Glimpsing Death...on a Near Horizon

I feel like I’ve showered in pure water. No residue. No need for drying. Or for clothes.
I will be embraced. Wrapped inside the day and the hour, eventually brought home again.

The day is long. The day revolves around the day, and around me and my thoughts that cannot be contained. And why should they be. The world isn’t a closed vessel. It spills endlessly. We are creatures meant to spill out and to spill in.

Maybe this non-death is a reminder to me of how messy life is, is meant to be, not to be contained in mind or the flesh. Won’t stay inside the lines. Won’t stay neat, polite, presentable.

On the other hand, always ready, prepared or not. 

What can my ear hear, what can my eye see if taken off their leashes? Where will my feet take me if taken off of leashes and out of shoes, away from the concept of leash, away from thinking about shoes, and socks and paved pathways, and unpaved ones, even the conceit of walking.

The animal inside us moves, it sees, it eats what its tastes guide it to, unapologetic to life for ingesting life, for loving the taste so much it licks the lips clean. That natural ecology of longing.

The universe just keeps opening up. Maybe that’s what I was learning , though I wasn’t thinking of learning, of getting anything right, except not to leave anyone out, thinking I’d forgotten how good those stolen moments were, how closely we touched on those uncalendared days that we didn’t know were passing from time and even from memory, but leaving a mark always, as messy humans do, as unblaming hearts and unanalysing minds will do.

That’s what life is, that holding onto life forgets, but that death knows and reminds and reminds and retells until we will learn it.

Don’t worry about the shoes, or even the walking. Just being the animal inside.

Freight Train

There are only a few surviving stories in my family about my mother’s preacher father, in his early, drifter days, before he got religion. It’s said that some things about him didn’t change after the conversion; he was always a stern and serious man, full of self-respect and private thoughts. So that, though he died when I was five or six – the first death of my life – in some ways, the Grandad I knew from Sundays in church and play fighting on the living room rug was the same wandering, silent John Hardwrick of family lore.

I can’t remember now just when he was born, or what America it was he grew up in. Some of that information is scribbled somewhere, in notes from my long conversations with my Aunt Audrey. I’ll never know many of the details of his life, but I’ve always known it was a very different life, inside of a very different world.

What I think of most often when I remember Grandad is the train-hopping. It was his preferred way to travel. What must that have been like, in the 1900’s or the 1910’s?

Aunt Audrey said that Grandad liked to ride on the top side of freight cars, that he would ride standing, and looking backward over the country he was travelling through. He was a casual laborer in those days, though intelligent and with some elementary education. He had a travelling companion, a life-long friend who would eventually settle down with him in Detroit. Wade – let’s call him that, as I don’t remember his name - would find himself periodically abandoned. Ever so often, he’d wake on some morning to find that my grandfather was gone. A week or two later, he’d get a telegram from him, saying he’d found work in such and such a place, and he’d set right out to rejoin him. And a few weeks or a couple of months later, the pattern would repeat itself.

It’s said that my Grandad had his spiritual awakening while train hopping. One day, as he rode along in his customary stance, looking backward from a freighter top, he received a clear message to “Sit Down!” I don’t know if it came as a voice or an un-beckoned inspiration, nor what he thought was happening, but he promptly sat, and the next moment he heard and felt the whoosh of a tunnel as the train passed through. Had he taken time to consider that voice, that message, it would have been his last act in life. As it was, he gave it much consideration later, and it transformed his life.

I’ve always thought it would be a thrill to hop a train, but never seriously expected I would do so. The closest I’ve come to sharing my Grandad’s experience is through the hitch-hiking I did in earlier years. That came about as a convenient expedience rather than a choice for adventure. A trucker picked me up near a bus stop on a country road and carried me into Holly Springs, Mississippi. And for several years thereafter it was my own preferred way to travel. When I peer past the romanticism of Grandad’s image, I image that his train-hopping may have come about in a similar way. I like to think that he and I shared the same feeling of freedom as we travelled, that his miles of rails brought him the same sense of overcoming life’s ordinary limitations that I felt on the open highways. Maybe peering off the top of a freight car was something like staring out at the desert night and hearing a single approaching car when it was yet miles away.

