Month: February 2020

Sometimes at dusk, when the high desert sky is scrubbed clean, heaven and earth become one. The process is both stark and enchanting. As the sun sets in the west, rolling hills and flat-topped mountains lose their identity, morphing from mounds of scrub, tree, and rock into graphical plot lines of time, the areas under their curves no more than inky summations of what was, is, and may still be. Above these shadows, night, starless, polished, and glossy, pulses with infinite possibility. Gradually, if observation cedes to emptiness, the two perspectives merge. The earth extends a slumbering embrace. The sky envelops the terrestrial outreach. Night ascends. Yong wraps itself inside yin. Opposites end.

We live in a world of contrast, of comparison. Differences help us distinguish. Vivid variations enable values to be learned, exercised, and shaped. We see things because of shape, light, and color. We touch and taste the smooth and sharp edges of change. We hear modulation. We smell heterogeneity.

We breathe. First in. Then out. Or out. Followed by in. We assume that out follows in but there is no space for in if out does not happen as well.

Try something. Take a breath in. Not a deep one. Just a small or medium inhalation. What should come next? Should you complete the process of inhaling? Or should you exhale before the next expansion? Does it matter? When you consciously think about that place, the pivot between in and out, does that awareness interfere with the spontaneity of the experience?

There is good in all of us. There is also good’s antithesis. It helps me to recognize each, to know their oppositional existence, to avoid the easy excuses when my thoughts, actions, or spirit are not aligned with the positive, when what I do is not reflective of who I aim or am meant to be. It also challenges me. And unnerves and frightens me. My shortcomings motivate me to be better but they can also encourage me to judge the faults and failings of others. I feel better when I can clearly detect right and wrong. I can tolerate the gravitational pull of physical mass when I am able to feel lifted by the releasing energy of aspirational spirit. This can make me look out, to gaze “there”. Which can cause me to look away from in, from being with “here”. Day can turn proud and boastful. Night can assume a belittled and disparaged place in my life.

But day cannot exist without night. And night cannot play its role without day. My eyes cannot always be open. My sleep cannot refresh unless I reawaken to a new cycle of light.

Breathless release at the border of contrast can help transcend the paradox of being. It can feel freeing to vibrate, even temporarily, at the boundary of understanding and renewal.

When I was teenager, I wanted to be a comedic actor. The desire had not been lifelong; it came upon me, semi-abruptly, in the latter part of high school. I don’t recall if there was a precise moment or motivation for the ambition. I just remember that the longing to inhabit character was suddenly there, a gnawing sensation in my gut, a hole that needed to be filled.

My family didn’t have a frame of reference for this appetite: no one we knew did anything on stage or TV. So it wasn’t clear what I should do with the interest. I was a good student. I played sports – with passable but not excellent results. And I wasn’t even very funny. I loved slapstick humor, sure, cracked up at dumb jokes, and was drawn to watch Laurel and Hardy or Abbot and Costello movies. But I don’t think anyone in my neighborhood would have called me funny. I had spent grade school getting into fights. I was competitive about grades. I was way too serious.

Still, somewhere inside me lurked an inexplicable appetite to act, to be absurd. I took a summer acting class. And, in my senior year of high school, I quit the basketball team to be in the school play. We were doing Shakespeare. Midsummer’s Night Dream. I was Puck.

I was an awful Puck – in a pretty awful staging of the play. I was also a foreigner for the drama folks, the academically intense pseudo-jock interloper who unexpectedly had discovered theatre. My interests were better suited for stand-up comedy than for Shakespeare. Yet there I was, a bit player in a small series of sketches the name of which I cannot recall. And the inhabitant of a key role in a storied piece of Shakespearean literature. My friends sort of shrugged. The basketball team went on to the state playoffs. My parents smiled.

But – consistently during the performances – the audience burst into laughter. Surprisingly, the laughs, were not at my interpretation of Puck (which, to my recollection, could at best be called bizarre). They came in response to a single line that I had in the brief series of sketches. It wasn’t a line I thought was supposed to be funny. And yet, one show after another, it was.

Our lives take unexpected twists and turns. Our interests, opportunities, and identities can sometimes seem alien or inexplicable. Often, we bumble along. We yearn to be part of something bigger than a dreary stream of days of mundane being. We can even burn to do something, to be somebody, that others notice, that anyone notices. To be different. To play a role.

