Month: January 2019

They were an unassuming pair of socks. Pale grey, factory knitted in the 1970s from thick Vermont wool, they did not receive frequent wearings, remaining folded at the back of the sock drawer until the depths of winter. Annually, however, during one toe-chilling day or another, they would get their chance – until, that is, I noticed a pattern. Invariable, within a day or two of wearing the socks, I would get sick.

Alas, despite their link to my undergraduate days, the socks had to go. 

Common sense might have dictated a course other than wooly destruction. The apparent relationship between sock use and sickness was no doubt silly; the notion that wardrobe can influence wellbeing would be considered by most people irrational, unscientific. Besides, the darned things were still in good shape.

But one year, two decades or so ago, I felt pushed to the limit. Three days of fever, chills, and myalgias finally effaced any bemused fondness I may have harbored for the quixotic relationship between textile and physical state.

A friend posited that responsibility for illness rested with me, not the wool. His logic held that because – once – I had coincidentally become sick after wearing the socks, I had expected to become, and hence indeed did become, sick with each subsequent donning. “It’s not the socks’ fault,” he winked, “it’s you. You’re the one making yourself sick.”

My wife spun a slightly different, and decidedly more supportive, explanation. “Maybe you self-consciously know when you’re about to get sick,” she suggested, “and you wear the socks right before the symptoms set in. To help you get ready.”

Socks as innocent bystanders versus socks as illness signalers: a pair of theories very consistent with western medicine and intellectual tradition. Both offered with the best of intents. Both rejected by my younger self.

“Look,” I argued, “I already recognize the cues from my subconscious about impending illness. When my mood turns negative, I know something physically yucky isn’t far behind. So I respect rather than recriminate those mental signals, and I rest, drink more fluids, even try to replace negative thoughts with positive ones.”

That is what I said. What I wondered was different: they were probably right. So I wore the socks one fine January day when it wasn’t cold and when my outlook was positively sunny. I laughed at my ludicrous indictment of a lifeless textile. I pulled the socks on and went about my day.

Twenty-four hours later I wasn’t laughing. The problem, it seemed, was not in my head. It was in the socks.

There were last minute pleas for soft sentencing. “Maybe the socks are involved,” a colleague whispered, “but it’s not their fault. They may be holding some sort of bad energy but you were the one that gave that energy to them, the first time you got sick. Look, socks are inorganic. They aren’t doing this on purpose. They can’t.” The perspective was shared with an imploring tone. Save the socks.

I considered some possible avenues to footwear redemption: donation, frequent wearing in the spring and summer, even some sort of ceremonial cleaning. In the end, however, I just needed space. I severed the sock-sickness cycle via the county landfill.

The inanimate world can surprise us. We hear stories of hard-to-explain interactions between people and inorganic objects. Crystals and jewelry are often cited. But there are other, equally mysterious experiences with other things and structures, large and small. Many of these interactions are positive. None of them make so-called “sense”, at least not in the way we explain sense scientifically. Still, they are there. We can feel them.

Last week, while straightening up a drawer in my clothes closet, I found a small plastic bag I had placed there multiple months ago, a ziplock container with a few of my father’s personal things. There were tie clips, cuff links, and an old watch. The watch had stopped; it hadn’t been worn since his death. Responding to some sort of instinct, I stretched the flexible band over my left hand, settling the watch face on my wrist. It fit. Next I sorted through the cuff links and tie clips, smiling at my father’s penchant later in life for sartorial style. By chance I glanced back at the watch.

It was running again.

After my heart paused, I realized that the watch must have an automatic winding feature; movement caused it to restart, not some familial force reaching through the space-time continuum. Nonetheless, something important had happened in that continuum when I slipped the watch onto my wrist, something akin to a mini-cosmic reboot of some non-linear measurement based on the transfer of wearership from father to son. There is more to this watch than modern time.

I wear it now, intermittently, not because I need to know the time of day; there are so many other ways of knowing that from the technology surrounding me. I haven’t even bothered to reset the hour and minute. No, I wear the watch because of another sense that it brings me, one that is far more basic, more foundational. It regulates me somehow, physiologically. It also grounds me someotherhow, lifealogically.

Unlike those socks, the watch just feels right.

Low clouds blocked the morning January sun as nests of grey mist hugged the rolling hills, flattening the light, making everything in the high desert seem closer than it really was. It had rained and looked as if it might soon rain again. A handful of cows stood motionless in the landscape.

They don’t look up much, those cows. Most of the time, when there is grass to be eaten, their heads are pointed downward, focused on the business of grazing. On a morning such as this one, on a stretch of Arizona highway with level road, low traffic and long vistas, I could, with soft gaze, appreciate the light and the scenery. And I could wonder if animals that live amidst that scenery ever pause themselves to take in the view.

The first answer is no: cows don’t have higher consciousness and awareness. And yet they experience certain emotions, such as fear; photos of cows being taken to slaughter reveal clear panic in their eyes and faces. Other animals likewise demonstrate emotional responses to a variety of situations. I don’t need to anthropomorphize canine capability to recognize happiness, sorrow, fear, and distress in my dogs. It’s there. It’s real.