When I was approaching fifty, and concerned that I was entering my last days of any kind of adventuring, a colleague and I fantasized about finally hopping a train. He’d grown up with a Grandad and family lore too. He and I were working with street people and quite a few of our clients had hopped a train or two. It had become a thing among drifting youth of a certain disposition, and we were even schooled on some important do’s and do not’s. We’d been nudging our clients into taking on ambitious, outside the box type goals, to broaden their sense of what was out in the world for them, of what was possible. Why not us?

So we planned a week when we’d head west, and go as far as we could for a week before we’d turn back home by more traditional means. It felt like a perfectly stupid thing to do. And like something that would send us not so gently into the certainty of our waning years. I was newly free out of a marriage and reveling at the vast freedom of being single. My buddy was married and, for better or for worse, two weeks before our scheduled departure, his wife put her foot down. No way in Hell was he going away to hop a train. So instead, we went on a canoe trip on Lake Temagami. It was great.

Heartbeats per Page

I once came upon a theory that the human heart has a certain, more-or-less set number of heartbeats it can deliver. This number acts as an upper limit. Once you use up your allotted beats, that’s it! A belief in this theory can be developed into an argument against exercise, or any other form of exertion or excitement that gets the heart palpitating. Running for the bus, scary movies and roller-coaster rides, even orgasms, would take minutes (and cumulatively, days, months, years) off of your life span. On the other hand, regular exercise that improves conditioning has the effect of lowering one’s resting or low-activity pulse rate.

I don’t know if there’s anything to this, but it’s got me speculating about writing from a different angle. I’ve been writing my entire life. Is there a set limit on the words I have allotted to me. Will I reach a point where the words just stop coming?

My experience of how my writing has shifted over the years lends credibility to the notion of a limit on words over a period of time, if not an entire lifetime. As a student, I wrote a lot for school. But then I stopped being a student. And what happened? I began journaling. In fact, I began my first journal the very month that I dropped out of university. And – though with a fluctuating regularity – I kept journaling for decades. And then, I stopped. And the end of journaling coincides pretty closely with the time I started blogging. Actually, all this suggests not only an upper limit, but also a lower limit on words. It’s never really rung true to me, but maybe there’s something to the notion that writers write because they have to.

As one who aspired (and still do) to make a career of writing, I’ve always lamented that I write so little. But this self-assessment is based largely on valuing some writing and devaluing other writing. I’ve only had six pieces of writing make it into print, in a publication available to the public, bearing my name, for which I received compensation. That’s 2 short stories, one short-short, and three reflective essays on social issues. It hasn’t been much of a career.

But there’s been so much other writing. There are the boxes of writing bits and pieces accumulated over the years of trying to develop my skills, voice, themes. There are the many more boxfuls of material I discarded because I saw no value or promise in them. There are the hundreds, maybe thousands of computer files, some on the machine I’m using at this moment, but many abandoned with discarded, older desktops and laptops and, yes, word processors, and likely never to be opened again.

There has been lots of work-related writing, too: case notes, proposals, minutes, agendas, lesson plans, evaluations and the like. Some of this has been very important on a personal level, both to me and to my clientele, and I’m as proud of some of it as of anything else I’ve produced. This includes advocacy letters, case summaries attempting to place the arc of a client’s journey into perspective, documents weighing in on program and community issues, or responding to a court or police action and its effects.

Then, there’s the truly personal writing. The emails and letters – occasionally, a poem – to loved ones. Sometimes, I’ve written a letter that has all of me in it, and those instances are very much like the times I’ve thrown myself into a piece of fiction or a creative essay. Once, when I was trying very hard to push my writing to a higher/deeper level, and was experiencing serious self-doubt, I dreamed an entire story. I lived it as I slept, and I awoke with it fresh and vivid in my mind, and ready to pour out onto the page. Another time, while composing a letter/poem to a woman I was deeply in love with, I spent a night of drifting in and out of sleep, rising to consciousness ever so often with words and sentences and small edits. These were instances when I felt almost consumed by the act of writing, like I was disappearing into it. And yet, feeling complete, and nourished and expanded by the experience, which is perhaps what death – that final consummation – is all about.

