene was more than a coincidence, as you'll see in a moment: It was incredibly prescient of the next part of this whole experience.

Anyway, you can imagine that as soon as I saw the jungle on that cover I had to buy the magazine to read on the plane to Hawaii, especially as the theme of the issue was "Coming to our senses"! That fit perfectly, not only with what I wanted in Hawaii, but with Ms Black's interpretation of my dream. So now even the picture helped to convince me that maybe she was right. And that maybe reading it would help calm my fears.

As soon as things settled down on the plane, meaning when I had got my fill of looking down on the clouds (which I've always loved to do on flights), and when we had been fed, and I decided I could do without the dumb movie that was being shown, and as soon as boredom had begun to set in, I pulled out that magazine and began to thumb through it. Hmmm. What article would I read (as there were a lot in it)? And how would I even make that decision, since reading it had to do with more than just information gathering, but with such etherial things as prescience, dreams, fears, existential thoughts, and so on. In other words, with my subconscious. The main article, at least the one emphasized on the cover, was called "Shaking Our Senses Free", which sounded perfect. But then again maybe it wasn't. How to tell. So I looked at the table of contents. "The Invisibles - enigmatic dimensions of the everyday." Hmmm. "How I Pray is Breathe: Thomas Merton in the Hermitage Years - Merton's rehabilitation of the sensible." I thought about that one. I have always been a little fascinated with Merton for some reason. And this was about his time as a hermit, something I could relate to from my own experience as a hermit out in the wilderness. I wondered what had happened to him. What it was like. But on down the list: "Common Sense - An interview with Peter Kingsley." Wow. Common sense. Something I do and don't take deeply seriously. Yes, I want to read that. "A Walk with Krishnamurti: From his Journal - Attention without wish, without search, without complaint." That sounds like an idea I like, but ever since I read a bit of one of his books when I was young, and thought "That's Nuts!", I've had a hard time getting back into it. "Recovering Sight - Freeing the gaze from "mere looking"". Sounds good. "Embracing the Irrational - An interview with Marion Woodman". I, Mr. Rational, have always wanted to see that flip side clearly. "Smell - Scent as medium between Heaven and Earth." Okay. And "Embodying Wisdom", about Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's teachings. And finally, "Now I am Sitting Here - Experiencing sensation and feeling." Sounds just right. And by Gurdjieff. And then there were short articles just as interesting, and poems, and epicycles, and film reviews, and book reviews. What to read. I still couldn't decide, so I started thumbing through it.

But first I noticed at the top of the contents page a description of the cover picture, a painting by the Cuban Tomas Sanchez, "...known for his paintings of dense tropical forests, full of etherial light and the sound of cascading waterfalls, just this side of magic..." Yes. Can't wait.

I flipped the page. The first article was illustrated with meaningless paintings of some kind of flowing something, looking all too familiar, like the hippy paintings of the sixties. I need more than that. Then I saw Thomas Merton. He was sitting at an outside table, reading a book with a pen in hand, wearing a denim work jacket over a sweater, with a little smile on his earthy face. (Reader, try to remember this image for later.) I was hooked. Listen to this. He wrote it from his hermitage in 1965, in a letter to a friend: "...This is where the silence of the woods comes in. Not that there is something new to be thought and discovered in the woods. But only that the trees are all sufficient exclamations of silence, and one works there, cutting wood, clearing ground, cutting grass, cooking soup, drinking fruit juice, sweating, washing, making fire, smelling smoke, sweeping, etc. This is religion. The further one gets away from this, the more one sinks in the mud of words and jestures. The flies gather." This reminded me strongly of what Ms Black said about my dream. I was excited. I read on. Since Merton was grounded in the practicalities of life, as that quote suggests, he then was free to practice his Catholic meditations without drifting off into the clouds, so to speak. He even made Zen Buddhist meditation part of his daily life, helping him "to clear an inner space, to simplify and cleanse." What he discovered in those years was only hinted at in his writings, to say nothing of the article I was reading. It seems he discovered a new vision, or rather a way the world is put together that isn't normally seen. Totally new ideas are generally very difficult to wrap one's mind around, and much of what I was reading certainly was that. But here's a quote that will give you a feel at least of his direction: "The sensible around me (nature, etc) becoming conscious of itself in and through me. A solitude in which one allows nature this virginal silence, this secret, pure, unrelatable consciousness in oneself. ... The self-awareness of the great present in which my body is fully and uniquely situated." He's saying that he is part of nature. A component of it. And his consciousness of it is it's consciousness of itself! I think when you just read this you can easily deny it, saying that consciousness is still confined inside his own mind. But when you're there in the midst of nature meditating, just seeing the rest of nature, not thinking, and so being a part of it in your consciousness (not just your body being a part of it), then it seems quite different. In fact, I'm not really sure that the one point of view is any truer than the other. We are a part of nature to a much greater degree than we are generally willing to admit.

In any case, I finished hemming and hawing over the article just before we finally began to descend toward the Maui airport. Three hours had passed. The Fasten Seatbelt sign was on. I looked out the window and thought about my feelings, and about the reality of what was happening. From my window seat I could see the jungle way down there as we dropped toward it. But all those ideas of Merton's were very solid in my mind, and they were intertwined with Ms Black's comforting explanation of my dream. So I was fairly relaxed. Alert, certainly. And thinking of possibilities. But waiting to land.

Which we did.

A taxi took us to the Banana Bungalow hostel, a situation which would take some days to get used to, especially for Linda, and the next day we immediately went on the first of the hostel's free tours. It took us through Lahaina, where we saw the huge banyon tree, then snorkelling amongst all those schools of colourful little fish at the reefs at Kaanipalli, and we even stopped for a quick side visit to a Buddhist shrine.

Which was nice. There were a few of those beautiful Asian temple buildings with all that intricate and very colourful woodwork supporting the roofs. There was also a big statue of the Buddha sitting on a wooden platform. Some offerings lay at the top of the flight of five or six steps leading up to it. This was billed as the largest statue of Buddha outside of Asia. I was curious why it was so big so I went to read the plaque about it, as I had about the temple buildings, but then another glance suddenly stopped me. Something about the statue told me it was not something that should be seen through tourist eyes, by way of a plaque. You see, it was not only a large statue, in fact a very large statue, but as I looked up at it, I realized there was something about its size that was important in itself. It wasn't just a large version of the zillions of little Buddha statues in the tourist shops. In other words, it wasn't big just as a show of big reverence. There was something else. As I gazed at it, I slowly saw what it was. Now picture this clearly in your mind if you can: This is the Buddha sitting with legs crossed and hands at ease, meditating. His back is straight, not slumped, so there seems to be no effort in his posture. In fact the whole feeling is of effortlessness, even from such a large person. Rising behind him, and to each side, there are very tall Norfolk pine trees, but the Buddha himself is so large that when you look up at his face you only see the tops of the trees behind him. He is not dwarfed by them as we are. He is up there with them. Well, this juxtaposition makes me think of the trees themselves, something I have more experience with than the Buddha. The trees are very old. As I look at them, their feeling overwhelms me: They are not going anywhere, not struggling to get anywhere, as we are. And yet they have not given up either, you might say. They are just there. Period. Unmoving. And unmovable. Comfortable being there. Fulfilled. Always fulfilled. Not needing anything more. I can't help but compare them to the statue in front of them. That very large, presumably heavy Buddha sits so comfortably in that cross-legged position and with that perfectly straight back, as straight as the trees, yet with such a relaxed, alert posture. He's very much like one of the trees. He's not even 'doing' a meditation, but just silently being there. As Merton described the trees, he's an exclamation of silence. He seems like he could sit there, without aches or pains, unmoving but alert, forever. Before I see him closely I expect his eyes to be closed in meditation, but instead they're open, open to the trees and the world around him, and yet not looking, just seeing. That's exactly how the statue looks. Just seeing, alertly. As Merton saw himself, he is a part of nature, not apart from it.

And he has a very slight smile. Or is it just the natural expression of his body, so comfortable with itself and the world around and all the time passing?

I would love to be like that.

Linda and I passed on through the world. I did my share of hiking the jungle trails and swimming in the ocean. And now we're living in a rainforest in Canada, yes actually living amongst huge trees, in the dappled beauty of nature. I'm slowly getting used to a less-stressful life. And I'm learning to discipline myself, to have my own source of strength and motivation, not to just run all the time from my fears as I did in the city. What I do is for me. And Linda. It's a start.

What works

2006-03-28T14:03:00.000-08:00

What works, originally uploaded by Stan2.

It's been extraordinarily rainy here for the last week and a half, some kind of record. A week ago the fancy big outdoor luau we had reservations for was cancelled because of a storm the night before. We managed to attend last night's, during which it only sprinkled at the beginning and then at the end of it (they gave us ponchos). Didn't matter really. It didn't make or break our Maui experience, which is just about over.

This morning we were sitting in our rockers out on the balcony. The morning rain had stopped and it was still warm enough for me to have my tea in a short-sleeved shirt and shorts, although Linda had just got up so I put a blanket over her legs. We were gazing down at the parking lot out behind our building. I was space cadetting as usual, and Linda was observing. She said, "Have you noticed that so many people, when they have even a small bag, put it in the trunk of their car?" No I hadn't. I couldn't even imagine such a thing. I had to think hard to come up with a theory for this one, it so took me by surprise. "It must be that some people have a mindset that they must do everything the way it SHOULD be done, or is SUPPOSED to be done, without thinking about it," I said. "A LOT of people," Linda said. I couldn't imagine such a life. I thought about Linda and I. As different as we are from each other, neither of us are anything like that. I said, "You and I tend to do what works, or is easiest, first, and then secondly think about rules."

We thought about how we've spent our month in Maoi. Linda said it's surprising how little time we've had a car - for three days - and we've only taken cabs four times. On the other hand we really like the little local buses we've piled onto so many times, along with the friendly Hawaiians. And as much as the hostel took Linda by surprise during our first week, she looks back on it as the best time, considering all the people we met and the tours they took us on. Since then we've had lots of time to relax and get Linda out of her work mode.

The rain has just slowed us down to an even better pace - the most languid moments and days either of us can remember. This is what they call here 'Hawaiian time'

..........PS A reader, in the comment section below, told me the real answer to the bag-in-the-boot riddle, and this isn't it. It's simply a response to living in a crime-ridden country, something I have little experience in, being I'm from Canada.

Ghost ship

2006-03-28T13:57:00.000-08:00

Ghost ship, originally uploaded by Stan2.

I bought this camera here in Maoi, and have never had a digital one before (as you can tell from my blog). I had only tried to use the time exposure setting on it once, but last night I saw the lights of a cruise ship out in the harbour.

Well, I've always been strangely (subconsciously it would seem) attracted to ships that were lit up, possibly because they seem like little self-contained cities, or, more to the point, floating images of people getting along harmoniously. (For an introvert, that is a very big dream.)Also, they have always had for me a sort of religious feeling, maybe representing some kind of heaven, which, way out there across the water, is unobtainable. (Maybe this is just another way of saying the same thing.) And they usually are seen very unexpectedly, as happened in this case, as if appearing from another world.

Well, I whipped out my camera and decided to try my second-ever time exposure on it. Linda saw me fiddling with the camera and said she would be across at that gift shop over there, and wandered off. I took my time and got the settings right, for two seconds' exposure, then found a large tree trunk to hold it tight against. It took a while getting it at the right angle, wedging one finger under it and so on. Finally it looked good so very carefully I clicked it. For a second the screen showed "processing", and then I could see the little picture (the screen on my camera is smaller than most). The tree looked good, but when I looked down at the ship I could see something else there, something white. I pressed the telephoto button. It zoomed in on the middle of the tree. I scrolled down. There, under the tree, was a white figure, looking straight at the camera. A shock went through my system. For a split second I recalled seeing this in so many movies: Somebody would suddenly see some dead relative or business aquaintance across a busy street, standing still, looking at him. Then a big truck would go by and the person would no longer be there. I zoomed in closer on the white person and it was Linda! But she had gone to a store! I had the immediate feeling it was her ghost looking at me. From the other side. (Later I thought it was like she had been killed crossing the street.) I immediately looked up, across the street, and there was the white figure still standing there staring at me exactly as in the photo. Another shock overwhelmed me. I stared at her. She didn't move. Finally I snapped out of it and realized it really must be her, in body, not just in spirit. It had to be! I waved. And she waved back! Ha ha! Very funny! Don't do that to me.

Well, her excuse was that she saw me behaving in a very still manner, so she decided that's how she should be.

Let me tell you this about Linda: She is not a totally predictable creature.

Maoi Moments

2006-03-28T12:52:00.000-08:00

Maoi Moments, originally uploaded by Stan2.

Sitting at a table in a shady, cobble-stoned area between buildings, with seller's stalls, milling people, stores - everything - under the sky-spread green of a banyon, it's massive trunk rising beside me, I was watching a local cat, lanky black and white, meandering among the tables, sitting contentedly sometimes, living there on its own, not needing an owner. I petted it lightly behind the ears, and under its neck when it stretched its head up happily. Then a little boy came around the table, spotted it, and said to himself, "There it is." The cat immediately slipped under a fence behind me and walked off. I recognized this situation. I thought about it a while, then realized the cat was like a woman. I was the man who loved her. I felt her feelings, touched those feelings. The boy was MEN. The cat was an object. He wanted her. He wanted to grab her and pick her up.

**

Linda and I were sipping tea, waking up out on our balcony in the warm humid morning air, sitting back in two easy chairs. Linda had her feet pressed up against the railing. I put my cup down on the little wooden table. Just at the edge of my vision I noticed movement. I looked closer. Scurrying over the table were some tiny insects, so tiny I could hardly see them, looking like spiders, except that they were following each other like ants, running around on the table top and up and down one of its legs. They were very tiny, whitish. The more I looked the more of them I could see. I thought how strange to see spiders that behaved like ants. How would they find their prey without building webs? Were they scavengers? I brought it to Linda's attention and she was kind of ambivalent about the entire mystery, not really wanting to let it enter her morning mind, but wondering about it nevertheless. Because I was. She's like that. Well, eventually I took my glasses off and got my eyes right down there on top of them and could see that they had six legs, not eight. They actually were ants, just strangely coloured ones. I sat back. I had this feeling of having looked into some kind of a between-world. Yes. For sure. There are two worlds of critters in terms of us humans. There is the world of cats, birds, geckos, whales out in the water, brightly coloured fish, that kind of thing. They catch our attention. Then there are for instance the chicken-flu viruses, the assorted tropical amoebae and bacteria in the water, zillions of things we injest every day like dust mites (have you seen those magnified?), worm eggs in our boxes of cereal, and on and on. They are so tiny and we are so monstrously huge, mountain-like, that we don't notice each other. Can't. Wouldn't want to if we could. Don't need to. But between the geckos and the mites there are these in-between creatures. My little white ants for instance. Linda and I had just come back from the beach up at Ka'anipalli, a fancy resort area, where I swam for a bit and then where we had some lunch in this great, outdoor restaurant beside the sand, its heavy tables under huge shade umbrellas. I watched the little birds that liked to sit on the edge of the umbrellas, scan the tables and sand under them, and then flutter down fast to grab scraps - in and out before those great human legs came along. Well, now I wondered what else had been running around on those tables that not even I had noticed. And of course the waitresses were focused on much larger things, not the least of which was stress. The eyes of the tourists were half shut, seeing only the blue out there, sometimes the white rolling surf, and each others' eyes drifting in the ambiance.

Eight-sided pie, a local delicacy

2006-03-27T19:13:00.000-08:00

Eight-sided pie, a local delicacy, originally uploaded by Stan2.

The other day Linda met me at the wharf as I got off the Lahainna Princess, a charter boat that took about 20 of us out to the Molokini atoll to snorkel. We went for a cup of tea and I told her about all the colourful fish I saw and especially about my regrets at missing the octopus. (After I had got back on the boat someone said he had seen it, and described exactly where it's hole was, from which he could see its tentacles emerging. I could see in my mind exactly where the hole much have been and kicked myself for missing it.)

Linda said, "Oh, I hate those things - all those tentacles, and the way they all come together and it shoots off," gesturing with her hand like a rocket. "And that head." She made a face. I watched her with a smile. (The more she's just being herself the sweeter she is.)

I said, "Yeah, it's alien, like a creature from another planet." Which got me going in my own direction. And the more I thought about it the more worked-up I got. "Yes," I explained, "they are exactly like aliens. Because they evolved on a completely separate line from ours, ever since they were I guess one-celled animals, or nearly that far back. They came up through what we now see as clam-like things, and snails and slugs, and squids, to the ultimate end of the line, the octopi. They have highly developed eyes, for example, and brains probably equal to many primates. But here's just how alien they are: The workings of their eyes are inside out, compared to ours, and their brains are not two sided, but are built evenly around a ring. Their whole chain of evolution could easily have taken place on another world, it has so little to do with ours."

Linda was nice enough to listen to my spiel, but with this little smile she just couldn't repress.

Under the banyon tree

2006-03-27T19:04:00.000-08:00

Under the banyon tree, originally uploaded by Stan2.

Last night I went out for a walk in the late evening. There were only a few little groups of late partiers out still, but mostly I was alone, which was a shock. In the daytime Front Street is crowded with tourists. Now it felt a bit like it must have back in the early part of the last century. The buildings are still all the same, preserved just as they were then - wooden two-story structures, many with balconies on the top floor. The great trees, and the warmth of the night are the same as when whaling ships crowded the harbour. I kept walking, just couldn't turn around it was so quiet and peaceful. I finally came to the great banyon tree. All of its twelve trunks were lit up with spot lights under its immense canopy, which covered the whole block of two thirds of an acre. I walked in amongst them, totally alone. The only sound came from one of the branches over to one side. Two of the tree's hundreds of mynah birds were yapping at each other, in their usual loud but musical way. I don't know what about, but it did sound like a late-night conversation - they never seemed to repeat anything. I wandered around under the leaves, eventually leaning against one of the very strange, probably 40-foot-long branches, a foot in diameter, that run out horizontally only five or ten feet from the ground. At 40 feet this one had put down a trunk, again a foot in diameter, just to support the branch, and then went on horizontally another 40 or 50 feet where it put down another trunk that this time continued up into the canopy, pushing the tree on outward. I wondered how sturdy the branch I was leaning on was, so I pushed against it rhythmically. Eventually the branches going up into the canopy way off at the far end began slashing around. A mynah bird on it protested quite vociferously, "Hey, what's going on here!!" Then another added his outrage, and another. "It's night time! How come our branch is going all over??" Then a few in a neighbouring branch that wasn't moving at all said, "I don't know. It's all pretty quiet here." Or something like that. Others joined in, all expressing their concern or relief. Of course, no one bothered to come down to look around and see what was happening. I got a chuckle out of it for a while, but finally stopped and wandered off. The tree became still, and the mynahs stopped chattering and went back to sleep. I don't know if they snore, but I didn't hear any if they did.

Linda with big snails

2006-03-26T16:17:00.000-08:00

Linda with big snails, originally uploaded by Stan2.

Linda and I were walking down the street in Lahaina the other day, talking, and she was looking at me with this little smile on her face. I can't describe it. I said, "Why can't I ever get a picture of you looking like that?" She said, "Well, because I had all these little feelings in me."

I guess our feelings mold our faces a lot more than we think they do, or, more to the point, those subtle expressions have a lot bigger impact on the people who know what they mean than you would think they would. And that impact is what they are trying to photograph. What I'm trying to photograph in Linda. Of course, the act of photographing someone instantly puts them in a whole different emotional situation. And even beyond that, there's the person we think we are, and so the person we think we look like. That expression may actually make it to the surface now and then, but not in a particular situation that detracts from it, meaning just about any situation that involves other people, especially for an introvert like me!! Ha ha ha!!!

An incident I remember from way back in my college years: I was working in the college paper, and at one point I was standing up on a chair getting down a box of something for some reason. It so happened I was alone at the time, and being an introvert I was very relaxed in that situation. Well, at that moment the door opened and the paper's editor, a fellow student, walked in. For some strange reason, my open, relaxed feeling carried on, even with her looking up at me. I knew it must have been on my face because it was all through me. A smile immediately came over her face and she said, "Stan, you would make a great Santa Claus!" This was nowhere close to Christmas. Anyway, you see what I'm getting at. Our emotional situations really colour how we look, and how others see us.

Here's another one from way back in my teen years, that I'll never forget. I was walking up to an intersection in Calgary. It had just started to rain. This fairly good-looking business woman, the only other person at the intersection, had just reached it from ahead of me. Well, just as she glanced at me I happened to glance up at her umbrella with a feeling of envy, which I could tell for that split second had come become visible on my face. I, a young man, a stranger, was walking toward the woman at that moment, and incredibly she immediately said to me, "Would you like to share my umbrella?" She held it over slightly, with her on one side and I was expected to get under the other side. She must have been as shocked as I was at her offer. I smiled and said "Sure", but immediately both of us felt how awkward it was. We walked across the street sharing the umbrella. I tried not to touch her. We didn't say anything because we didn't know each other, and were too much in shock to talk anyway. When we got to the other side, I guess I could have kept on walking under the umbrella with her, but instead I smiled and thanked her and went down the street the direction I had come from. I didn't want to put her in an awkward situation. And yet it was her who had made the offer. And yet I knew that she didn't have any choice. She was just reacting automatically to my expression. Well, here's the thing. That expression of mine was, unlike the vast majority of peoples' expressions, pure and spontaneous. Just like my Santa Claus one. What does that imply? That the great majority of our expressions are manipulative, either in terms of trying to make other people react in a certain way, or in trying to make them see us in a certain way. And the people seeing those expressions react defensively to them inside. The result is a constant battle going on between people.

So when someone sees a dog, with it's pure, spontaneous expression of happiness at seeing us, we cannot help but react to it just as spontaneously and strongly as the newspaper editor and the woman with the umbrella did to me.

And when two people who love each other deeply look at each other, that feeling can overwhelm their faces with a freedom their feelings seldom otherwise have.

Warmth

2006-03-23T12:42:00.000-08:00

Warmth, originally uploaded by Stan2.

A cloudy, breezy day. She was feeling a bit chilly. I took advantage.

Incredible times

2006-03-21T12:47:00.000-08:00

P3060053, originally uploaded by Stan2.

We can scarcely believe our eyes. Such strange, and beautiful things.

Life is..... (Hawaii part 2)

2006-03-15T18:19:00.000-08:00

On a couple of the Banana Bungalow hostel's tours, I found myself sitting with Linda and a very urbane, extroverted, gay guy from Chicago. He liked me, I guess.

Anyway, the night before he had suggested I use his cell phone on this day's tour to try to find accommodations for the rest of the month (starting within a couple days). We were beginning to panic, as we had only planned our first week at the hostel, leaving the rest up to fate. Since fate was turning a blind eye, I phoned a couple places whenever the van turned a corner that got us within range of a cell phone antenna. The only success I had was a bed and breakfast in Lahaina, at $150 per night, up $90 from what we were paying at the hostel! And that was only available for three days. We grabbed it. At least we had that. Then the gay guy suggested very seriously that we try the resort he was going to be staying at, a gay and lesbian resort, but an open-minded one, at least so he claimed. He said he thought they might have a unit left, as they did when he got his that morning. Usable air space was rapidly disappearing when the guy from the resort answered, and yes did have a unit, for only the exact four days that would finish off week two of four for us, so I thought God or someone had decided to give us a reprieve and rapidly read my credit card number to him and yes he did get it all without interruption. So I sat back and tried to enjoy the rest of the tour. And forget that that four days would cost us $180 a day! I concentrated my attention on the crazy trees outside.

Well, the bed and breakfast turned out to be on the exact opposite end of the scale from the hostel. It was UPscale. Seriously designed. Everything went with everything. And it had the best of everything, from the shower to indoor architecture to the swimming pool and jacuzzi outside. And waiting fruit bowl. I thought at least Linda would enjoy it, being a designer at heart, and badly in need of CLEAN. But I guess only a woman could have predicted this: She couldn't relax the whole time we were there because every little disturbance we caused in the perfection of the place caused her stress, feeling we were messing up somebody else's home, and maybe even that at any moment her long-deceased mother might walk in and frown. So it goes.

The gay resort was in another town, Kihea, basically a series of resorts and strip malls on the beach, where you had to have a car as there weren't even any corner stores in walking distance. So we had to rent a car for that four days, which cost us another $80 on top of the $180 for the unit. Oh well. The price of not planning ahead in a high-demand area. I should have expected it from my years dealing with the supply and demand of flowers. The guy we knew was only there for our first day, and when he saw us strongly suggested we (meaning I) should come up to the clothing-optional rooftop. He said you wouldn't believe how liberating it is! Really. It's not sexual. Just gives you a very liberated feeling. Well, believe it or not, for about an hour, to Linda's amusement, I stewed about whether or not I shoud go up there, just out of politeness at least. I considered all the ramifications of embarassment, by whom, of what. But finally, in the end, it occured to me that maybe I should just be myself, that maybe that's what life is all about, especially when you're on vacation. And being myself meant not going up and exposing my private parts to a bunch of hopeful lads who may or may not have much else on their minds. So I didn't. Basically we just ignored them for the rest of the four days, and they us. Seldom were we or they around at the same time anyway, as we used this precious time with a car to drive everywhere we wouldn't be able to get to otherwise.

During our last two days there, however, three really big, built guys moved into the unit on top of us, and spent every second they were in (and up) bounding back and forth using our ceiling as a trampoline for their massive, muscular heals. They stored all their goodies in the kitchen area and ate outside on the opposite end of the place. Each of them would crash back and forth for each item he was using: a plate, something to eat, a knife, a fork, a cup, a saucer, some sugar, some milk, a spoon to stir it. Count it: That's at least nine jogs for each guy, 27 for the three of them, coming and going making it 54, with at least five beats per trip, totalling more than 270 body slams per meal. And that meal only gave them that much more energy to storm around with later.

On our last day, Linda and I packed and called the cab, and waited outside in the blissful quiet. The only sounds were the light breeze in the crazy trees, a few cars going by, and the most beautul bird song that just didn't stop. They were quite small birds, one up on a line, another on a branch of a palm tree. When I'm relaxed, my brain starts putting things together. I told Linda have you noticed how the bodies of birds and fish and whales are all the same shape, like the cross section of the fuselage of an airplane. I meandered on about this being an example of convergent evolution, totally different creatures evolving into the same thing to fit the environment. I could have kept on that tack for a long time, but the incredible non-stop song changed my direction. The song, I said, of each bird contains a lot of information about it: it's species, it's age, how big it is, how long it's been in that territory, and so on. I was getting ready to compare it to human society when it occured to me that Linda had already heard her daily quota of theories, so I asked her about the garden bushes she had been looking at. She said she couldn't get over the fact that she knew all of them, but only as much smaller indoor house plants, and she loved how much better they looked here, bigger. you see, her and I have completely different interests.

Anyway, the taxi came and took us to a village where the bus to Lahaina stopped. We caught it, stashed all our luggage in the front and rolled on through this very weird, unexpected, desert-and-cactus side of Maui. The Lahaina Inn was an old hotel, built in the 1920s, and now a very pleasant 'inn'. We have a little room with balcony, filled with antique Victorian furniture, which Linda loves. It's quiet, and not as expensive, $130 including taxes, and we have no need for a car for the next two weeks as the bus can take us from here to everywhere we haven't gone so far.

It's an interesting time for us, a nice mix of expected and unexpected. We're planning things moment-to moment, and it's getting easier for us all the time. And more enjoyable. We like doing things the simple way, taking the bus, buying food in a grocery and sitting in our camp chairs by the beach eating it. The second you let your guard down, the beauty that's everywhere here comes storming in.

We were looking at paintings by famous rock and rollers in a rock and roll museum here after we got set up in our room this afternoon. I read one of John Lennons songs, a hand-written original copy. It was called Beautiful Boy, written for his young son, saying he couldn't wait to see him grown up, but would have to be patient and get there from where he was, day by day. The last lines were, "Life is what happens to you/while you're busy making other plans."

Hawaiian breeze.

2006-03-10T21:44:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Lahaina, Maui, with a black guy behind me playing reggai and the warm ocean breeze moving around me. In the breaks in the music I can hear the surf out on the other side of the road.

Linda and I were in such a panic before we left Vancouver, first getting the last details of the sale of our store cleared up, and then moving all our possessions into storage, that we didn't do a very good job of preparing for our time here. We decided to give ourselves a month in Hawaii, time to really relax and get the albatros of the store off our backs, especially the stress of it all, and the continual feeling that we should be working even when we no longer had a store to work. Linda, especially, was burdoned with that.

Anyway, since we were going for a month, the idea was to keep our costs down as much as we could. I had gathered from a relative who had been to Hawaii not too long before that the hostels were good and a lot less expensive than anything else. You didn't have to be young anymore, and presumably the facilities were nicer than they used to be when I was hitchhiking back in the '60s. So I decided to do a search on the internet. The Banana Bungalow hostel in Maui turned up, and looked quite nice. So we phoned and booked a week there, a room at $59.00 a night.

Well, when we arrived, it looked EXACTLY like the hostels of the '60s, down to the thin walls, the co-ed washroom (there were others as well), the big bunk rooms, the communal kitchen and all the young HIPPIES! Yes, hippies. They looked exactly like I remember them! And were still into the same things. I guess I could have adapted fairly quickly if I was alone, but Linda had no experience with this kind of thing, and when she saw the shoddy room, and that we had to share a washroom, and what they were like, and the kitchen, and let's face it they weren't any cleaner than you would expect hordes of young travellers to leave them, she got pretty down. And when I saw that, I got REALLY down. I mean depressed. Let's face it, I got her into this. I couldn't even enjoy the beautiful Hawaiian environment for the first day. I was amazed, however, that Linda began to pull herself out of it fairly quickly, faster than I did. When she sees how things are, she can really adapt. I'm very proud of her.

In the back of my mind, I knew that mainly we really needed to get out of our shells and to start talking to people. Also, the main benefit of the hostel is that it had free tours of Maui, different ones each day of the week, which otherwise would cost us quite a bit. So the second day we started talking, and then immediately went on the first tour. In a couple days we started to relax and by mid week we were enjoying it. I was snorkeling (even Linda was a bit), even went surfing once in the long rollers coming in (okay, boogie boarding - which is a mini surf board you body-surf on). As each day wore on, we felt closer and more comfortable with the others, people from all over the world - especially when they found out I had done some 'travelling' that was big even for them, not just touristing, a big insult at a hostel. The really big tour of the week was a twelve mile hike through the vast Mars-like crater in the centre of Maui, ending with a nearly vertical 1,200 foot climb up the crater wall, with what seemed like endless switchbacks. I was by far the oldest, and even though I was the only one who had to take a break part way up, I'm proud to say I actually made it. And conquered my fear of heights enough to do it. It was an incredible, unforgettable experience, and the hostel we were staying at was the only organization offering a tour of the crater! So that made up for a lot of the negatives.

In the end, we had met some really interesting people, done things, and seen things that we had no idea of before, and then suddenly found ourselves with no place to go to. Panic set in, and we began searching like mad for new accommodations. The adventure continues.

A wonderfully horrible day.

2006-02-23T09:34:00.000-08:00

I must tell you about a very strange day I had a little while back.

Lately I've been trying my hand at trading stocks on the internet. Some time ago Linda's cousin won an $800,000 Lotto prize, and in trying to make that money grow for himself he invested $4,000 in a stock-trading software program. He became very excited when it seemed to actually fulfill its promise, multiplying his money quite magically. Well, since then, I've discovered that it isn't nearly as easy as it seemed to him at the time, that time being an up-market for stocks in general, what they call a bull market, during which it's close to impossible not to make money.

Anyway, I've been studying this stuff for some time, even though the whole thing is quite alien to my nature, out of the hope that one day I might increase our little potful to the point where we may not have to work at all anymore. (Retirement these days isn't what it used to be.) Well, I finally started getting the general drift of it all, and then worked out an angle that whould hopefully hold up in the world of real money. I practiced it for quite a while with Monopoly money on stock price charts, and sure enough it did seem to work. It amounted to buying low and selling high, as per usual in stock trading, but it involved a way of actually determining where the lows and highs were. (Don't get me wrong, this is all pretty standard stuff.) So I was excited to dive in.