We can be filled with a hunger to have purpose.

Ah, but the world does not offer us a script, at least conspicuously. As adolescents, there isn’t a storyline and character description handed to us. As adults, there can seem to be an absence of storyline, or perhaps a futility to role and responsibility. What is my part? Will I ever learn my lines? Does it matter if people don’t laugh, cry, or smile in response to my performance?

“The universe is universing again,” a friend likes to say. We laugh at the expression – with an unspoken just maybe awareness. Sometimes the world does indeed seem to move us about. Sometimes I find myself in life scenes and scenarios that seem to follow a plot. The experience makes me want to stop, to turn and ask for direction. Except there aren’t any words written on cue cards. There isn’t anyone positioned offstage to whisper me my next line. And there isn’t an audience watching knowingly, a gallery whose response I can predict based on what their predecessors did yesterday. There is only now. Here. There is only my interpretation. Today.

I would have done better in high school to take an improv class. Looking back, I can see that the young man who wanted to make people laugh was a shy, uncertain, hopeful kid who needed to learn confidence, skills for interacting with others, and the ability to adapt. He didn’t really want a script. He wanted reassurance in the importance of creativity, experience in the art of spontaneity. He wanted to find safety through the shared embrace of the unknown. He yearned to laugh, yes – but with others.

That kid is still trying to fill the intermittently achy emptiness of the unknown. He feeds it with a variety of foods. Many are nourishing. But one of the best sources of sustenance remains the joy of the smile, the silly joke, the belly laugh. And the wonder of doing so with someone else.

Hunger is meant to be shared.

There is a stretch of highway just outside of my town that I frequently use, to bypass the busier city streets. Two miles of pressed asphalt, it is only the space between two exits on a busy interstate. Using it shortens the commute home. But the road is aging; the shortcut can be a bumpy ride. And so, after scores of trips, I’ve learned where the bumps, craters, and mini-crevasses lie so that gently, yet with purpose, I weave my wheels first right, then left, then in alternating style as I try to avoid the road’s assaults on rim and rubber while remaining in the same lane. To someone traveling behind me, I must sometimes seem to be impaired. Perhaps only when they bang into a hole that I’ve try to avoid do they understand what it is I am up to.

Occasionally I make it through those two miles of highway unscathed. That gets a smug smile or relieved sigh. More typically though, despite my best efforts, one of the dreaded momentum jarrers jabs me. The impact reverberates across frame of both automobile and occupant. It sharpens my focus on the stretch of pavement ahead.

They are out there, the perturbations and imperfections in life’s surfaces, the divots and indecencies surprising our daily activities. The potholes.

It is impressive how quickly one can open up. Seemingly without warning, a piece of the world that was smooth yesterday becomes a disrupter today. The change can be sudden. It can cause harm. It can feel unfair.

I don’t know about you but I still can get offended when one of life’s potholes presents itself. What did I do to deserve that? I was just moving along calmly, minding my own business, maybe even enjoying a moment or two of calm and peace. Then wham. Reality wrecks the serenity. Tranquity cedes the stage to strife.

The material world ages, sure. And our lives do not come with guarantees. But it would be nice to know what we can depend on. It would seem just to be able to rely on the same rules of the road from one day to the next.

We know this cannot be so. We understand that we shouldn’t expect tomorrow to honor our efforts from today. We’ve heard that attachment can lead to suffering.

Still, we expect. We traverse the diurnal patchwork of repaired behaviors and pathways and we adapt. We attach. We suffer.

I am learning to integrate some symbols of release into my circadian rituals and rhythms. It can be something visual: a small Buddha, a Catholic prayer card, a picture of my children when they were young, a single word on a piece of paper. It can also be a pattern: saying the words ‘thank you’ when my feet touch the floor each morning, taking a deep breath before I eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, touching a piece of sculpture or a crystal each time I pass. The point of the exercise is not to have new routine but to have less. It is to remind me to pause, to smile, to wake up. To be.

Life will always have potholes. Some of them are and will be more serious than others. It is nice when, because of either my navigation skills or the simple flow of the universe, I am able to avoid them. It is best, however, when I am prepared to bounce through and out of them, without taking the experience too personally. Smooth passage now is no assurance of a bump-free future. And a moment-pounding present is not a guarantee of a discord-filled tomorrow. I know the distinction, intellectually. I still need plenty of cues and traffic signs, emotionally and spiritually.