Certainly, this side of Life is finite. There comes an end to heartbeats and to words, whether measurable or not, whether foreseeable or not. But I’m finding something beautiful here as I contemplate it. In the context of an expanding universe, can death and other endings be seen as anything other than transitions? I don’t know that it really matters. I’m not angling for a kind of pseudo-immortality here. Maybe what I am angling for is a deep resonance, connective tissue, something other than a tidy, summing up. After all, we don’t measure a lifetime by the number of heartbeats. And we don’t weigh words in isolation.

Learning to Commute

             It’s a most unexpected discovery: commuting as an organizing principle of life.

               I’ve been at it for six weeks now. Two hours each way, four hours per day, getting from home in Hamilton to work in Toronto, and back again. I can still hardly believe that I agreed to this move, knowing that this commute would be a daily requirement, controlling factor and drain on my life. I worried over it, but since everything else about the move appealed to me, I trusted that I could at least tolerate it, if nothing more. And now I find that commuting has brought a level of order to my life that’s been lacking for a long time.

               It’s embarrassing to write, even shameful, but structure is something I’ve needed, but have avoided throughout my adulthood. My nature is to dodge the limitations of set schedules, time lines and due dates. It’s equal parts stubbornness, a warped sense of independence, and a tendency toward indulgence that hold sway. Consequently, I’m always struggling with the management of my life, always feeling there’s not enough time for all the things that are important to me. And unexpectedly, commuting has carved out a partial solution to all of this, and I find myself embracing it.

               I’ve done my share of commuting in the past and it’s always been a burdensome waste of time. Strap-hanging on buses and trains; jostling through crowds of strangers; dirty seats, no seats; not having the right change for the fare, and worst of all, turning a corner to see my bus pulling away - these are all reasons I’ve hated commuting. Even drive commuting is painful, however much it may seem an attractive alternative to strap-hanging. The relative absence of physical discomfort allows for the full impact of the boredom, the restlessness, the mind-numbing inanity of most radio, as one sits in slow-moving traffic as life ebbs slowly away.

               The main worry I had facing my current commute was having to conform to a schedule. I’m a late night person, and a late riser. I’m not very fond of clocks and alarms and, no, I’m not the most punctual person you’ll meet – and I’ve very much enjoyed the freedom of not having to be. A locked-in schedule does not appeal to me.

               However, from where I live in Hamilton, there are two direct, express trains to Toronto every morning, and the latest leaves the station promptly at 6:46. There are other options, but they all involve even longer commutes. 5:30 feels like an un-Godly time to arise in the morning (it’s practically the middle of the night!), but it makes my life work, so I’m making it work.

               But how does one go from a loose waking time, variable according to my next day’s schedule, how late I was up the night before, and how often I choose to hit my alarm’s snooze button – to an early commute schedule that has me dropping into my desk chair at an hour when I was previously lowering my feet to the cold bedroom floor? With surprising ease, it turns out.

I don’t really like admitting this truth, but it all seems to come down to having options taken from me. If I miss a train, it doesn’t cost me just a few minutes, as missing a bus or a traffic light did previously. It costs me at least half an hour, and that time is lost from the relaxing, evening end of my day. There is now an economy of minutes I must take seriously, to keep my life functioning…so I do.

Yet, I can’t get over how easy it’s been. Nor how much good has come out of it. I’m actually becoming more productive at work, as my days are more organized and predictable. I’m loving the feeling of arriving at and leaving the office with the first wave of colleagues instead of the last – makes me feel that I’m leading rather than lagging. And the added quiet, and the quality of light and air in the mornings, it’s all surprisingly refreshing and enlivening. I’m a bit shocked that I haven’t missed a train yet.

               But the greatest bonus has come in an area I had come to feel some despair about: my writing. The morning of my first commute, I whipped out my laptop the moment I was seated, and I wrote for the first forty-five minutes of the seventy-five minute trip. On the way home, I did the same. In no time at all, it became a habit, one I find myself positively looking forward to. In fact, one of the most satisfying moments of my every working day is when I get seated in the near-empty GO train, at the start of its run. The attendant comes over the speaker and announces the one to five minutes remaining before departure. The sky is still dark as I take off my coat, settle myself and turn on the laptop. By the time I tap in the date at the top of my opening page, the train has begun to move, and its slow, rocking motion nudges me along. Where will I begin today? With some idea newly formed in the night? Revising yesterday’s product? Attacking the novel chapter I’ve been revising for submission to my writing group?