Which I did. Well, suffice it to say that the reality seemed to bear little obvious resemblance to the theory. I went up and down and up and down, but more down than up. As did the contents of my account. Finally I heard something on the business channel on TV - which I had on beside my computer. It was a very good bit of news for General Motors. I can't remember what the news was now, but anyway I decided to put some money in it, thinking that others would too, which would drive the price up. Sure enough during the minute or two it took me to make up my mind, I could literally see the price shooting up on the computer screen, thou. I wasn't worried, though, that I was late, because I assumed the price would go up for several days. So I put my money down. Anyway, just after that I heard some good news about another company, Sirius Satelite Radio. The owner was buying a ton of the company stocks himself, which presumably meant he had confidence in the company, or at least other investors would get that idea and drive the price up, a self-fulfilling prophesy. (The stock marked is driven by self-fulfilling prophesies.) Sure enough, while I put some money on it, I could see the price jumping on this stock as well. That afternoon I felt quite proud of myself, thinking I had just made up for most of the money I had lost up till then.

Well, next morning, on the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, at 6:30 am my time, I was horrified to see the price of each of my new stocks plummetting. I looked at the news and saw that there was a general downturn in the market that morning. Trying to think through my stress, I decided hopefully that, after the prices dropped to some degree, hungry investors looking for a deal would snap them up, driving the prices up again. No such luck. Down and down they went. By early afternoon I realized they weren't coming up again, so I sold them both and lost about 1% of the total amount I had to play with. I was in shock. Very depressed.

Well, then I had to go somewhere in my van for an apointment. What I wanted was to hide in a corner and lick my wounds, but instead I dragged myself to the van, got in, turned the key, and nothing happened. The battery was stone dead. Oh God. I was VERY down now. Pretty much ready to cry. By sheer willpower, I got myself together, went back in and called a cab. It boosted the van and off I went. The motor hummed nicely for about ten blocks and then just stopped. This time I called the automobile association, of which I'm a member, for a tow truck. On our way to the garage, the mechanic explained all the possibilities, including being boosted by a vehicle with it's motor running, which would blow the alternator, which normally charges the battery. So the lightly charged battery would then only get me a few blocks before dying again. Oh great. Why didn't the dealership warn me about this when it sold me the van? Well, as the mechanic said, why should they care?

While I was waiting for the garage to analyze the situation, I sat in their waiting room staring at the TV hanging above the desk, thinking about all the money I lost today. Incredible! The dead battery alone would cost me about $1,500.00. Not to mention... I started going over my trading mistakes. What had I done wrong? What should I have done? Why? When? Back and forth. Eventually I calmed down to the point where I was able to see through my emotion, and the whole picture came together. I had done everything that the books had told me not to do, ignoring all that advise, actually not even realizing that I had learned it in the first place. It was as if I had done no studying or practice at all!

But now that the mistakes had been made, and the study and practice had lept back into my presence, all the answers were very clear. Now, for the first time, the theory and the practice were one. The words I had read earlier were visceral to me, part of my body, of my real functioning. I wouldn't make those mistakes again.

And then I thought about all I had learned from the mechanic in the cab of his truck, with my disabled van in tow, basic things about the world of vehicles that I would never forget. He taught me a lot, things unrelated to the battery. Like the fact that in these modern vehicles the gas pump is built inside the gas tank and relies on being immersed in gas for it's well-being, so that if you let your tank get below a quarter full the pump is likely to suddenly seize up. And to replace it inside a gas tank is a very time-consuming, expensive, operation. The dealers don't mention this. To their benefit. Because many of the newer models are built with computerized locks on everything so that only the dealerships and no one else can repair them. This is the kind of thing the mechanic taught me, while we were out there shaking around in the cab of his tow truck.

In the lobby of the garage, staring blankly up at that TV set, a very strange thing happened: I began to feel happy. Energy was surging in me again. I was so surprised at my reaction I had to try to figure out all over again what I was reacting to. It was quite simple really. What had been a terrible day had turned out to be a very good one, even a victorious one. Because I realized now - it became very clear - that the way to really, deeply learn something is by making mistakes. Trial and error. Emphasizing the error. I realized that without the mistakes, or at least without some serious struggle in trying to apply what has been easily learned from words, the words could not become a part of the real world a person lives in. All the way home from the garage, on the sky train, through a huge mall, on two busses, and walking the final stretch, I beamed with the feeling I had had a VERY successful day. Expensive, but more than worth it.

I became very self-conscious of the fact that I had not smiled to myself so much for many years. But that didn't stop me.

Linda and I are heading to Hawaii now for a month, our first vacation together for twenty years (we could never both leave the store at the same time before). I will have access to a pay computer and so will make the occasional contribution from there, but I won't be able to visit other blogs till we get back. To anyone nice enough to put comments here, I should be able to respond. See you later.

You may also want to read through the comments below, since many of the best ideas in my posts occur to me and my readers during the give and take of the comments and responses.

It's not what you think.

2006-01-30T01:27:00.000-08:00

It's been so long since I wrote anything, and so much has happened in my life since then, that I'm not even sure I can write anymore.

I don't know where to start. I guess I'll just plow ahead and see where I get when I go there.

Looking back over my past posts, I can see that they've wandered a fair bit since the beginning. So if I'm going to start writing again, this seems like a good time to start fresh. I've decided to go back to my roots, so to speak, to go to what's the essential me, to that which I love and value the most. Why bother with anything else? I don't write often enough, and I'm at the place now where I don't really care how many people read my writing anyway. If I am anything down inside, I know I'm not an entertainer.

So what am I getting at? What is this deep part of myself that is going to be front and centre from here on in? Am I going to start pushing some cult? Some kind of weird stuff? Something skewed? Out in left field? No. I'm definitely not a weird person. Even the part of me nobody but myself sees isn't really weird. Really. It's just difficult to see. Even by myself. Which is typical of men in general, I think.

Well here it is. My big thing in life is revelations. Wait a sec. It's probably not what you think. It's definitely not The Book of Revelations in the Old Testament. (Even so, notice that even though I'm an agnostic I still can't help capitalize it.) I'm not speaking of revelations in any mystical or religious sense, even though they are pretty close to being sacred to me.

My kind of revelation is more a mental or intuitive thing than mystical. Then again it may be the same thing. I've been having revelations for so long, for most of my life, that I don't really know the difference anymore, if there is one. Let me just state plainly what I love. I love the sudden understanding of something that I didn't understand before. It may come in concepts, wordy ones, or it may be visual, as a vision. But more often than not it is a feeling, a form in me that describes some part of the universe, and that, if I concentrate and pin it down, I may be able to drape words on it and thus make it visible, to myself and others.

Many revelations are quite simple, little more than ideas, but ideas which come unexpectedly. If I could remember fast enough I could go back over them afterward and count off the steps by which they occured. On the opposite end of the scale are the big blow-your-mind explosions. They're not very common. I wish they were. There's nothing like them. But they aren't. If I remember correctly, and this is very difficult to do, even right afterward, what leads up to them are a number of often quite different things, including sometimes an experience, mixed with forms and feelings of how things are, mixed with appropriate ideas and concepts, the kind I could have read about, and all mixed with my own analytical thinking and intuition, whatever that is. Sometimes these will all come together very quickly, in seconds, or they may meet each other over a longer time, maybe one at a time until it all coalesces.

I think everybody experiences what I'm talking about, perhaps some more than others. It definitely has to do with what a person is interested in. Someone with very limited interests will have few revelations, but certainly not none. People who are vitally interested in everything, as part of their character, will have revelations all the time. Why? Because the subconscious learns what motivates the conscious mind, and likes to get in on it. If the conscious mind really strongly wants to understand things, as its main priority, then the subconscious will adopt the same motivation and try to understand things itself. These understandings are felt by the conscious mind as revelations. As sprouting from intuition. Or even from the myst.

The simpler revelations aren't too difficult to communicate. I think the very simplest form the basis of much of the chatter in society. On the other extreme, the great visions are pretty much impossible to get across. Oddly, they can seem very straightforward, or at least fairly obvious when you are actually experiencing them, but just putting them in appropriate words is nearly impossible, and when you do manage it, you find nobody gets what you're saying anyway, except those who have had the same vision themselves. At least that's been my experience. Even revelations that are easier to describe, very logically, are extremely difficult to communicate simply because the listeners have their own connotations for the words you use, and their own ideas that spring forth from your phrases, all of which form a jungle they can't see through. The most meaningful revelation I've ever had, which totally changed my outlook on reality, has fallen on deaf ears every time I've tried to relate it, except with one person - my sister. And it took a lot of back and forth, and I mean a lot, but finally she saw what I was trying to say and she was astonished. And I was thrilled myself. I was beginning to think that maybe it was a crazy idea and that I was crazy for thinking it.

There are a few things that are really deleterious to the formation of revelations, I think. The biggest one is the idea, the socialized idea, that there are planes of existence, higher levels to which you can aspire when you're on one of the lower levels. This is the religious person's equivalent of the equally deleterious levels in secular society - the pecking order. My impression is that this strong belief in status is instinctive, genetic. But accepting that instinct as being objectively true kills the open mental state needed for revelation. It forces a person to believe that the only things worth learning are those that come down from on high - from priests and experts. Lesser individuals must simply listen closely to their words, or read their textbooks. And certainly any lay people would just plain be silly to try to understand things not in their own fields of expertise.

In fact not being highly specialized allows a person like me to be open to all manner of things. And not being close to successin society, to victory in attaining great status in some pyramid, also makes it easier to see beyond the pyramids and thus to take one's own ideas more seriously. Furthermore, being outside the pyramids of society keeps one from striving for perfection, which one only does to achieve higher status of some kind. And there can be no bigger obstacle to an open intuition than a struggle for perfection.

By way of illustration of a small revelation, here's one I had lately. I've always wondered why so many people can't see that the snakes-and-ladders game they are playing is only true if they believe it is, and simply disappears the second they don't take it seriously. Well, I'm an introvert. And it suddenly occured to me that probably most of the people who are embedded in the game are extroverts. And those of us outside it are mostly introverts. I won't try to convince you of it here, but if you think of the difference between introverts and extroverts you will see where this little revelation came from.

You may scoff at the idea. Well, the mere fact that it is a revelation doesn't mean that it is absolutely true, or that it may even have a feeling of truth for another person, since every person's being, and thus that being's revelations, is composed entirely of that particular person's unique experiences.

Anyway, I've decided to use this blog as sort of a diary of my revelations. I won't bother with the big ones, but the others can be pretty nifty as well. As a diary, it will be mainly for myself, but I will be happy if you enjoy them too. Who knows, revelations, even if not communicated, may at least be communicable.

You may also want to read through the comments below, since many of the best ideas in my posts occur to me and my readers during the give and take of the comments and responses. Included is a short but fairly well-written version of one of my 'best' and most-valued (by me, at least) revelations.

"What you need is...."

2005-09-26T01:14:00.000-07:00

Now that my summer of near-constant stress and panic is more or less over, I'm trying to learn something from it. It was four months long at least. I bloody-well better get something out of it.

One lesson I've come up with, in trying to reduce my stress load, is to be a perfectionist only in those few things in which perfection is critical. For instance, it's not going to make any difference whatsoever whether or not my postings to my blog are perfect. In fact, I'm going to make it a rule from now on that they not be perfect. I will suffer less stress writing them and enjoy them more. And I will have less trouble jumping in and writing in the first place. Anyway, why should they be perfect when I'm not? If the postings give an image of anybody, that person will inescapably be the writer, me, and to suggest in any way that I am in any way perfect would be a big LIE. I'm so far from perfect, that, well, I don't even know what perfect in a person is. I'm thinking about it as hard as I can right now, as I type, and I'm not coming up with any answers. So I guess I would go so far as to say that maybe there is no such thing as a perfect person, or, even further, that there are only imperfect persons, or even further yet, that there are only persons, and that the term perfection is being wrongly applied here, that it simply doesn't apply to people at all. That it only applies to things like scores on tests. What I'm saying, I guess, is that maybe the Nazis had it all wrong. Somebody should have told them. But I suppose most of the imperfect people who could have set them right believed in imperfection as well.

Anyway, the upshot of this revelation is that I am from now on just going to jump into my postings head first, or maybe feet first if I'm a little leary of what I'm jumping into, and start writing. For instance, I have given myself an hour and a half right now to pound this out. I will, at the end of that time, go back over it only to correct typos and spelling and grammatical errors, but not, definitely not, to make myself look better. I look how I look. I have grey hair, and it is indisputably getting thin on top. I have a little bit of a pot belly which I'm alternately trying to get rid of and to accept. I get stressed out very easily. If I was a professor, I would be the absent-minded kind. In fact, I would be proud to call myself that. But I'm only a florist instead. An aging farm boy, actually. Stuck in the city. And on top of it all I'm self-aware. Which I'm not sure is a good or a bad thing.

Some of you who have been following my stuff here may have read my last blurb. If so, you will know a bit already about my stressful summer. Well, I won't bore you, or stress you out (or stress myself out all over again) by elaborating on it all. Suffice to say that I was forced to do some real living but wasn't warned about it in advance. Not fair. If you've seen 'The Matrix', you will recognize me in it. I was one of those bodies suspended in a coccoon of fluid, slowly being drained of life, while all the time thinking I was a florist in a beautiful city on the West coast. Then, without warning, some compassionate soul drained my tank, dragged my body out, and opened my eyes. For the first time for a long time I was really living.

If you want to see what I was forced to see, you're welcome to look through my eyes here. At my imperfect life.

One morning, somewhere near the middle of this eye-opening summer, roughly a couple of weeks after I wrote that last posting, I woke with a start, far too early for me, to a very real, shockingly real dream. It wasn't a Matrix dream. It was a real dream. (If you know what I mean.) In it, I had been watching the chaos in my life swirling around me, the turmoil I could hardly grasp because it was all happening at once, and then I was a little further away from it, watching it in the distance - just chaos and turmoil, nothing substancial I could really make out in terms of its composition, and between me and it a kind of a white-dream distance, which I didn't notice until a man stepped in front of me from the side. He stood there a few feet away, looking right into my eyes. He was wearing hospital garb, and had a very rough face, but large, intense eyes. His head was slightly cocked to one side, and he said to me, very firmly, "What you need is oneness."

I woke up, and the dream remained strong and clear in my memory, as if it had really happened. So I thought about it briefly, but didn't take very seriously the guy's advise. I thought that's a dumb thing for a doctor to say, and anyway what a dumb-looking doctor, and drifted off to sleep again and into another dream. When I woke to my alarm clock I had no memory of the dream I had just woken from, other than the fact that I had had one, but I could still remember the doctor just as clearly as before.

I thought about it as I woke up. Again, I thought his prescription left something to be desired from a doctor. All I could think of was that he was some kind of a new-age witch doctor pretending to be a real doctor in my dream. And his rough face supported that idea. I had breakfast and went off to work, thinking about the dream on and off all day, because every time in the past when I had had one of these dreams I couldn't forget I had invariably discovered something valuable in it. I had learned that in those cases my subconscious was no longer just mumbling to itself, as it is usually doing in its dreams, but is actually speaking to me, Stan. And this dream even further emphasized that. Always before, even the unforgettable dreams had been like normal ones in that the characters wouldn't really speak to ME, but, if they must, somehow, they would only go so far as to relate to another character in the dream who represented me. But here the doctor was looking ME squarely in the eyes.

Well, at some point in the day I remembered that in my last posting on this blog I had actually been writing about the problem of living two lives instead of one. (You can check it out if you want to.) I figured my subconscious must have got the idea of oneness from that. As opposed to my real life and my escape life. My escape life is like my virtual world in 'The Matrix'. Once in, it's very hard to drag myself out. Simply because the real world causes so much stress.

But there was something else about the dream. I could not shake the look of this 'doctor'. There was something about him. It made me think that this might be a bigger, more important thing than just a rehash of my other posting. For one thing, who could this guy be? His odd features seemed to be deliberate for some reason. During supper that evening it came to me. I was eating at the table while Linda was sitting on the couch watching TV. I glanced at it, but couldn't get into what was on so I began to think about the doctor again. Of course, as soon as I did, his image popped into my mind, but this time transposed over the TV screen my eyes were on. And there he was, name and all: House. His name is Dr. House. Those of you who have been watching TV lately may have seen him. It's a new show, a medical drama, called 'House'. I don't normally have any interest in medical dramas, but watched parts of this show a couple times because the main character intrigued me. Yes, he does have a very rough look, practically beat up. (He even hobbles around with a cane.) So, Eureka!! I excitedly told Linda. (She's really into the show, ever since I first mentioned it to her some time ago.) She said, well, maybe.

Then a couple days later, I came in and sat down to eat something again. This time Linda was actually watching 'House', and, without thinking, I happened to glance at it just as the doctor was saying something to someone (actually to the TV camera), and suddenly I was actually looking at my dream in the real world!! A shock went up my spine! Yes, that was him. Then, as I talked about it excitedly with Linda, the dream finally began to make sense. You see, Dr. House is a different doctor than has ever shown up in any other TV medical drama. His character is made to look somewhat repulsive, not so much ugly as simply causing discomfort. Most characters on TV are soft and cuddly, to one degree or another. Even the supposedly ugly ones are actually beautiful, just not quite as beautiful as the beautiful ones. But not House. He is just plain strange. You can see that he could have been handsome at one time, but now his face has the uncomfortable roughness of a drunk's. You could say, okay, at least he has a great mind. But his mind is as repulsive as his face. Moreso. He is very harsh, even egotistical. He doesn't mind hurting people's feelings. He does it all the time. So then what's left to admire? There must be something. Let's face it, he's the star of the show. Well, then it occured to me what it was. To House, the truth is everything. There is no evading it. There is only the search for it. That's how he solves his medical problems. With a direct, eyes-wide-open stare. Comfortable lies don't exist in his life. There is no kidding to his patients. They get the blunt facts and only the blunt facts. I don't think you will ever come across a real doctor in a real hospital like this guy. But my subconscious knew what it was doing. It wanted me to take very seriously what it was going to tell me, so it had Dr. House himself do the job! And it made sure I wouldn't forget the image of him before I next saw him on the screen! In other words, my subconscious wanted me to know that it had some very important truth to tell me, and it wanted me to take it very seriously. "What you need is oneness." Not a sugar pill, as a normal doctor would prescribe, but the truth, no matter how dumb it sounded or how difficult it would be to swallow.

This means more to me than you might think. In dreams like this every little detail is heavy with important symbolism. You mustn't miss a thing. A house for instance generally is symbolic of the dreamer's self. I already knew this because I love interpreting dreams. (In fact, dream interpretation is probably my only genuine talent.) Since a house represents my self, and this doctor's name actually was House, something my subconscious would know, and know that I would know it, I suddenly looked at him as if at myself, and realized that yes, of course, he was me alright. I have the exact same desire for unvarnished truth. It wouldn't be much of an exageration to say it has been my lifelong quest. And I've been blunt with it far too many times. So here I was, telling myself my own revelation, and stamping the the greatest importance on it. It was me slapping myself and shouting, "WAKE UP!!"

I've been thinking about oneness ever since. And my lack of it. And need for it.

For instance, a few days after the dream I was on a small ferry from Vancouver Island to Gabriola Island. As I always do, I got out of my van and walked up to the front and looked at the water and the landscape. The sun had gone down some time before and there was only a wash of deep orange light low over the land I had just come from. I could just make out the silhouettes of some of the small islands against the purple sky ahead. I knew the scene was beautiful. But I couldn't feel it. I was still anxious from the day's business encounters back in Nanaimo. So I thought, "What you need is oneness". I thought, what exactly does that mean here? What does oneness have to do with the scene around me? I know it has something to do with my stress. I can't feel anything, either myself or my environment. Oneness. I will stop trying to feel the beauty outside me, because I can't, and just be the only one thing I can be, my own self. My body. That made sense, so I concentrated on myself standing there, imagining the weight and shape and size and look of me, to me. And nothing more. And suddenly, automatically, the feeling - the whole sad, longing, adventurous, lambent mood - of the sky and the water and all of it, came flooding in through my eyes!

That was the beginning. It's a very big problem.

Okay, my time's up.

Stagger onward, rejoicing.

2005-07-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

I have a new idea for this blog.

Those of you who visit regularly are well aware that the comment section here is usually more interesting than is the posting itself, and can actually become EXCITING at times, not only because of the special community of people who hang out here, but also because my own responses to everyone's comments and then their's back to mine, and as well their's to each other's and mine to their's and their's to mine and each others, often result in an exponential blast out into who-knows-where. On this blog you don't holler "FOUR!!" but "SNOWBALL!!" As a result, every once in a while, somewhere in the comments to pretty much every posting, I become intolerably excited. I find myself writing an essay instead of a comment. Well, I've decided that from now on that comment will become my next posting.

It'll be fun, not only to see how far we can take this, through how many postings, but also into what strange country.

So down to business.

This is my first posting back from a long and difficult time out in the darkness.

Well it just so happens that the mysterious Ms Black, near the end of the previous comment section, got me so excited about The Dark Side that my response was verging on becoming an essay. Which was my que. So, instead of punching the 'Publish' button, I saved it, realizing it must be the beginning of my new idea for the blog -- to turn that response into my next posting. How lucky, also, that the ideas in it fit perfectly with what I had planned on writing anyway, about my difficult time out in the wilderness.

The particular comment by the anonymous Ms Black that got me going was a response to one of mine about psychopaths. Amongst other things, she said, "Actually, I have read that in our dark side resides our greatest strength, once we've brought it into light."

Which naturally sent me into a paroxysm .... "As for The Dark Side, it is a very easy thing to turn into a cartoon. In fact, in my opinion using sadism and murder as examples of darkness really throws people off what it actually consists of. The darkness in a person's life consists of those aspects the person doesn't want to admit possessing. What it isn't, but which many people mistake it for, is the blatant "bad" stuff that some people do admit to having, and in fact enjoy, but which society hates them for. Those kinds of things are the dark things of society, not of the particular individuals who embody them. Some of the most horrifying individuals in society have no problem at all with what they are doing. These are the psychopaths. They don't have a dark side. You have to have empathy for your victims to see your actions as despicable and 'dark', and to not want to admit you are like that. I see true darkness in a person exactly as darkness is in terms of day and night. Night is dark not because it's "bad" but simply because we can't see what's out in it. There's no sunlight. So for those who want to understand their dark side, I apologize for throwing them off track with talk of psychopaths. Take my dark side, for example. It mostly consists of my shyness and the secondary effects that has on me. I have always fantasized myself to be a strong person. Meaning I have found it hard to admit to myself that I'm weak, that I have a serious, life-debilitating weakness stemming from shyness. It was only when the weight of unavoidable evidence became so overwhelming that I was forced to accept it that I began to see myself and my life as it really was. That's a much bigger thing than it sounds like. Because it seems to me that until you can accept your weaknesses you can't really see yourself at all. Every self-description up till then is a fantasy based on the need for denial. Even those real aspects of myself that I did see in those early years were out of proportion. For instance, I always knew I was good at understanding things, but until I could see not only that but all of me, I necessarily made it seem a bigger part of my nature, and a more wonderful thing altogether, than it really was. In fact, I was a shy person who was good at understanding things. As soon as I put those two things together, a much more real image of myself jumped out. (As it did just now for you reading this.) So what I am is not some particular aspect that I'm focussing on at any given moment, but instead I'm me. ME. Saying it like that is a way of saying I am invisible until I can see all of me."

So what's been happening to me the past while, and how does the above relate to it?

Well, it's been one of those thankfully rare times (at least in my life) in which everything terrifying and stressful happens all at once. I'll give you the abridged version, just enough that you can get the flavour.

First off, my aunt died. She had serious dementia, and had been in a nursing home for some years. She was in a different province and I hadn't seen her for most of that time, and couldn't speak to her on the phone. So I had pretty much given up ever talking to her again. But I felt very bad about it, even moreso because I knew that no one else visited her either. When she died, my guilt was made eternal.

At the same time we were having serious problems with the store. I had to figure ways out of them, which caused a lot of stress, and took a lot of time and effort, both of which I should instead have been applying to sorting out and finalizing the store's accounts, which the government was demanding for taxation purposes, and which were getting seriously behind schedule. I'm still not any further ahead in this, because of everything else that's been going on, and, as you can imagine, my stress load, and my FEAR of Big Brother coming down on me, is just getting worse and worse.

Then a cousin in Calgary lost his son to suicide. I met the boy a couple times, and he seemed tho only semi-normal person in that strange household. His mother was a serious schizophrenic, and would sit endlessly on a stool in the kitchen, chain smoking and staring at the cupboard, while all around her the house was torn apart, literally. His step-father wasn't close and was demanding. Their house was always in a shambles, in an endless process of process of having vaaccum hoses installed in the walls, and fancy wiring for electronics in the floors, etc. When I was there last, you had to walk carefully on planks and pieces of plywood or you would fall through into the basement. I think for the son to have to come home to this weird, depressing, stressful place, was too much for him. He couldn't, or wouldn't, study, and was made to constantly repeat grades in high school. He was addicted to stealing. Finally, at seventeen, he escaped by marrying the single mother next door who was his own mother's age but who at least added some semblance of normality to his life. They moved here to Vancouver. He got a job as a waiter in a nice restaurant but was fired two weeks later. All the staff clapped as he exited the building. I assume that his kleptomania had done him in. After being comforted by his wife into the wee hours of the next morning, he went out and jumped off a bridge.

By the time this happened, I was pretty much of a wreck myself, and the funeral service only made me moreso, as is evidenced by what happened on the way there. I was navigating for Linda, and it was, although distant, a fairly simple trip, practically the whole distance on one main thoroughfare. However, about half way there we came to a detour. The city was working on the highway and had shut it all down for a stretch. So I had to figure our way around the detour. The trouble was, my map was in the form of a book, and to find and follow a new route I had to flip back and forth from one page to another, in different sections of the book. But I couldn't keep the page numbers in my mind, or keep my fingers on the pages, or even remember what I was looking for from one page to the next. And Linda was going so fast there was no way I could keep up with her. Very quickly I became so stressed out that I couldn't function at all. Finally she pulled over and put her arm around me. I sat there and tried to hold back tears. You see, when I was in my first years of college, way back when, I had had a hand in my own best friend's suicide.

I had literally pulled him out of a very locked-in, claustrophobic situation, much like this nephew's. I took him out to pizza places and from there into the world. To some degree. I would call him up and we would go out. But finally I began to feel that I shouldn't have to do all the calling up all the time. Then I began to feel that he was using me, to boost his ego, convincing himself that I needed him and enjoying the effect of me calling him up all the time. So one day, when I couldn't take it anymore, I pointedly suggested as I left his place that he should call me up sometime. And I waited. And waited. A couple years later he committed suicide, and in his obituary his mother quoted him as saying he was disappointed. In life in general, I guess. But no doubt my abandoning him didn't help. So on the way to my nephew's funeral, the result of his own suicide, I was definitely having difficulties.

What else? Oh yes. Linda is sick much of the time, weak and in one kind of pain or another. Her life isn't much fun to say the least. She is being diagnosed, presumably, as we speak, but I'm fearful she is developing fibromyalgia, which isn't treatable. The responsibility of being the main designer at our flower shop is making it much worse, I think. So we decided to put the shop up for sale. For real this time. (We've postponed it for years.) It's no easy matter, as we've owned this store, which we started from scratch, some 18 years now. It's incredible the amount of work we have to do getting it prepared, and all while all this other is going on.

Also, I decided that the best thing to do after it's sold is to wholesale flowers, and that I'd better start doing that now, for various reasons. So, as all this other has been going on, I've been setting up a new business. And part of what it takes to do that is to sell myself to other flower shops as a wholesaler they should buy from. For shy people like me, selling oneself is one of the most stressfull things imaginable. But I'm doing it, and it looks like I'll be successful.

Also, I'm, as usual, trying to support my sister, who has Chronic Fatige Syndrome. Over 90% of the time she can't budge from bed. Even moreso than the fatigue, the pain all over her body quickly becomes unbearable if she tries to stand. Sometimes it's worse than others, but for a long time she had become so bad that we both thought she was never going to get better again. And in fact that's what statistics claims about people who get as bad off as she has been.

As you can imagine, Chronic Fatigue is a ripe area for con men. Because so many parts of the body come into play in terms of the possible causes and physiological components of fatigue and pain, and because there is no cure, these people develop very convincing regimes that are supposed to control the disease to some degree. And anyone in this kind of totally debilitating situation will find it hard to resist throwing money at these things. Well, I've put a lot of effort into working my way through all this morass. Finally at one point I stopped reading and just thought about it carefully. And I realized it had to have something to do with her heart. That had to be the root cause of it all. This was a couple years ago, and at the time all I could find for a possibility was Left Ventricular Dysfunction, or a hole in the valve.

This seemed too serious to be of any practical use from my position as a layman, since it required major surgery. So I went on to other things. Lately, however, I've found that someone has discovered that many if not most Chronic Fatigue patients have a nervous system disease in which their heart is given the opposite instructions to what it should receive. When the body is lying down, the heart is told to speed up instead of slow down, and when standing, it is told to slow down instead of speed up, causing a serious lack of blood to the upright body, which requires the blood to be pumped uphill. Serious fatigue and pain all over are just two symptoms.

Anyhow, because of this revelation, my sister got off all her 'home' remedies, such as taking salt by the spoonfull (the idea being that high salt intake normally causes high blood pressure, statistically, which would be nice to have in this case. However, in someone with this kind of disease, the cause of which is certainly not lack of salt, high salt would no doubt just make things worse). So, anyway, now she is remarkably able to get up and do a few things every day, and has for some time now. And most amazing of all she has found a neurologist who is a believer in this twisted-nervous-system cause, so we're hoping she may one day get a pill and suddenly be normal again! But in the mean time, she's selling her house and trying to move, and her house has mold, and she can't find a place where she could survive because one of the worst symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is extreme environmental sensitivity. Just the slightest thing, the smell of a lady's perfume, or dust from a rug, will cause her to crash to near death for a long time. It's a terrible life.

I know my sister has no one in her life, simply because she can't have. For starters, most people just think she's lazy! Even many doctors do. So they turn their backs on her. The ones who are more accepting are still far too demanding in their friendships to bother with someone who seldom is able to give anything back. So they turn their backs on her. And we have virtually no relatives but each other. Consequently, I'm the only person in her life. However, it works out pretty good because we have these awesome conversations on the phone, the kind that go on for hours, her laying in bed and me at my computer desk. We are opposite in many ways, including in terms of religion and political beliefs, but we can still go incredibly deep in so many things.

For instance, during one of the last times I called her up, we somehow got to talking about the horror of life. About how so many peoples' lives are simply a matter of painful survival, of grinding down to nothing, of extreme self-avoidance due to that relative horror which their lives consist of. I think that I tend to look for this, and puzzle over it, more than most people do, as a result of the value I place on seeing reality just for its own sake, but even I can only tolerate glimpses of it. My brain just simply cannot take staring that horror in the face. Anyway, we talked about the great number of people we think live these kinds of lives. Virtually alone. And about the real source of horror, which is that others cannot tolerate being exposed to them, that they must turn their backs. They must disown them. Disown the existance of them. That's the most horrible thing to these poor, hopeless people. Their own disabilities would be a lot less horrifying if they only had a few trustworthy friends they could laugh with.

Anyway, my sister at one point said that I seem to have an answer to it. I thought I misunderstood her at first, but she said it again. No, I hadn't. And sure I had a ready answer, but I didn't want to tell her what that answer to the horror was, straight out, because it would only make it more hopeless, and that didn't seem to be the right thing to be handing her. My answer is that life is truly pointless, in an absolute sense. We are just animals on this planet, like the mice. It doesn't matter at all if we live wonderful, inspiring lives, as have those few whom biographies are written about, or if we are ground to nothing by never-ending, relentless horror. If it really mattered, all that horror wouldn't be allowed to exist. But since it does, what makes the difference? What will tip our lives one way or the other? Well, not much. It could be something as minor as a few words spoken to us as children by our parents. Or finding ourselves, unluckily, in a given situation. Happening to see something that has an emotional result. Being born in an upstanding family. Or not. Having a certain genetic mutation in our bodies, without even knowing it. Inheriting something from our parents. Being damaged along the way. Being killed. Or not. Or just the opposite of these.

