Grey this late January Midwestern day grows steadily colder. Curving streets reflect back black and grimy. Patchy, dirty snow remains mounded edging suburban driveways. What had been a solid ice pack on the macadam is now small blotches wet from salt and friction.
Most living here don’t hate January’s doldrums. Days of no sun and no warmth are the price paid for summer evenings. In January it is hard to do but people do remember July days when the sun lingers late, not completely gone until 10 PM.
January is acceptance, is being here and being now, is knowing it is what it is. January is transitory.
Tall deep green pines line the streets in many a northern town. In fresh snow, these living spires are the image of the ideal holiday card, cards we wish we had sent. When the snow is dirty and stained, we can turn our eyes to long extended boughs feeling beauty in nature’s long game.
Often stiff winds drag across Lake Michigan pulling snow east and down. As likely as not these come howling at night. Thankfully the gales are usually spent of most of their moisture by the time they get here. ‘Tis an amazing thing to watch those tall pines bend and wave against a moonlit sky as the wind rages.
Walking virtually empty streets the plague is the furthest thing from my mind. Wearing a hoodie, a poofy insulated coat liner (came from an old destroyed coat), and a 2/3rds length leather shell I barely am bothered by the cold. My exposed flesh feels it and so this outwear mishmash is topped off with a scarf, a beret and I wear fur lined leather gloves. I know I am an odd sight but I don’t care.
Walking empty streets, I can jettison the ugly that pervades all the streams of information flowing in my direction. My eyes focus on the pines. My eyes focus on the snow shovels set against side doors. As I lift my feet moving forward again and again my only thought is to avoid the next patch of ice. I laugh a little laugh at the swath of ice that exists only because the trunk of a tree shades that part of the walk when the sun, when it makes a rare January appearance, comes. A walk on a cold winter day in January is as mind clearing as an hour on a meditation mat.
The greatest gift we give each other is that we become a mirror of goodness. When we see the goodness in others, we call it forward.
Tara Brach
Sunday has arrived in mid-Michigan. The air is warmer than yesterday; temperatures will reach 30F. Clear blue stretches from one horizon to the other. Yeah it is good news today will be 12-15 degrees warmer than yesterday.
Slept in today rolling out of the sack at about 9 AM. Went downstairs and cleaned up the kitchen. Dishes and pan were in the sink from last night’s meal. I said I would clean them before bed but it didn’t happen, blame it on lazy husband syndrome.
Had convinced my wife to make an Iranian dish, an egg drop lentil soup. “Twas tasty but not tasty enough. The broth needed something to brighten the flavor, a few drops of fresh lemon helped but nevertheless fell short. Still the soup was filling and warm on a cold winter day. My wife is a wonderful and creative cook.
Yesterday was a day of loss. First thing in the morning ran down to metro Detroit for a memorial service for the beloved wife of one of my best mates. With Covid-19 running rampant I wasn’t going to stay for the full service but I did have to let him know how important he was to me and how I wished I could do something to help with his pain. We talked for just a few minutes and we hugged. He truly loved her and she him.
After I cleaned up downstairs today, I made the coffee-one pot regular, one pot decaf. I then put on the soft jazz that is my tradition/ritual for Sunday mornings and made some waffles. Chocolate chip waffles with raspberries can drive the sad and dour malaise out from my soul most any day.
In a few minutes I will set out for a forty-minute walk. I will put some jam band music on my headphones and walk most of my normal summer route. Passing each yard on my circuit I will again read the front yards signs. Messages like, “Black Lives Matter”, “Love is Love”, and “Hate Has No Home Here”, dot the yards. Each yard I pass has a beautiful garden simply waiting for a spate of warm days to explode in blooms of bright colors. Doing this walk for years now I have come to appreciate the rhythms of the seasons as each yard experiences them.
The quote that opens this post came to me form a Buddhist publication this morning. Does it really matter if it is Buddhist or behaviorist or Baptist? If we acknowledge the good acts, the good traits in others, can it do anything but reinforce to those people that the good they are showing deserves to be seen more? Return goodness for goodness, kindness for kindness. Maybe this week I will be able to put this into my daily regimen.
Have a good Sunday. Say your prayers or burn your sage. But above all be kind.
At this juncture I have been up for just shy of five hours. Breakfast was oatmeal with raspberries. Had some decaf with cream. Exciting gourmet stuff, isn’t it?
Today has some bright spots, the temperature is hovering near 34 degrees. Compared with the last several days it is positively balmy. I have taken the opportunity to get one of my three walks of the day in. Soon as this is posted I will set out on walk number two. Trust me I got my walks in yesterday but it was soooo damn freaking cold. My brain told me not to go out but there was that voice that said, “You have got to go and do it.” I listened to the voice. In the winter I try to walk 20 minutes three times a day. Still, the knees are old and the cold temperatures make them complain.
As I walked out this morning, I saw a condensation trail of a jet travelling from west to east. Almost reflexively I began humming No Expectations. If I had my hearing aids in, I would have brought the Stone’s song up on Apple Music and sang along far off key as is my way. Dogs flee when they see me shambling down the street singing along to dinosaur tunes.