               I’m writing with more regularity and consistency than I have in some years. It’s been six weeks now. Strange to say, the only days I haven’t gotten in at least an hour of writing have fallen on the weekends, when, despite all my intentions, a day can so easily fly by, the period of quiet focus that I imagined, never having come. I know this is nonsense, delusion…yet?

               I’m grateful. I’m re-energized. I’m optimistic again, that I can address my writing goals and see myself moving toward them in real time. The discipline of this commute seems to be spreading to other areas. I’m having a somewhat different feeling and approach to time, to the minutes and hours of the day, the weeks and months of the calendar. Never did I imagine that commuting could be so good.

Fade-In to Tomorrow

The workday is over, the day fades, and the long, busy year passes into memory.

And what happens to it there? Does it merely fade? I know that it changes shape as well, as some things fade from importance, and others grow in significance.

I don’t want to even pretend that I know what this past year has been. It feels like it’s been rich and full of contradictions, and being pulled in different directions. This blog has been caught up in the tidal, back and forth pull of priority. For a time, in the Spring, I reconnected to writing here again, and also to producing my jazz Podcast. Then, months ago, this blog fell away again, and I hardly noticed. But the podcast continues. And there was no plan for any of it, except to try and stay engaged.

If something has become clearer in the year it’s the presence of holes. Holes that will not be obscured by ignoring them. Holes in personal relationships, for one. There are relationships I’ve ignored, undervalued and lost. And there are others that have remained and even grown stronger, despite my inattentions, or maybe because not all friends value and need the same thing.

There’s the hole that has emerged in my narrative, in what I write, think about, in what I use to explain myself, to myself as well as to others. This blog has made this gap in particular very vivid. Because, more and more often my writing stops when I come face to face with some aspect of my life that I’m reluctant to share with the friends and with the strangers that may read my blog. I didn’t realize how wide some of these gaps are. They touch on what I think my “purpose” is, on ideas of commitment and loyalty, and they cover huge swaths of what falls under the categories “sex” and “relationship”. Large gaps, some with answers that are within reach, but will require courage to grasp; some for which the answers are faint, others for which they are frightening; and there are those gaps for which there are no answers at all.

Gratitude and gain make themselves known through all this wandering in wondering. And I realize, with some surprise, that I am grateful not only for those simple answers that rise up and are a comfort in my hand or heart. I am also grateful, maybe even more grateful, for realizing that answers are very often incomplete, superficial, and over-valued. One of the beautiful prizes is to find no answer at all. Maybe to discover that some pressing question was not that at all, but more of an ardent affirmation of what had no fixed, accepted place. Because yes, those mis-placed, unrecognized, dismissed urges and knowings and longings do scream, they do. They make themselves known, and we mistakenly think it’s all about our questions, about what we think we need to know, to figure out, to achieve.

But the hero of this brief essay, if there needs to be one beyond you and me, is the Fool. The first card of the Tarot, the innocent in the world, the ultra present one who thinks not a second about anything that isn’t NOW. The Fool is forever stepping over cliffs and into ditches, stumbling open eyed into various manifestations of the unknown. I will walk into 2016 with my arm interlocked with his, an unknowing grin on my face, ready for whatever comes!

The Best Ever

One of my great joys in life is reading a book and, upon finishing it, feeling, with passion, appreciation, and a little sadness, that it’s the best book I’ve ever read. I’ve experienced this joy many, many times. And NO, there is no contradiction in that.

Because, being the best book I’ve ever read is not a relative thing, and it’s not something that will necessarily endure any tests of time. It’s a valuation of a moment – usually a long moment: a few hours or days, sometimes longer – but a moment all the same.

Of course, I’m being very un-literal here. But if you love books, or paintings, or movies, or music, or dance, or sex (and really, there are so, so many different experiences of life that this feeling relates to) I’m sure you know what I'm writing about.