But I didn't tell my sister my answer. She, living her horrible life, didn't need to hear that. And lucky I didn't anyway, because I realized later that she hadn't meant that I have an explanation for the horror (which of course is the first thing to pop into my mind, me being an obsessive theoretician). No, she had said "answer to", not "explanation". Well, it's interesting what happened right then. I was sitting in my chair at the store, pushed back from the computer, eyes darting around in that work room looking at nothing in particular. Then I happened to glance back at the computer. On the screen was the comment section to my last post about taking a needed break. You see, I had just read the last comment by the mysterious Ms Black, and had actually called up my sister thinking I would read it to her, which I sometimes do, as the comments often cheer her up. This was the comment in which Ms Black quotes D. H. Auden's line: , "Stagger onward, rejoicing," and then the poem from a new-age book which she said describes my blog. Seeing it there on the screen in front of me, I recalled my original justification for calling her, and, at the same time, had the odd but distinct little feeling that maybe it had something to do with what we were talking about. But I didn't know what. So I read it to her, actually thinking I was changing the subject. "Stagger onward, rejoicing." Immediately, Twila burst out in laughter and said, "That's it! That's the answer!" I could see what she saw in that, but I wasn't sure it had anything to do with me. Anyway, I carried on reading the poem Ms Black then quoted.

May the door of this home be wide enough
to receive all who hunger for love, all who are lonely for friendship.
May it welcome all who have cares to unburden,
thanks to express,
hopes to nurture.
May the door of this house be narrow
enough to shut out
pettiness and pride,
envy and
enmity.
May its threshold be no stumbling block to young or strained feet.
May it be too high to
admit to complacency, selfishness and harshness.
May this home be for all who enter, the doorway to richness and a more meaningful life.

When I had first read this in Ms Black's comment I related to it well enough, as it basically states my own outlook on life. But I wasn't really bowled over emotionally. Yet when I read it now to my sister, with the feeling that it might have something to do with an answer to the horror of life, I unexpectedly choked up over every line, and could hardly get through it. Afterward, she was just about as choked up as me, and said, "That's the answer you have. You put it in your blog." I began to see what she meant. Universal acceptance has always been how I see things. And it is a big part of this blog as well. And most of the horror in our world is caused by the exact opposite of that. We both had big smiles on our faces as we thought about it.

Another idea I've had for a long time also began to percolate to the surface then, making itself seen as part of the answer as well. It's this: A person can have two points of view on virtually anything. One is negative and the other is positive. You can, for instance, see all the world and its details as being unacceptable, harsh, useless. Or those same details, and the world they make up, can be seen as not only acceptable but fascinating, even miraculous in their sheer existance. Or, in the one perspective, you see hopelessness, a life of grinding horror, and, through the other eye, you see a person with will and a sense of self. The horror of the one and the beauty of the other. My sister's own life is a great example of this. Much of the time, it has seemed totally hopeless, and yet, even in those times when she could scarcely move a muscle, and when even her brain wasn't getting enough energy to work properly, and when there seemed no future at all, except death, she still had a relentless will and sense of who she was. Even then she was far from being nothing. Amazing to me, in fact. Miraculous.

A short break.

2005-06-09T08:14:00.000-07:00

Yes I'm still alive. But it seems I needed a break from blogging. Things have been a bit difficult lately, but usually that doesn't matter. This time it did. I have something pretty much written, and as soon as I feel I can finish it I'll jump back in here, and come visiting as well.

Gravity pulls you down.

2005-05-22T02:16:00.000-07:00

"I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.
And when I found my devil,
he was serious, thorough, profound, solemn.
He was the spirit of gravity -
through him all things fall.
Come! Let us slay this spirit of gravity!
Not by wrath but with laughter do we slay.
I learned to walk.
Since then I have let myself run.
I learned to fly.
Now I do not need pushing in order to move from a spot.
Now I am light, now do I fly,
now do I see myself under myself.
Now there danceth a god in me."

From 'Thus Spake Zarathustra', by Nietzsche.
This was supplied by Elizabeth (littlepage) after reading in my last posting the description of my harrowing Mothers' Day week at the flower shop.

I think I'm spending my entire adult life unlearning gravity.

It's not easy for such an essentially grave person as myself!! Yet I know I have to if I want to live my life - not just slide to the end and off. But working a store, desperate all the time to survive, is a heavy hand on one's soul. It's a hand that's very hard to see out from under. I have to keep reminding myself.

Occasionally I see somebody who's walking on air. And I think about myself. Or I just stop to think, and realize again what's happening, and what's really important. Loving someone who is suffering more than me helps too. I know how deeply an unexpected moment of lightness can affect her: It's as if God suddenly touched her brow! So I try to catch myself when something slightly funny strikes me, something I would normally just toss out, and instead let myself instantly run with it. We both laugh so hard the whole day changes. Those little things are so big even remembering them lightens me.

I'm trying more and more to enjoy the little things...any little things. Not just the birds singing and the pretty clouds, but especially the dull stuff: making a bouquet, sweeping the floor, washing dishes, organizing some paper work...REAL little things. I try to relax in them, to just do them feeling how easy it is and how actually pleasant it is when I let myself relax into them, when I don't do them wishing I was doing something else.

You see, I think I nearly always do wish I was living a life that was a little less real, wishing reality would just fade out a bit and fantasy would fade in. Maybe shyness and introversion started me on that course. Along with the resulting difficulty and stress I experienced socially. Then of course the nearly twenty years of stress at the store just added to all that, making the division between reality and my unreal world more obvious, and more habitual. I felt that the only really enjoyable things were movies, music, games, computer stuff, fantasy. Mostly a mental world, as opposed to here where my body was. But now I see how far removed all that is from reality, from MY real world. I'm not saying they're unreal. Of course they're not. Everything is real in one sense. But together these things constitute my own unreal world, the one in my mind.

But slowly I'm becoming more aware, and more desperate. I feel the difference quite strongly now, that enjoying unreal things isn't really enjoying at all. It's escaping. Enjoying unreal things, REALLY, is part of dying.

You may also want to read through the comments below, since I have elaborated quite a bit on the ideas in the post there, including discussing possible solutions. Anyway, many of the best ideas in my posts occur to me and my readers during the give and take of the comments and responses.

In the wheel.

2005-05-11T23:06:00.000-07:00

I survived Mothers' Day.

To those of you who are new to this blog, that must sound like some kind of incomprehensibly weird joke. To the rest of you, those who know that I'm a florist and that Mothers' Day is one of the most hectic days (it's actually a week) of the year for us, you may or may not be relieved.

Normally we have a second designer working with Linda that week, but this time she was recovering from an operation and we weren't able to get anyone else in time. So, if you can imagine, Linda had to single-handedly create something over 100 arrangements in a period of just three days! Which she did. That's about 35 a day. Yet, many of them were so beautifully done that, if you were open to them, they would take your breath away. Sadly enough, most people who receive them aren't. To most, a flower arrangement means something. Other than what it is. Which is another thing altogether. Somewhere else in time and space. From the meaning. Which doesn't exist at all.

But that's a whole other story. I don't want to get into anything heavy here. I don't think I can. I'm trying to remove myself from it. From way, way too much stress. I can't tell you how deeply I need lightness. Mothers' Day week in a flower shop like ours, especially in an understaffed one, consists of at least four days of solid panic. You are every minute trying desperately to accomplish as much as you possibly can, while at the same time holding in your mind all the details you must accomplish in the succeeding minutes, and while doing all the jobs you are constantly interrupted with, by customers and the like. Some reading this will say I am nuts or immature or simply less wise than they are to let stress get its claws in me like that. They will say I only have one life to life, and that I should at all times strive to be calm, centred. Well, those people have never owned a business. And had to live off its proceeds. They've never had the responsibilities that come with owning a business. In fact I would suggest very seriously that the main difference between a stressed-out person like me and such spiritually advanced souls is sheer luck. They just happened to not get into the kind of situation that I, and millions of others, did.

Just for a moment, let's take the basic myth of our society seriously, that it is built upon a basis of democracy, individualism and free enterprise, and that those three are based on the relatively free flow of goods and money through businesses. Then all of our calm heroes should count themselves very lucky to be able to survive on the outside. I'm not being facetious. I can relate to them. When I was young, I was cool and on the outside myself, trying always to emulate in a small way my movie hero Clint Eastwood, the ultimate strong individual. But in fact I was no bounty hunter. Or even just plain strong. I lived mostly on handouts of one kind or another, handouts that began their journey my lazy way in frantic businesses. When eventually I discovered what it took to be a human being as opposed to an ideal, there I was myself, running inside that little wheel. Running in place. With all the cool youngsters looking right through me, just as I had done.

Well, now my endless run has slowed, temporarily, to a more comfortable jog, and I'm still alive. I didn't have a heart attack. This time.

There is an alternative. I could be a dumpster diver.

What a weird world it is.

I have the answer to the joke for you.

2005-04-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

I don't normally write about anything political, because, by my age, I've read so much of it that I just can't bear it anymore. When I read newspapers, I just chuck out all the political sections except maybe the international news. It still holds a little interest. But local stuff? Are you kidding?

There's an election coming soon here in British Columbia and I drive past huge signs in people's yards that just say, "Vote for Joe Blow!" They may also mention the name of his party, or they may only order me to vote for the party, as a variation to keep me interested, no doubt. If I had a fire cannon on my van, I would torch every one of those signs. That's all they're worth anyway. I guess the idea is simply this (simply this stupid): that nobody will waste their vote on a party that doesn't have a lot of yard signs. That's modern democracy for you.

The reason I'm writing this rant (all political statements have to be in the form of a rant, for some reason), is that this morning, on the way to work, I walked past the alley behind our store. The smell of fresh ashphalt was drifting out so I stopped for a minute to see what was going on. City workers were filling a hole. I stood there admiring the scene. One guy was directing ashphalt into the 4X4 foot space thay had made, using a big tube from the back of a truck. Another guy was sitting in the truck waiting. Two guys with rakes were standing to one side waiting. A guy was sitting on a little roller tractor waiting. A manager was standing to one side with his arms crossed waiting. Soon the guy who poured the ashphalt stood to one side and waited while the two guys raked. When they were done, they stood to one side waiting while the roller guy rolled. All the while the manager guy stood to one side looking on. This isn't the joke it sounds like. It actually did happen. Just this morning. Behind my store. In fact, Linda and I, who both do about fifty different jobs, and are never caught up, were shocked. If this was a private business, there would be no more than three guys there, all working constantly. And they would charge for three guys' labour. But since this is a city project, and all city workers are members of the city employees' union, they can charge for six guys' labour, and Linda and I are forced to pay them for it with our taxes.

This argument is as old as the hills. Or, I should say, as old as labour unions.

I would like you to know that all my life I have voted for the New Democratic Party (NDP), which, in Canada, is the left-wing, social democratic party, sponsored since it's formation by labour unions. It is far more left-wing than is the Democratic Party in America. In our province, British Columbia, the NDP actually was elected into power a couple times. But both times it so badly managed the tax payers' money that it lost most of its constituents. The last time, in order to employ more BC workers, the NDP premier decided to build some extremely expensive ferries, faster ones than we normally use, or have any need for. The government wouldn't just buy the ferries from the best source, but instead had them made right here in our harbour by a local builder that had never built ferries before. Because of this, and extremely poor management, the ferries that were built cost far more than anyone had anticipated, and, as well, continually had to be reworked due to technical problems. In the end, they were too expensive to run at all, and were finally put on the market, and, since no one would buy them at a reasonable price, were given away for pennies. Us taxpayers lost incredible amounts of money. I don't vote for the NDP anymore.

On the other hand, I couldn't conceive of voting for a right-wing party.

What's my alternative? Sometimes I don't vote at all. But I do like going to that gym in the elementary school near here. There's something about the little old ladies who volunteer to sit behind the ricketty tables and check the books for our names. And the line-ups of people who, no matter how little impact their votes have, feel strongly this is the difference between our own relatively decent, civil society and and all the corrupt and uncaring monarchies and dictatorships and oligarchies in our past, and which still flourish in many parts of the world. All of us ordinary people, not one looking anything like a celebrity or a politician, standing waiting in the line in this little school gym know that this is a very special event, one of the greatest developments in the history of humankind. So I like to go, even if I have no feeling of there being a worthwhile party to vote for. I guess it's the idea that, even so, these little lineups in these funny amateur situations scare the crap out of the people in power. Even if nobody in opposition would be any better than they are, that fear alone keeps them thinking about human rights and fairness and doing at least a bit of good for the people they're supposed to represent.

I've decided this time round I'm going to vote for the Green Party. I can no longer relate to either left or right-wing economic causes. I'm willing to let the financial chips fall where they may. But I do care deeply about the environment. And what's happening to it these days, on a global scale, nearly makes me cry. Us human beings are in the process of causing the biggest, fastest mass extinction of all kinds of plants and animals that the world has ever seen. That's no longer gloomy speculation. It's a fact. And yet we hardly care. Both left and right-wing parties are far more concerned about making money and keeping people in jobs than about the permanent extinction of life on Earth. That some rich person shouldn't lose a little more of his millions to taxes, or that some construction worker should be able to keep on building houses non-stop and not have to reduce his intake of triple Macs, are both far more important issues to the major political parties than caring about the percentage of deadly solar radiation that reaches the surface of the Earth ripping through the DNA of any critters it strikes, or that billions of plants and animals that depend on the eons-old status quo for their health will simply starve to death when it changes due to the heating of the Earth.

Okay, we've heard all that before. It's old news. Give us something NEW. We've thought about the environment before. Been there, done that. Now it's time to, say, become millionaires, or try Viagra before we're 30. Or... anything. Even committing suicide would be more exciting than having to think about the environment again.

Well, here's something probably YOU don't even know. It's new! The mass extinction that we humans are causing is far, far bigger than the sum of the damage caused by cosmic rays, global warming, tearing down the jungles, massive pollution, over-fishing, over-farming, spraying the Earth with all manner of apocalyptic chemicals, and anything else like that you can think of. The biggest source of mass extinction, beyond all these combined, is turning out to be something hardly anyone knows about. It's the mass movement of people and things around the world. Yes, just that! Our incredibly massive, and quickly growing, transportation networks, via air, water and land, are not only moving people and goods, but species of plants and animals as well. The speed of transportation nowdays is such that practically anything can survive the journey, and the need for speed has become such that very little is checked for unauthorized passengers. All kinds of things hitch rides, especially in the holds of ships that are flushed in foreigh ports, and in the closed containers that don't even end their journey at ports of call. Airplanes are the same. So many species are moving around the world so quickly, and taking root in foreign countries where there are no defenses against them, and competing against and devastating local life, that concerned citizens, no matter how frantically they try to root them out, are very quickly losing the battle. In the not too distant future, we won't have local ecosystems at all on Earth anymore, just large, globe circling, climatic ecosystems, occupied by the same few species all around the planet. That will spell the end of the great majority of local species of plants and animals on Earth. To me this is so gut-wrenchingly horrifying that I can't comtemplate it for more than a minute at a time.

To you? If you never leave your city, it may not bother you at all. In which case, jobs and the level of taxation are what really have your blood boiling.

----@@@@@----

To all my friends in the blog cosmos who haven't seen much of me at their blogs recently, I apologize. I have been very busy filling most of the gaps in my day with marketting our store for the coming Mothers' Day week, about the busiest week in the year for a flower shop. We desparately have to make up for lost time during that one week, and to make up in advance for the coming long, slow summer if we're going to survive. I will probably only have a little time till the end of this week to respond to comments here, but not to go visiting, and won't have any time for either next week. After Mothers' Day, May 8th, and a little period of R&R, I'll get back into the swing of things.

Oddballs have regrets.

2005-04-23T10:26:00.000-07:00

I'm definitely an oddball. I rank right up there with the oddest. Every once in a while I do something that brings it to my attention. Then I have to deal with it somehow. I have to admit it to myself. It's always difficult.

Like everyone, I would love to be a normal, loved, admired, perfect, outgoing, sophisticated, accomplished (yet capable of the deepest love and intimacy) man who is the spitting image of Sean Connery. That would be nice. Oh, yeah...and rich. Then at least I could go for a makeover. Whatever that is. And another thing: I would be the type of guy who, later in life, would always say, when asked, "I have no regrets."

But no, I'm an oddball. I do have regrets. Lots of them. A never-ending flow of regrets. It's true, I can remember other things, if I put my mind to it. But the memories that just come to me out of the blue are usually things I regret. I said something that caused someone to get angry at me. Or I did something that hurt someone, usually inadvertantly, but that doesn't matter. I still regret it. No matter how I would justify what I did at the time, and no matter how right the justification was, the only thing that seems to have ever mattered was the outcome. If it was negative, I will end up regretting it for the rest of my life.

I've sort of got it figured out now. I think it all stems from being a shy person. Not just introverted, but shy. When I was young, I couldn't even hear what someone was saying to me through my anxiety, if I didn't know that person well. I would have to memorize their words and repeat them over in my mind a second time. Life has been a struggle. But I've managed to dig myself out to a large degree. I pushed myself out into the world in quite dramatic ways, and now am a little easier with everything. I'll never be an extrovert, or one who just can't wait to chat it up with the next stranger, but I talk fairly easily with customers in our store, and I do have a few friends. I'm even married, yes to a shy woman, but I am married.

And I try not to cause too much destruction around me as I plow blindly through society, never having learned social refinements or even what to avoid doing. Both my parents were just as shy as me, small-time farmers who literally never had anyone over. We just existed, and milked the cows.

When I finally moved into the city to go to college, I watched people. It was like being transported by UFO to an alien world. I was amazed that everyone seemed to be playing roles, as if they were someone else. I began copying them, assuming that they couldn't accept anyone who wasn't playing their particular roles. It took me quite a while to begin just playing the role of myself.

Anyway, I'm all grown up now. I've been in the city most of my life, but I still feel like a farm boy. A blundering, rough little farm boy. Continually doing things I soon regret.

Just a little bit ago, here on this blog, I pulled off my latest escapade. The Pope was dying, and the Vatican was athrong with millions of grieving people. I sat there quietly in my chair observing and thinking. Suddenly an idea occured to me. I compared the Pope, atop the Vatican for 35 years, with the four-year elected terms of our government leaders. I saw this difference as an example of how all the earlier autocracies of the world compare to our modern democracies. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I got excited about it, and, while it was fresh in my mind, immediately started pounding it out on my computer. To show that democracies were better, I put into the essay some of the negative things I've heard that the Pope has done. While I wrote it, in the back of my mind was one of my regular readers, Mael, the only one I know who has a Catholic background. I thought she might not like all the negativity so I tried to balance that with the same number of positive things the Pope had done. Even so, I hesitated before I pushed the publish button, thinking maybe this isn't the best thing to do. But my excitement about new ideas, as usual, won over and out it went into the world.

Mael did read it, and it did upset her considerably. It felt to her like I was attacking the Church, and at a very insensitive time. She has good reason to defend it, beyond any religious reasons, because a good deed by some nuns is responsible for much of the positive direction her life has taken. She had told me about that earlier, and I had forgotten it. Too bad or it might have brought me back to earth.

So now I'm beginning to see what I did. It's one thing to put forward negative ideas about an institution in a book, or in an article in some magazine, where it is to be expected, maybe. People can pick up the book or magazine if they feel the ideas suit them. But what I did was different. It's easy to say it's not different, that publishing a post on the internet is like getting it printed in a magazine. And that is how I felt. Being a shy person, the individual readers tended to be ignored in favour of the nameless, faceless, and decidedly less stressful masses. All they are is IPO addresses. Domain names. And very occasionally fake IDs.

But then people will now and then leave comments. Real people. Individuals. Individuals who can be hurt. I had even met Mael once. She lives in Vancouver as I do. She's a real person to me, and someone whom I know quite a bit better than I have any right to.

In an email subsequent to my posting she said, "If real change is wanted, we approach each other as human beings, with respect and curiosity, not as antagonists." I think I'm beginning to see the light. Publishing a post on the internet isn't a mass-media thing. There are actually only two of us here: me and the reader, sitting opposite each other. Me writing something and Mael reading it. Mael is grieving for someone as important in her life as my father was in mine. And I look her in the eyes and calmly insult him.

I'm sorry, Mael.

And thanks for waking me up.

You may also want to read through the comments below, since many of the best ideas in my posts occur to me and my readers during the give and take of the comments and responses.

You'll find comments on:

forgiving people
forgiving oneself: starting at comment 7
the idea of "there are only two of us here": comment 15
Catholicism: comments 9, 10, 16, 17
Shyness vs introversion: comments 14, 19, 21, 23-30
Generalized Anxiety Disability: Comments 26-30

Five is a hive.

2005-04-16T00:58:00.000-07:00

Last night I returned a rental van to the dealership and wandered around downtown before catching the bus home. I don't go downtown much, so when I do my eyes and senses are open; I have the feeling I'm very close to some immense pulsing body, the mother bee of the hive or something. And since I was open, my stomach let itself be heard, so I ambled into a MacDonald's, again a place I haven't been to for a long time, I guess partly because Linda won't go in them anymore, after that time she was grossed out when a fairly rough-looking guy stood in line next to her with some kind of unspeakable stuff hanging about an inch down from the tip of his nose, yet didn't seem to notice or care about it.

So there I was sitting at a counter looking at the landscape around me. A woman in a buckskin jacket sat at another counter right in front of the window, not so much looking out as at the reflection of the people behind her. A young Chinese couple were at a booth down a level near the door - he talking on his cell phone, about her, her laughing and saying it wasn't true. Near me an older man sat eating a burger, facing away from me. His hair was longer and swept back. He wore a sociable soft yellow vest. He was older than me. I was younger than him. But what did that mean - tomorrow I would be his age. The young people waiting in line, glancing around, certainly didn't think they would ever be his age. I know that. I was them yesterday. Of course, if pressed, they would say they'll get old. They would consider it intellectually. At least those would who don't simply think they'll die first, and so don't have to try to relate to him. I thought about his long hair and his vest. It was as if he, also, was denying his age. Maybe. But in any case the whole arc was right there before my own eyes suddenly, very visible. Time. I'm in the middle of it now, or really I guess past the middle, although I don't like to think that. He's well past the middle and approaching the far end. And the young people are so close to the beginning they can't see the arc at all. As I sat there looking at the back of his head, I felt that I was right then really seeing it for the first time - the overwhelming scale and effect of it on the world, on us and on me, and also, even so, the way we hide it, or hide from it, so constantly. I had the feeling of being in the presence of a vast conspiracy, or dark force, much like the queen bee under the city.

I wish I knew more about time. All I know are things that don't really mean much. Like what physicists say - that it's the fourth dimension. I can't imagine what that means, if anything other than it being a label for some mathematics. And why do people go through this strange physical change as they pass through the arc of time? As if their bodies change only to force them to become aware of time itself. There doesn't seem to be any real physical necessity for aging. Damaged DNA can be repaired. Maybe, as biologists seem to think, there just isn't any evolutionary way for the body to learn new tricks after a certain age. The idea is that when a body has finished having it's offspring and rearing them, then any mutation that would keep it healthy or alive longer after that point would have no way of being passed to the next generation, because that generation has already been born and gone, without being affected by the mutation. Makes sense, but it also seems that the body actually gets older on purpose (if you can say that about evolution). We are made to age. Not to just live till we die. We're made to get crippled, and stiff and blind and full of pain first. Well, maybe there simply is no on/off switch and that this decay is the only way to accomplish that. But it's a very strange thing to encounter in life. After spending years and decades dreaming of the future, and of then slowly learning to fulfill those dreams and then working hard to make them happen, only to find that some strange thing has invaded us and is slowly taking us away from it all to somewhere else that we never had any idea of, or wanted - it's all very strange.

And hard to get used to. And moreso all the time.

You may also want to read through the comments below, since many of the best ideas in my posts occur to me and my readers during the give and take of the comments and responses.

Also, you will find side excursions into:

the evolution of the English language
chronic depression

Shepherd and sheep.

2005-04-08T22:44:00.000-07:00

As I write this, there are four million pilgrims milling about the streets of Rome overwhelmed by feelings of sadness and love for Pope John Paul II. Their grief and affection are such that there is a growing feeling amongst them that he should be made a saint, as fast as possible. He's only been gone a few days, and probably hasn't yet performed the two requisite after-life miracles, so it would seem that his admirers want him canonized simply out of love for him.

When I was in my 20s I too was caught up in this kind of hero worship. My leader, during the youth movement of the 1960's, was a semi-youngish politician, at least young for Canadian politicians, Pierre Trudeau, whom we swept into power as our Prime Minister, and whom most of us eventually fell out of love with when we were finally able to see through our infatuation to the reality of a very real, conflicted person trying to lead a conflicted country full of conflicted individuals. As we watched in astonishment, strange events occurred, events which brought us around like a slap in the face. I particularly remember an instance when he unexpectedly faced a crowd of heckling, placard-waving youngsters out here on the West coast. There's a famous photo of his reaction: standing there silently, angrily giving the crowd the finger! We had originally voted for him because he was a strong individual, both intellectually and physically, strong enough to stand up for his beliefs, but now it occurred to us that he also felt superior to all those of us who weren't lucky enough to be so strong. I vowed then that I would never get swept away by hero worship again.

Well, I attended one of Pope John Paul's mass ceremonies when he visited Canada in 1984. Not being a Catholic I wasn't as overwhelmed as many of the young people around me were, but I could easily understand their feelings. The Pope seemed to be a completely good person, also one of integrity and honour. I still see him that way today, and I'm even further now from being a Catholic than I was then.

There's no question that Pope John Paul II has done many great things. He helped end Communism; he helped heal the rift between Catholics and Jews, a particularly deep rift because of Catholic support of the Nazis during the war; and he helped reunify the Catholic Church, preventing it from splitting into many isolated churches with their own directions, and thus helped spread Christian spiritualism in a rapidly growing world.

These three triumphs are balanced by three reminders that the Pope, no matter how worshipped he was by the masses, was just a human being like the rest of us.

A representative of the women of Latin America pleaded with him, in a famous, televised get-together, to allow abortion in particular instances. Her reason was that many women in Latin America were being raped and then forced to marry the men whose children they bore. Instead of siding with her, Pope John Paul shocked her, and many other women, by suggesting that these women were themselves responsible for their rapes. This was the same nonsense used by much of the male establishment in those days to justify lack of action against rapists.

No doubt the Pope wouldn't have said what he did had he had more experience with women, but he had never allowed himself to, a commendable show of self-control for a Catholic priest. And anyway, he couldn't suddenly allow abortion just because of one woman's plea. Yet, what a horrifying thing to say. It certainly didn't do anything to ease the misery of raped women, and probably made it easier for some men to rationalize any brutal actions they intended.

Among his many trips to foreign lands were the Pope's journeys to Africa during the height of the awesomely devastating Aids epidemic there. It has only been in the last year or two that the first semi-affordable drugs have been made available. Until now, the only recourse authorities had was in fact the only one that really works, even now: prevention. Education and the use of condoms in North America and Europe has prevented Aids from reaching anywhere near the apocalyptic heights it has in Africa. But the Pope, standing in the midst of all that viral slaughter, spoke strongly against condom use there, a stance that definitely undercut the early movements to educate the people about Aids. Who knows how many people died directly because of the Pope's strong will.

Again, no one can say the Pope did this with evil intentions. On the contrary, he felt that the universal 'truths' of the Church had to be carried unsullied through all short-term upheavals in the world. Furthermore, he believed that individuals had to take responsibility for their actions, and that sex out of wedlock, a sin in
the eyes of the Church, was something individuals were expected to avoid by means of shear self-control, or, if not, suffer whatever consequences would follow - anything from a little guilt or death by AIDS. Neither of these motivations on the Pope's part were anything but honourable, and yet untold numbers of people died because of them. The only plausible answer is that he simply was not realistic. Neither he nor the Church he ran. His sense of realism was clouded by his own beliefs and by his own strength of mind, which made him think less of people without his self-control. But, in any case, the official Church policy was to oppose condoms, since they not only prevented AIDS but conception as well.

Most commentators agree that the Pope found it very hard to believe that members of the priesthood, his fellow priests, were paedophiles. Consequently, he delayed doing anything about this horror until it was too late to prevent the scandal from devastating the Church. I don't know how Catholics now see their own church, whether they have mixed feelings or not, but I do know that many if not most non-Catholics now relate Catholicism to paedophilia automatically. I know I do. If I had children I would never join the Catholic Church simply for that reason. Possibly I'm more biassed than many, however, because the only male I ever knew who was brought up Catholic was sexually abused by his priest, to the point where it emotionally ruined his life to a large degree. Did I simply happen to know the one in a million boys who was molested by a priest, or is it as common as that would suggest? I don't know. But it makes me shudder.

Of course, the Pope did not delay taking action because he wanted to give the paedophiles more time to molest more children. That's silly. He held back because he couldn't believe that his fellow priests were weaker than he was. Let's face it, they weren't some other variety of human he had little experience with, like women or Africans; they were fellow priests, the same kind of human as himself. At least they were on the outside. So the Pope was simply unrealistic, once again. He couldn't see clearly.

The question then is this: If this man was so unrealistic, why was he voted into one of the most powerful positions in the world, voted in by Cardinals who probably knew him nearly as well as they knew themselves? The answer is fairly obvious when you think about it. They voted him in because he was such a good man, so admirable, so focussed, so strong, so what they all admired in a person and especially in a leader. Why would they vote for a lesser person if they had this remarkable example of human potential in their midst?

So a super human became the shepherd to an immense flock of sorry sheep - all these ordinary weaklings who couldn't properly do anything for themselves but instead depended on each other to hold themselves up and to keep them going, and who, thus, could all fall together or rise, depending on the mass mood of the moment. Or upon their leader. John Paul took it upon himself to scold, cajole, punish and reward as needed, whatever it took to keep his flock moving in the right direction.

This attitude has always been one of the worst faults of autocracies. Those who are not as strong as those in power are seen as inferior and deserving of any punishment that comes their way. And the ones at the top are by definition superior and deserving of all the greatest rewards.

And this attitude is one of the main reasons democracy has pre-empted autocracy as the main form of government in the modern world. Because democracy is government by the 'inferior ' people, for the 'inferior' people. Or, seen realistically, it's simply government by the people, for the people. The people think for themselves, and, in voting, no doubt make many mistakes, but at least they stand up as tall as they can and take their lives into their own hands. And the 'superior' people are then forced to take them seriously. And themselves less so.

You may also want to read through the comments below, since many of the best ideas in my posts occur to me and my readers during the give and take of the comments and responses.

A pretty damn good idea.

2005-03-27T22:39:00.000-08:00

My last post went the way most of them do on this blog. It started out fairly simple, with talk of crows and pigeons, but then, as the number of comments grew, followed by responses to comments, and with comments responding to comments, by the time we were down 20 to 25 we were getting into some pretty heavy stuff: instinctive fears, loops of anxiety, existential lobotomies, the sifted chaos of the present, its weight of memory, the slide into the future, that sort of thing. As usual, the last few comments solved most of the world's problems, but, as usual, nobody was there with us to benefit from it. They had all cashed in their chips a long time ago and gone home.

So then, as usual, I said to myself, "I know what I'll do, I'll just lift this forward and make it into my next post, so that we'll start with the good stuff at the top next time." Not only would everybody get a chance to read it, but the new comment stream would end in some really outrageously deep territory, which I would then lift into the next post, and... and this is just getting scary!

Last night Linda and I went out for dinner at the Cactus Club. I told her about the idea as we ate. And thought about it myself. The process of one thing leading to a deeper one and that to a deeper one yet reminded me of a similar thing I had hatched up a long time ago. It was a way of conversing with my unconscious mind, by presenting it with a question, then taking the answer that came to me and presenting that to it as the next question, and on and on.