Seeing that white slash across the brightening sky I was reminded that I have no wish to be here. Right here, right now I am a prisoner to a virus. At this moment in time, I am incarcerated in my home by those whose assert individual rights without accepting communal responsibility. Ugh. I so want to be back in Portugal struggling with the language, eating mussels in wine and garlic broth and wearing a tee shirt and shorts all the way up to November 1st.
Monday was two years since I retired. Truth be told I don’t miss work. What I miss is the human contact. I like talking to people and my job was the perfect venue to talk to a great number of different people. Not all of them we sane or healthy but almost to a person they were freaking interesting. The BSC among them just amazed me.
My life is one of ritual. From brewing the coffee in the morning to flipping the light switches off when I go to bed there are set and defined patterns. While I remain here in the US the ritual is none too spectacular. Today’s big activity will be categorizing last year’s uncategorized entries in Quicken. I heard the IRS’s warning about the kafuffle this tax season will be. Thus, I have got to get those taxes done early.
Soon I plan to be sitting in the garden by the aqueduct in the Amoreiras area of Lisboa having an espresso and eating a pastry. Life is short. Simple pleasures should be embraced.
Just question arising from a random thought. Did you pick up your vocabulary from talking or reading? Me, it was mostly reading. Never having heard some of the big words I read spoken aloud had it pitfalls. With words that began with p, which I now know is silent, when I said the word with my voice, I found a tortured way to work the p into what I spoke aloud. Pneumonia as I pronounced it became pa-known-ya.
I was reminded of this by a word in the title, anxiety. It was in college when I first said the word aloud. Ah-nex-ity rolled off my tongue in the middle of a small group discussion of an assigned reading. To no one’s surprise I got laughed out of the room. Right then I realized I possessed in my vocabulary an entire wealth of words I had defined by context having read them again and again but which I had never pronounced verbally. The course instructor comforted me by saying it was not uncommon. Oh well, just an aside. On to other things.
Two years ago, on this date January 10th I retired. Within a month of leaving my job I was sleeping through the night. ‘Twas a joy to wake up without an alarm clock. ‘Twas a greater joy that when I hit the pillow, I would sink into a deep dark and virtually dreamless sleep.
For decades I had trouble getting to sleep. Most night I would find myself at 1:30 AM stretched out flat looking up at the ceiling thinking things like, if I can write that up by my 10 AM hearing tomorrow I can give my attention to that much longer order I need to write. Often my mind was working out the chess moves to navigate the social intricacies at work. What did my boss really mean with that comment? Etc. Modern life, it is riddled with pitfalls and pitfalls cause anxiety.
Not working washed away so much of my anxiety. Through the initial waves of the pandemic, I still slept well. Every day I was walking long distances and I was stimulating my mind with books and articles from papers and magazines. I did things like painting the living room, those coats of paint were something that was long overdue. I planned, plotted and eventually executed the oft times delayed escape to Portugal. For the better part of 22 months, I slept well.
Since early December the anxiety and troubled dreams have returned. Omicron with its high positivity rate and the wide array of people who I personally know that have tested positive are bothering me. Worries about inflation and my inability to cross international borders bother me also. My age is starting to worry me. Yeah, the whole road doesn’t go on forever thing is playing on my mind. Concomitantly the fear that the money won’t last bubbles up. I think I am okay but…. Well, easy comforting sleep has fled from me.
When Omicron passes, I will probably feel better. At least I hope so. But for now, I am staring wide awake at 1:30 in the morning. My eyes are focused on either the ceiling or my iPad as I try to slow the hobgoblins in my mind down. And the dreams. In the past month I have dreamed about missing trains and begging for help where nobody spoke my language. I dreamed the streets outside my home had turned into lasagna. Cars were getting stuck in cheesy, gooey, baked wonderfulness sinking up to their door handles in tomato sauce and stringy cheese. Last night my middle of the night subconscious reveries were all over the place. One dream was a teen action adventure akin to Risky Business. In another I had been hired for a government job as a technical assistant. Turns out when I reported for work, I was required to hit the button that administered lethal injections to prisoners. I was standing in the room with the button in my hand screaming, “I didn’t sign up for this!!!” when I awoke.
I will be wearing an N-95 mask for the foreseeable future. I will be avoiding contact with people returning to having my groceries delivered to the trunk of my car. I will be watching church on YouTube and texting in my offering. Hopefully the current Covid wave will crest and fall leaving us alive on the shore. Hopefully less fitful sleep will return for me. Do I blame my own damaged psyche or the pandemic for my anxiety and troubled dreams? Yes.
When trying to think of something to write about today my first thought was to give a listing of recent programs that I have found above par. What crossed my mind was the notion that with so many of life’s usual distractions foreclosed to us we must all be either reading, exercising on home equipment or watching television. Television being so easy I am sure more people are enjoying an hour of HBO Max than a 40-minute walk in 20-degree weather.
