Reminiscent American Me

I have a lot to say about this, but I will share instead...I remember this film from elementary school in the 70s (1974 and beyond) and it is seared into my brain. It was an early DEI movement, and it is beyond relevant to see where we have come from to where we are now.

I encourage everyone of all ages to watch it in its entirety. Especially younger people who might be challenged to finish but might also see a window into our generation's experience. It shows an era and a culture I grew up in and internalized.

It might be cringy at times, but I think it's beautiful.

This is the America and culture I grew up in.

I want it back.

Free to Be You and Me

https://archive.org/details/free-to-be

Presence

 There’s a permanence to my presence only I see.

Sometimes that’s liberating, but often, it’s lonely.

These days, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Little Losses

Freckles was dead when I woke.

Stuck between the glass of the terrarium and the pottery water dish he drank from for 13 years. He was clearly moving about and just stopped suddenly, completely unaware that last step was indeed his last.

Aidan was only around 7 when he got him. I wonder how old Freckles was. Knowing now how long they live and how slow they grow, probably older than I thought.

Pets were something of a life lesson at the beginning. I always thought, more about teaching to love rather than be loved, to care and be responsible, and to learn grief and loss in a safer way.

I’m sitting in the backyard of the home my family and Freckles only know - the only home that knows us and the only place we all know together, to the exclusion of everyone else. 

There is a rare mild thunderstorm with only a spattering of louder-than-it-really-is rain bouncing off the top of the umbrella I sit beneath, while the shallow low distant rolling rumble of sorry sadness moves west to east above me.

The new and first grave in our backyard rests freshly covered beneath a 25 year old magnolia tree. I suggested that as a place to lay Freckles to rest because it has a story. 

I planted that small tree from a 5 gallon bucket 25 years ago in a place in the planter my wife and I arbitrarily drew with a can of spray paint. The tree never flourished there, but it lived - barely growing. Really, just hanging on. It grew only a few inches taller than it was when we planted it - until about 4 years ago when I moved it to a more open and brighter spot.

Since then, it’s flourished and found a new life, and grown at least 10 feet, and now it is covered in more flowers than it should be able to support after so much time only slowly growing.

Freckles sits beneath that second-chance late bloomer now, while showers splash atop the miniature pottery cave he lived in his whole life, a shrine, but also a new home for Fred and Wilma, the lizards I’ve named in my backyard. Their babies will sleep right above Freckles, hiding in the same rock he did his entire life.

The rain is milder now, and the thunder more distant but still tangible in the chest. 

Some losses are larger than their smallness suggests.

A Ship with One Anchor

A ship should not ride on one anchor,

    nor life on a single hope.

                  Epictetus

The sea twists and turns and churns below you - 

as controlled by you as the rising of the moon 

or the direction of the wind that guides you.

The sea has little mercy and no fear of love.

 

There is little hope for the rising of the sun - 

forever eclipsed by the darkness of your heart, 

it's fallen beyond the horizon for its last time.

No longer lighting your way - its time is done.

 

With the loss of your only hope, the loss of love,

you lower the sail and drift alone on the dark sea.

Then the wind dies, as does your heart, and the sun,

forever hidden from you, cries alone and without hope.

Modern Life's Loss

 In between the empty spaces is where life lives.

Hope

 The hole in your soul is only hallow because it is surrounded by you.

Good Fear

Fear is good for the species - without it, we would never have evolved to where we are now (well, ok, maybe it's a bad thing), or if we had, we would all have lopped our tongues off in a fan, and this would make kissing much less enjoyable.

 

When I was a teen, I spent more than a few minutes from time to time staring into my own eyes in a hair-spray-blurred bathroom mirror, with the door closed, and the shrieking sound of my siblings only barely dulled by the cheap hollow door, trying to burrow into my mind, looking for my “true self”.

 

From time to time, I would shed a tear.

 

I do not know now if they were mostly tears of pain and sorrow, or love and joy, but I know they made me feel…something...they made me feel something when my greatest fear was that I was not able to feel anything at all.

 

On those occasional trips down me-lane, there was a clawed hand of fear on the back of my neck...but you know, as often as I looked inside back then, I don't think that it mattered much.

 

I can control a lot inside my mind, but very little outside of it, and even though I like to dream of myself as the free God of my own universe, the truth is I am at the whim of chance and chaos every moment of the day. And when the shit hits the fan I wanted so desperately to stop with my tongue, I learn that I really don’t control much inside my mind after all.

 

The real answers I want are unattainable...either inside my personal universe or outside in the perceivable one.

 

Plea to Youth

Young people...

I know you might be disappointed and disillusioned, disheartened, doubtful, overwhelmed, and disconnected - and maybe sometimes (or even often) dejected and defeated and deeply discouraged.

I know it must be hard...I think the older don't always see the despair and the doubt your generation burdens.

But please, for all of us, even those that don't know they need it yet, I'm begging you...please...connect and seek to understand the world you are living in. Engage and drive your destinies.

It's your future - not to be handed to you...it will be yours no matter what, so don't be disempowered and disarmed by false realities presented to you in every corner of your life by those that want to deny you the destiny you desire.

You are our greatest hope.

And we need you.

Fossilized Me

While sitting in the backyard alone on a nice Halloween day - alone, quiet, with birds chirping and wind gently blowing, a lizard I’ve named Fred making his daily way across the sun warmed mow strip soon after I finished chasing a fat beautiful squirrel off the walls and eaves of my house with a garden hose, thinking about the yard I planted 24 years ago and remembering the inflatable pool in the backyard with the kids in it - just having a moment reflecting on my connection with the place.

The idea of ripping out the plants I planted so long ago suddenly occurred to me, and I started thinking how I have lived and worked here most of my life, and all the best parts of it - right here in this place over so much time.

And thinking about the nature of the universe and time dilation, the arrow of time, and how reality Is really always only the state of - not matter - but really, energy - the energy that makes matter - it’s really the state of energy in the moment that makes it that place and that time over the arc of existence in this specific dimension.

And thinking how spending time in the emotional gravity well of your existence must have something of a geological impact.

As minerals in water turn to stalactites and stalagmites over eons by leaving trace elements as they drip their very essence in one place, so too, might our presence in this fold of time leave a calcified evidence of our being.

——-

If the soul is anything, it must be the calcified ever growing network of infinitely intertwined tendrils back to the collection of our past presence in time and space.

Memories really are just the worn footpaths of our lives through our specific plane of existence.

If there is an afterlife, it must be forever retreading these same paths, reexperiencing them over and over again, with ever-widening eyes and an always changing, recursively growing understanding of how that specific past made each of those moments that particular now.

Awaking Randomly

I'm just a katamari's collection of all the memes, cliches, and cultural roadkill I've blindly collected, randomly rolling through my particular time and place, violently regurgitating the almost-unprocessed contents of my sour gut right back into the foul fetid world it came from.

I tried shouting into the void once. 

Even though I wasn't looking for an answer, or wishing for an echo...I expected more in response…