All this percolated away as we ate, as my chop sticks scooped rice from a bowl, as I looked at the bits of chopped vegetables in there, and chicken, and mmmm the flavour so good. How would I go about making this at home? Chonk, slurp, scoop, crunch. Linda was gazing over my shoulders at the ambience in the room, of which there is plenty at the Cactus Club (I'm one of the few people who's noticed the crow looking down from it's perch in the black metalwork of the enormous candle chandelier way up in the shadows under the ceiling), when my light bulb came on.

I said, "Hey Sweetie, I finally figured it out! I've been carrying this problem around with me for ages and I finally solved it!"

She's used to this kind of thing. She looked at me with this lopsided bit of a grin, and said, "What now?"

With a bright face, I said, "Well, you know how we always used to have wooden chopping boards, before they came along with the plastic ones?"

She said, "Yeah?" She was expecting some abstract, scientific or philosophical nonsense, but chopping boards she could relate to.

"Well, the problem with the plastic ones is that you have to really wash them well, or the bacteria build up and pretty soon you get salmonella poisoning just from making your salad."

"I didn't know that." (Neither of us are the greatest cooks in the world.)

I said, "Well, it's true. Whereas, with the old wood boards, we would hardly ever wash them, at least really well, and no one ever got sick from them."

"No. You're right."

"I read about this a few years ago. The reason is that the wood has natural enzymes in it that kills bacteria. You actually don't have to wash it. The wood does it for you!"

"You're kidding!" She was alert now, staring at me.

"Well, ever since I first read that, I've been wondering off and on why the enzymes don't get used up. You would think they would work for a while and then it would be game over, because the wood is dead, and not producing any new ones anymore. But you can use a bread board for years and years and not get sick from it."

"Yeah, okay," she said. These problems don't have as big a grip on Linda as they do on me. But she indulges me when she can, when her body lets her.

"Well, I just figured it out!" I had this big smile, like I had solved the deepest problem of the universe. "The tree the bread board was made from was NEVER alive!"

She just looked at me like she wished she was curled up at home on her nice soft couch with a blanket pulled over her and Velvet purring beside her. And a nice romance on TV.

But my eyes had her in a wrestling hold. "I'm not kidding. Trees aren't alive. The only part of a tree that isn't dead wood is a very thin layer just under the bark. All the rest of the tree inside that is dead right from day one. But, see, the enzyme explains why it doesn't rot. Somehow the alive layer deposits this remarkable, long-lasting enzyme into the wood inside it, which continually kills all the bacteria that get inside from then on, so that it never rots, even though it's dead the whole time!" I was beaming, I was so happy with myself. "So that's why a bread board doesn't have to be cleaned well."

I chuckled and we went back to eating. After a while, I said, "For the life of me, I can't remember how I came up with that idea!"

Maybe it was something in the rice bowl. Or the crow on the chandelier. I guess one thing led to another...

Feathered Minds

2005-03-22T00:57:00.000-08:00

Waiting for the bus the other day, I was eating peanuts and thought I would feed a few to a couple pigeons. I was surprised that they hardly noticed me, motoring around me with their eyes to the ground like I was a tree. It reminded me of a beggar I saw once who went back and forth on a street corner, always at his fastest walk, to anyone who came near, not really seeing them, just needing to go constantly toward the possibility of that coin, as if it were a drug. It was very sad. Anyway, as I stood there with the pigeons, a couple of crows flew down nearby, and edged in, but never managed to get a peanut. Yet they're supposed to be smart for birds. Well, I think their problem was that they actually saw me there. They knew what I was, and it made them a bit leery of moving in too close. They would see the peanut, and start to move, but then would look up at me -- straight at my face. And that would throw them - while the pigeons kept motoring around, oblivious. I got on the bus with a feeling that I had briefly entered another world - well, the same world, but through very different eyes, ones I hadn't really realized could even see it, let alone clearly.

You may also want to read through the comments below, since many of the best ideas in my posts occur to me and my readers during the give and take of the comments and responses.

Blossoms

2005-03-14T20:57:00.000-08:00

blooming
in backyards
billowing down boulevards
blowing
swirling
suspended mid-air
in hair
like lips, nostrils flaring
falling
waiting
on roofs of cars
like dewdrops
held softly
to bosoms
aching
in the morning sun.

There's nothing like Vancouver in the Spring. It's paradise. Where only days before the city was rough with dark, stark, winter trees, now many streets are literally enveloped in ethereal pink or white blossoms. The trees have suddenly become so covered in blooms that often not a single branch is visible. Every Spring I'm totally amazed.

But just as amazing to me is how few people revel in that beauty. I watch them walking down the street under these billowing pink wonders with their heads down or staring straight ahead, and I'm baffled.

I can understand many office workers not being able to feel the beauty of a dense forest or of a swamp or the winter rain. As a youngster out on the farm, I was immersed in all these things, as most city folk aren't. So I can see how they would find it difficut to relate to honest-to-God nature, which is essentially an unorganized thing, chaotic and without purpose, or at least the kind of purpose we can relate to. When you look at anything in the city, you immediately see its purpose: A sidewalk is something made to walk on, street lights to obey. Even the flowering trees are there for a reason. And we know that if that purpose did not exist, then neither would the object. But nothing in nature is like this. In a sense, it all just happened. Slowly, over millennia. When you look through a chaotic tangle of brush, and it looks chaotic, that's because it is chaotic. Obviously, if you look long enough, you'll find patterns - the ways things tend to work. But few people seriously believe any more, as they did in Victorian times, that everything was somehow planted here by an invisible hand.

It's not easy to see beyond the composed postcard images we've been taught to admire, and actually manage to enjoy the real beauty of that purposeless world of nature. There's only one way to do it that I know of, and that's to first let go of all the baggage we've picked up in the man-made world, so that we can just see. And listen. And smell. We can't impose our ideas of beauty on it. Or even our memories of past beauty. The second we do, we've lost all hope of seeing the real thing. We have to just be open to what's there, completely. Moment to moment.

I have a good exercise for you, if you're interested. It's available to anyone, pretty much anywhere. It involves just looking at the clouds. I don't mean sunsets. You carry too many ideas of what you're supposed to be seeing in a sunset for that to do you any good. I mean ordinary clouds. They aren't terribly impressive at first glance, but let yourself see them. When you do, you'll notice another problem: They change minute to minute, so that you can't hang on to a particularly beautiful formation. You have to let it go exactly as it changes into something else. For me, as I get older, this isn't an exercise. I enjoy the beauty in ordinary clouds more all the time, and find myself looking at them in all kinds of circumstances.

Entering a forest is a similar experience, especially if you're moving through it. You can't hang onto anything, but have to just see what you see. The only way to move through the forest is on foot. Any other way and you tend to relate to it as to a movie. And the best company to take along is none. Other people force you to stay in your socialized, city mind. The best time of day is evening, when your senses are most alert. And the best frame of mind is none. Just relaxed.

But it's not easy. It reminds me of when I tried meditation back in the 70s. For the first while, my mind would insist on talking. It would bring up old hang-ups, humiliations, good times, anything but the here and now. Likewise, it takes a while for it to find out I'm actually out in the country, that this is something really different. The thing is, these are awfully huge brains we're talking about - billions of cells arranged in unthinkably complex patterns. It's amazing they ever find out about the outside world at all. Or care. But they seem to be built to do just that. They only need to want to.

As I was saying, most people in the city, and I'm a good example now, seem to be so caught up in their conditioning, in their daily rewards and punishments, like drug addicts, that they hardly care whether nature exists at all. And certainly not whether it survives. But it still surprises me that they don't at least appreciate those bits of Nature that are allowed into our engineered world - that are purposefully planted by us, in neat rows, properly pruned, and that bloom in a way that exactly satisfies our own idea of Beauty. So why does no one revel? Do most of us not care about beauty at all? Or do we simply have no time? Or is it that we're unsatisfied with the old ideas? Are these trees just too Traditional, too much Objects of Beauty? Are we looking for more mystery now? The kind we know lives out in the forest? Who knows.

Well, I'll tell you what I think. I think these great modern cities are driving us crazy. They have us whipped into a frenzy. All we can think about are our present inadequacies and our hopefully better futures. We're so driven we don't have the energy to notice anything around us - not just the trees but our fellow humans as well, even the cities we inhabit. What we've become is just a few ideas, that bind us like ropes. The sum of our petty lives is some words we keep repeating over and over.

Sure, I suppose I'm generalizing. And maybe I'm exaggerating. But if so, only to a degree.

You may also want to read through the comments below, since many of the best ideas in my posts occur to me and my readers during the give and take of the comments and responses.

An Opening

2005-03-07T16:58:00.001-08:00

Beyond the wall, she waits.
Link by link,
the chain rattles;
the massive gate lifts.
Delicate displays are made, offerings:
tiny poems,
particles,
forgotten essences,
long-hidden jewels.
She accepts them all,
cradles them,
caresses.

Since time began
my soul has never
stepped from the shadows
into the open.
And even now
there is only
this one hand,
the few treasures it offers,
this one friend.

From deep inside
I begin
a long
exhalation-
a sigh,
barely audible.

Sitting across the table
upon which our poems mingle,
she glances quickly at me,
and mentions
that she prays
before starting each poem;
that the being,
the father, the friend,
who is holding her softly in his arms,
accepts her words
and returns them,
suffused with life.

As she does mine, in turn.

I think one of the most positive and important things that can happen in people's lives is to be shown that their inner beings are absolutely acceptable. I think that's one of the great things about Christianity, and probably any religion. And it's one of the big things about writing poetry too. You are exposing part of yourself you normally never talk about, and offering it to others. When you find you're not being devastated with criticism, as perhaps you expected would happen, at least unconsciously, you will probably be more accepting of yourself.

And, like they say, you can't really accept or love others until you're at least passably okay with yourself. Because then you can stop feeling totally defensive all the time. A good little test of it is this: What happens when someone gives you a gift or praises you unexpectedly? How do you react? The defensive person who can't accept himself simply can't relate to it, and, inwardly at least, refuses it. It's main effect is to cause embarrassment. But the person who has come to accept himself as being okay can say, "Yeah, I did do a pretty good job, didn't I?". And smile about it. And compare himself to others who have done similar things, with the feeling finally of being part of that community.

Is it possible to be astonished by politics?

2005-03-01T12:27:00.000-08:00

There aren't too many things that astonish me anymore. Normally it takes something like those crisp photos of the Martian surface the little rovers are beaming back. Or somebody I thought I knew doing something totally out of character. Or even a wonderful poem. But suddenly I'm finding myself astonished by international politics! And yet for decades now I thought I was far too cynical and had read way too many newspapers for that to ever happen again.

Well, first here's a little background. When George W. Bush invaded Iraq, I was one of the very few left-of-centre oddballs to be in favour of it. At the time I couldn't see any viable alternative, and I believed all the stuff about weapons of mass destruction. Even today, I still have a hard time with part of it - the fact that Saddam Hussein would have begun work on atomic weapons as soon as he was able to, when the embargo was lifted.

Nevertheless, when it became obvious that there were no WMDs already developed, and when all the post-invasion horrors arrived by the truckload, with no remedies in sight, or even considered, I changed my mind. And when finally Bush's only remaining justification for the war was a slogan about spreading democracy throughout the Islamic world, purporting that it more than made up for all the death, it was pretty obvious the whole thing was a mistake.

But all of a sudden that slogan is turning out to have been prophetic. I'm not sure Bush and his people really did plan to turn the Islamic world upside down politically, or if it was just an excuse that proved to have more substance and power than even he knew, but in any case it seems to be coming true!

In case you haven't been following the news, here's a series of events that will definitely bring you up short, if, like me, you are more left than right-leaning, and yet you like to stare reality in the face, no matter what.

Since the invasion of Iraq, the first shock to our political systems was that the dreaded terrorist Muammar Gaddafi of Lybia suddenly did an about face and is now right in there with the most pro-Western Islamic countries. Not too many people dispute that the main thing that changed his outlook was his sudden fear of an invasion by the armies of George W. Bush.

Then came the Purple-Finger Election in Iraq, and the incredible courage of the 60% of Iraqi adults who each faced the possibility of dying as they stood in the lineups at the polling booths. The sight of that phenomenon on all the TVs throughout Islam had an even bigger effect on Moslems than anyone including George Bush had seriously imagined. Suddenly the idea of democracy switched from a hated American thing to a Moslem-owned symbol of hope.

And suddenly upheavals are occuring all over the place.

Just a few days ago the 23-year-long ruler of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, surprised everyone by announcing he was going to allow the first free elections that Egypt has ever had (with an actual slate of candidates running for President, not just him as in the past) . This came not very long after his latest persecution of opposition leaders, so his turn-around was quite sudden. Apparently, it was a response partly to pressure from the Bush administration, but no doubt Mubarak was also well aware that the desert winds were a'changing.

At the same time the citizens of Lebanon decided they wanted out from under Syria, which presumably was responsible for the assasination a couple weeks ago of the one man in Lebanon who seemed capable of galvanizing the country against Syria. Well, killing him did just that. The citizens, who have tolerated the foreign oppression for years now, have decided en masse that this is the time to rid themselves of it. And as soon as they hit the streets, their pro-Syrian government resigned! Just like that. As well, the Syrian troops are moving back to their border, with a very good possibility that they're going to cave in to American and U. N. pressure and leave completely!

Who's next? Saudi Arabia? Iran? It's beginning to look like the old Domino Theory that the Americans held about Southeast Asia back in Vietnam War days: Once they start falling they will all go down.

Anyway it really does look like Bush's strategy is working and that a major political change is sweeping through the Islamic world. If so, George W. Bush will be seen as one of the most effective American leaders in history! Now, if that isn't astonishing, I don't know what is.

Politics is usually just so much talk. And hardly any of that talk means anything. But all of a sudden, it's taken on solidity: Reality is changing - the real world. The earth is moving under our feet. It doesn't matter how I, you, or anybody else feels about it all; George W. Bush is having a major impact on the world.

Cliche Engine

2005-02-25T21:00:00.001-08:00

As I stand there, looking on,
watching it all perform,
as the silver moon
sprinkles its sparkles
and the black lake sleeps,
I gather in the cliches like flowers.

But when I stop looking,
I feel the force of those flat shapes,
and in me my own controlled flailing
as I drown and live
in this ocean
of muscular dreams.

I was sitting in front of my tent looking out over a moonlit lake trying to describe it's rather common, yet shocking, beauty in a poem. I was having problems. Every phrase I used was a cliche. And with each new cliche I became angrier and angrier. So finally I stopped. There was definitely something wrong. I began to think the very idea of cliches itself had to be wrong. Because that cliche-covered lake, laying out there in front of me, was just so beautiful. Yet it was just one big cliche. The only conclusion I could come to that made sense was that cliches must be cliches for a good reason. Yes, I began to see it....They ARE over-used terms, but why are they over-used? Because they work. Because they are perfect for the job at hand. They instantly bring up the right images in the mind of virtually everyone who hears them. How bad a thing can that be? And then I began to see something about it I really liked: The fact that so many descriptive terms are used so automatically by so many people implies that human life is full of universal experiences - millions of things we all know and acknowledge, things which connect us into one big family of very similar beings, no matter how much we may dwell on our differences.

So ordinary life, seen every day in the ordinary ways we all see it, is far richer and more important to us than the derogatory term, 'cliche', would have us believe. It should come as no surprise, then, that the folk poetry that forms the basis for most of our cliche-heavy pop and country music is overwhelmingly more popular than the more literary forms of poetry that very few people can relate to.

Still, there is something to be said for creativity - for those of us who are into it.

No words...

2005-02-23T17:48:00.000-08:00

æ©éè¡åé, originally uploaded by Ccming.

There are no words to describe the beauty. The space. The feeling. The reality. Even if you can actually see it through all the words behind your eyes, there are no words to describe it. Words fog the eyes. Words turn the mind, tangle it. I could try to describe the clouds, the size of the sky, of nature, the look of the young woman, the breeze in her skirt, and we would both be lost.

But it's all there. See it?

Do you think you're a bit strange?

2005-02-15T21:43:00.000-08:00

One of the beauties of hard reality over fantasy is that in the real world interesting discoveries are waiting everywhere for those who are looking for them. And a good place to find them, I've found, is in unusual events.

The latest unusual event in my life spawned two discoveries. The first I put in my last post. For those who missed it, the event occured while I was delivering roses for my flower shop on Valentine's evening, a time when I was extremely exhausted from three days of non-stop stress. Upon exiting from several apartment buildings I had just made deliveries in, I found that for a minute I couldn't remember where I was. Not only were my directions lost to me, but also the street I was on, the part of the city I was in, and where I had parked the van. Yet I could think perfectly clearly. It occured to me that thinking (analyzing, theorizing, trying to understand things) was my specialty in life, my one big talent, so it was being given all the energy it needed, but at the expense of abilities I wasn't as good at, things I didn't see as important aspects of my 'self'.

Well, thinking about this experience later (how could I not, being the kind of person I am), I realized just how little importance, and energy, I must put into those abilities in my day-to-day life, that they should be so quickly sacrificed. In this case, it was my feeling of being situated in the real world, of being closely aware of it and thus always carrying an internal, continually-updated map, with me accurately positioned on it.

It occured to me that if, at 55 years of age, I still wasn't any better at certain things, like this one - in other words if I wasn't any more 'well-rounded' than I had been as a teenager - then becoming well-rounded as life progresses simply must not happen to any great degree. And yet, when you're young, just the opposite seems to be the case. You're convinced that with a little work, a little training in the gym of life, you could make yourself into pretty much anything. All possibilities are open to you. You could become amazing, marvelous, cool, gorgeous, talented, wonderful, sophisticated, loving, strong, attractive, inspiring, charismatic, or, to be more specific, you could become a great scientist, a Hollywood celebrity, a modern Sherlock Holmes, a Nobel Prize winner, a ruler of the world, even a superhero with super powers.

Well then, becoming a mature adult obviously muct consist, in one sense at least, of finding out who you actually are, finding out who you actually are not, resigning yourself to both of these, and hopefully then getting into really being that real person.

And that real person consists of an assortment of things you are both good at and not so good at, all of which will define your sense of your real, inner self all your life.

Well, here's my second little idea (or 'discovery', from my point of view).

As your life progresses, you don't just have talents and inabilities that remain with you, but you slowly become sculped by them as well. You start to look like them to some degree, not only to yourself, inside, but to others as well. I've noticed that this becomes more severe in people who really go to town with their talents, who dive into them, who take them very seriously, and who also basically ignore the other aspects of their lives. The problem is that as they ignore their inabilities, they sometimes ignore a lot of outer reality as well. They may become eccentric, which isn't bad in itself, but they may also become strange, and loudly strange, which often has exactly that feeling to onlookers - that they've removed themselves from reality by following their passions and only their passions. That they've stopped looking around.

It has always seemed to me that the people who not only have highly-developed talents but who are also deep, whole people, are the ones who don't greatly depend on them, who don't use them exclusively for ego support, but who develop and use them to some large degree as abilities they can contribute to society. It strikes me that the beauty, and result, of this is that the realism of society keeps having an impact on them. I don't necessarily mean society as a whole, but at least some part of it has an impact, at least some friends (so long as they aren't all clones). Talents that are open and out there and with other people seem to remain healthier, and so these people themselves will more likely remain mentally/emotionally healthy into old age,
instead of becoming stranger and stranger.

Take me for instance. When I was younger, I went through a period of keeping my thinking inside myself, and of getting deeper and deeper into myself with it, and I did start to get pretty strange. It scared me. I didn't want to be a weirdo, as I knew I only had this one life to live (sorry, Andy, that's how I felt), and I really wanted to be a normal human being during my one life. Well, since then, and through the last couple decades of my adult life, I've struggled constantly to see others around me as if I were them, and to see me living here with them in life. I still think a lot, but I also work a business, have a wife and two cats, and now I'm even sharing my thoughts with other reasonably normal human beings online. We're all being normal thinking human beings together. To some degree we act as checks and balances on each other. Each time we worry about how someone will see some idea or feeling we have, we are trying to see how we relate to reality.

It's true that being worried about how these other people see us all the time is a block to freedom. If they weren't there, or if we didn't notice them, we could really move, fly along in whatever way our passions took us. But there would be no way of telling just where along that course we would move away from reality into fantasy. The only way to tell is to slow down, to get bogged down in all the people and muck of reality around us. In which case we lose a large part of the freedom we would have had. We become prisoners. But this prison is different: It's constructed out of the real world.

Postscript:

Reading the comments below, especially those by Andy: 'Spicy Cauldron', I began to realize I had missed an important point when I put this post together. To paraphrase Andy, he suggests that he is quite happy to judge himself, and is capable of seeing himself clearly enough to be able to do it sanely. Well, anybody could say this, of course, but, knowing Andy a bit, I know that he has certainly been through a lot in life, and so has had to confront reality and digest it, in some depth, over a long period of time. In other words, he has reached a certain maturity. Well, it struck me that young people may be different from more mature people like Andy in that they are (and need to be) much more concerned about others' reactions to them. But as they mature, they gain a stronger feeling of reality, in all it's forms, along with a stronger sense of what sanity is, having had more time to feel it all out. In other words, as people age they carry more and more of reality along with them, enough, perhaps, to be able to check themselves effectively as they progress on the paths of their passions, and so don't need as much of it from others.

Nevertheless, there is no question that many people become stranger and stranger as they age, and many of these seem to have little interest in how the world sees them. So, where some individuals may truly be mature enough to keep themselves on the real tracks, others maybe never reached that point, but only think they did, and slowly slide off with no one to warn them.

What a lovely job to have.

2005-02-15T15:40:00.000-08:00

Valentine's Day is over. For those who don't know, I own a flower shop. We sell roses.

Another little fact of life a few very young people may not yet know is that men constantly put off buying things, especially flowers, until the very last minute.

Well, I finally got through about three solid days of panic. Boy is that hard on a person. I went as hard as I could push myself, driven by stress, for maybe twelve to fourteen hours a day, day after day. I couldn't even squeeze in a full night's sleep because the stress kept me awake late. I had to try Linda's sleeping pills, and some other home remedy of hers I'm not allowed to talk about, that apparently alleviates stress.

Here's a third little fact of life. Stress destroys brain cells. I am today stupider than I was last week. So be warned any of you who may come here looking forward to brilliant repartee in the comment section. First of all I will have to replace those few hundred thousand brain cells. Maybe I'll take music lessons, or learn karate. They say that if you do something that's very difficult, it actually does cause new brain cells to pop out like crocuses in the snow.

Anyway, yesterday, Valentine's Day, was the worst day because of the lineups. No matter how hard you try to re-educate yourself over the years, you never can seem to overcome the stress caused by finger drumming, sighs, restless body movements, down-turned mouths. Especially when you're obviously moving as frantically as you can.

We had something between 50 and 100 deliveries a day over the last several days, with by far the most on the 14th. Most recipients are very understanding of the difficulties of accomplishing this, but there are always a few who insist, no matter what, that the flowers be delivered between like 3:30 and 4:00, not a minute sooner or later, and that if you can't do that they're going to start screaming at you on the phone. Well, there are always a few legitimate cases of for instance women living in apartments who work all day and there's no way the roses can be delivered to them during the day, so I have to volunteer to do it myself in the evening. Yesterday I had nine to do on my most exhausting day, and I'm amazed that I didn't have an accident. Before I left, Linda took my arm and looked into my eyes and said, "Pumpkin, drive slow." So I did, forcing my brain to work. But as I started out my energy came back, maybe just from getting away from the flower shop. I smiled to myself, thinking I was getting my second wind.

Then I noticed a funny thing. This is how a delivery would go: I would find a parking spot, usually on a familiar street, park, take the roses out, walk to the door of the apartment building, buzz the apartment, say I was delivering flowers, open the door, find the elevator door and go up, look up and down the hall to figure out which direction to go, hear her call to me, walk down to her smiling face poking out of her door, hand her the flowers and have a mini conversation about how many deliveries I had that day and that I was just about done, and boy what a relief, walk back to the elevator, go down and out into the lobby, walk to the main door, open the door and go outside. Whereupon I would have no idea where I was. I wouldn't know what street I was on, what direction I was facing, even what area of town I was in. I would frantically look around for some landmark to jog my memory. Not seeing anything familiar, I looked for the van, having no idea where I parked it. Is that it behind that car? Can't quite tell in the dark. Or is that it back there? I would go toward the van that looked the most like mine. And then it would all start to come back to me - where I had parked it, the street I was on, the directions, everything.

I'm not getting Alzheimer's. It's just exhaustion. When I got my second wind, I think the little energy I had left was channeled away from some parts of me to others where the priority was highest. I noticed that I could still think perfectly well, even though I couldn't remember where I was two minutes before. Well, I'm a thinking person. That's my big priority in life. So I guess when energy is limited, my ability to theorize gets all it needs, like as if it really needed any in the first place, but my ability to do practical, down-to-earth things, the kind of things Linda does as a matter of course, completely disappears.

So here's my advise to young people who are still expecting to be perfect when they grow up. Forget about it. If you're not perfect now, you never will be. Whatever your specialty is now, that's what it will always be, and whatever your inabilities in life, you'd better get used to them: They'll be tripping you up till your dying day.
.

It's Fate

2005-02-12T10:03:00.000-08:00

In the comment section of the previous post, we became sidetracked into a topic much more interesting than the original one: destiny. Does such a thing exist, and if so why, and how does it work, and who runs it, if anyone? All kinds of questions close to our hearts are involved. Here's how the comments went, edited of extraneous material. If anyone has something to add, please do.....

Rain said...: accidents are unintentional and unplanned. but whether or not they were meant to happen is another story. the deterministic nature of things in life has taken up a huge space in my personal culture. i believe that everything that happens is meant to happen. nothing is accidental. even those occasional transparent discoveries.

Stan said...: Hi Rain, I am of two minds with regard to fate and destiny. I really am tempted to think something is going on like that, because my life is full of very odd occurances: Every time I hit rock bottom in some way, am at wits end, desperate, along comes a very weird event that pulls me out. And these events never seem to happen to me otherwise. It's got to the point I don't worry too much any more. On the other hand I have a hard time reconciling destiny with all the poor individuals who have suffered terrible, horrible situations. There are way too many to even begin to make it into the media. The world is full of them. So the way I pretty much have to see it is that I've just been lucky and these poor folks haven't been. The alternative is to have to believe that some monster like the devil is running destiny, and I can't believe that.


small squirrel said...: hey there, am so late getting into the fray... my mind has been unable to wrap around large concepts for long enough to sit down and write. I seem to read your posts lately and ponder and ponder with no conclusion. Which is wonderful!!!

stan I loved your comments about fate/destiny. one of my fave topics. I am also prone to strange coincidences, though they don't always pull me out of bad situations. I have the same issue you have though, with fate, in that it always makes me wonder about those who find themselves in bad circumstances... and I don't believe, really, that it was their destiny. I dunnoooo..

Stan said...: Now that I think about this thing that Rain brought up, this 'destiny', this manipulation of our lives by higher-ups, a lot of ideas show themselves. Of course there's the idea of higher-ups themselves (God, Gods, Powerful Ethereal Beings, Etc.), which we've hashed through a lot on previous posts. I'm normally an agnostic but in one of the last comments on a previous post I very rationally (so it seemed to me) figured out how there actually could be something to all this. And the upshot of that one comment is that I now am much more open to the idea of higher-ups. Which means that their possible manipulation of our lives, in the form of what we call destiny is not totally out of the question for me anymore.

But is there any evidence for it? Well, to speak personally, in the long journeys I went on over several years in my early 30s, I came very close to disaster a number of times, close to the point of despair and/or death. I'll give you one example. I was hiking through one of the mountain chains of BC in early spring. I was quite high in altitude, far above the valley bottoms between the chains, and there was a good lot of snow up there. Essentially at that altitude it was mid-winter. Well, the highway tended to have a vertical wall on one side and a cliff dropping off on the other. But not everywhere. This day I was pushing it to try to make up for a slow day before. In mid afternoon I came to a place by the road that was flat enough for me to pitch my tent. I thought about stopping there, but it was just too early in the day and so I made a fateful decision to carry on, assuming I would come to some other flat spot before nightfall. The trouble is I was only going three miles an hour. Well, there was nothing, only cliffs. Then it started to get dark, and still nothing. I couldn't camp on the road, the Trans-Canada Highway, or I would surely be killed by a vehicle in the night. There was only one lane each way. It was starting to get pretty dark. The sky was covered in cloud, and soon it would be pitch dark, with absolutely no light. I didn't have a flashlight, stupidly enough. I thought I would have to sit awake all night at the edge of the road, and it was getting very cold, with a wind. I could easily see myself dying that night. It got darker until I couldn't make out the snow any further than a couple yards away. Any darker at all and I would not be able to see any sudden widening where I could pitch my tent. And, right then, I came to the first variation since I had decided to carry on: a little side road that went off and dropped down into the valley!!! I pitched my tent on the snow of that single-lane side road just beside the highway. I was sooo relieved. Anyone else would have thanked God. I just thought how amazing it was.

Anyway, this same kind of experience happened to me again and again over those 8,000 miles of journeys, till I began to expect it. And here I am today, safe and sound.

There's only one way that these things could be manipulated, in terms of 'destiny', as far as I can see. The side road was always there, unchangeable. The sun would go down when it went down, the same for everyone. But the variable factor was when I started walking. That would determine how far I got before it got dark and before I got to the sideroad. Just what caused me to start hiking exactly when I did? I don't think I would have been able to pin it down even then, and even if I could remember the initial thought, "Okay, it's time to go," why did I think that then, and if it came after a necessary sequence of events were fulfilled, why did I start on those exactly when I did, and why did I do them at a certain speed and not another?

On the other hand, if my life was being saved by destiny, why were those missionary nuns in Africa, whom I remember reading about way back then, brutally raped and murdered by the natives? Why weren't they saved as if by a miracle? I'm sure they expected to be. And what about the millions of other women who are raped every year, and all those murdered souls. And what about the rapists and murderers themselves - why aren't they led to situations where they will see the light and manage to change their lives, as happens so often in movies? And why do people get sick and never recover? And why do they just slowly lose their dreams? And even sometimes lose their sense of goodness that used to keep them going? In so many cases, it wouldn't take much. In a cold snap, or a heat wave, some passerby might just decide for no particular reason to knock on a particular door, and getting no response, inquire about the resident, and thereby save an old person from freezing or heat exhaustion. But no one does. Until it's all over.

Well, there's only one way you can put the two together, the idea of some of us being guided safely through life, and yet others not. That is that destiny only applies to some. That for a few people there is something like a guardian angel, who can see the future and prevent bad turns, and for others there simply isn't.

If this is true, it's hard to imagine this 'guardian angel' being a single omniscient God. If it is, then there's some serious injustice going on here. This would not be the kind of God you could possible think of in terms of the glowing descriptions we normally use. Because why have some people who have tried so very hard in their lives to be good and to care for others been brought down so horribly, and why have people like me who have been pretty ordinary to say the least, been protected? Do you see the injustice there?

No the only answer is that there are certain beings who are doing this for their own selfish reasons, not for us at all.; 12:33 AM
Spicy Cauldron said...: I disagree. We are steeped in the idea that a personal god has an active interest in human beings over and above animals and the rest of the natural world, presumably because we are conscious, or sentient, and because various theologies present 'God' as having made us in 'His' image.

If we remove ourselves from the idea that we are above the cycle of life, which includes death, and the notion that we can somehow influence events by power of divine preference, then we start to recognise that we have our part to play, all of us. No one person is any more favoured by the gods than any other. I mean, in what terms would you quantify it? Money? What is money to a god? Sex, good luck, a full head of hair past 60... what? How do we quantify the favourites of the divine when we don't know what it means to be divine.

I'd say we are all favoured. We have the gift of life and free will to change, evolve, learn, enjoy, feel pleasure and pain. What more do we want? Are we really so selfish and small as to think that life is not the ultimate gift? If your life is not in itself proof of divine favour, then what the heck could be?

My gods aren't there to win me pots of cash or stop me getting run over if I'm stupid enough to set off crossing the road without looking. They are present, though, in me and my life, giving me strength and occasionally speaking to me. In so doing, I find them inspiring but I'm no more a favourite than you, Stan. I just have my ways of listening. You would have yours, and whether you or anyone else chooses to listen or not is... well, it's choice.