It’s about being so immersed in an experience – in this case, a work of art – that it becomes the world, blots out everything else, re-defines reality…for that long moment. It’s about a creation over-flowing its boundaries and invading your senses, so that, for a time, you live inside of it, and your life is exploded beyond normal you. You learn to think and feel and to BE a different way.

As you might suppose, I’m currently reading the BEST BOOK EVER. (Yes. I admit, I haven’t even finished it, and I already know it’s the best ever!) It’s The Orenda, by Joseph Boyden. I’m not going to try telling you what it’s about, or anything like that. Only that it’s powerful, beautiful, devastating, and that it is re-creating the world I know and live in. And that you should read it.

And, not so very long ago, I read another BEST BOOK EVER. That was Room, by Elizabeth Donoghue. Again: devastating, powerful, beautiful. (What else can you say when an artist creates an entire new world, out of bits of your own world that you thought you knew, but didn’t really.)

Okay. I know I’m writing nonsense here. It just happens to be true nonsense. When you are brought entirely into a world, even an imagined one, even an ugly and brutal one, as each of these happens to be, it becomes real. And when that reality is so sharp and clear that it resonates with all you know, and takes in and somehow makes clear-er, so much that you didn’t know, and even what you didn’t know that you didn’t know, well, relativity flies out the window, and there is only room left for superlatives.

There are movies I could write this about, and sunsets, and songs, and afternoons with the one I love, and…you get the point. Life is full of the Best Ever. This one just happens to be a book.
 

Nudges

Lately, I've been noticing how much I've been influenced - for the better - by acquaintances or complete strangers. Like most people, I think, I have a sense of my own independence and individuality. It's empowering to carry the notion that I'm my own man, with a mind of my own, walking my own path toward my unique, individual destiny. But of course Life has demonstrated to me how packed full of delusion and mythology those notions are.

I can't deny that just about everything I do is substantially influenced - if not determined outright - by a multitude of factors, including my culture, the media, my genetic inheritance and the conditioning powers of advertising and a formal education. It would be absurd of me to think that I dress myself, that I reach my own conclusions about politics or on social issues, or that I had much of anything to say about the foods I like.

Even so, It's empowering to think that I take all that and arrive at something of my own, independent of all these influences. So how do I explain the many ways in which my course has been drastically shifted by the odd conversation, an offhand suggestion, or an idle comment?

Awhile ago, an acquaintance who has lost a lot of weight, attributed his new physique to the hours he spends on his bicycle. The very next day, I was on the bike that had been chained up in my yard for most of the Spring, collecting cobwebs. And a colleague recently moved me to make an effort to get back to meditating regularly, by mentioning that he'd gotten his practice back on track. And a few months ago, a health professional I was consulting on a totally unrelated matter, suggested that I get hooked up with a writing group, advice I followed up on just a couple of weeks later, to great result.

None of these nudges were odd or unique in any way. In fact, all the actions that resulted were things I was thinking about to some degree, or things I knew I should do, but just hadn't gotten around to. They were actually all pretty obvious. I simply hadn't done them. But in all cases, getting the suggestion from a person I liked and respected made all the difference. And I'm intrigued by that.

It occurs to me that the effect of these nudges was much like the effect a deadline often produces. In both instances, there's a sense of immediacy that comes into the equation, and my will is mobilized in a way it wasn't before. But the nudge has a much more personal dimension to it than the deadline.

But this is something I don't really feel a need to break down and analyze until I understand it. I know that I feel grateful for them. I feel like I've been gifted by these acts, which each seems to involve aspects of sensitivity and of sharing. And as I think back, there've been so many!

There's one more nudge I have to mention. This blog was started as a result of an idle conversation with a stranger while standing in front of a bike shop. When she learned I was a writer, she immediately began to share the benefits she'd received from blogging, and she pressed me to start one myself. And I, who'd been very idly considering looking into it, for months if not years, took the plunge a short while later. And the rewards I've gotten from blogging have been transformative. I'll do a post about them someday.

In the meantime, I'm feeling much less caught up in the mythology of my independence. I'm deeply appreciative of these nudges that come, mostly unexpected and casual. I intend to hold myself open for more.