Sure, it’s easy to assume that birds singing in a springtime sunrise are not happy but only announcing themselves to each other and potential mates. It’s easy to make such scientifically informed assumptions because birds do not write us letters, emails, or leave any permanent evidence that they like what they feel or are capable of sharing it. But is awareness required for participation in beauty?

I remember the first time I consciously experienced silence, complete and absolute quiet. I was hiking along a plateau trail overlooking the Colorado River. Because my feet were tired inside a heavy pair of old leather boots, I paused to rest atop a rock outcropping. The sun warmed my brow. I closed my eyes. Suddenly, I fell into, and felt, nothing. I thought nothing. I heard nothing. There wasn’t even a buzz of emptiness in my inner ear. There was simply no thing. I was not there. If I didn’t open my eyes, or move, or even breathe, I had no evidence that I existed apart from what existed around me. I wasn’t asleep but instead awake in a way that I’d never previously felt. The realization jolted me out of the unifying moment. My eyes flew open to confirm I was really there, I was still really me, still in but apart from where I was.

My consciousness got in the way of my being.

Cartoons such as Larson’s Farside have depicted the inner life of cows and other animals. We laugh at their insights and perspective. We don’t really believe it though, that inner life. We don’t really think that cows know they are part of something wondrous, something sometimes magical. We understand that a cow knows nothing of the grandeur it inhabits, even when no one is watching.

And so we can miss the point, and the experience, of the majestic. Because our access to splendor is not necessarily through the avenues of our minds. In fact, our taste of the whole may rely on the opposite of mental awareness and acknowledgement. For grandeur may instead be enfolded within the absence of differentiation, delicately wrapped – paradoxically and parenthetically – within the boundary-free space that knows not me and you, this and that, here and there, above and below, reflection and witness. Grandeur may mysteriously rest in the enjoyment of knowing nothing of knowing.

A cow grazes on a plain beneath a cloudy sky. It does not need a view. It is a view.

The morning was damp and misty. October, 1988. A friend and I had driven through dawn to a place in northeastern Pennsylvania with a stream, a floor of matted leaves, and a soft morning of muted color. We stood on a small wooden bridge that arced over murmuring water.

“There are three things you need to know about fish,” C whispered. He had been quiet as we had walked from the car to the bridge. I was wearing some oversized waders bought the evening before at a Philadelphia Army-Navy store. C was wearing some gear that looked as if he wore it casually around his apartment.

He softly took a breath. “They like to eat, they like to sleep, and they don’t like to expend a lot of energy doin’ the first two.” My friend exhaled, as if he had reverently unburdened himself of a fundamental philosophy that had been solemnly passed down to him from prior generations. He gazed at the gently swirling stream. “Good luck,” he said. Then he moved off without a sound and, it seemed, without his shadow.

I eventually trudged off as well – just not where C had gone. My previous fishing experience had been in a dirty creek that arose from or drained to (it wasn’t clear to me as a boy) the rivers running around and past Philadelphia. As kids, we caught something we called sunnies, tiny fish that would rise to the surface if you dangled some corn on a hook into the water. A rod and reel were not necessary. Just some fishing line, a hook on the end of the line, and a single piece of corn on the hook. We could flip the sunnies onto the bank just when they opened their mouths to take the corn. We tried to do it without the fish getting the hook caught in its mouth.

This was different. This was careful, even meditative. This was totally foreign.

In his defense, C probably offered to teach me how to create an arc with the line and fly on the rod he had loaned me for the day. He may have even given me a brief lesson on land at some point or perhaps described the technique of fly fishing during our morning drive. I don’t recall exactly what I understood about fly fishing and it honestly doesn’t matter: I wasn’t there to catch any fish. Because when I saw C move like a cat through the marshy weeds, creeping almost motionless to the stream’s bank and then into the shallow water in one of its bends, I realized that I was out of my depth. So I turned and shuffled downstream, in the other direction, letting C have a chance to interact with any gilled life forms before they were so unfortunate to encounter me. I breathed in the morning air, I valiantly kept myself from tripping over the oversized waders (they were the last pair on the shelf at the Army-Navy store and were two sizes too big), and I slid into some water where I could see the stream bottom.

And I did my own fly fishin’.

A good fly fisherman can move a fly across and through a current of air that mimics an insect being buffeted by wind and landing ‘just so’ on a quiet circle of water. It is a thing of beauty. The fisherman is one with rod, line, and fly. A fish doesn’t have a chance.

A creek fisherman like myself should not try to emulate such majesty, especially on a morning as the one we were enjoying. A creek fisherman should not demean the beauty of the day and its moments by getting fly and line tangled in weeds, trees, and his own clothing. He should – and I did – find himself a spot of peace and wonder in a stream, coil up some line in one hand, and gently let the line drift from a spot not too far near his side to a place as far away as the coiled line wants and is able to go. A creek fisherman should not care that the fish aren’t fooled. He should not try to catch anything that he knows nothing about.