Remember, we are made of the stuff of the universe. We are not separate from it and if we are alive, we are meant to be here. Within these relatively flimsy shells, it's hard to fathom purpose, reason for living sometimes. Life, though, and consciousness did not happen by accident in my opinion... ah, but we're back to faith and, yet again, that wonderful ability to choose what we believe or reject.

In closing I hope I've been reasonably coherent because we are navigating deep, dark and beautiful waters here. I would say it is we who are more demonstrative of selfishness than any god. It is in our nature, of course, to put two and two together even if the numbers are too big for a human mind to comprehend. We do it anyway. It doesn't mean we're likely to be right, though.; 7:19 AM
Spicy Cauldron said...: Ah, one important point: justice has never been the same thing to all people. Our concept of justice changes from culture to culture, nation to nation, age to age. If human beings do not have a definitive, one size fits all concept of justice, while we're looking for justice from the gods do we even know what it is we're looking for? I kind of doubt it somehow.

I think people in the Western world feel collectively let down, on some deep subconscious level, by God. That's a fault of the Christian church down through the centuries and, of late, the terrorists of the other patriarchal monotheistic religions. When God lets you down, you turn to yourself and the material world. When you let yourself down, where else is left to go?

I find that very sad and utterly depressing to think on....; 7:24 AM
Stan said...: What you say sounds good, Andy. What I said didn't sound good. I'm inclined to believe that what I said was wrong too. But you didn't convince me of that, I'm afraid. And reason alone still makes my idea more plausible than yours. For one thing you avoided the entire problem. Essentially you said that people who come into a bad way could have chosen a better one. Well, that is hardly ever the case. Hardly ever. To name a few examples, those nuns who were raped and murdered. And in a more modern sense, all the Iraqis who were blown up by suicide bombers. And all those people who were killed by the tsunami. And all those who came down with Aids before it was understood where it came from . And all those filled with hate for their entire useless lives because they were beaten by their parents as children. I could go on and on and on. Yes it's possible to think of people who could have chosen a different path but it's not as easy. But let's think of them, in any case: The person who blunders out into the street and is struck down by a car. He could have decided to look both ways first, but his lover had just left him. He was so overwhelmed by emotion he couldn't hardly see in front of him, to say nothing of looking both ways. Is it therefore right somehow that he should be killed? Virtually everyone who makes a wrong choice did so for some extraneous reason that entered and made it difficult to think clearly at that moment. And all these people are devastated because of it. Nobody can say that's a just thing, if some spirt could have interceded and didn't. Only to teach a lesson? That's nuts. And what other reason could there be? I'll tell you. It could only be justice if there is no spirit there ready to intercede. I would like to believe there is, but if there is, I would like to see some evidence of the spirit behaving in a civil, caring way. Otherwise, even if I do believe, why should I give a damn? That's about the sum of it.; 8:10 AM
Stan said...: On the other hand, it seems there is something going on. I just can't put my finger on it.

The Collision of Minds

2005-02-09T22:12:00.000-08:00

Linda really likes watching American Idol, and so occasionally I sit in on a session with her. I have to admit it's one of the more entertaining reality shows I've seen. Last night all the contestants were singing and dancing before the judges in groups of threes. The judges were also a group of three, and, after one fairly bad group, they performed even worse than the singers: They actually got into a shouting match over their decision. Paula Abdul seemed to feel that her single choice of one of them should override the other two judges, and her and snarky Simon were just about to pull out the steak knives when the producer came in and ended it. The odd thing to me, the interesting thing that gave me pause, was that their final decision, after all the turmoil, seemed to be the only right one. Of the trio, only one guy was allowed to carry on in the competition, the only one I also would have kept.

For some reason, that situation recalled to me an incident from more than twenty years ago. I was on my long bicycle trip across Eastern Canada. At one little town in Nova Scotia I went for a beer in the bar, and started talking to this big, fat, very unhealthy guy who owned a monument business. For those like me who aren't afficionados of 'Six Feet Under', a monument business is one that produces tombstones on demand. This guy seemed like he would need one soon himself. At first it was kind of a depressing conversation, considering what he was like, and that I was a bit lonely as well, I guess, but in a while he got caught up in telling me his whole life story (me being a good listener) and finally invited me to stay at his family's house for the night. Well, it was obviously a pretty unusual event because I definitely had the feeling, in that yellowy claustrophobic living space, of being something blown in on a cold wind. In there, so much was implied and so little said - until I came in, that is. Hearing their father, and her husband, just blab everything to this stranger obviously embarrased the rest of the family, who had never heard it themselves, and anyway just wanted their evening routine restored. But he seemed to have opened inside into this different space. He suddenly called his son over, a boy in his early teens, and told him in front of me that he was going to pass his monument business on to him when he died. He obviously had never said it out loud before. This was the first tangible evidence the son had ever had of what his future would hold, yet he was so embarrased by his father's behaviour that he could only mumble, with irritation, "Okay, Dad," and break away quickly and go into his room. But the father's eyes were bright as he resumed talking to me. His whole life was falling into place.

Just the other day, I was writing my last comment in a string of responses to all your comments. We had wound our way from a poem about fake cowboys, through the thoughts of five or six of us, down a number of turns and byways, into and through the idea of existential angst, to a place where it all came together for me. Suddenly I could see what had really happened on those long journeys I had made, and the real value they actually had in my life (I've always been a bit sceptical). So, in the process, I discovered just what kind of struggle and upheaval I had always needed in order to change in a big enough way to really grow. It took all that, all of us, and me working with all of you in these ways, to finally see it clearly, after two decades. If we had never gotten together like this, if I had just kept to myself as I have most of my life, just meandering along alone, I can see that I might have never, ever, been in a position to work it out.

But now my life makes a lot more sense than it did.

I find all this really interesting, that from the collision of minds something much bigger, yet much closer to reality, can take shape. Somehow in the loud give and take some subtle thing emerges, or is allowed to emerge. Intuition, I think. What it feels like is that intuition is more readily available in those situations. Instead of just sitting back and watching events unfold, it suddenly becomes an active participant.

Cowboy Heaven

2005-02-04T21:07:00.000-08:00

Let me set the scene for you. I was in my early 30s, at the desperate end of a three-year-long journey - about 8,000 miles of walking, canoeing, and cycling - hoping to find some ultimate answers to myself and life, with very little to show for it. I had ended up on the eastern-most point of Canada - St. John's, Newfoundland - and decided to go back in the bush and camp out as long as the coming winter would allow. A week or so after I hid my tent and gear in the deepest forest of a closed park, all alone, I found myself shocked and enthralled by this encounter:

Imagine my surprise,
as I wandered out of the darkening forest
to catch the last warmth of the November sun,
on finding a group of Wild West cowboys
there in that closed provincial park
on the eastern end of the continent!
For a while the trees and I
stood there observing their strange intrusion,
with their steady slow chatter like smoke from a fire,
till they spotted me, and invited me over,
at least the talking one did -
and what a lot of talk it was
for a cowboy -
even though he wore a bandanna
just right, and a warm winter vest,
and leather chaps,
and on his head the hat
of a stalwart U.S. Cavalry officer,
with a little round tin of
chawing tobacco
back in his hip pocket.
He probably even used it.
A fire sputtered yellow in the iron grill
that the park provides with the picnic table.
And their horses, still saddled, sniffed the ground
under the fir trees.
He introduced me: Boys, he said, meet a cowboy from out west.
Where'd you say?
Calgary.
He glanced at me (some kind of real thing) uneasily,
and talked on.
Coffee simmered in a tin can.
Whiskey was handy in a flask. Most had leather chaps on -
one was peeing
off to the side. I said
they still round up cattle by horse
out west.
A young guy looked up
from the fire and told me that's what he'd really like.
And I could see it in him, as quiet as a prairie night.
And then the talking cowboy said, "Some do:
Some of the boys will be working here,
but come the first cool weather
you'll see them loading up their bags -
them that don't get saddled
with a wife, that is.
They'll mosey on down south,
maybe hitch up with an outfit in Texas,
then work the winter in Wyoming..."
Not him though - not without his buddies behind him.
We drank the good strong coffee
that was boiling in the big tin cup,
with a gulp of whiskey from the flask.
But night was moving in.
They saddled up, one at a time,
and finally,
out of a good old movie,
the cavalry officer shouts,
"Yo-ooo!"
and they pulled out,
with the sound of hooves clattering on gravel
and someone whistling,
'On the Road Again'.
I wandered along the chilly lake shore
watching Venus and Mars follow the trail of the sun
over the western horizon
and the stars blooming all around me.
As I gazed out past the moon
into that great spread of the galaxy,
I wondered how many real cowboys up there
were sitting contentedly by themselves
beside their fires on prairie planets,
gazing up, like me, into the blossoming heavens,
just whittling some wood, or humming a tune.

I hurried off to my tent and immediately started putting together this poem. Poetry was what I had decided to use as a tool while I was out there, to help me reach down inside myself. And it was working, sort of. At least, I was really getting into poetry. So, this particular evening, by the light of a candle, I wrote this sort-of-a-poem about these pretend cowboys. And myself encountering them. Somehow there was something there. I felt. If only I could see it.

Well, that bizarre image is the kind of thing you can get a lot out of, if you look hard enough. And no doubt everybody would find something different. To me, looking back on it from two decades later, it brings to mind the difficulties I have relating to myself, and to life, even now. For instance, every once in a while I get choked up with a feeling of not knowing who I am, as if I'm totally alone in the midst of a void, with no surroundings to define me. Or something like that. And sometimes I even have the feeling that this bleak vision represents actual reality and that the rest of the time I'm just distracting myself so I don't see it. When I was in Newfoundland, I had purpose - I was on a journey, a quest. That defined me then. But now that it's long been over, I often feel a little like those fake cowboys, not knowing whether my life really just consists of me playing a role, or not. And, if so, how deep does it go? And if I were to stop, what would I be?

JErm is No Guru on a Mountain Top.

2005-01-31T23:22:00.000-08:00

My life is like an old car. It keeps running okay, more or less; it just needs a lot of tinkering. I would love to have a flashy new one like I see on TV all the time, but I just can't afford it. I'm stuck with this one. And I do get by with it. But it keeps me thinking. I come up with an endless assortment of theories on how to improve it. Occasionally, I even put some of them into practice for a few days, until I'm distracted. But basically my life is pretty much the same now as it ever was.

My big theory, my bottom-line theory, is that it just isn't bad enough. If it was, to the point of being nearly unlivable, I might come up with an actual life-changing idea, and I might even follow up on it.

Well, very occasionally I meet people who actually are living that kind of life, and very occasionally they do pass on their rock-bottom revelations. Here's the latest. It's from JErm, a website designer/artist/techie. I've been reading his blog for some time, and he makes the occasional comment on mine. He's had a really rough life, and freely admits in posts on his blog that much of the time he hates himself. Here's one of his latest posts, which he kindly gave me permission to reproduce:

"I have a love-hate relationship with life. I know, this sounds absurd. But consider this. Sometimes life acts like a bitchy girlfriend. It never gives me what I want, it never agrees with me, and it never cease to torment me. When I come to think about it, I don’t like this relationship. I want to break it off!

"That was a thought from my suicidal moments.

"Now I realize. It’s not only life that’s been a bitch to me. I haven’t been perfect either. I never give her the attention she needs. I never listen to her. I don’t even give a shit about what she has to offer. In fact at most times I was the jerk.

"My conclusion is. Life is a bitch. But I’m a fucking jerk. And the fact that we’re still together tells me that we’re somewhat even! :lol:"

This is not the enlightened advise of an Indian guru who has distilled it from the wise words and beatific smiles of endless generations before him. This is a guy who has been hammering his head against the concrete wall of his life. He has been dumped on in the worst ways by a world he was forced into, has watched others being pampered and loved, and has hated his life all the more for it. Yet suddenly, down in that hole, he decided to look at it all differently, to turn 180 degrees, put on a smile, open his eyes, and see if it makes a difference.

Well, I don't know the answer. Perhaps he will fill us in on how this idea has affected his life. No doubt it has and it hasn't. I've never seen a single revelation that has totally turned a person around. Usually it takes a massive one just to slow one's momentum slightly, to get a toe in the crack of a door, to allow, maybe, a second revelation, and then a third, and so life carries on, a boat on a slightly different tack, maybe the wind no longer directly in the face, the waves less choppy, the ride slightly smoother. But, in comparison, for a while, it feels like drifting into harbour.

How Long Can Christmas be Extended?

2005-01-29T11:28:00.000-08:00

stan
Originally uploaded by Stan2.

Christmas is finally over! Can you believe we just now took down the last of our decorations, a cedar garland with red lights around the canopy?

People say

2005-01-24T02:11:00.000-08:00

Stanley you really should read more poetry,
learn the latest styles,
practice practice, and get published
for heaven's sake -
become known; be somebody.

But to me on this beach
I'm only a pebble falling back
and forth in the surge of the surf;
a glisten
on a ripple on a wave.

I had a dream once
of wave after wave after wave.

I would like to write a poem like the sea.

I Have Very Large, uh...well...

2005-01-20T18:29:00.000-08:00

Feet. Really, I'm not joking. When I walk down the street, people look at me. It's nothing new. They always have. I used to think it was because of my ruggedly handsome good looks, of which I'm enormously well endowed. But no, I see now what's going on: I tend to rise up in an arc with each step forward. I guess it looks unusual to most people. And that bobbing movement is amplified by my height. I'm embarrased by it now, so I try to slide through a crowd, but it's difficult, especially on concrete. If there's any rough spot on the sidewalk, my shoes will find it, and will suddenly pitch me forward. I never actually fall on my face though. My achilles tendons at the back of my feet are exceptionally strong. I simply give a good pull on those and I rise up again. So you see, I manage okay. If only other people would just try to ignore me.

We, the Little People

2005-01-17T18:52:00.000-08:00

We, the little people of North America, are often cynical of the institutions of democracy, freedom, and equality that our society so values and endlessly trumpets, yet so often falls short on delivering.

Our democracy is tainted by giving it's citizens little choice at voting time, and then by trying to force the vote with superficial slogans, with massive amounts of money being poured into simplistic advertising, and by lobby groups that seemingly have more influence on policy than do the people.

Freedom is tainted by the endless manipulation of citizens by government and media, and by the omnipresent advertising of business, and much more.

Equality? Everyone knows about the never-ending racism, sexism, and homophobia, to say nothing of good-looking vs plain, the eloquent speakers vs the stutterers, the able vs the disabled, the smart vs the dumb, the thin vs the fat, etc. etc. We sometimes wonder just who is equal to whom.

Well, things could be worse. It doesn't hurt to occasionally take a side glance at places that genuinely are worse. For instance, I've read the occasional piece of reporting from Europe, that great continent of our heritage, that's absolutely horrified me. Democracy was born in Europe, yet it is now rife with corruption and class-oriented power structures. Italy, for example, is so used to corruption that it's prime minister has no problem staying in power through massive bribery scandals. And France and England seem to be built on corruption. As for democracy, where in Europe can you find a feeling of real democracy, the kind where ordinary people are valued simply for what they can provide to society? Does it exist? I'm cynical.

Of course, these are massive generalizations of the worst kind, and can be argued with endlessly, but let me illustrate what I mean with an example.

This is the European Space Agency, supposedly one of the most modern institutions in the world, unveiling the first pictures of the surface of Titan. Jeffrey Bell, a retired space scientist, made this report for SpaceDaily.com:

ESA Flubs Titan Landing Show
...drip feeding the handouts

by Jeffrey F. Bell
Honolulu HI (SPX) Jan 14, 2005

I just watched on NASA Web TV the European Space Agency's bizzarre idea of how to present the first landing on a new planet to the public. It was a sorry spectacle - probably the worst PR disaster in the entire history of space travel. Never has a great technical and scientific feat been made to look more trivial.

First, they did not place the raw images immediately on the Web in real time, or show them on TV, or even show them on internal monitors like JPL has done at least since Voyager. Instead we all had to wait for an old-fashioned delayed presentation. (I can't wait to hear Richard Hoagland's interpretation of this.)

One of my favorite memories of Voyager was watching the images of the Uranus moons arrive in real time with a group of planetary astronomers and geologists. We could whip up instant interpretations, argue about them, and wait with bated breath for the next image that might prove us wrong or right. Now with the NASA Channel and the Internet, this amazing experience (seeing a whole new world at the same time as everyone else) can be available to everyone.

What possible reason is there for denying us this?

Second, the presentation got exponentially smaller with time (with no explanation of why). They had about 350 pictures of Titan taken with the descent imager. The world press was initially told that 18 selected images would be available. Then when the TV show actually got started, we learned that the descent imager PI (Marty Tomasko of the University of Arizona) had three ready to show and comment on.

We actually got to see only one image of Titan taken from 16km altitude. But we in the TV and Web audience don't see it at first. Instead it is projected on a screen at the ESOC control center, and we see images of a small group of privileged guests in Darmstadt gaping at the image we can't see and clapping their hands for what seemed like forever.

Finally they show the image to the public. Prof. Tomasko gets maybe 30sec to explain what we are looking at. But before he can show us the closeup pictures, the announcer jerks the mike away. He goes around the room to various high officials and managers and asks them in English for their reaction- but specifies that the interviewees must answer in their native languages!

There is one official for each of the major language bocs paying for the ESA. Anybody tuning in to this part of the program by mistake would think they were watching a comedy sketch.

Before the Parade of Nations ends, my PC Webcast freezes up. By the time I'm back on line, NASA TV is showing the usual pap again with no link to ESOC. But media friends who saw the whole show say that the promised 2 images from lower altitudes were not officially shown or described (one of them seems to have gotten some screen time by mistake).

And how about what we really wanted to see? The first picture from the surface of Titan? It's not shown at all!! They put it up on the web about half an hour later, after the TV show is over. Clearly this could have been available as the dramatic high point of the presentation, if things were properly coordinated.

Quite aside from the lack of information in this presentation, the social attitudes embedded in it are quite incomprehensible to anybody born and raised outside of Europe.

At a JPL landing, the center director and maybe the NASA Administrator might be there, but they wouldn't be the center of attention. The coverage would center on 1) the images 2) the scientists explaining them 3) the bright young people at the consoles who do the real work on the mission. No American mediameisters would think of making managers and politicos the focus of the coverage, and people would complain bitterly if they did.

This is a classic example of a major cultural difference between the USA and Europe that anybody rarely talks about.

For myself, I first ran into it at science conferences in Europe. There was always an 'honorary organizing committee' made up of local political bigwigs that had nothing to do with science. "What's the point of this? What are you scientists getting out of it? Aren't you compromising your academic freedom by sucking up to partisan politicians?"

The answer was "We've always done it this way and if we don't stroke the egos of our politicians they will cut the science budget to punish us."

"But what if another party wins the next election and you get a new set of politicians?"

"They'd still be offended that we were not sufficiently respectful of politicians as a class."

After years of visiting Europe and talking to friends from there, I finally got it through my thick skinned head that most European nations are still mired in pre-Enlightenment thinking, even after 200 years of bloody revolutions.

They may superficially look like modern liberal states, but the old habits can still be found if you scrape off the camouflage. The people in charge no longer wear plate armour and mostly don't inherit their jobs, but they are still aristocrats at heart. The common man still doesn't count for much (even if he has a Ph.D).

And the common man mostly goes along with this. He may vote for "worker's parties" like the Trotskyites or the National Front, but finds it perfectly natural that there are no primary elections in which the workers pick the party candidates or seeing all the top government jobs held by graduates of a single government-run school.

So maybe the average Space Cadet in Europe wasn't as disappointed as I was by this inept, anti-intellectual, reactionary, elitist approach to showing the taxpayers what their euros bought. Probably there won't be many paving stones torn up, or streets barricaded, or protest rallies outside the main gate of ESOC. But one can always hope.

Jeffrey F. Bell is a retired space scientist and recovering pro-space activist.

Something About Her (updated posting)

2005-01-15T13:18:00.000-08:00

Stylish and stuffed
with meatballs,
my lady,
in black velvet
and jingling earrings
from the jungles
of Africa.

The man
in the suit
behind me
can't tear his eyes away.

Over the last couple of posts, and umpteen comments, we've been talking about love. And then suddenly my sweetheart went away. She didn't leave me altogether, thank God, but just went on a week-long trip to visit her relatives in far-off Ontario. And here I am getting more lonely by the minute, with only little Sweet Pea curled up beside me for company. It's getting very silent here in the store.

I thought I would distract myself by posting a new poem, and so I got down my folder, thumbed through it, and there was the one love poem I've ever written for sweet Linda. Staring me in the face. I had posted it here earlier, along with an essay. But, even so, I can't think of one I would like to post more than it right now, even if it is a second time around.

This is a simple little poem. Read it and enjoy it. Then take a second look. (I like these second looks.) It's a much more subtle poem than it seems on first glance. Just for starters, its title is one of my best puns. I would suggest you read it a few times, as it isn't long. See if you can get the implications - about her, him, and me. And about the relationships. And maybe even something about life itself. I've written a lot of poem/essay combinations. (I used to put them on a stand in the doorway of the other store we were at before we moved here, for passersby to take.) I found that no matter how long the essays were (usually two sides of a sheet of paper), the poem always contained much more. You just had to be willing to make the connections yourself that were implied in the poem but not stated outright.

That's one of the beauties of poetry. The reader can have sudden revelations and understandings while reading the poem, the same thoughts which occurred to the poet earlier and then were put into the poem, but as if they were the reader's own revelations and not the poet's. This is the best possible method for imparting new information to a reader, it seems to me. It gives the information vitality and the excitement and triumph that comes from understanding something for yourself, as opposed to dryly reading another person's idea, as from a school textbook.

There's a bit of a story that surrounds the images in the poem:

One day after work (it was some years ago now, but as if it was yesterday), my sweetheart and I went down to 41st Avenue in search of a dress to buy for my elderly mother, thinking we had seen a store there with clothes that would be suitable. Afterward, we stopped for dinner at a Greek restaurant. As we walked to the table, I scanned the other diners to see if they looked like the kind of rich people we expected to see in that area of town. Some did. Some didn't. Who knows - maybe they look just like anybody else. Probably not quite like us though. Linda has her own unique clothing style that comes from the inside out. And as for me, I'm lucky if I even remember to put clothes on.

We ordered. She had spaghetti and thumbed through a gardening magazine, while I munched on a pizza and read a hard-cover book on evil, the companion volume to an English TV series, that only cost me $3.99 at Book Warehouse.

In a while, Linda leaned back, exhaled like she had been holding her breath, and said, "Boy, am I ever stuffed!" She has a little stomach. It doesn't hold much. Unlike mine.

The waitress came and cleaned away the empty dishes.

Then, as the people from a table behind me got up and left, Linda leaned forward, made a face, and said, "See that guy? He was staring at me the whole time. Every time I looked up, he had his eyes on me."

I smiled and watched him go out the door, a guy in his 40s, wearing a suit. I didn't see his face or who he was with. "You should have told me. I would've just moved over between you and him."

She looked down at her magazine. "Yah, I guess I could have. I didn't think of it." She flipped a few pages. "Anyway, you get used to it. I can ignore it pretty good now."

I looked at her, trying to imagine how that guy had seen her, trying to see through the sweetness I can't help see in her, and the love I feel for her. Then I said, kind of out of the blue: "Stylish and stuffed, my lady."

Linda laughed. A little gleam started to form back in behind my eyes. A poem was coming on. (She said later, "I can tell when there's something going on inside there," pointing at my forehead.)

We know each other so well.

The Love that Stays

2005-01-13T01:13:00.000-08:00

In the comment section of the previous post, A Love-Struck Riddle, a group of us imagined the world divided (somewhat humourously and somewhat seriously) into two kinds of people - those who are lovable and those who aren't. At some point, a lady named Linda (whom we subsequently agreed was a member of the lovable species) wandered in, enjoyed the discussion, then went home to do a little in-depth digging on love. She doesn't have a blog of her own, so when she returned and presented us with the fruit of her labours, in the form of a humble comment, we decided that it was far too good to get trampled on along with all the other word balloons. Instead, here it is, in full:

Just for fun, I found the following definitions below describing Love, Affection, Tenderness, Empathy and Narcissism.

love (l v)
n.
1. A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.
2. A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance.
3.
a. Sexual passion.
b. Sexual intercourse.
c. A love affair.
4. An intense emotional attachment, as for a pet or treasured object.
5. A person who is the object of deep or intense affection or attraction; beloved. Often used as a term of endearment.
6. An expression of one's affection: Send him my love.
7.
a. A strong predilection or enthusiasm: a love of language.
b. The object of such an enthusiasm: The outdoors is her greatest love.
8. Love Mythology. Eros or Cupid.
9. often Love Christianity. Charity.
10. Sports. A zero score in tennis.

v. loved, lov•ing, loves
v. tr.
1. To have a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward (a person): We love our parents. I love my friends.
2. To have a feeling of intense desire and attraction toward (a person).
3. To have an intense emotional attachment to: loves his house.
4.
a. To embrace or caress.
b. To have sexual intercourse with.
5. To like or desire enthusiastically: loves swimming.
6. Theology. To have charity for.
7. To thrive on; need: The cactus loves hot, dry air.

v. intr.
To experience deep affection or intense desire for another.

af•fec•tion ( -f k sh n)
n.
1. A tender feeling toward another; fondness. See Synonyms at love.
2. Feeling or emotion. Often used in the plural: an unbalanced state of affections.
3. A disposition to feel, do, or say; a propensity.
4. Obsolete. Prejudice; partiality.

ten•der1 (t n d r)
adj. ten•der•er, ten•der•est
1.
a. Easily crushed or bruised; fragile: a tender petal.
b. Easily chewed or cut: tender beef.
2. Young and vulnerable: of tender age.
3. Frail; delicate.
4. Sensitive to frost or severe cold; not hardy: tender green shoots.
5.
a. Easily hurt; sensitive: tender skin.
b. Painful; sore: a tender tooth.
6.
a. Considerate and protective; solicitous: a tender mother; his tender concern.
b. Characterized by or expressing gentle emotions; loving: a tender glance; a tender ballad.
c. Given to sympathy or sentimentality; soft: a tender heart.
7. Nautical. Likely to heel easily under sail; crank.

em•pa•thy ( m p -th )
n.
1. Identification with and understanding of another's situation, feelings, and motives. See Synonyms at pity.
2. The attribution of one's own feelings to an object.

nar•cis•sism (när s -s z m) also nar•cism (-s z m)
n.
1. Excessive love or admiration of oneself. See Synonyms at conceit.
2. A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem.
3. Erotic pleasure derived from contemplation or admiration of one's own body or self, especially as a fixation on or a regression to an infantile stage of development.
4. The attribute of the human psyche charactized by admiration of oneself but within normal limits.

So my thoughts are that some of the ingredients which “lasting love” (as opposed to “infatuation”) requires are:
• empathy;
• a sense of underlying oneness with your loved one (connectedness);
• respect & acceptance of yourself;
• respect, acceptance & admiration of your loved one;
• the state of not being excessively narcissistic;
• emotional balance and the ability to “feel”.

A Love-Struck Riddle

2005-01-09T16:15:00.000-08:00

Many riddles there are, my love,
but only one does within me rise
Tempting me now to recite it to you
Desiring your rapid replies.

"Of all the stars," so it goes,
"In all but all the skies,
Which by far are the brightest ones
To this man's aching eyes?"

Here is a tiny clue for you,
So as not to completely surprise:
"Which stars shine so beautifully
That he drops his head and cries?"

You have not guessed, I know, my love,
So prepare yourself - I tell no lies:
You yourself could never have seen
The stars in your own loving eyes.

I've occasionally caught Linda looking at me that way, unselfconsciously, so that she didn't turn away when I saw her, with stars of love in her eyes.

And I've found myself looking at her that way too. Just now, for example. It's a peaceful Sunday afternoon. We came home from brunch with her brother a couple hours ago. Linda laid down on the couch and looked out at the plants she loves so much on her balcony and at the beautiful white winter wonderland beyond it, with snow piled on every branch of every tree in the quiet, still air. I made myself a Chai tea and went in to do some writing, then wandered out again just now. She had pulled something warm over her and gone to sleep. All the pain in her body is gone. I can tell. Her black cat, Velvet, is sitting in its favourite spot by her head. I stood there looking at her in the quiet, happy she's comfortable, loving her.

I regret to say it wasn't for Linda that I wrote this poem. It for the girlfriend I had before I met Linda. But the poem was not so much a description of that woman as it was hopeful of a future love, maybe prescient of Linda herself.

In fact I wrote it at one of the worst moments in our bad relationship. I don't recall ever feeling this woman loving me, except at the beginning during our infatuation, but what was that but a drug experience, the effect of hormones. As soon as it dried up, we were left with our real selves. And then the shouting and bitter accusations and recriminations and insults began. It just got worse and worse. I kept hanging in there, thinking it would change, but it never did. On the worst day, she had gone out with some friends, and I sat down and composed this for her in the twenty minutes before she got back. It softened her a little. She said it was nice, but she was realistic enough to see that it didn't really apply to us, and so that reality carried on.

But if I hadn't met her, I wouldn't have met Linda's cousin who lived below our new apartment in Vancouver, and then Linda, and then home free.

I have this theory now. See what you think.

A lot of the big psychologists in history seem to have developed their own classification systems of personality types. Most of them work something like astrology, in that you find out which type you are and when you read the details you are amazed at what a perfect description it gives of you. So then you suddenly become a fanatic at classifying all your friends and relatives and getting the real goods on them. There are usually eight or ten or more different factors in these systems, and they combine to produce the unique individual. Carl Jung had one. Then there's the more modern Myers-Briggs. And so on.

Well, I've come up with a personality theory of my own, one you're bound to like. Mine is simple in comparison to the others: There are only two types. The world is divided into two kinds of people. They are the lovable ones and the unlovable ones.

I know. I can hear some of you laughing. But the rest are going, "Oh yeah! That's right!"

Of course this isn't Psychology. It isn't even Pop Psychology. But there's a third category that I've never heard mention of before, which may just be more valuable than either of the former in some ways, and in those ways maybe more true. I'll give it a name: Experience Psychology. This is what we out in the field, so to speak, as opposed to those in the lab, have discovered to be true, in that it works. We may not know the whys and wherefores, but we have a gut feeling about it. And this is mine, derived from my experiences, and from those of other people I've talked to. And from - let's not forget it - intuition.

Well, there's more to this than just saying there are two types of people. What happens is they go and get into relationships with each other, sometimes wisely and sometimes not. Mathematically, there are four possible combinations, well, three in practice. Two lovable people can get together, or two unlovable ones, or a lovable one and an unlovable one. I can hear your minds going right now, placing yourself and your friends in those categories and analyzing all the relationships. But lets not jump the gun.

First, I should describe just who these lovable and unlovable people are.

What we're talking about here is practical stuff, not what could theoretically be possible, and which no doubt happens somewhere on the planet. For instance, in theory everyone is lovable by someone. This would be true even in practice if the right people could somehow find each other. Let's face it, some of the worst serial killers have their assortment of lovers. Or, in a more positive vein, there are I guess some very pure saints amongst us who are capable of loving the most evil, caustic creatures the world has produced, simply because those creatures are humans, and the saints want nothing in return. Fine. But I'm talking about something you and I can relate to in our real lives.

And this is what my own experience tells me: I know I'm capable of loving someone, just for herself. I've found that out. I'm capable of caring for her. But when that person, after some time, demonstrates that she isn't capable of caring about my welfare, about my life, but only reacts to my life in terms of how it affects hers, then eventually I lose my ability to care about her anymore. After being manipulated and sucked of energy long enough, with nothing coming back to help me, I eventually have to take my own life back and give it what it needs myself. That's what happened with me and the girlfriend I wrote A Love-Struck Riddle for, and also the one before her, which was pretty much the same story. These two women I classify as unlovable. They can't return love (except, perhaps, in those rare moments when they have nothing more pressing going on). I've decided being able to return love is essential in a normal intimate relationship, unless you're a saint. (Obviously, the feeling a person might have of being unlovable has nothing to do with actually being unlovable by others. Many people who can care about others have been hurt so deeply that they can't imagine anyone loving them. It's been beat out of them. They've been convinced by someone's physical or emotional brutality that they really aren't worth anything other than being beaten. And so they may fear intimacy and be more comfortable just being by themselves. But that doesn't say anything about their ability to care for other people who happen to be nice to them, and so be loved by them in turn.)