Watching television to me is like eating popcorn, it is fluffy, lacking in material substance, and disappears almost instantly upon ingestion. As a result, the things I have watched over the past year plus have vanished from my upper levels of consciousness. In order to give myself a cheat sheet to work from I pulled up my watch histories from Netflix and Amazon Prime. Time travel, witches and wizards and a smattering of police procedurals came up as the most frequently occurring programming
I could come up with an easy rationale for the last item on the list, my watching police procedurals. The world is a sprawling mess on a good day. In the middle of a pandemic life is akin to spin art. You remember spin art, right? It was a boardwalk/carnival attraction where you applied acrylic paint to a high gloss paper fastened to the agitator of an old washing machine. When the spin cycle setting was hit the paint spread outward and viola-spin art. Our lives are all being thrown out of whack by the spinning forces of a virus and of political unrest. We are nervous. We are ill at ease. We need comfort. We need assurance.
‘Scuse the digression. Crime dramas have a simple formula. A heinous act occurs. Logicians (the police or private detectives) apply their brains to the traces of evidence at the scene of the crime. Hypotheses are tested and eventually the wrongdoer is revealed. Upon discovery the perpetrator is usually punished, sometimes in a grisly and ironic matter. Programs like Law and Order, New Tricks (British-Amazon Prime), Cardinal (Hulu) or Bordertown (Finnish-Netflix) are clear examples of the genre.
We like these programs because they reinforce the not really accurate notion that life progresses logically and good wins out over bad more times than not. Plus, smart good-looking people in tailored clothing sorting out conundrums are engaging images. Comforting to think there is justice and that it is a predominant force in the universe. Comforting yes, but true-not so much.
But why time travel and sorcery? Sometimes the programing contains both, e.g., A Discovery of Witches (Amazon Prime). Trust me I have watched a great number of time travel and magic based programs in the pandemic. For me such programs are not a new thing, when I was a kid ABC in the 1960s had me with Bewitched and the Time Tunnel. I have an idea as to the why.
The primary theory I have about why I (and I believe others) are captivated by such shows is that we humans have regrets about what we cannot change in the extant material realm. There are so many things we cannot make better with all of our talents and skills in the here and now and it hurts us. But if we could go back a day, a week, or years we could correct that one act that has ruptured a friendship or allowed someone to suffer needlessly. If we could weave spectral threads together and incant a few obscure vaguely Latin sounding phrases we would heal the sick or change our economic position. Magic of course, unlike time travel, could make us prettier, either in fact or using glamours, and more likely to be loved or at least desired.
We humans have a great burden of regrets for choices poorly made, for social status dictated by the vagaries of whom you were birthed to, and for our lack of success or our dearth of material acquisitions. In almost every scenario posited by a time travel show or a show about covens and the like, there is a wrong or a failing that will be ameliorated over 10 episodes by a good heart, proper motives and the zing that a trip to 15th century France by a 21st century human will add.
We all regret what we have lost in the past two years. We have been denied freedom. We have been denied pleasures. No concerts. No movies. No large birthday gatherings. No office Christmas parties. No ____________ (fill in the blank) that we used to enjoy so very, very much. We have been denied and we have been hurt. We are tired and degusted. Our spirits are at the breaking point.
If only we could travel back to a point where we could ride on an open road with the top town in route to a good time concert on a hill somewhere. If only we could wave a wand and Omicron and Delta would quickly fade and vanish leaving us to resume our lives in full, no masks and no distancing. If we could slip through the cracks in reality like they do in those television serials our lives would be some much better and without regret. Yeah, there are reasons why such fantasies are so alluring right now.
Maybe I am wrong about these things, it is clearly possible. Of course, I am not saying my opinion covers every reason for the popularity of such programing. But as I sit here, I keep wishing a magic button would appear on my desk and that simply by touching it I could make it all better.
Christmas is over. Time to move on to other things.
With the coming of the villainous Omicron the Effective Transmitter, we are all at incredible risk of Covid-19. Based on government statistics Michigan (where I live) has had 17.5 % of its population come down with the disease already. This is mind boggling. For every million people infected here 3,000 have died. And the vast majority of the deaths have come among the unvaccinated.
Vaccines, masks, social distancing and testing, these are tools that if used will control the disease. Obtaining an N95 mask is no longer onerous or expensive. Is it really a denial of your liberty to wear one in public for the good of the community? Masking up is the simplest way to carry out the responsibility of your citizenship, that bit about not harming others. I would hope that you get a vaccine because I believe science supports their broad efficacy and limited risk. But if you won’t get the jabs, at least wear the damn mask. If you feel the slightest bit sick don’t go to public spaces like grocery stores, malls and houses of worship. These things are common sense. These things are common courtesy.
Someone asked me a question about my beach roots versus my small town roots. I am posting two links here so as to give her some insight into that. I am also throwing in another short piece about miscreant behavior just for grins.
I am posting this here because Facebook has deemed the underlying blog offensive. Bite me Facebook. I cannot even send a messenger message with the link. These are old.