So if you see me weaving down my daily life commute, careful that you don’t necessarily follow the same path: my skills are under continuous development. Sadly, I still head straight into holes that yesterday I knew were there. Besides, I may following someone else whose courage and aplomb I admire, someone else who I’m hoping has figured out the best route to safety and smooth sailing.

Someone like you.

The envelope is postmarked September 21, 1961. 6:30pm. Upper Darby, PA. Inside is a letter from a twenty-six year-old man to his younger brother, a young man stationed at Fort Sam Houston in Texas for military basic training. The letter begins with:

Things have happened! 1. I got a driver’s license. 2. Bought a car. 3. Can get in and out of car alone. 4. I start St. Joe’s night school Monday. All of a sudden your lazy brother has regained some of his drive and become a dynamo.

The writer was my father. At the time he wrote his brother, it was almost three years since he had been paralyzed by the polio virus.

The handwriting is scratchy, with blurred and abbreviated words that are sometimes difficult to make out. I am able to read it probably because I learned as a young boy how my dad formed certain letters on the page.

He was proud of himself, despite his matter-of-fact tone. The two page communication shares details of his purchase of hand controls, how he borrowed a car to learn how to use them, taking and passing the driver’s test, and then purchasing a two-door Valiant.

I was a little upset about going so far into debt so that as soon as we got the car home (before I paid any money) I told Carol that if I couldn’t get in by myself – the hell with it.

With help from my mom, he describes figuring it out, first getting in by himself, then getting out by himself (or, as he wrote, reversing the procedure). He concludes his description of relearning to drive with Now all the remains is for me to get some adaptations made to the car so that I can get the chair in and out by myself – then I will be free.

“Free.” In November of 1958, my father was twenty-three and fresh out of military service. He and my mom had a two year-old son (my brother) and barely a dollar to their name. Dad had gotten a job selling insurance for New England Life. Mom was pregnant with me. There was a general plan for more education – for Dad, as a first generation college student. Then a stranger sneezed in his face when he was waiting to use a pay phone. A few days later, a bad flu followed. Paralysis. Eight months in acute and rehabilitative hospitals. And my birth in June of 1959.

This letter is written over two years later. I know from family stories that the intervening time between my birth and Dad’s declaration in a streaky fountain pen of regaining his drive were not easy. They involved my aunts and uncles helping my mom help (i.e. lift) Dad up and down steps, into and out of cars. Wheelchairs that weighed almost as much as he did. Relearning how to do simple things such as using silverware, writing, and, yes, driving. An understanding company that kept my father’s position available for him – for when he was finally able to navigate his way from my parents’ second story apartment to the company third floor office across town.

And being “free”.

I received this letter just two weeks ago. My aunt and uncle are moving from their house and, in the process of sorting through decades of memorabilia, my aunt discovered the letter that my uncle had kept from so long ago. Mom and Dad have passed; other than my aunt and uncle, there are very few people alive who were with my parents in the year that the letter was written. I have only Dad’s written words in this letter, a few old photos, and my own memories of stories he and my mom occasionally told us when we asked about their lives from that time. Mom didn’t especially enjoy reliving those years through remembrances; she would mumble something about living in the present. Dad would get a hazy look on his brow. His eyes conveyed what I understood without words. Once he told me: “We learned how to make it work. That was the only thing to do.”

Now this letter. The second page reads like a simple recounting of mundane facts. He received a full scholarship and enrolled in night school, with a major in accounting. The insurance company was moving their offices into the city – so things should start to shape up. Then, informed by his own basic training experience in the Southwest, Dad told my uncle about a great smorgasbord in San Antonio. Two dollars for all you can eat. He closed the letter with a note to my uncle to take care of yourself and enjoy the sun (Hurricane Ethel is supposed to hit here tomorrow).

We all encounter our moments in life, circumstances that challenge us, situations that humble and sometimes bring us, quite literally, to our knees. Some of us have more to deal with than others: the birth lottery can be cruel; bad things happen to good people; tragedy traumatizes the innocent. Explanations for the seemingly random and fickle nature of fate are few. For me, this found letter from 1961 offers a simple reminder that, when difficulty befalls, the way forward is in front.

Just drive. You never know where life’s journey will lead.