Linda and I are obviously both capable of caring for each other. We do it in truckloads. So we each fit the category of lovable. We've loved each other now for twenty years, full time - and during most of those years we were working together in the daytime as well as living together at night.

So in terms of relationships, two lovable people together is obviously the best situation. These are the ones who marry and never part, and whom you see strolling down the street hand in hand when they're in their seventies.

Two unlovable people together may actually work, depending on their needs. If each supplies what the other wants as a spinoff of taking what they want, especially sexually, and probably also in terms of what will give them respect in the community, or on the street, then they may be perfect for each other. Until they want to move on, of course. The perfect example of this, in my mind, is the cliche Hollywood Marriage, wherein two narcissists find temporary fun and excitement.

The third category, a lovable person living with an unlovable person, is a recipe for Hell on Earth. If you're getting into one of these, get out now. It's obviously hell for the lovable person, doing serious damage to self-esteem as well as the ability to care. But it also hurts the unlovable person, because this person's negative reactions to the other only bring back the same in kind, and, on top of that, cause tremendous inner feelings of guilt. As well, the inner anxiety and darkness that is the cause of the whole thing just keeps getting worse.

My suspiciaon is that there are about the same numbers of men and women who are unlovable or lovable. There is a stereotype of men floating around that says they are basically interested in sex, and after that simply in getting the right wife and family to give them prestige in society. I'm sure there are men like that, but my experience of being a man, and of fellow men, tells me that it's not true. I do believe there is a general difference between heterosexual men and women, but it's not that.

Any women who are reading this, I hope you think carefully about what I'm about to say, because there is a lot of truth in it, and it's something not commonly known, or at least acknowledged. It's this: Men tend to have two outlooks on the world of women, both operating at the same time, as if there were two people in there, separate from each other. One is more in the conscious level, reacts faster than the other, and tends to hold sway in superficial situations. This is the one women stereotype men with. The other is a little more subconscious in regular superficial situations, holds back, but takes over when things are just right. The first is the person who is attracted to breasts, sexy faces, narrow waists and round hips and bums. In superficial situations, for instance at the mall, at a party, on a bus, this person has command of the eyes and is the motivation in charge of the brain. But then, at some point, this Sex Guy meets one of these women, and she actually smiles at him and says a few words, whereupon the other person begins to step forward, listens carefully to the voice, to the things she says, and watches her expressions - for different things than the Sex Guy does. This is Love Guy, and he is starting to fall in love. And the more he falls in love, the more he takes over. Pretty soon, when the two have parted, all the man thinks of is what the woman said, the smile on her face, the feeling she gave him of her femininity, and the love that is growing in him. Just for the heck of it, alone in his bed that night, he tries to imagine her breasts, but Love Guy won't let him, much to his surprise. Finally the man and the woman get together and a third thing happens. A hormone. So then you have this wild time of love, sex, and infatuation. But a couple months later suddenly there are just two people staring at each other, each of whom may or may not be lovable.

There's one final question to this topic, a biggie: What makes unlovable people unlovable? Why this unfairness? Are they doomed to be unlovable for life? Can they become lovable? This is a whole other post for later, and grist for the comment mill to follow, hopefully. Some of my ideas about this can already be found in the latter part of the previous post, in Jamie's comments and my responses.

Laughter

2005-01-06T01:48:00.000-08:00

This is a comment conversation between me and Neha Viswanathan in Delhi, on her blog called Within/Without. She began with a poetic entry:

Gratification

The most gratifying sight for a feminist is probably to see women,
girls, old grandmothers ... laughing.

Undiluted. Sunlight. Moonsprinkled. Loud. Soft. and Conspiratory.

Women laughing.

Stan: Not just for feminists, but for anyone who likes women, their laughter, when it is untampered by strain or artifice, is the most beautiful form of music, flowing together like bird song.

Neha: Stand corrected. But it's interesting, most men who are on the MCP side, find women's laughter irritating, even vulgar. I can think of many cultural idioms world over that do not favour women who laugh loudly.

I love laughter. It is perhaps the most spontaneous of all expressions.

Stan: I expect it's a cultural thing. We in North America have a much more equal society, I think, than most older cultures do, and so we appreciate women more for what they really are than for what we would like them to pretend to be.

Stan: By the way, what is the MCP side?

Neha: That's true in a way. But take a closer look at images in the media. For instance cartoons. In most cartoons, the vamp, or the evil female character has a loud laugh. It's almost vile. Whereas, you don't find the female positive protagonits doing that!

Ditto for slightly older movies!

Btw, it's interesting. Take an average Hollywood movie with a pick up scene in a bar. Laughter is the temptation the woman offers quite often!

Take it to the next level. Loud laughter is never expected from nuns. Monks, one doesn't really think about it. I think the experience is very subtle, even if a lot less! MCP - Male Chauvnist Pig!

But yeah.. things are way better over there where you live!

Stan: The whole thing of laughter is very interesting, not just women's. We hardly ever laugh when alone. Largely it's a social thing, a way of socially bonding with others, I think. But if you think about it, it's nearly always social bonding between equals: women laugh with each other, and men with each other, and couples when they're in love and overwhelmed by inner feelings, but as soon as the infatuation drops and they find themselves with this other individual, then laughter either continues if they genuinely feel equal, or stops if they don't. Sound right?

Neha: Bingo!

The Toll

2004-12-31T15:01:00.000-08:00

"How is it that though I claim to be indifferent to the world, I am so affected. How does one respond to a natural calamity? For a terrorist act, one can hate the act, or the terrorist, or discuss it in ideological theme parks. And yet, when nature strikes, one is confused. How is one supposed to rationalize this?" These words are from the blog of Neha Viswanathan, a great writer residing in Delhi, relatively near the Tsunami devastation, and who is trying hard to help the effort with practical information mixed in with her very evocative prose and poetry.

I too feel a bit confused by it all. This horrendous act of nature seems out of place. Or is it maybe out of time. Is this why we have a hard time relating to it? One would think modern, aware, scientific people would be extremely familiar with, and prepared for, anything capable of such devastating power. Not only in all the practical senses but emotionally as well. We would be ready when it happened. Yet we aren't.

Saying that, however, there comes to mind an image of people who were.

In ancient times, way back before the era of great civilizations, this is how all calamities happened. Nature took its toll. Today the word toll is used for the fee that is exacted for use of certain bridges and highways. In those days the one with one hand out, and a great club in the other, was always nature. So people continually expected that some unexpected devastation awaited them around the next corner, or the one after that. And inevitably some genius among them came up with a brilliant, practical solution: They attempted to replace nature's mass devastations with a series of small sacrifices, the idea being to keep nature's anger from building to the point of furious, unrestrained attacks. In the long run, the toll would be less. More would survive.

But since we constructed these great civilizations on the most fertile lands, using great hordes of gold and silver, we have continually been in conflict with jealous neighbours across our borders. And amid the never-ending news of war we quickly forget nature's toll. So now and then he grows dissatisfied and angry. Just when we've once again turned our backs.

These are brutal facts. Yet there are others to also bear in mind:

The Facts

As the jaws of tomorrow, or the next dark hour,
close on my mind, or, when pulled to that mass
of space where the world is devouring itself,
I try not to run,

for the facts are gentle --

the touch of the floor, the chair that lifts my weight,
the air as it enters, Linda, her love, and these beings
their lives being sung, and the green leaves dancing,
and down over all of us
the breath of the sun.

Science vs Religion and the Sense of Superiority

2004-12-21T19:54:00.000-08:00

More and more it seems the biggest issue of our age is the tussle between science and religion. Science and its offspring technology have such tremendous power in today's world - moreso all the time - that its presence is becoming overwhelming, and along with its presence comes its dampening effect on religion. So religion finds itself in an endless struggle. And the struggle isn't just out there in society - it's also a very personal one within many individuals, who don't believe as strongly as they might if that pesky doubt hadn't been planted by science. I'm an extreme example. My subconscious is a true believer in God, but consciously I just don't see it at all. So I have this inner conflict going all the time, just as society as a whole has. Consequently I've had to do a lot of thinking about it over the years.

To religious people, science and scientists are beginning to seem just plain anti-religious. Yet when they think about it, religious people, who feel deeply that they are searchers for the absolute truth, don't understand why scientists can't, as easily as them, believe in God, since scientists also profess to be primarily searching for the truth - only by different means. Well, the fact is that during most of the history of science, nearly all scientists were very religious. Most even saw their mission as one of uncovering God's creations, of demonstrating God's power and omnipotence and His amazing wonder's. Even Charles Darwin started out that way, apparently.

But then a big wrench was thrown into the works: Darwin and his ideas of evolution. If it weren't for evolution, scientists would be no less religious today than people in other sectors of society. In fact, outside of the field of biology, most scientists are still quite religious. But biologists are the big exception. Only a minority believe in God and the explanation is fairly simple: They've studied evolution in detail as part of their training.

People who haven't studied it insist that evolution doesn't prove anything about God. They say there is no way science can prove or disprove the existance of God. And that's true. No-one disputes that. But there is one big problem that everyone who really looks into evolution soon realizes: It's existance implies there is no need for a creator. It implies that all of life simply 'evolved' from simpler life and that there was never a point when a creator had to step in. The strength of that implication isn't so much in the fossil evidence of earlier life forms, although that is overwhelming in itself, but is mostly in how evolution works. Once you see the process, and understand it, it really does seem like there is no need for a God in this universe, to explain anything at all. That's the big problem I have too. Deep inside I do believe that God exists, but consciously I just can't see where a god could fit into reality, and what the point would be anyway if evolution is true.

A major support religious people have for their beliefs is the existence of morality. They tend to believe morality comes from God, not from people. It alone is proof enough of God's existance. Not only that but it is a reason to believe in God, since without that belief a person won't receive God's morality and so can't be truly moral. Thus it's also a strong reason to preserve and spread religion, because without religion and the belief in God by many people, morality would die out, leaving the world to the forces of anarchy and evil.

I'm kind of ambivalent about this, as I am about religion itself. On the one hand, I don't believe morality comes from God or religion, but from two other sources: One is our ability as human beings to empathize. Just as a result of the sheer size and complexity of our massive brains, we can imagine what other people are thinking and feeling, and we then can relate their feelings to ones we've had where we were hurt or otherwise affected, in similar circumstances, etc. So we want to prevent their hurt just as we would like to reverse our own. Also, I'm convinced that morality is partly a result of an inherited instinct we have - a proven one, by the way - called altruism, which makes us want to help not only our relatives, but strangers as well. This instinct is a product of evolution, and is the answer biologists have to the religious person's belief that morality comes only from God, and thus proves God. They say that even without God we have an instinctive tendency to be moral people.

On the other hand, immorality is rampant in our society. It's easy enough to see how this negativity could be caused by many of the uglier characteristics of our society, and especially by the effects they have on people, for instance the very common lack of solid family upbringing, the molestation and child abuse, the vicious gang life of the streets for those who leave abusive parents, and the extremely violent electronic games nearly all children are immersed in these days. There can't be any doubt that these must erode away a lot of the morality, natural or supernatural, that many young people would have otherwise, leaving many of them 'empty'. Killers like Scott Peterson could be a result of this kind of thing, it seems to me. (Or they could simply have a brain defect, which researchers have discovered to be common in psychopaths - a particular defect that prevents them from empathizing.)

From a moral, spiritual point of view, a person like Scott Peterson must seem like only an empty shell of a person, a dry husk, and so should just be gotten rid of. From this point of view, the death penalty doesn't seem harsh at all. It would be like chopping down a dead tree trunk.

My view as an agnostic, and a moral one, is completely different. My sense of empathy - not so much with Scott Peterson's mind, but more simply with his existance as a fellow human being - tells me very strongly that if not for my own relatively good family background, or my circumstances, or for having a whole brain instead of a physically defective one, then I could have been Scott Peterson myself, doing horrible things, and seen as a monster, when actually all I would have been is me, but in those circumstances.

That's my biggest problem with religion, other than the question of truth. Religion seems to give the believers a sense of great superiority over everyone else. Some, Jews for example, can even refer to scriptural 'proof' that they are God's chosen people, and that therefore everyone else is inferior. But how can ANY people who are destined to go to Heaven not feel superior to those who will inevitably end up in Hell, or at least in some in-between realm, for all of eternity? I can't imagine not feeling superior. And not only do they look down on non-religious people that way, but they tend to feel no less superior to other religious people who happen to be members of any of the many other ancient religions on the planet (with all of THEIR MEMBERS feeling superior back again), and incredibly they even feel superior to members of of their own religion just for being in other denominations!!! It's amazing how self-righteous, and, seemingly to me anyway, unChristlike, religion tends to make people. Well, I'm no different: When I was coming home from Bible Camp as a kid, I remember very clearly seeing my friends playing at the side of the road as we drove past them, just as I had played with them a month before, but suddenly they were animals, soulless, empty. It really depressed me.

I don't know what to say, except that all this is wrong. Non-religious people have inner lives that are just as deep and moral as religious people do, often moreso because they have to consciously work out many things which religious people just accept as given.

Personally, I don't think religion itself is the root cause of a sense of superiority, but comes after the cause already exists. I think this feeling is just another instinct. You can see the sense of superiority everywhere: in patriotism, which is totally universal and unstoppable no matter how disgusting the state is that people are patriotic to (Nazi Germany is a good example), in sport fanaticism, in loyalty to the company one works for, in loyalty to one's nationality, even in loyalty to objects, like particular wines, or cheeses, or .... virtually anything. The only good explanation for such an ever-present feeling is that it is instinctive. An instinct is like a perpetual hunger, and with rational animals like us, it requires rationalization. Religions, like nationality, offer an excuse, an easy rationalization for feeling superior. They give people another justification to feel patriotic to a group and superior to all outside groups. And morality is just another. Just as is being able to speak well, or walk elegantly, or dress properly. It indicates to others a person's value. Or lack thereof. Fashion consists of nothing else. And good looks. We all know that simply being plain-looking, especially for a woman, is as bad as being immoral. It's totally devestating to her life. And for a man, not being Clint Eastwood means - not only to others but to the individual himself - that he is obviously inferior (at least so his subconscious mind feels). How many possible reasons to be inferior can we as a group of equal humans invent? The most creative person in the world couldn't name them all.

We seem to spend an awful lot of our time and energy looking for reasons to dislike others, reasons to despise them, to be disgusted by them. Very, very seldom do we look for reasons to see them as equal. Unless they're already part of our group.

Postscript.

The comments that follow contain an extensive debate about evolution, which delves into the reasons for the conflict in my mind: My subconscious believes in God, but consciously I see no reason for there to be one. In my comments I try to get across the many different implications (as opposed to proofs) resulting from evolution that make it difficult for my conscious mind to believe in a god. But then, about two thirds of the way down, Roh Mih, a Buddhist in the Phillipines, whom I have trememdous respect for, added a quote from the Tao Te Ching, saying he could see no conflict between it and science. In my response, I at first analyzed it, showing that to me it did conflict with science, but then began to see a way it could be interpreted so that it describes a spirit world that at the same time allows for the existance of evolution exactly as biology sees it!! I was in shock. It was a revelation to me, and, if it holds water after thinking about it a while, it just may be the beginnings of the eventual unification of my conscious and subconscious!! I hope so. It's what I've been looking for all my life.

Murder

2004-12-13T15:53:00.000-08:00

Scott Peterson has received the death penalty for murdering his wife and unborn daughter. Many people who have assiduously been following this sad situation jumped for joy that the beast got what he deserved. Finally we see justice served. O. J. managed to escape it and to this day is living the life of a carefree golfer. But not Scott Peterson.

How many of us are going to be crying for this man when something hungrily enters his body and destroys him. Not many. Because that something won't be a current of electricity, or a devastating poison, but Justice. Justice will fell the beast. There is something about that word that allows a person to do terrible things and feel quite free of guilt afterwards. It's like James Bond's 'license to kill'. We all want one of those. And we're given it as a juror in a murder trial. And the rest of us are given the right to at least root for murder when a beast is being tried.

What's wrong with that? I've been trying to work it out in my mind for decades and I'm still not sure. I mean we all have to die sometime. If Scott doesn't die now he will die later. Let's look at it objectively: Nobody alive today will be alive a hundred years from now, two hundred at most. And I would be really surprised if the whole human species doesn't go extinct within a few hundred years, or a thousand. But even if it doesn't, you can be sure that an awfully large percentage of the population will be destroyed either by war or by ruthless Nature far before their time is up. So why get all upset over justice done to a killer.

Well, what I've been able to make of it all is that we can't really look at it, or anything else, objectively. I mean we simply aren't capable of it. We aren't computers. Or, more accurately, we aren't brains. I mean that: We aren't even our own brains. We're minds. You may think this is just word play, but I've come to see that it isn't the case. A brain is a bunch of neurons and chemicals, and electrical patterns of some kind. We humans are supposed to be nearly the only species that is self-aware, but if our brains try to see themselves, they will always be frustrated, as there is no way they can. They can only see outwards. No matter how hard they squint, they can never see back in and watch the patterns of their neurons moving and forming as they're watching. The mind is a different matter, however. The mind isn't the brain, but rather it's the feeling that the patterns of the neurons have when they operate. It's not the electrical patterns themselves, but the feelings generated by those patterns.

For billions of years in our past, all those countless minds back then knew nothing at all about the fact that they were actually the brain operating. When they thought about themselves, they simply thought about memories of their actions, decisions, feelings. No neurons there. No knowledge of them either. Today, it's no different, even with our knowledge. We are taught about the brain, but we still can't see it operating when we think about who we are. The mind, on the other hand, really can see itself.

So as you can see, I've come to see that we live simultaneously in two totally separate worlds of reality, the objective world made up of neurons and electrical patterns, also of atoms, sub-atomic particles, even of gravity, stars, the contents of outer space, and so on. Then there is the subjective world of the mind, overlaying it all, you might say, even though it is totally contained inside our skulls. The feeling of being a person is contained within this subjective world, as are all our experiences of living out in the world -- of society, relationships, jobs, responsibility, fun, TV, history, even going to Mars, the horrors of war, the ambiguous feelings of love, followed by birth, not forgetting our actual self-awareness, even its extreme form known as enlightenment, I expect. And if the mind, why then of course the soul. Maybe even spirit. And God?

What I'm saying is that objectively it may mean nothing that Scott Peterson dies, but even though our bodies, and his, all inhabit the objective world, we as human beings don't. We live solely in the other realm of fear, anger, hatred, justice, responsibility, society, empathy, compassion, soul, sin, guilt, the subconscious. We live in the world of living not only with others but with ourselves.

Solve it With a Draft

2004-12-03T18:00:00.000-08:00

The deeper we get into the Iraq war, the more inevitable a draft seems. As more Iraqis are killed, more Muslims in general are turned against the Americans, seeing them as Nazis. And the more they see them as Nazis, the more militant and determined they become, and the more militant they become the more desperate and brutish the Americans become. And on it goes.

If the Americans had invaded with a large enough force, either with the help of a great coalition, or with a huge army of their own, none of this would have happened. Maybe. In any case, they didn't and now they will have to resort to a draft.

The ugly thing about a draft is that it forces people to do what they don't want to do, something you would expect in a dictatorship, not a democracy. It takes away peoples' freedom, a cherished value in America.

Fine. But think about it a little deeper and you'll realize it's far, far worse than that. If American males were all insensitive tough guys, there would be no problem. They would be happy to be drafted, a good excuse to get away from the family and into some action. The trouble is, how many of these guys are left? A good share of them are already in Iraq. They joined up early. Along with a some very misguided souls who felt it was a cheap way to get an education. The big problem with a draft is it will find (and force to go into the bowels of hell) all the other men, the more normal guys, those who wouldn't think of joining up, all those sensitive young men who regret hurting others verbally, let alone murdering them. And it will force all the slightly screwed-up people, and all the introverts who can't tolerate loud noises, to routinely blow peoples' bodies apart at close range. What will their futures hold if they survive all this? And it will force all those of us, who, even in their quiet homes, live in fear of anything and everything, to go off into a strange country and somehow try to survive a very real, constant, 24-hour threat to their lives -- a constant, never-let-up panic: They could simply be blown up any second, no matter how safe it may seem, no matter what time of day or night, week after week, month after month. All everyday guys like me. What horror.

Already there are reports of a large number of mental casualties, and these amongst those who volunteered!! Even many of them couldn't take it. So what will happen to the sensitive people? A whole generation of young men will be destroyed. They will suffer far more than trauma. All the handy illusions and fantasies that allow them to get through their work days and their dates at night will be stripped away, leaving them to stare blankly at their own fear and uselessness, at their own lack of 'masculinity', that ideal which they were conditioned since earliest childhood to believe was the only really important thing in life. From then on they will be stark naked.

And they will come home to join a new generation of boys that has grown up on the virtues of overwhelming strength and killing power, the new view of masculinity demonstrated to them over and over and over again in the computer games they constantly play. These boys won't have to go to war to be brought face-to-face with their weak, little selves. It will just happen, and then they'll want to kill no one more than themselves.

This is what will come of the great American values of freedom, democracy and family. It's far too depressing to think about.

But hopefully I'm wrong.

Clothed

2004-12-03T01:10:00.000-08:00

Follow the ends of the dream
to the skies of delight and fall
through the light air into the rustling
waters of the mind. Here
through dawn, through dusk, quatrains float by.
Here the animals and plants
of the forest and the waters and the earth live;
and here are the bodyless things and the sun gatherers
and the moon watchers and they all stand
and nod together. See. No one comes in
to the room of life
covered with their selves alone.

Asleep at night we dream. It's the strangest thing.

When I was young, I always felt, or hoped, that somewhere, or at some time in the future, life would be perfect. The winds would always be gentle and sweet, living would be easy, everyone would be kind, decisions would be unnecessary, especially ones with real repercussions, and so on. But then I discovered that those are the dreams of children. Life is rough. Not smooth. Real life is an obstacle course, with real obstacles.

When life gets too rough, we escape into our fantasies. We drift into daydreams. And at night our minds take us away on those sweet gentle breezes. Two thirds of the day we slash our way through the jungle. Then for the last third we rest in a little boat lapped by little waves under a big moon that glows with a big smile as it reads us stories.

Sounds nice, doesn't it? And makes perfect sense.

But it's all hogwash. Dreams are not the relief from reality one would expect. Just the opposite. Our waking life is the relief from reality. Dreams force us back into it. We spend two-thirds of our lives desperately trying to perfect a fantasy we can live with, one that preserves our childhood daydreams as much as possible while allowing us to ignore as much of the roughness of reality as we can. All of us do to some degree. We pick our ways very carefully through the world. We slash and burn more of it than it does of us. And the biggest part of reality that we try to destroy, to not acknowledge the existence of, is that huge part of ourselves that doesn't coincide with our fantasies.

I love dreams for this reason. They aren't an escape. They're a doorway into the real world. Anyone who has spent a lot of time in that shaky borderland between reality and fantasy, yet who is attracted to reality, or at least to the idea of it, is attracted to their dreams. Strange but true.

Being attracted to reality, loving it, doesn't take us there automatically -- it only points our noses. Because we aren't the simple little things we seem to be at any given moment, we're who we've become. That's why we carry so much emotional baggage, and why we find it so hard to change. We have enormous momentum. To change course even a small degree toward something more real requires a constant strain on the steering wheel -- too little or not consistant enough and we don't change at all, too much and our tires leave the pavement and we end up on our heads.

Yet day to day life (the fantasy of it we live in) is so distracting that it's really hard to keep our hands on the wheel at all. Many people find they must go on retreats or join groups or take up disciplines or pay psychiatrists just to keep the pressure up. It's like dieting. For the rest of us, who are maybe trying for the longer haul, and for less change, our nightly dreams can act as reminders of the true complexity of our lives, a fact we tend to ignore, and often of our position and course in the deeper and more long-term ocean of life.

No matter how removed we become from reality, how tightly we wear our blinkers, we still dream every night. It's always there. Of course it's usually easy to ignore. We just snap our eyes open with the alarm clock and more often than not the dream obeys our command and snaps out of sight. But that doesn't stop it: It takes no heed, presenting itself, audience or not, every night. A door blown ajar by a wind.

I love analyzing dreams. I think it's my favourite thing. Having a dream is like being offered a mystery. How often does that happen otherwise? And how many of the normal mysteries you confront can you actually solve? Very few. You seldom have enough data. But you can be pretty sure you can solve a dream if you really apply yourself, because all the clues are there, if not in the dream itself, then in the life and personality of the dreamer.

But it's not easy. It's especially difficult to analyze your own dreams, because they often contain things you either don't want to think about or that just haven't occurred to you consciously. The most intriguing ones, and often the most difficult, are those that present feelings of how your whole life is going, including your often-forgotten past and your often-repressed desires for the future. Most of us lose track of this continuum amidst our daily upheavals.

Some people argue with this, saying dreams are just rehashes of the days events, and have nothing to do with our lives as a whole. Let me report here an interesting study done by some dream researchers a while back. They had their subjects wear rose-tinted goggles throughout each day, then woke them during each of their nightly dreams. The contents of the first dream of each night were always deeply rose-tinted, with the tint decreasing through the subsequent dreams until finally the last one had no tint at all. Which strongly suggests that the first dreams of the night are filled with content and feeling from that day, but that the last dreams are only concerned with longer-term feelings. Which makes that last dream the most interesting of all. How handy for us!

A few months ago, I began thinking about dreams and suddenly realized it's been a very long time since I remembered a dream, and yet dreams have been a big part of the personal journey I've been on since I was young. So it was clear to me, once again, how little of myself has been taking an active part in my life lately. I decided to get back into trying to remember my dreams, then writing them down and analyzing them. That night I told myself to remember my dream, repeating it before I fell asleep. Well, much to my amazement, in the morning I did remember the last one of the night. Not only that, but it was in perfect detail, and unforgettable, even through the shattering noise of my alarm, and even while scrambling to get ready for work!! It was as if this particular dream had been stored there trying to get out, trying to reach my conscious mind, but with no luck all this time. Because none of the subsequent ones stayed with me near as easily.

The dream took place in Calgary, the city I grew up in. I guess I had returned to visit, and ended up attending some kind of a show in a theatre-like place. It seemed to be under an overpass, something like that. I scrambled down through rocks and weeds to the front of it. I still remember the fresh, summer feeling of the atmosphere and the look of the building. The sun was shining off it's white, wood wall, and there were some small trees and natural bushes growing along it, as if it were out in the country some place. I stepped in through the door. It was darkened, and oddly hushed, with no sound. It wasn't as if the people in the seats, which rose up away from the stage area, were waiting for a show to begin, or something like that -- although that went through my mind at first, I think. It was more like I was surrounded by my own space, into which the sound from the the people and a stage, if there was one, didn't enter; yet I could clearly hear my own light footsteps in the quiet. As I walked slowly up the aisle, the people sitting around me were looking forward toward a stage, I guessed, kind of still. Then I turned to look down behind me. There was a woman in a seat just below where I stood, her head forward, chin on her hand, looking forward toward the stage, or just thinking, as maybe they all were doing, I couldn't tell for sure. I recognized the woman's back, and thought, "It's Barb!!" I stepped down and said, excited, "Barb!!" She looked up at me and we both smiled and gave each other a really big hug!! And then I woke up.

Well, I thought about it throughout the morning, couldn't get it out of my mind in fact. In my experience, dreams as brilliant as this one, that you just can't forget, are the really symbolic ones. Maybe all dreams are, but for sure these ones are. It's as if they're composed as lessons for my conscious mind; whereas most dreams seem to be more the mumblings of my unconscious speaking to itself -- mumblings, but still speach, for those willing to work on them. Well, I was not allowed to forget this dream, as if I was being forced to look at it and learn something. I realize that's entirely possible, as my unconscious speaks its sentences in it's own way, as a story composed of visual symbols instead of verbal ones. But if you analyze it properly, it's still a sentence, or paragraph. So I tried hard to figure it out, but I just couldn't see any symbolism in it at all, except the obvious statement that I missed my friend Barb.

Before she got married and moved back to Calgary with her husband, Barb lived here in Vancouver, for quite a while. We used to get together every week or two and read our poems to each other, and critique them, something we really enjoyed doing. We had met way back in college, and though our lives have followed along different paths ever since, we have always felt close. This dream made me think about Barb more carefully than I normally would, and I realized just how much I missed her. I must, to have it come out so strongly like that.

Well, I just couldn't find anything profound in it, so, not to waste it I decided to write Barb and describe it to her. And hope she wouldn't get the wrong idea from it. At the end of the letter, I wrote, "Ha ha. How do you analyze that in terms of Freudian symbolism. I don't know, but I do know that I miss you a lot, and even more, my unconscious mind misses you as well, maybe even more!!! Think about that." A few minutes later I fired off another short email: "Then again, Barb, maybe that dream was based on telepathy. Maybe you were thinking the same thing! That would explain how vivid it was." (I had a pretty convincing experience with telepathy once.)

After pushing the send button, I kept mulling it over, and also worrying how she would react to that ending, that I missed her so much. So a couple days later I wrote her again. I include it here because, as I wrote the email, I slowly began to see what the dream was all about. Maybe I was far enough removed from it in time by then, or the act of writing about it distanced me intellectually. Maybe both. Anyway, you can see how the analysis developed, and why it's so hard for a person to analyze his own dreams, especially right after waking up.

"Hi Barb. Since I wrote you the description of the dream, and tacked on that it was like telepathy, it seems more and more like it could have been an actual case of telepathy. Imagine it this way. Maybe, you went to a play in real life, alone, which made you feel lonely and your feelings ended up directed toward me, way off somewhere, that distance symbolizing your loneliness, and while you were watching the play, you were daydreaming that way, deeply because of your loneliness. So then I actually received your feeling via telepathy, and held it in my subconscious until I was consciously able to see it. That fits the dream because of the silence surrounding you, like it was all in your mind, even though I was outside you there.

"On the other hand, maybe it was just a dream of mine: The silence could be my own feeling of expectation -- it felt like that too. I was very aware of the feeling around me, because of the hushed silence. And there wasn't any silence like that outside the building, as I recall, but only as I entered, near where you were. In that case maybe it was a dream of my own missing you, and so there was the expectation throughtout the dream of meeting you again. But definitely the idea of the stage - that kind of symbolism - was not part of it. I didn't even get a feeling there was a stage, just that everybody was sitting in seats looking out there, a large group of people. And you were looking there but also thinking deeply or feeling deeply. No, the big thing was me discovering you there, and how wonderful that was.

"Wait a second: Now I have a better idea of how it could have occurred as telepathy. You didn't go to a play, but had a lonely feeling there in the city with all these people around you, and possibly being surrounded by people made you feel even lonelier. I know that happens with me. So the feeling came across to me of you seated alone, thinking inwardly, away from all the people seated close around you.

"Then again, maybe this was what the symbolism of the dream was all about but it wasn't telepathic: It was my own idea of your situation there, put into a dream form. Then again, maybe it wasn't my idea of your situation but actually of mine, and that in my dream I used you to symbolize my own inner loneliness. Maybe you are a symbol to me Barb of my own inner female, those aspects of you, maybe spiritually, that are also part of me but are cut off from my conscious mind by disbelief. And which are then lonely. Are we getting warm? The reason you had your head in your hands is that you were going deep, which symbolizes to me going into the unconscious and the spirit. And the silence around was the buffer between my unconscious and conscious minds, I had gone in through the walls surrounding my unconscious mind upon entering the building, and there I encountered myself, the deeper part of me. There are no words in that place, thus the silence. The other people there were I guess the deeper parts of others, being there all together, but in their own depths. And now we get around to what you were looking toward, not so much looking at, but facing as you went inward: well, that part of the dream is for you to answer, Barb. The spiritual world I suppose. Or at least my unconscious idea of it.

