Do you have time to meander with me today?
Time … that’s what it’s always about, isn’t it? As Mary Oliver asks in her lovely poem, “Invitation” … do you have time to linger for just a little while out of your busy and very important day? … It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world. Yes, truly, to be alive in today’s broken world is a serious thing and a gratefully received gift following a month that T.S. Eliot once described as “the cruelest.” My plans for April included an inspiring Light Waves post, sending a poem a week to my subscribers in celebration of National Poetry Month, and in anticipation of turning 87, looking forward (as had become my birthday tradition) to a series of little lunches and quiet gatherings with friends and family. But then, what is it they say about “plans”? Tell them to the Gods and watch them laugh? Indeed!
Not being one for what I call old people’s ‘organ recitals’, I will spare you the details. I will, though, offer this sketch. Please feel free to skip it if you’d rather. On April 2nd, just a week after the replacement of my 10-year-old pacemaker battery, I experienced a nasty trip and fall; a full body slam onto a concrete floor resulting in an ambulance ride (my first in several years) for an ER evaluation to determine whether my old bones and my new battery were still intact (good news there) and whether I had any internal bleeding, especially to my brain (good news there too). The verdict was simply that my body had taken a severe battering and I would likely feel it for a few days or more. Well, yes, sure enough … after a few days of severe pain enhanced by a dry cough and increasing shortness of breath, there came an “exacerbation of chronic CHF (congestive heart failure)” — a diagnosis I’d been quietly living with for a while. That brought me back to the ER and a 7-day hospitalization to wring out the fluid accumulating in my lungs and elsewhere, and to manage the atrial fibrillation that had somehow gotten stirred up. A wonderful Home Health team followed me home and helped me adjust to the idea of a “slow but persistent recovery if I behaved myself”. I became acquainted with the notion of “hospital decompensation” as the reason for the s l o w part. Fun Fact. Some docs actually proclaim that for every day in hospital, the discharged patient gets to spend a week recovering. Hmmnnn. As I like to say … Old Age is Not For Sissies! But still … a privilege to be here.
I have a long-time friend who asked “How will you re-invent yourself this time?” I don’t know yet, Kay, but I’m grateful for my tendency toward optimism. It definitely helps when those laughing gods make their appearance. That being said, it feels realistic to add that this Aging Rascal’s occasional writing may become more “occasional.” So, if you’re not a subscriber to my meandering Light Waves, now might be a good time to sign on. It won’t cost you anything and will get my future posts into your email box every time one goes up. While I know better than to believe you will be interested in everything I suggest you take a look at, I invite you to stick around and see what happens next.
What follows are some of what may have gone unnoticed or were maybe too easily forgotten these past (almost) couple of months. Let’s start with the Artemis II adventure, a light in the midst of much darkness, that I got to watch from my hospital bed. Such an amazing demonstration of what can happen when we remember who we are and what it means to explore possibilities together.
And for a few minutes of nostalgia, how about this?
Not meaning to give you whiplash, BUT … my fellow Substacker, Val D. Phillips really outdid herself last week with a deeply-thoughtful post titled “The Two Paths: Survival and Extinction,” in which she uses images from Artemis II to share her thoughts about the Hopi prophecy spoken of by Thomas Banyacya, Jr, a Hopi messenger whose job while alive (he died in 1999) was to simply share the Hopi Prophecy regarding the end of the 4th World with people who were willing to listen. Val says this: “My husband was one of those people. He was able to hear Mr. Banyacya share that prophecy as he was meant to do so, orally, in person. … I did not hear Mr. Banyacya speak, nor am I Hopi, so it is not my place to share the prophecy. I cannot be entrusted to represent it accurately. But I would like to share what I understood from it, how it guides my life.” If you are interested in their thoughtful reflections and if you will allow yourself time to read what Val (and her husband in the post’s comments section) have to say, I would love to hear your thoughts. Later?
Of History and Hope
by Miller WilliamsWe have memorized America, how it was born and who we have been and where. In ceremonies and silence we say the words, telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know. We mean to be the people we meant to be, to keep on going where we meant to go.
But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how except in the minds of those who will call it Now? The children. The children. And how does our garden grow? With waving hands—oh, rarely in a row— and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.