And I didn’t. The fish and I kept to ourselves. At least, that is, until I had watched the light change through a range of tone and hue. And also until I had pensively consumed a sandwich, beverage, and snack, and had listened through a small headset to some favorite guitar music on my recently purchased Walkman.

I caught nothing, cared about nothing, until I was as still and yet as fluid as the life forms that surrounded me.

The tug on my line was subtle; it took a few minutes for me to realize that it wasn’t the water or a rock or my imagination that was pulling at the rod that I forgot was connected to the fly somewhere downstream. It was a trout. When I reeled the fellow in, walking toward him as I went, I saw that the fish wasn’t caught on the fly and hook but was instead wrapped up inside a few circles of the line. He wasn’t hooked. He was lassoed. And his mouth was gulping at the fly just out of its reach.

The moment was serene and surreal. It was also sacred, in an unexpected way. The sun, which had crept high in the sky, bounced its autumnal wisdom across the backs of the rocks in the gurgling rapid, the ripples of the undulating water, and the scales of my lassoed fish. Carefully, I unwound the young being from its entrapment. I almost wanted to send him away with the fly he couldn’t get, as a souvenir, as evidence of the story he might later tell his own kind. I also sort of wanted to show C that, hey look!, somehow I had caught a fish. But I knew that wasn’t right, and it wasn’t correct.

The fish had caught me.

The startled trout and I stared at each for a moment that now feels more like three decades. Both of us felt a bit foolish. Neither of us winked. Then I opened my hands and we went our separate ways.

I never told C that I learned another thing that morning about what fish like. Yes, they like to eat and sleep, and yes, they don’t want to expend a lot of energy when eating and sleeping. But C, I know now that fish also like to do something else, a fourth thing that, like the first three, isn’t so different from us and the rest of human kind. They like the freedom to keep swimming.

It is magical how life catches and releases us.

One of my delights as a father of young children was driving my daughters to school and various activities. Sometimes there was silence. More typically, there was banter and commentary. It was never dull.

Once, when one of the girls was only seven or eight, she took issue with me on the topic of perfection. “It’s not good to want to be perfect,” she announced from the back seat. Aspiring to be the dutiful parent, I tried to explore the difference between the goal of perfection versus its achievement. My young daughter would have none of it. “No one can be perfect, Dad,” she stated firmly. “It’s not good to try.”

My daughter’s declaration stuck with me. She was not a child who was lazy, indifferent, or unengaged. At seven, this girl participated in things. She had strong opinions. So from whence did this surprising conviction arise? Was she indirectly telling me, in the only way that a young child could, that my expectations of other people – of her, or perhaps even of myself – were too high?

We didn’t discuss the topic further, at the time or since. But the comment stayed with me, buried somewhere inside my memories, recently resurfacing as something of substance I’ve encountered in my life, a lesson unrealized.

The little whippersnapper was right.

I’ve lived my life as a pretty goal-oriented person. Both my upbringing and personality shaped a strong sense of potential for the world and specifically of my capability to achieve my own place in it. You can accomplish anything, if you set your mind to it. Over decades, I’ve repeated that mantra often, leaning on it when a seemingly insurmountable challenge lay before me as well as when I needed an excuse to either not engage in something or in fact to fail. I could do something, if I really wanted to. Some things some times were just not important. They were simply not goals.

And so I’ve trudged through almost 60 years of life, accomplishing some goals, failing at others, and deciding not to try to succeed at still more. I’ve learned to see much of what I do as success or failure from the perspective of task and objective. This trait has served me well – at least in some ways. It has, however, left me unfulfilled in others.

Goals are useful. They motivate us, get us out of bed in the morning, lead us into and through challenging circumstances and situations. Goals bring certain successes, especially in careers and vocations. And yet they are limited. Of greater importance, as we age, it becomes clear than they are limiting.

Have I had a goal to be perfect? ‘Definitely not’ is my first answer. ‘I don’t think so’ is the honest next. Because, in all truth, I have kept wanting to improve myself, like some rough-edged sculpture, smoothing corners, burnishing, polishing my traits and strengths in search of still unrevealed or soon-to-be glistening ability. There are diamonds in there, I know it. I just need to extract them from the mess of discardable rubble.

But is the drab rubble just as much me as the sparking gems I’d prefer that you see? Is self-discovery less excavation, less looking within, and more a process of revelation, more a learning to release and reach out?

We aren’t perfect, none of us. Still, we sense the perfect, in an odd and wondrous way, through our imperfections. We also experience the majestic – something related to the perfect – when we embody the essence of acceptance, when we see ourselves as part of the other, when we focus less on personal achievement and more on interpersonal awareness.

I do, therefore I become. That is the voice of tomorrow. Of separation. Of striving.

I am, therefore I can be. That is the voice of today. Of communion. Of being.

Maybe that was the message I heard from the back seat of the car so many years ago. My 7 year-old was expressing the very heart of being.