"Now I see why the dream was so vivid and why I remembered every detail, even though I woke to the alarm clock. It's because the dream was actually supposed to be a meeting between my conscious and unconscious minds, and so my conscious mind had to actually be there, meaning I wouldn't forget it upon waking. So maybe my unconscious mind was trying to tell me something: that I better get it together. And that both parts of me wanted the other part, and liked the other part, and needed the other part."

So there's my life at the moment. It feels right. The dream has pretty clear eyes.

Barb wrote back and said, "I did get your ruminations on your dream, and enjoyed the process as much as the product. Neat to watch someone working things out -- it does work so much better in the linear form of writing than in the circular paths thoughts tend to beat around the brain. And I tend to agree that me in your dream probably does represent an aspect of yourself -- that makes sense, and thank you for assigning me such an appealing aspect."

So, now that I've known Barb all these years, just who is she? It's like what's outside of me is actually way inside, and what's deep inside I'm finding outside.

Amazing these dream versions of us, these dream people. They're here all along, always following our lives, caring. Showing us that, if only we'll look. If just a glimpse of them can show how rich and multitudinous each one of us is, then we must be constricted into very tiny spaces in our minds, as we push our way through the city, to feel alone.

Gerald in the World

2004-11-10T20:18:00.000-08:00

Gerald, rough with the street,
marching through his strange dark life,
Gerald, cranial fires
scattering flashes
of intense, refracted, focused light,
tells me of the rain:
of the long, sleepless days and nights,
of depressing, unceasing cloud,
cloud drizzling through the skull,
cloud dripping cold
from that other world,
and then of that
first opening,
that first sight of light-blue high
and higher air
breathing down,
and how seeing it washes
such a joy through his body
it can only be the face of God.

And I know that in those open moments
we too, from our own cold world,
look up, with Gerald,
and our pointing hands, too,
flow on out,
and the sun will pour for us,
and we too
are washed clean.

Of all the people who lived and worked along Fourth Avenue, where we had our flower shop before we moved, Gerald Budda was by far the most famous, at least for his character.

I first encountered Gerald many years ago. Linda and I were sitting in a restaurant minding our own business when suddenly there was a white blur in the doorway. In the worried hush around us, customers with food crammed in their mouths froze as they were bombarded with pronouncements about Christ and Judgement Day by someone wearing the robes of ancient Palestine. Within seconds, the intruder whirled around and left. Jaws loosened and life carried on.

Since then I was warned about Gerald a number of times by other store owners, was told he's a paranoid schizophrenic, that he likes to throw chairs through store windows when he feels slighted, that he was consequently banned many times, by order of his judges, from the street, but always to no avail. And I've caught him stealing flowers from our display, watched him accost innocent civilians just to tell them what was going through his head at that instant, seen a miraculous recovery spurred on by a cafe owner who gave him a job and housing provided he took his medication regularly, then watched him revert to 'normal', and wondered about him and his life.

Well, it turns out Gerald loves flowers, probably more than most of our customers do. He used to pick them wherever he could, to give to people he liked, especially his many women friends, but then he started buying them from us and we got to know each other. So when he wasn't in the mental hospital, or, more often, in jail, he would occasionally drop in to visit.

For instance, one wet day I was sitting at a sidewalk table outside the bakery next door, and Gerald plunked himself down in the opposite chair. Among other assorted tidbits, he mentioned that few people ever see their own insignificance in the world, because few can really see beyond themselves and so be awestruck by the world around them. I was astonished by his perceptivity. Growing up in the country and spending a lot of time on outdoor adventures, this was an old revelation I carried with me. But Gerald? Supposedly insane? I expected this from only the sanest people? In fact, I would have thought it would be a good test question. But then, without stopping, Gerald informed me of certain spots on the sidewalk on Fourth where time is not the same as it is elsewhere. For instance, when standing in such a spot, one's watch may read 6 o'clock, but in reality, it's, say, 4 o'clock. Gerald said you have to be very sensitive to feel it. That it's some kind of a space/time thing. I wasn't going to argue with him, because I thought I remembered reading somewhere that schizophrenia could be simply a case of extreme sensitivity, that that could explain the symptoms. We babbled on in the cool air, and then he pointed out the rays of sunlight that were then sliding down through the first hole in the clouds. And how wonderful it was that they could so quickly lift spirits. Like Gerald on the street, I have too often been caught out in very depressing weather with no relief in sight, alone and in despair, so I knew what he meant. He said everyone feels this, and told me I should write a poem about it. Yes, he was right, and later, as I thought about it, I began to feel that Gerald himself was important to it. Thus "Gerald in the World". I wasn't sure how he would respond to it, and was relieved when he said the description was perfect.

The poem eventually sparked Gerald's enthusiasm about poetry in general. One day he raced in, grabbed a pen and paper, and dashed down his own first poem, composed while walking. I don't know what I was expecting, I suppose something either too juvenile or too bizarre. I was stunned when I read it. This is far, far better than a first poem has any right to be. I would be proud to have written it myself. And it's simply the description of an extremely smoggy day on the street! Notice, again, that desire for the sun.

It Took a Month
to Make that a Day

L.A. smog next to the morgue,
Sunscream of the Lust Days of summer.
It became stale like
the coffee in the mugs,
and the faces of the People
began to fill the Blanks
in my Mind
and For a while the
Nife dug too long,
And I began to realize
Eye can't take it Anymore -
Asleep I awoke and relief
The beauty of it,
And felt
it took a Month
to Make the Day.

Once, Gerald gave me a copy of one of his court cases, dated 1984, concerning the twelfth time he had broken his parole ban from Fourth Avenue. A court worker, in trying to explain this to the judge, said that Fourth is his "psychological home". Makes sense. People who live on the street are people who don't feel welcome in the buildings of the city. But the street has accepted them, so they've learned to live there and enjoy it. To them, the places other people inhabit are like the wilderness is to a farmer - it's not worth noticing. On the street they can find places of shelter, sources of food, companionship, entertainment. The street they live on is their home, in all the ways our apartments are ours. It's not their neighbourhood, it's their home. The sidewalks, the cheap cafes, the alleys, the vacant places, the people, the flowers whether wild or planted, the institutions that help them get by, the police, the suited transients with spare change, all are part of their home. And, as Gerald pointed out, the deep, blue ceiling of the sky itself, in fact all of Mother Nature, also is a big part of their home and of their lives, enjoying it, surviving it. Most street peoples' lives aren't nearly as bleak and despairing as one would expect. Like all of us, they've found, and learned to enjoy, the precious good things, and strive to avoid the bad. So it's not necessary to avoid them like the plague. Being nice won't turn them into leeches. They already have a home they're comfortable in, and a life. The main difference between them and us, it seems to me, is drive. We drive ourselves into the future, and so live anxious fantasy lives. They are driven into the present.

Near the end of the court transcript, Gerald, who is defending himself, to the irritation of the judge, attempts to tell the judge why he is so often abused. The Accused:"Because they know I'm harmless. I'm just a conversation. I mean, I sit here and I look at all these reports here, and you're a psychiatric inmate - people who have been in mental institutions are your most discriminated people in society. They are always telling you what to do and how to do it. They treat you like a little baby. So you have to go in, get comfortable, and then you can find out what you can get away with and ..." The Court: "Have you figured that out for my court yet?" Once, when Gerald had just got out of jail, he told me that, among other things, the police had made him sleep naked on a concrete cell floor. Who would believe him? Or care?

There's something about Gerald I admire. Maybe it's how different he is. Unlike me, he doesn't hesitate a second to talk to complete strangers. He doesn't care what people think. Yet everybody wants to cure him. No dice. It's obvious Gerald enjoys his life just as it is. In the middle of his trial, he interrupted to tell the judge he was "flashing on a pencil sharpener", and informed His Honour that he'd taken LSD earlier. The judge asked if he wanted to recess to see a doctor. Gerald said no. This is his life. He has a whole retinue of strange drugs he uses at odd times to change his world, his self, in certain ways. But it's him. And when he's in the schizophrenic mindstate, that's him. When he's not, that's him too. He knows himself and enjoys himself. Another thing: Occasionally some upstart business owner, who is of course new to Fourth compared to Gerald, will insult him by, say, tossing him out. But Gerald doesn't just slink off into the shadows. He defends himself. Maybe with a chair through the window. Or at least a good splash of coffee. All the while knowing the punishment he's in for! And another thing: As much as he's been abused by society (most of his adult life), he's never hurt anybody himself. And now Gerald tells me he's turned all the jails into monasteries! He says they're good places to think about yourself. Few distractions.

It sure makes you think. Most of us are desperate to be something better, more acceptable, than we think we are, and so we throw our real lives away. We're buried in a morass of fear and desire, and our days consist of seeking rewards, avoiding punishments (few of which compare to Gerald's), and satisfying cravings in order to fill our emptiness. It's certainly true for me at any rate. But Gerald is like my sports hero John McEnroe was back when he was a tennis brat. Both are far too real for most people. They're who we really are but are too afraid to admit.

Postscript

Since putting Gerald's story here in my blog, a couple people in the comment section below said I should get it published. Well, I guess I'm a typical introvert: let me write, but don't expect me to go out marketting my stuff.

Even so, it has been published already, although in a bit of an odd way. It's a funny story too.

For starters, I have to admit that I didn't write this just now. I actually wrote it several years ago. You see, when we had our store on Fourth Avenue, we had a lot more people walking by than we do here. It was a busier retail area. So, I began putting copies of my poems on a little stand in the doorway for passersby to take. Then I added little blurbs about the circumstances the poems were written in, and they soon became longer and longer and developed into full-scale personal essays. I even developed it into a unique little art, whereby the poem and the essay related to each other but not directly. They related in such a way that the essay would help the reader get on the right track to get the most out of the poem, which they would then read over again, and get it. But sometimes they were both about the same thing, as this one is.

Anyway, Gerald of course would take a few copies off my stand to give to people he knew. He felt it validated him as a person. Not only did the essay make him look better than people tended to see him, but I had actually written a poem about him! And how many people can say they have poems written about them? Not only that, but it had his own poem in it as well!! Anyway, he started asking me for more and more copies so I had to run off batches of like 500 for him. He would go into restaurants and give one to each table of fine diners, and then he would take the transit and hand them out to all the passengers, telling them all that it was about him. Pretty soon there were literally thousands of copies of them all over town. Pretty funny. Anyway, one of the people who got one was the guy who ran the local chapter of the Mental Health Association, where Gerald would go for coffee. He liked it and asked if he could publish it in the next issue of their little booklet, which they send to all their members and patients (another 4,000 or so). Of course I agreed, with the proviso that they send me a copy. Anyway, when I got it, I was stopped by it's title. I still get a laugh out of it. It's called, "In a Nutshell"! I kid you not. So anyway, between Gerald and me, this essay has been around. I haven't seen Gerald for a while now though. Last I heard, he had finally given up on Fourth and made Commercial Drive his new "psychological home".

Surviving this Darkness

2004-11-06T13:31:00.000-08:00

Do you remember the cynics who used to say that there's no difference between the major parties; that once they're in power they all do the same things anyhow? We know that's not true these days. And those of us who were hoping with all our energy that Kerry would manage to pull off a win are deeply depressed. Not only because he is gone, but because Bush survives. Hopefully, there is some help for our dark condition, some remedy that could get us through this period, other than anti-depressants.

Well, I keep coming back to the everyday life. Even if the national/international scene, and the (mostly small) ways it disturbs our day-to-day lives, is not to our liking, even if in some ways it's horrific, there is still the great, vast, unstoppable world of the everyday. No matter what happens, it's there: all our conversations, our little but big satisfactions, our loves and likes, our accomplishments and compassion, the way we all help each other along through each day in a vast spiral of timelets into the future. There is still so much to enjoy in life. Too much, really. I'm going to try to concentrate on all that for the next four years. As best I can.

Living the day-to-day life well isn’t expressed better anywhere than in the poem below. Every once in a while I reread it and it brings me back to the world I actually live in. It not only perfectly expresses the value of that day-to-day world and how best to live it, but it itself is expressed in a soft, easy, day-to-day way. Nothing flashy or avant garde here; nothing here-today-gone-tomorrow. Just the eternal everyday. And soon enough the political wars recede into the distant background. The poet is Max Ehrmann. He wrote it back in 1952, two years after I was born. I imagine him one morning sitting at his kitchen table, gazing out the window, thinking of the things he’s learned from his life and from the lives of his relatives and friends, and then, with a soft pencil, writing this:

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, Copyright 1952.
Thanks to the 'Confused Muse', Elizabeth, for inspiring this post.

The American Terrorist

2004-11-03T18:32:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me that George Bush was very lucky that the video of that American terrorist showed up just a week before the election.

Right after that his numbers in the polls suddenly jumped several points and stayed there through the election.

Who was this guy? Well, here's a scenario. I'm not saying this is what happened, but it's possible enough that I hope people are looking into it. It goes like this:

The government realized that there was not likely going to be a major terrorist bombing in the U.S. before the election, since the 'chatter' was down instead of up as they had expected. This got the Bush re-election people very depressed because a few thousand dead people in the U.S. would have surely hardened a lot of the undecided voters against the terrorist threat just in time for them to make sure they voted for Bush when they arrived at the polling booth. But since there was no threat, Bush's team of plumbers (if he has one, as Nixon had), or the CIA, or who knows what agency these days, decided they had to act. It was probably a little crew, maybe some army people, like Special Forces, who didn't happen to have their own Arabic-speaking member, so they just did it themselves - put a scarf over a guy's face (isn't that handy for a 'cover-up') and had him rant on as if he were an American who had joined Al-Qeada. Luckily there was an American on the terrorist most-wanted list. To make it seem real, all they had to do was the old 'copy and paste' trick with the logo off an actual terrorist broadcast, pasting it down at the bottom of the video.

Did you notice that even though there was this major terrorist threat, the Homeland Security Department didn't bother to raise the threat level at all, as if they knew there was nothing to it? And Bush didn't comment on it, possibly not wanting to bring it back on him, if the truth comes out. And even more telling, the tape wasn't delivered to any of the traditional terrorist outlets, like Al-Jazeera, or the Al-Qaeda web site. Instead it went to an American media outlet. And if all that isn't enough to make you wonder, only a few days later Bin Laden himself appeared, saying nothing at all like what the American said, in fact just the opposite: He appeared for the first time to be offering the Americans a way out, saying that if they stopped threatening the security of Muslims, Al-Qaeda would stop threatening America's security. What would be the point of saying that if he was already planning on a major killing only days later, which is what the American 'terrorist' claimed. It would seem that Bin Laden knew nothing of the American or his 'plans', and had no such plans himself. So then where did the American pop up from? And why?

And then suddenly Bush's numbers go up in the polls. And they stay up through election day.

If it should all come out later, that this was done by some people working on behalf of the American government, it won't matter to Bush, as he is comfortably ensconced in the White House again, this time in his final term in office.

The Late Colonel Gordon Cooper, Astronaut, Gives Us the Goods

2004-10-26T21:59:00.000-07:00

Colonel L. Gordon Cooper, Mercury-9, Gemini-5 astronaut, passed away very recently, October 4th, 2004. He was one of the original 'Right Stuff' group of astronauts, one of the more interesting ones. In honour of him, here he is as he addressed a United Nations panel discussion on UFOs and ETs in New York in 1985. The panel was chaired by then Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.

"I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on Earth. I feel that we need to have a top level, coordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze data from all over the earth concerning any type of encounter, and to determine how best to interface with these visitors in a friendly fashion. We may first have to show them that we have learned to resolve our problems by peaceful means, rather than warfare, before we are accepted as fully qualified universal team members. This acceptance would have tremendous possibilities of advancing our world in all areas. Certainly then it would seem that the UN has a vested interest in handling this subject properly and expeditiously.

For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists and astronauts. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public. Why? Because the authorities are afraid that people may think of some kind of horrible invaders. So the password still is: We have to avoid panic by all means."

In another interview he said:

"As far as I am concerned, there have been too many unexplained examples of UFO sightings around this Earth for us to rule out the possibilities that some form of life exists out there beyond our own world."

And in an exclusive interview with the National Enquirer on 14 January 1997, Cooper speaks openly about alien spacecraft. He says there's been a massive government cover-up of UFOs for nearly 50 years and insists the American public has a right to know the truth.

"I know other astronauts share my feelings," declared Cooper, who went into space aboard a Mercury craft in 1963 and on a Gemini craft two years later. "And we know the government is sitting on hard evidence of UFOs!"

Cooper said he first encountered UFOs as a military pilot in Germany in the early 1950s, when unidentified craft were spotted over an air base.

"We thought they could have been Russian. We regularly had MiG-15s overflying our base. We scrambled ourSabre jets to intercept and got to our ceiling of 45,000 feet . . . and they were still way above us traveling faster than we were. These vehicles were in formation like a fighter group, but they were metallic silver and saucer-shaped. Believe me, they weren't like any MiGs I'd seen before! They had to be UFOs."

In 1957, Cooper was one of an elite band of test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base in California, in charge of several advanced projects, including the installation of a precision landing system.

"I had a camera crew filming the installation when they spotted a saucer. They filmed it as it flew overhead, then hovered, extended three legs as landing gear, and slowly came down to land on a dry lake bed! These guys were all pro cameramen, so the picture quality was very good. The camera crew managed to get within 20 or 30 yards of it,filming all the time. It was a classic saucer, shiny silver and smooth, about 30 feet across. It was pretty clear it was an alien craft. As they approached closer it took off."

When his camera crew handed over the film, Cooper followed standard procedure and contacted Washington to report the UFO and "all heck broke loose," he said. After a while a high-ranking officer said when the film was developed I was to put it in a pouch and send it to Washington. He didn't say anything about me not looking at the film. That's what I did when it came back from the lab and it was all there just like the camera crew reported."

When the Air Force later started Operation Blue Book to collate UFO evidence and reports, Cooper says he mentioned the film evidence. "But the film was never found supposedly. Blue Book was strictly a cover-up anyway."

Cooper revealed he's convinced an alien craft crashed at Roswell, N. Mex., in 1947 and aliens were discovered in the wreckage.

"I had a good friend at Roswell, a fellow officer. He had to be careful about what he said. But it sure wasn't a weather balloon, like the Air Force cover story. He made it clear to me what crashed was a craft of alien origin, and members of the crew were recovered."

Why has the government kept its UFO secrets for so many years?

"It started in World War 2, when the government didn't want people to know about UFO reports in case they panicked," said Cooper. "They would have been fearful it was superior enemy technology that we had no defense against. Then it got worse in the Cold War for the same reason. So they told one untruth, they had to tell another to cover that one, then another, then another...it just snowballed.

"And right now I'm convinced a lot of very embarrassed government officials are sitting there in Washington trying to figure a way to bring the truth out. They know it's got to come out one day, and I'm sure it will. America has a right to know!"

Captain Edgar D. Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut, 1971

"We all know that UFOs are real. All we need to ask is where do they come from?"

If this has your juices flowing, you might enjoy reading my previous post here. I attempted to see where a shot of clear thinking applied to a few facts would take me, in the general direction of alien life in the galaxy. I astonished myself. See what you think. If you read it, don't hesitate to dip into the comment section as well, where I try to survive a number of rebuttals, successfully or so it seemed to me, of course, and further developed the ideas in the essay.

An Introvert Goes on a Great Space Adventure

2004-10-15T21:17:00.000-07:00

I'm going to tell you right now, before you start reading this, what I want you to get out of it. I'm sure professional writers would say that's a no-no, but I'm so confident I don't think it matters. I'm going to try to bowl you over with the power of clear thinking. I'm going to demonstrate, in a very dramatic way, that it's possible, even in the confusing world we live in, to do astonishing things just with good, clean logic, applied to a few facts. I know, it sounds boastful, even arrogant, and also doubtful, considering that I'm not a PhD in anything, but only a simple florist. But read it anyway and see what you think. Remember, though, that it's not the subject matter that should bowl you over, nor even the conclusions, which definitely could, but just what clear thinking can accomplish if it's done right.

I've always been a big space fan. Is there life on Mars, all that. But if I could go to space myself, I'm not sure I would. I'm an introvert. I doubt I would even survive the trip into Earth orbit. That's for extroverts, I think. My biggest thrills come when I’m sitting very still in a solid chair in a quiet room, while my mind careens around on the roller coaster of its own energy. I have a favourite method: I start out with some problem I don’t have the answer to, then, referring to nothing except the bits of knowledge that have found lodging in my noggin, I simply turn on the mental energy and see where it takes me. It’s always exciting.

Of course, there are no guarantees. I could just as well end up in a dead end as going down the freeway. Or nuts. But the older I get and the more bits of data I collect, the more confident I become.

So, blast off begins....

Now! The unanswered question is, ‘Why has SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) not yet discovered any signs of intelligence in the universe, other than our own?’ My mission, which I willingly accept, is to answer this to my own satisfaction, as well as any related questions. For instance, if aliens exist, why are they so elusive, what are they like, what is their attitude towards us, how long have they been here, and why, what is their civilization like, how big is it, how many civilizations are there, etc. I hear what you’re thinking: No one can possibly know these things, or even come close to a plausible answer. It’s so impossible there’s no point in even trying. Well, I think I can change your mind on that. Anyway, come along for the ride and see what you think.

So, as to why SETI hasn’t found any signs of civilizations out there yet, we will first ask the first question: Are we alone in the universe? No. It’s become pretty obvious lately that life has no difficulty getting started. The basic molecules, amino acids, are virtually everywhere, floating around in space and on all planets. And the latest finding, which has just now become public (I think I read it on Space.com) is that they readily combine into peptides, only requiring the presence of liquid water and a substance that is constantly being spewed from primordial volcanoes - called carbonyl sulphides. And water is one of the most common molecules in the galaxy. Once you have peptides, it takes very little to combine them into the complicated molecules of life (RNA and proteins). Consequently, there is bound to be one-celled life, at least, on most if not all planets in the galaxy that are warm enough to have liquid water. And that’s a lot of planets, according to the latest planet discoveries, and the extrapolations based on them. Well, once you have one-celled life, you automatically have evolution to more complex forms. So we have to assume that a lot of those planets have developed life to the point of having intelligence and then civilizations.

By 'a lot of planets', I simply mean a lot. Because when you start out with a galaxy with nearly uncountable stars in it, and thus with nearly uncountable planets, no matter what percentage you eliminate for one reason or another, you still end up with a lot of planets with civilizations on them. Even the famous old Drake Formula from the 1950s, which came up with a fanciful total by taking off large fractions (sheer guesses) for each of about ten different factors (like percentage of stars with planets, percentage of planets with liquid water, and so on), still predicted about 10,000 civilizations. And lately we’re finding that some of those factors were far too conservative in their estimation, meaning there could be a lot more than 10,000 civilizations in just our one little galaxy.

If that's the case, then why have we not discovered any yet? Well, maybe we can answer that if we find out what those civilizations are like? (I hear you scoffing.) A lot can be determined simply from the age of the galaxy. It’s 12 billion years old, and our own solar system is somewhere around five. Life on Earth began 3.5 billion years ago. It took that long for civilization to arrive. Based on these statistics, here’s a good question: If it took that long for us to evolve, can we expect other intelligent life forms we might meet to be less advanced than us, or about the same, or more advanced? Well, I read somewhere (and promptly forgot) how much of a lag time there is from when the galaxy formed to when the first life would physically be able to form. You see, in the beginning there were only the simplest of atoms: hydrogen and helium. They gathered and formed into the first generation of stars, and the tremendous gravity of these stars compressed the tiny atoms into large clumps - heavier atoms - which comprise all the heavier atoms in the universe today, including carbon, oxygen, iron, etc. So the first chunk of the life span of our galaxy didn’t have enough heavy elements yet for life to get going, even for planets to form. My memory isn't coming forward with the exact figure, but I don’t think the atom-forming period took anywhere like half the galaxy’s existence, but, just to be on the conservative side, let’s say it did. In that case, starting half of twelve, or six billion years ago, planets like ours formed and began developing life. If we assume each planet that had liquid water and volcanoes took 3.5 billion years to evolve civilizations, as ours did, then the first civilization as advanced as our own is right now existed about 2.5 billion years ago! That means that any of those first technological cultures that managed to survive their own natural or artificial apocalypses would now be 2.5 billion years old! An astonishing thought.

The age of a civilization will possibly say something about its character. Which is good, because whether we are likely to meet an older or a younger one is not that difficult to figure out. It’s a process of elimination. We ourselves only narrowly survived the first fifty years. Just fifty years. So let’s say not many civilizations can manage to survive their first hundred years of high-technology, what with nuclear weapons and ozone holes and other even more horrendous horrors that we on Earth are only beginning to figure out, and let's say that even fewer make it to 500 years, and fewer yet to 1,000 years. It looks like we're heading to zero civilizations left in fairly short order, right? Wrong. I can imagine one kind of society that can survive a thousand years of science and the development of fancy technology. Their people would definitely not be warlike by nature, like Klingons; they would either destroy themselves with internal warfare, or be destroyed by others in self-defence. No, a successful, really long-lasting civilization would have to be composed of a naturally peaceful people. They couldn’t just idealize peace, as it wouldn’t last. It would have to be a deep part of their character, a natural part, built into their genes. Of course, in the future, ‘natural’ can mean a number of things: Either they have always been peaceful, or they were more like us originally and then had the warlike aspects deliberately engineered out of their genes, or they are a race that evolved from an artificial beginning. Likely all three kinds of civilizations are out there, at least the last two. And likely they are combined in each civilization, living happily together, since that has to be their nature.

Next question: If we meet a civilization at random, will it be one of these old ones, or would it more likely be a lot younger, more like ourselves. Answer: It will without doubt be a lot older. Because, based on the above logic, which says that most civilizations will go extinct in their very early years, the chances of us meeting one that, out of 3.5 billion years of its evolution, lives out its existence in the blink of an eye - a few hundred years - is extremely minute. In other words, if we travelled to that planet and arrived at a random time in its existence, the chances are practically 100% that we would either be there sometime way back in the 3.5 billion years of evolution, long before intelligence developed, or sometime way after it killed itself off.

On the other hand, considering the enormous periods of time before Earth ever existed, and before life developed on it, during which civilizations of any age could have come and gone - a period totalling at least 2.5 billion years - then we are very very unlikely to discover, to say nothing of meeting, a civilization anywhere close to as young as we are. The odds against it are so high as to make it nearly impossible. So we can rest assured that if we do have a close encounter of the third kind, it will be with a representative of a very ancient people, more ancient than we can possibly imagine.

What will it’s culture be like? As we’ve seen, being ancient, it will have to be peacable. But to keep itself from going extinct, after millions of years of living with extremely powerful technology, it would seem that it’s main guiding principal would necessarily be to root out any possible ways it could meet its end. It would certainly change itself with bioengineering, but it would also constantly be looking for any worlds in its territory or anywhere within its influence where a civilization could be starting. It would watch it carefully, and if it turned out to be warlike, or even partly warlike as we are, it would guide and manipulate and change it. It’s peaceful nature would no doubt keep it from destroying it, but anything else would be permissible.

Well then, are they watching us? That depends on how likely they are to be here or anywhere close, since the galaxy is enormous. We have to assume that any very old civilization will have slowly spread to nearby stars, colonizing their planets, and moving on to stars near them in turn. There was an article published in Scientific American a couple years ago, which calculated how long it would take one civilization to colonize the entire galaxy by going from one star to all the nearest ones around it, and they doing likewise, in something like 400-year cycles, I think it was, time enough to allow each colony to go from nothing to the point of wanting to leave. At that slow rate, they figured that the entire galaxy could be colonized four times over by now.

So in this vision of mine, that has already happened, and probably not by one civilization, but by many, meeting each other and sharing the galaxy for a time, then joining into one, this being the only alternative since all of them have long ago become peaceful and would rather amalgamate than think of the prospect of eventually fighting over territory.

So if anybody reading this believes in UFOs, it’s pretty obvious that in this view of mine (if it isn’t impossible for some practical reason - which I can’t imagine), they are here now, observing us.

This must be true - that right now there is one vast civilization spanning the entire galaxy, made up of a large number of different races, and local cultures, but everywhere everyone shares the very strong number-one trait of peacefulness. Consequently, for us, our future is predetermined: When the time is right, we will be led out into the great civilization, and, at the same time, changed to the degree they see fit.

When did they begin watching us? Certainly not in the last few decades. More likely at some random point during the 3.5 billion years of the history of life on Earth. Probably later rather than earlier, as they would be able to tell from a distance whether chlorophyl was yet active, and whether oxygen-breathing animals were roaming around, and probably even how close life was to developing technology. Possibly they sent their first probes here back during the time of the dinosaurs, as they would leave an easily seen chemical imprint on our atmosphere.

Okay, if they showed up back then and are still monitoring us, when will we meet them? Well, this isn’t my idea - it came from some busy brain at SETI, I think - but I like it and think it very possible. We will meet them when we have colonies on the moon, to the point where our astronauts can look around a bit. Some of the most fascinating geological formations in the solar system are the many lava tubes, both on Mars and on the moon. These lava tubes are vast caverns, horizontal with fairly flat floors, high walls and great curved roofs. They snake along just under the surface for many miles, and are many times larger than would be needed to house a city. They are very common on both planets, having been carved out and roofed in by smoothly flowing lava streams that suddenly stopped at some point and competely drained out of their enclosed riverways. On Mars, scientists expect to find ice pools at the bottom end of some of them, and possibly ancient bacterial colonies living inside them today. They are ideal for human colonies because they would completely protect their residents from the sun’s deadly cosmic rays and ultraviolet light, by far the biggest problem we would have. Colonists would simply inflate a large, strong balloon to fill a part of the interior, possible a mile or more across. The lava tubes on the moon, unlike those on Mars, contain no atmosphere, and the vacuum as well as the roof form a perfect, and immense, storage house for anything. Anything put there will be exactly the same millions of years later. So the exciting possibility is that the first explorers will find in them the archives of the watchers, hopefully with visual records for us of the history of life on earth. And then the meeting will occur, that is if they are actually here in person and not just in ‘spirit’, in terms of robotic technology.

So what will they look like? As I’ve suggested already, there will likely be two basic kinds, life that evolved from chemicals, like us, and life that evolved from artificial intelligence. The artificial ones may surprise us, but how about the others? Science fiction has overwhelmed this question with an endless variety of answers. From ones that look like us to ones more like whales or octopi or insects or reptiles. Or even spirits. This is a situation that calls for the form of culling I call my ‘let’s-face-it’ device. In science fiction, the strangest forms are usually a result of very strange situations. And of a sense of fun on the part of the author. So let’s look for the more likely situations. For starters, carbon is everywhere and is the perfect atom to serve as the carrier of life, for a number of reasons. Consequently, these intelligent races will be carbon-based, not silicon or see-through. And if carbon-based, then the natural complex molecules called amino acids and peptides, all of which form readily in natural situations, will lead to their combined forms - RNA and proteins and then DNA - as naturally as one-two-three. In other words, most habitable planets with life will have life basically similar to life on earth. So what will the intelligent forms be like? Well, on Earth we have intelligent apes, including us, but we also have fairly intelligent swimming mammals, fairly intelligent molluscs (octopi and squids), fairly intelligent birds (ravens, parrots, etc,), which, by the way, are direct descents of dinosaurs, which would be mentioned here were they not extinct, and fairly intelligent insects. Some would say that any of these forms could develop into intelligent civilizations. I don’t think so. Whales have no hands and so can’t manipulate the real world and will forever be doomed to a life of swimming around in a vast ever-more polluted pond. Octopi have hands to some degree but must also live in the water, their whole structure necessitating that. Rockets and outer space will not be for them. Insects are doomed to be tiny because of their exoskeletons (vs our solid rod-like bones) and because the science of scaling shows that an exoskeleton simply isn’t strong enough to allow more than a very small size. But, even as a tiny critter, insects like ants and bees have a high social intelligence. The trouble is that their intelligence isn’t the kind that can learn from individual situations, but only learns over hundreds of years, through evolution. That’s simply not the kind of intelligence we’re talking about here. No one will ever be able to have a conversation with an ant colony, even if it does have air conditioning and is good at farming.