Who were many people coming together cannot become one people falling apart. Who dreamed for every child an even chance cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not. Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said, and how we have grown, degree by slow degree, believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become— just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.
All this in the hands of children, eyes already set on a land we never can visit—it isn’t there yet— but looking through their eyes, we can see what our long gift to them may come to be. If we can truly remember, they will not forget.
Two hundred and fifty years into the American experiment, it turns out that it takes a King to tell us how to run our Republic.
On Tuesday, His Majesty King Charles III, the great-great-great-great-great grandson of George III, the British monarch who lost the Revolutionary War to a bunch of impertinent colonists enamored of Enlightenment ideas about the natural rights of man, spoke to the U.S. Congress.
With dry wit and a sense of irony that was surely lost on the host he so subtly trolled, Charles extolled the virtues of American-style liberal democracy now under threat by America’s own leader.
What does it say about our current politics that polite British-accented clichés about the benefits of the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and the strengths that flow from “vibrant, diverse, and free societies” could end up sounding downright subversive? The King’s biggest applause line was a tribute to Magna Carta, the thirteenth century compact between an English monarch and his restive nobles, which, Charles noted, has become a pillar of American constitutional jurisprudence, with the Supreme Court citing it at least a hundred and sixty times in its history, not least to establish “the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.”
It was a telling sign of our dysfunctional times that members of Congress from both parties, having been increasingly iced out of decision-making by a President claiming unprecedented executive power for himself, immediately rose for a standing ovation.
There were whoops and cheers and what appeared to be grins of amazement at the King’s cheek. Did it matter that Donald Trump did not get the joke?
(If you have time) read the full article here from the New Yorker.
One of my favorite things about Elderhood (see what I did there?) is the way it mellows us, although hopefully, not so much that we become listless and docile. Some of us are out there with the Raging Grannies standing up and singing out for human rights, healthcare, and enthusiastically welcoming immigrants.
And if you’re not too arthritic you may still find yourself occasionally raising a middle finger … but then again, you may have become more gracious and subtle, like my friend who sent this Mother’s Day card.
While we’re on the subject of mothers, how about this from one of my favorite guys, Robert Arnold?
And how about this about Grandmothers … not raging or even singing, just listening. If you happen to be reading this in the vicinity of Central Park …
“The greatest gift you can give someone is the purity of your attention.”
— Richard Moss
The Grandma Stand in Central Park — Mike Matthews’ grandmother lived alone in Seattle, full of love with nowhere to give it. That memory grew into a lemonade-style stand in New York’s Central Park, where wise, witty grandmas offer life lessons to anxious passersby.
Be The Change: In all your interactions today, focus on giving of your presence.
And one more change of pace before it’s time for my nap. My publisher and webmaster, the author Maya Bairey, lives on a floating home with her husband Peter and a very elderly cat. Never a mother herself, Maya fosters a growing community of crows who are becoming part of the Baireys’ everyday life. Fun Fact: Did you know a gathering of crows is called a “murder”?
Why do I bring this up?
Another of my favorite writer-type people, Thom Hartmann (a fellow Portlander) just posted this in his Wisdom School: What it Means to be Human … “Awe is the Cheapest Medicine We’ve Got” and if you take the time to read his opening paragraphs, you will see the connection. His words might motivate you to read the whole piece. Here you go.
Years ago I lived on a floating home in Portland, and one of the rituals I still remember best was stepping out onto the deck in the early morning, when the light was just starting to find the trees.
The Willamette River would be moving the way rivers always move, indifferent and ancient, and I would stand there holding a mug of coffee, watching the mist lift, feeling something inside me settle that nothing else ever quite settles in the same way.
I didn’t have a name for what was happening. I just knew the days I started that way felt different.
Later in the piece, he goes on to say: Awe, it turns out, is one of the deepest anchorable states available to a human being.
What the research is showing, in other words, is that awe doesn’t just feel good — it changes us.
Can you think of a better way to end our time together today than considering the value of Awe? I can’t. And given that Awe, to me, often pairs with Hope, which sometimes comes packaged in music and poetry, let me say “until next time” with this from Ara Duzian and Emily Dickinson.
Sending Love,
Sulima
Buying me an occasional coffee helps me keep these stories coming … and gives me one less reason to cross my fingers when my Social Security payment is due!