What I’m getting at is that there is very good reason we as humans look the way we do. We have two eyes side by side so that our brains can see three dimensions directly ahead, to judge distance accurately. Two opposite ears for the same reason in terms of sound. Nose above mouth to help taste the food we eat. We are standing upright so we have two hands free to manipulate the world, which is how we apply our intelligence. We have opposable digits to hold things. A less important but still big characteristic: we have lost our hair so we can live in hotter and colder environments, wearing clothes in colder ones (that’s my theory anyway). Taking away any of our main physical characteristics would likely have caused our extinction ages ago. So I’m saying the aliens would look similar to us. But how similar? Well, what would have happened if the dinosaurs had not gone extinct? The answer is very common in science fiction, and is a good one. We would exist just as we are, but have scales...or some such minor characteristics left over from our reptilian ancestry. In evolution this is called convergence. There are zillions of examples where a creature of one ancestry found an empty niche - a situation not taken by the creature that normally inhabits it, maybe on a large isolated island like Australia - and slowly changed over time to fill that niche, into a creature nearly identical to the one that normally occupies it elsewhere. Even organs converge. An octopus has eyeballs that are nearly identical in their workings to human eyes, except that they evolved directly from simple light-sensitive spots on the end of a stalk, over millions of years, the kind of spots you find on snails. Also their brains are remarkably similar in internal structure to ours, except that they aren’t two-sided, but are donut shaped!!

In other words, we are due to meet representatives of a great galaxy-spanning civilization, sweet, peaceful people, who are very much like us in general outline. Or were, way back eons ago when time was young. Who knows what they’ve made themselves into by now.

Leaving No Prints

2004-10-02T22:53:00.000-07:00

Twisting away, finally,
from stillness
into the galloping darkness,
throwing myself headlong
into the flowing fog,
following no path,
leaving no prints.

A lot of the time I feel like I'm living in a pressure cooker, frantically trying to keep the lid on or who knows what might happen. This poem certainly doesn't describe my life, but represents kind of the ideal opposite to the life of pressures. The Life of pressures. I have always felt that really there is no such thing as life. As there is no such thing as love. Love is a verb, not a noun. Same with life. There is no such thing. There is only the process of living. Life is only an ideal in our minds. It's what we think we're supposed to do, which throws a wrench in the works because all we can do is live. To try to live up to a Life means we have to twist our natural living into an unnatural shape, repressing huge chunks of ourselves that we think are wrong. And not using much of the rest. I present myself as an example.

A while ago I saw a few minutes of Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, being interviewed on TV. He caught my attention because he happened to be talking about something close to the hearts of some of the best friends of this site. He was saying that the shamans of the ancient, worldwide religion, Shamanism (as he called it), the only universal religion the world has ever seen, were people who had succeeded in removing the barrier between their conscious and unconscious minds! I've wished all my life that I could do that. Very occasionally when I'm really relaxed I get feelings about things, feelings I'm convinced come from my unconscious mind. Once in my early 30s, out in the solitude of a forest in Newfoundland, I struggled to reach my unconscious by means of poetry - memorizing it, reading it and writing it continuously for a month, with partial success, and partial failure when it took me, in the end, to the edge of insanity instead of health. But apparently the ancient shamans did master it somehow, over the eons before Christianity came, and, as my blog friend Andy, a modern witch from London, claims, it is carried on in pagan practices in many parts of the world today.

I'm intrigued. If it's true, it means they have learned to remove that barrier, however briefly, allowing them to unite the brain. It's one of the most fascinating ideas I can imagine: What would it be like? We try to imagine sometimes having 'lucid dreams', in which we are asleep and dreaming, but, at the same time, knowing we are dreaming, and so are to some degree awake, or conscious, inside our normally unconscious dreams. But, as with normal dreaming, we are still laying down, paralyzed, with our eyes shut, not conscious of the world around us. What if it worked the other way around; that we were living our normal daytime lives, moving around doing things, but at the same time our normally unconscious minds were there also, conversing with us but in the way they normally do - with symbols heavy with feeling. The only way I can see this working in a practical way is that the 'dream mind' would have to forgo using all those visual symbols, at least to a large degree, and also of course it couldn't supply the manufactured environment it does in dreams. Instead it would have to concentrate mainly on just adding feelings to the conscious mind. Visual symbols could be thrown in occasionally, when necessary to say something important, but only if they didn't confuse the conscious mind. For instance, an object that was known to represent something in the unconscious or spirit world could suddenly appear in the right situation, as a statement.

Well, none of this sounds very spiritual, or otherworldly. Instead, we seem to be implying that all these feelings and visual symbols would simply be products of the unconscious mind. But who's to say? If there is a spirit world that you can't normally see, it would much more likely make its presence felt through the unconscious mind than through the other, which focusses so much on mundane things like earning a living or trying to decide whether to vote for Kerry or Bush. So then the unconscious part of this united person might originate either totally in the physical brain, or partly in the physical brain and partly in the spirit world that only it can see. How could you tell the difference? Well, like any good scientist: by testing it. By its effects. E=MC 2 was only some scribbling on a blackboard until the first atom bomb exploded.

But, as intriguing as all this may be, I'm not sure I want to try it on myself again.

Spirituality, Witchcraft, Paganism, All Manner of Things

2004-09-29T13:03:00.000-07:00

Anyone interested in any of the above could do worse than to dive into the great conversation we have going on in the comment section of the previous blurb here: 'A Ritual Opening'. There are a number of very interesting people chatting it up, including a witch, Andy, who inhabits the place I've always thought of as the heart of witchcraft, London, England; Mael, a woman in Vancouver deep into paganism and all manner of ritual traditions; me - more or less an agnostic who is so curious as to be downright odd; and a host of other great conversationalists, all sitting around my comment living-room having a very curious time indeed. Come on in and join us.

A Ritual Opening

2004-09-21T19:03:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try something a little different: I'm giving myself two hours to write intensely about something not knowing in advance where it's going to lead, and see what happens.

I've been reading Mael Brigde's blog, 'Water Fur and Flame'. This woman is very interested in festivals and rituals, those of all cultures and religions, and she does a running commentary about them as they come and go through time. Normally I would have no interest in this, but something attracted me - the great photos partly, and partly her personality, I think. But also for a long time I've had a tiny little feeling that there is something about ritual - that it is one of those very slightly opened doorways, one I should open and look inside and I might be overwhelmed by what I find. So what I'm going to do is see if, by running on at the mouth about ritual, I can somehow open that door. I hope I can.

Where to start: I guess with me, and how I've seen ritual up to now. Probably the reason I'm using ritual in this funny exercise is that ritual is the very opposite of where I live, of my whole outlook and direction. I'm an extreme outsider and ritual seems to me to be what you would find in the very inside. I grew up in a tiny farm family, with shy parents and a sister I rarely talked to. I related more with my fantasies and with nature than with other people and society. There were no rituals in our life. My mother was a devout protestant but kept it to herself because my father was an atheist. She did manage to get me into Sunday School for a short time, and to Bible Camp for two summers. There was a lot of ritual at Bible Camp, but it only lasted two weeks; just as I was starting to get used to it, it was over. We would be asked to say a prayer every morning and night in our cabin but I never volunteered. And there was the weird and scary thing of being taken out in the bush to be saved, which I didn't understand at all. And one of the camp clowns kept making a big joke that he had been saved seven times. I didn't like him but I could understand what he meant. Then, on the last day, we were taken down to the beach for a wiener roast and a special treat. We all stood around in a circle and two of the camp counselors, whom we all had grown to respect and love, started grabbing each other and throwing each other down and kicking each other in the side with the sand flying up into our faces. Later I realized they were professional wrestlers but we didn't have a TV at home yet, so I had no idea it was a sport. I thought they were trying to kill each other, and we were forced to stand there and watch. You can imagine the upheaval going on inside me. Even so, as we drove home I remember passing some friends playing by the road and I thought how animal-like they were, with no feeling of spirit or God. Obviously something had happened to me, but it quickly wore off and I became myself again.

Years later, though, I found that I obviously was still a believer deep inside my unconscious mind. One wierd friend I knew, who had been raped by his catholic priest as a boy, wanted to play me a recording of rituals that were chanted to music by members of the Church of Satan of San Francisco. He was proud of this recording as it represented for him the height of the hippy counter-culture that he was big into. Well, he put the record on, and the wierdest thing happened. Only maybe thirty seconds into it the biggest revulsion I had ever experienced rose in me like a heart attack coming on and I said, in a panic, "Turn it off!" He looked at me like I was joking, so I said louder, "You'll have to turn that off right now or I'll have to leave." So he did. He was shocked because I was normally open to virtually anything. Well, I'm sure there was no real Satan in that recording, so the only answer I could think of was that inside me there lived a church, some kind of living faith in God and goodness and all that kind of thing, which I had had no idea of until then.

Some years later I started writing poetry to help me get in touch with my unconscious mind, which, along with my feelings in general, was blocked off in me as much as it is in men in general (I'm generalizing here, obviously). I tried to write the poems by just writing down any words that popped into my mind - what you might call 'automatic writing' - and the resulting 'poems' began surprising me with a lot of fairly religious, or spiritual, references. So I became really convinced that I was inhabited by a religious person I had no contact with.

Subsequently, I began to see this problem in my life as being similar to that of modern society in general: Consciously I wanted to understand the world completely, as rationally as possible, and so grew to love science as the tool that led in that direction, whereas unconsciously I retained a strong belief in the presence in and around me and everywhere of a God - which implied a belief in the creation of the world and everything in it including me. And a belief that everything has an absolute purpose, which didn't fit with my conscious view of reality either.

As you can imagine, I'm a funny kind of being when I enter a church. I'm looking around seeing everything, and trying to understand it, practically the way an anthropologist in Borneo would, while at the same time my unconscious mind is finding itself at home - coming alive, being at peace, praying, whatever... Well okay, I really don't know what it's doing. I suspect, but how would I know. I do know, however, that I have a good feeling about churches. I like them. I don't like bikers. I like goodness, for lots of reasons I could easily tell you, and I don't like badness, also for reasons I could easily tell you. But without those reasons I still like goodness and don't like badness. Without thinking at all. I would put my life at risk to help somebody before I had the chance to stop myself. I know that because it's happened. Driven by the goodness in me, I guess. Sappy movies, when I get roped into seeing them, make me cry for all the very obvious, sappy reasons. No matter - I still cry.

Well, sometimes I wonder what it would be like not to be split into science and religion. But to be completely religion. I could try it, maybe. But no I can't. Someone who believes in the truth as strongly as I do, and I do very strongly, can't just suspend disbelief for a moment, pretend, as if he were reading a novel. All I can do is wonder. So when I see religious people engaging in the rituals of their faith, I look at them and try to imagine what they get from it. When I was younger, I used to scoff at people believing things like a little wafer being the body of Christ, and when they ate it they ate his body. What nonsense. But, on the other hand, I also felt that these were adults, people I must respect just as I do myself, so that, taking them seriously, one day I may be able to understand what they're doing.

Well, when I got older I did finally see it, or something anyway. I saw that these people engaging in these weird rituals were mainly setting their minds up for an experience. Just as many people prepare their minds for sleep with the ritual of brushing their teeth, these people were opening doors in their minds, allowing spiritual feelings to wash over them like a baptism. The elaborate look of the church, the sounds of prayer and chanting and hymns, the presence of the priests, memories of previous times there, all these were things that prompted changes in their minds, and allowed them to enter the presence of God, to be with God in their feelings. Or - as I could imagine it happening inside myself, if I allowed it - to open the door to my unconscious and allow the faith that resides there to overwhelm my conscious self as well.

Seen this way, obviously it doesn't matter what the ritual consists of. Every culture has come up with the oddest things that it's decided will work in rituals. Those odd things don't do anything in themselves; they are just where it happens.

So I guess this is how I see it now: Ritual brings a person out of the idea-world he lives in, the world of responsibility, of doing this and that, and the stress of getting things done on time, of making enough money, of being good enough in all ways, of conforming to what others want, of trying to please everybody and make them smile. Ritual brings the person away from all that busyness to a complete stop, as meditation is meant to do, and from there into the eternal world of his ancestors who have all done this before him, of his entire culture, of his faith and his god, a world where he can stop trying because he is tiny in comparison. All he has to do is be there. In the ritual, he is not under the judging eyes of the little people around him but bathing in the presence of some kind of total acceptance. (Acceptance if he's a good person, of course. If not, he will find no peace anywhere.) So I guess this is what I'm coming to in this exercise: The person in the ritual doesn't escape reality, as I used to think, but comes down to reality. Comes down to earth, you might say, to the eternal, soulful earth, and this kind of earthiness is one with God.

I don't know if a person like me can adopt rituals at a late period in life and actually expect them to have this effect. It would seem that you have to grow up with them. They are part of your beliefs. Or at least were. Even if a person becomes skeptical of the wafer actually being the body of Christ, it would still have the same effect, because the skepticism only exists in the conscious mind. The great other part of the mind has a very long memory and involves itself deepest in the long course of the life. So I expect I will always remain an outsider. I will have a church but only in my unconscious.

Something About Her

2004-09-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

Stylish and stuffed
with meatballs,
my lady,
in black velvet
and jingling earrings
from the jungles
of Africa.

The man
in the suit
behind me
can't tear his eyes away.

One day after work, my sweetheart, Linda, and I went down to 41st Avenue in search of a dress to buy for my elderly mother, thinking we had seen a store there with clothes that would be suitable. Afterward, we stopped for dinner at a Greek restaurant. As we walked to the table, I scanned the other diners to see if they looked like the kind of rich people we expected to see in that area of town. Some did. Some didn't. Who knows - maybe they look just like anybody else. Probably not quite like us though. Linda has her own unique clothing style that comes from the inside out. And as for me, I'm lucky if I even remember to put clothes on.

We ordered. She had spaghetti and thumbed through a gardening magazine, while I munched on a pizza and read a hard-cover book on evil, the companion volume to an English TV series, that only cost me $3.99 at Book Warehouse.

In a while, Linda leaned back, exhaled like she had been holding her breath, and said, "Boy, am I ever stuffed!" She has a little stomach. It doesn't hold much. Unlike mine.

The waitress came and cleaned away the empty dishes.

Then, as the people from a table behind me got up and left, Linda leaned forward, made a face, and said, "See that guy? He was staring at me the whole time. Every time I looked up, he had his eyes on me."

I smiled and watched him go out the door, a guy in his 40s, wearing a suit. I didn't see his face or who he was with. "You should have told me. I would've just moved over between you and him."

She looked down at her magazine. "Yah, I guess I could have. I didn't think of it." She flipped a few pages. "Anyway, you get used to it. I can ignore it pretty good now."

I looked at her, trying to imagine how that guy had seen her, trying to see through the sweetness I can't help see in her, and the love I feel for her. Then I said, kind of out of the blue: "Stylish and stuffed, my lady."

Linda laughed. A little gleam started to form back in behind my eyes. A poem was coming on. (She said later, "I can tell when there's something going on inside there," pointing at my forehead.)

We know each other so well.

In superficial ways, the way people normally compare each other, Linda and I have very little in common. I love understanding things, and poetry, and so on - a mental kind of life. She loves gardening, visual beauty, crafts, family. And yet all it takes is a glance and we're so close.

Too many couples split up as soon as infatuation dies, or after their first serious fight. Too bad. They lose the chance to experience real love - living comfortably with someone you know nearly as well as you know yourself, and who knows you the same way. You have to experience it to really appreciate it.

All it takes is two people who basically like each other, no matter how wildly different they are. Eventually, if they're committed enough, and if nothing trips them up too soon, they'll find they're living the same life. They'll come to feel that a threat to their relationship is a threat to their lives. To start over from scratch at that point, after each being such a deep part of the other, would be unimaginable. As would finding other partners they could equally well depend upon to accept, even love, the most delicate parts of themselves.

I've met women since Linda and I got married who may be better suited to me in one way or another. (I'm not talking about physical attraction. Beauty has nothing to do with this kind of love.) But to start a relationship with one of these women would mean leaving Linda. And that would be inconceivable. I know exactly how it would hurt her, and how deeply, and there's no way I could do it. Anyway, it would destroy my life. The substance, the meaning, would be taken from my life, and suddenly everything would be superficial. I would be separated not only from her but from the world. Standing alone in a desert.

We only have so many years on this planet. And it's becoming clear to me that we can spend them in one of two ways. Either we can keep tasting and discarding, keep running frantically after anything at all to fill the void, but never finding it, or we can stop, commit ourselves to one person, lay ourselves open, be amazed that that person loves us, give love in turn, and finally relax.

We're either somewhat comfortable in life or we're alone and empty. And a real, deep comfort seems to require two people. It's as if there's a part of the mind that demands a deep bond with another or it won't let us alone. Maybe there's a built-in need. Genetic. Who knows. But it's strong. For instance, look at how many married men who look for outside their marriages still refuse to leave their wives, obviously needing them more than freedom. Sex seems to be irrelevant to satisfying this need.

Biologists have an answer. Apparently most animals that bear offspring which are very vulnerable for a long time, like birds and humans, have an inherited need for strong, lasting pair bonds. One individual simply can't do all the work for both the offspring and itself. Single mothers will attest to this.

But it feels like more than that. Maybe it's just a lucky byproduct, or maybe it's more, but it seems to me like that other person has come to serve as the link between the deepest parts of our selves and the outer world. And if we don't have that link, then only our outer parts can relate to the outside world, while our inner self remains isolated and drives us frantic in its quest.

It couldn't happen. No Way.

2004-09-11T18:17:00.000-07:00

Years and years ago I had a girlfriend who caused me no end of grief. When we first met she warned me that she was a narcissist. Right out, just like that. At least that's being honest! Well, what was I going to do - say okay get lost? No, I just said, "That's okay." She wasn't my first girlfriend, but I was a shy kid and she had a great body and all that. I wasn't just going to start thinking about my future all of a sudden.

Well, the future came soon enough. I suppose we managed about two years together, but there wasn't any real love there, obviously, and she couldn't see why she shouldn't have fun with other guys who liked her body too. So things got worse and worse and ended that way.

Years later - and I mean many years later, long after I had moved to B.C., had gotten married, and had long owned a flower shop - I drove my van one winter day to the garage to get it worked on. I took the bus back. It was rush hour. I had an aisle seat, and was staring at the back of the seat ahead of me. I was fairly relaxed. Considering that right beside me was a line of people's bums, and heavy sweaters and jackets were flopping around my head. In the other direction was the side window, dirty from the slush outside. There was a small round area in the middle of it that was still clean enough to see out. Well, most of the time I was just resting my eyes, my mind drifting. Then, at one point I absently glanced past the person sitting beside me and out the window. In that split second, my former girlfriend, who happened to be walking along the sidewalk, glanced up and our eyes met.

And the bus passed on.

For a minute, it all seemed very normal. Someone looking out a window and someone glancing in. But then I began to realize the near-impossibility of it happening by chance and I began to wake up.

I vaguely remembered someone telling me that she had moved to B.C., a different city though. Even so, what are the chances that, just at the right moment, she would be in Vancouver, be on Broadway near me, be on Broadway the same time I was on Broadway, be on Broadway one of the few times that year I was in a bus and so had the freedom to look around; and what are the chances that, both being on Broadway, we would actually pass each other, and that I would look out that dirty window even once, that one of the few times I did glance out she would be walking by right then, that, incredibly, she would be exactly in my field of view for the split second I looked at the hole in the window, that, even more incredibly, she would not only look up at the bus with its ten or fifteen windows but that she would look up only at my window, and not only at the window but at the hole in it and not only the at hole but at my eyes in the hole, and do that exactly at the right time as my eyes passed by deep in that window hole at 30 miles an hour.

Nearly impossible.

It's fate, I hear you thinking. It has to be. But before you get too sure, think of this: Nothing came of it. And I didn't want anything to come of it. Nothing could ever come of it. All that happened was two former acquaintances, acquaintances who didn't like each other, passed on a street. Period. If it was anything, it certainly wasn't fate.

Yet the world looks quite a lot different to me since that happened. The more I think about it, the more certain I am that I witnessed something important. It makes me feel that if only I was bright enough maybe I could figure out the whole world from that one clue.

If only. But at least this much would seem to follow: that emotional connections take place partly on a telepathic level, and that they don't die as quickly with time as do the emotions we are aware of; the emotions themselves may dampen, but the telepathic connections they created remain longer. And the world would seem to be thick with these things, whatever they are. Even so, they're invisible to us. They can be noticed, but the catch is that a mind has to be at rest to feel them. Which it very seldom is. Not only did all the factors I listed above have to be just right for me and her, but both of us had to be at rest as well. If I hadn't been packed into a winter bus in rush hour, and on the aisle seat, I would likely have been busily occupied looking at the world around me, thinking about it, not wanting to miss things, to waste time, life is so short. I wouldn't have been at rest enough to turn to the window on the command of a completely unconscious feeling.

I'm awestruck at this whole thing.

I've thought about it a bit since, and, if you're curious, and I mean really curious, here's how far I've gotten:

First, I find it interesting that neither she nor I knew the other was there, before we saw each other. This implies that we couldn't have directed our own telepathy toward each other, either consciously or unconsciously, which is how you normally think of telepathy being used - as a tool, an action you take, or one that somebody else takes towards you. So some aspect of it had to have come from outside both of us somehow, as if it was directed from, or was organized, outside of us, even though it was our own emotions that were involved.

Some folks will immediately jump in here and say that if it came from outside it was God that made it happen. But remember that no 'fate' was involved, that there seemed to be no purpose to it. Okay, maybe God's purposes can't be so easily understood, but for the moment let's just assume that it is as it seems, that there is no purpose. And see where that might lead. Because otherwise all thinking must come to a crashing halt. And what fun is there in that.

So where are we? We've arrived at some kind of a massive system of interconnections that is without intention, as if it carries no motivation of its own other than to interconnect. It just exists. It would seem to be floating around in the space between people, yet be connected to them, something like a huge 'aura', so that when they come near each other, the unfelt emotions floating in the space around the people touch, recognize each other, connect, and that connection out there then comes back and tries to connect the physical bodies together by directing their attention toward each other. In other words, the emotions have motivation and intention, but only after they themselves recognize and connect. Pretty darned weird.

It gets even weirder: Unlike the aura new agers have always talked about, this one contains not only its present parts (emotions being felt right now) but at the same time its past parts as well. (That wasn't my present girlfriend, but one from long back into my memories, ones I seldom dredged up.) Speaking of memories, what else could those past things be that connected between her and me but memories? It seems they would have to be just memories. So what are memories? They're nothing really but neural patterns in the brain. Well, if that's all the connections are made of, how could they be outside us? They couldn't, so they must be something else. It must be that somehow the past emotions out in the aura are no different than the present ones in the aura; they must be just as 'here and now' and alive. The only explanation I can see is that suddenly we're not talking about regular reality, but about the kind of reality that physicists mean when they say time is another dimension, and things aren't really like they seem to us at all. Which is about as conversation-stopping as bringing up God as the explanation!

A couple of other very similar experiences I've had in my life add another dimension to this scheme - that the emotions don't have to be tied to a living person at all but can be attached to a dead one, or even just an object. The situations are too lengthy to discuss here, but they were very similar to this one. I was very much at rest, and suddenly looked in a place I would never have looked normally and was shocked at what I found. A dead pet and an emotion-laden object. In neither case was my future affected by the outcome. Yet it was as if I was strongly directed to look there. If it wasn't God that directed me, it must be that emotions that had at one time been directed toward those objects still remained with them. Or I would never have found them. Which means that some aspect of the original emotions can actually detach from the person and survive outside.

The only next question I can think of is, "What does outside mean?" Are we deluded somehow in our feeling of inside and outside? Of the subjective world and the objective world? Well, we either accept that things that are supposed to be totally limited to subjective reality - inside our skulls - can somehow move outside them and survive intact, or the objective and/or subjective worlds aren't what they seem. If they aren't, that means either our 'inner selves' aren't so 'inner' after all, but are much more a part of the big world than our delusions lead us to think, or the 'outer world' isn't so 'outer' after all but is much more a part of our subjective selves than our delusions will allow us to think.

And beyond that I am just not able to go. So far, anyhow. Maybe I need more clues.

Or brains.

Take a Guess

2004-09-08T13:33:00.000-07:00

After years of selling flowers I've come to the conclusion that most men do not have a place in their brains for flowers. They simply can't see them. They have places for cars, careers, sports, and so on, but none for flowers. When a man finds himself entering a flower shop with a woman, quite often he will turn and whisper to her, within maybe fifteen seconds, that he will be just outside, and then immediately disappear into the street scene.

What I'm saying is that people's brains are attuned to certain things and not to others. My brain, for instance, cannot retain figures. It rebels very strongly at the idea of having to work with them. So whereas some people will remember numerous quantities of various kinds, and look forward to effortlessly regurgitating them to the amusement of others, I tend to have to either look things up or guess.

Well, lately I've turned things around somewhat. I've come up with a way of guessing rough amounts that I really enjoy using whenever I can, just to see how close it will bring me to the real thing. I'm so into it now that I actually look forward to being asked something I can use it on. And the results of my efforts keep surprising me.

For instance, let's take a random example to guess a rough price for, something I've never thought of buying before. Say a lawnmower. Okay, this is how I do it: I think of two figures, one wildly high, and the other wildly low. So wild it's very obvious, on each count. I would say $10,000 is way way too high, and $10 is way way too low. Now I work my way in. $5,000 is closer but still way too high to consider paying. On the other hand, $50 is still way too low for a lawnmower, a good, loud, powered one. $1,000 is still far too high, I would say, just as $100 is too low. How about $500? Well, on the other hand, how about $200? Not sure? Okay, at this point I'll just take the mid-point between them: $350. Think about it. That seems like a price you could imagine paying for a gas-driven, spanking new lawnmower. Okay, how much are they really? I just did a search and yes indeed, they are $300 to $400 each!! Think I cheated? That I made it work out because I knew the price in advance? Okay, try it yourself then. It doesn't have to be prices. It can be weights, lengths, whatever. Any quantity.

I think I know how it works. It all depends on the endpoints you start with. Each direction could go infinitely far, of course, but we intuitively pick two finite points just about the right distance apart. Our intuition knows how far to go in each direction.

Okay now, here's an interesting question: what if, instead of intuitively picking endpoints a limited distance away, we started with the very furthest possible points: those at infinity. What would our zeroing in give us? Well, let's see. The smallest would be zero, absolute nothing. And the largest would of course be infinity itself. Now working in, here's the way I do it. Instead of cutting the distance by halves etc, I move by orders of magnitude, or at least what I see as magnitudes. (You have to do it like this because what is half of infinity? It's still infinity.) So moving in to my first stop, I put the size of galaxies on the big end, and atoms on the other. Then another 'order of magnitude': the size of the Earth, and the size of a virus. Then a forest and a heart. And the midpoint - a human being out for a hike.

Linda and I just got back to Vancouver from our Labour Day weekend at our little half-acre plot on Gabriola, surrounded on two sides by NATURE!!! It's virgin nature (or as close as you can get to it these days, within a million miles of a city). Just inside the trees behind our property a great cliff rises 200 feet straight up, with immense fir and maple trees climbing a scree slope of ancient boulders that lifts them half way up, to 100 feet above the roof of our tiny cottage. And then from there, the strength of those highest trees, or, I should say, the combined force of their tiny water-sucking corpuscles, lifts their great crowns nearly to the very top, to whatever lives up on that never-before-seen plateau. I've heard some animal sounds drift down, and the occasional human voice.

I often stand on the delicate deer trail that runs precariously along the top edge of the scree, where it abuts against that vertical cliff, with my feet soft on thousands of years of leaf mold and decaying branches, on old deer droppings and feathers that have wafted down from the circling turkey vultures that are so high up there it makes me dizzy to peer at them through those golden maple leaves. In that place, against that immenseness, with the universe above it, and with blobs of sunlight playing across my body, leaves dancing gently around me, birds and crickets singing, the lightest imaginable creatures moving in the air around me, and, between branches beside my legs, shining webs, with at their centres the waiting fishermen of the air, and then unseen everywhere the tiny tiny multitude slowly carrying out their intricate tasks.

Standing there like that, I know I am just right, perfectly suited. I'm small enough to be agile and yet large enough to be capable of moving great distances, of being safe from the constant search of hunting little eyes. I'm very very comfortable there in that ancient slice of nature. The gigantic trees and rock formations wrap around me like a winter coat, and the small things support me, or at least could, with their various abilities - they could keep me going forward with their energy.

I'm made to live in this paradise, this nature that seems to me like a paradise because I am so perfectly made for it. Much of the year, I can if I want to actually walk out through the door of my house with nothing protecting me, naked. In the future, on Mars and the Moon, people will live for centuries always inside safe spaces, never able to go outside at all, without wearing the enclosure around them in the form of space suits. Yet, here, on this amazing planet, we can step outside our homes with no clothing on at all, completely vulnerable, and look up into the night sky, straight above us, through billions of miles of unimpeded universe. In total comfort.

It would seem that one of two possibilities must be the reason. (Or maybe both together.) It could be that God created the world and everything in it, including us, so that all the contents fit perfectly together. Or it could be that over millions of years we evolved ever so slowly within the rest of nature, thus fitting ourselves to it perfectly (as we can feel when we leave our cities behind). And that the place where most of the evolving occurred was very tropical, a skin-temperature climate. Where we lived naked all year long.

In any case, finding myself inside it, under that cliff, there is no question any more of what is natural and what is unnatural. I am as natural as can be. We are a natural species, and so everything we do and produce is also natural.

But how can that be? Our actions are so destructive of nature, and so newly destructive, and so ... artificial ... they can't be natural.

I've become convinced we live in two worlds at the same time. It's taken me a long time to see this, at least as clearly as I do now. This is how it seems: The world I have just described, of everyone and everything being natural and all part of the natural whole, is objective reality. It is all something I cannot opinionize about it, or point fingers at. It is just how it is. It is there. It just is. Absolute reality. But then factories enter the picture, pollution - massive, rapid species extinction. It's fine to say it is absolute reality, but it soon won't be anything at all if it all dies out, due to our unstoppable exertions. So this is the other world we live in: subjective reality. Here are the good and the bad. Horrors and beauty. There is no question these are true, even if they are limited to our brains and to the creations of our brains. For example, global warming is an aspect of nature, of objective reality. Everything that happens when the globe slowly warms, the myriad changes in nature, are all objective parts of nature. And, just as people are also objective parts of it, so are their automobiles, their factories, and air pollution. What an automobile consists of objectively is submicroscopic particles, forces, energies of various kinds, and a lot of space. But it is also true that a person can climb into all that and drive it off, polluting the air as he goes. This is the equally true subjective reality, which we contain in our minds, and which we then build outside ourselves, just as birds builds nests.

Now that I see it this way, I love to look at everything both ways, to get into both attitudes, both viewpoints. And thus try to see the whole truth. The objective view is practically a Zen outlook. It's calming. Everything and everyone is equal, existing side by side in this one, totally all-encompassing universe. Yet at the same time, and inside that same universe, the subjective world also exists - it really exists. All our creations, the mad scramble of capitalism, the love we have for our partners, our hatred of evil, and of those who encroach on what is ours. And on and on.

We naturally think we are seeing objective reality when we look out of our eyes, but it is impossible to see sub-atomic particles, gravity, in fact anything which really, objectively exists. Only scientists can see it, and actually they can only see models of it, not the thing itself. What we see out of our eyes is also a model, which we've built in our brains, a representation built somehow out of long threads of neurons - that they themselves look at!! No one's knocking model building - it works. Yet it isn't the real thing, and much of what we assume in everyday life is the real thing actually isn't even a representation of it, but exists only in the subjective world. It's very hard to tell the difference.

I've found it exciting to discover that many of the contradictions we traditionally put up with in our ideas and philosophies, many of the causes of debate and conflict in in society and in the world, actually are no problem at all seen in the light of these two, equally true worlds.

So here is my idea of the enlightened buddhist monk: he has decided to return to the city from his cave so he can get a good, well-paying job, enjoy a steak now and then, and really teach his kids a thing or two if they don't start shaping up.