The truly astounding news, however, is that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that he is rolling out a new screening program for “testosterone deficiency” among troops, calling it necessary to allow them to operate at their “absolute best.” I would submit one has to weigh the advantages of jacked-up masculinity after turning 30 against the increased odds of eventually dying from the second leading cause of cancer deaths among men—the first being lung cancer. According to the National Cancer Institute, 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetime. Or as my doctor has said, all men will develop prostate cancer if they live long enough. The question becomes, why speed it up?

Now my father was a tee-totaler who never drank alcohol in all the time I knew him. He also never drank coffee. He eventually died of complications from Parkinson’s disease at age 89, but he also developed heart disease in his 70s. I doubt drinking coffee or alcohol would have extended his life. In fact, it is scientifically proven that alcohol acts as a systemic toxin that impacts virtually every major organ and increases the risk of at least seven types of cancer. Now how do we convince Sec. Hegseth that alcohol and testosterone show a correlation with cancer? We can’t.

During his confirmation hearings, Hegseth—a notorious drunk—promised to stop drinking if he could leave his FOX News desk in favor of leading the mightiest military in the world. I would maintain—judging by his aggressive and often illegal orders—he has likely broken his promise or at least has failed to follow any effective recovery program. In AA we call this being on a “dry drunk.” Merely sobering up is not enough to ensure emotional or behavioral growth. Intervention by concerned citizens is not likely given the degree of egregious and dangerous behavior our Chief Executive has been allowed and enabled to engage in. Thus, since there is no changing a narcissist’s personality disorder, one thing we can do is alert military personnel over 30 that the testosterone boost is optional and indeed forbidden for transsexual men in the military. Young men need to be aware of the dangers of high T, just as the Brits need to consider more caffeine in their high tea. Perhaps Sec. Hegseth should consider resigning given his incompetence and failures. And you guys with low T, the coffee is on me.

“Supreme Court’s Ruling on TARIFFS is deeply disappointing! I am ashamed of certain Members of the Court for not having the Courage to do what is right for our Country. I would like to thank and congratulate Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh for your Strength, Wisdom, and Love of our Country, which is right now very proud of you. When you read the dissenting opinions, there is no way that anyone can argue against them. Foreign Countries that have been ripping us off for years are ecstatic, and dancing in the streets — But they won’t be dancing for long! The Democrats on the Court are thrilled, but they will automatically vote ‘NO’ against ANYTHING that makes America Strong and Healthy Again. They, also, are a Disgrace to our Nation. Others think they’re being ‘politically correct,’ which has happened before, far too often, with certain Members of this Court when, in fact, they’re just FOOLS and ‘LAPDOGS’ for the RINOS and Radical Left Democrats and, not that this should have anything to do with it, very unpatriotic, and disloyal to the Constitution. It is my opinion that the Court has been swayed by Foreign Interests, and a Political Movement that is far smaller than people would think — But obnoxious, ignorant, and loud!”

Sorry, Your Highness. We may be obnoxious, ignorant, and loud, but we, the people, are not a small political movement. We are the vast majority who reject your war mongering, illegal tariffs, brutal treatment of immigrants, defacing of our institutions, and your lawless behavior now and in the past. You are not a king. You cannot do whatever you want like a willful child. You cannot conceal your heinous offenses in the Epstein Files forever. In fact, two of your three heroes on the Supreme Court have been credibly accused of sexual assault and harassment just like yourself.

You may devote our tax dollars and your delirious waking hours to rigging the next election, but you will not succeed. You are enormously unpopular in this country and abroad. Your shrinking MAGA base can go back to the fringes of decent society while those of us who believe in democracy, humanity, and the rule of law will erase every vestige of your vain and vulgar attack on our Constitution from our public spaces and policies. Your name will be scrubbed from the Kennedy Center and your mug shall be removed from the Department of Justice that shall no longer answer to you. Your Qatari jet? Sold for parts. Your gold statue? Remember Saddam Hussein? Your ostentatious White House ballroom? Wrecking ball. Your repulsive body? The memory care unit of a maximum security prison for crimes against humanity. Your legacy? Tarnished, but preserved as a cautionary tale for those who even think about attacking our democracy in the future. Your loyal partners in crime, the incompetent and corrupt government officials in your administration? Jail and public shaming.

Finally, shame on you for the pain and damage you have inflicted on America and our true allies. Your accusation that the majority of Americans is “obnoxious, ignorant, and loud” is merely another projection of every insane, rude, and vile aspect of your pathological personality disorders. We may be colorful, but our culture does not need costumes. We are America. 🇺🇸

The Rubicon must be a winding river because we have crossed it repeatedly during Trump’s unprecedented rule. The transition from democracy to dictatorship takes many twists and turns, but America is nearing the final crook with the MAGA secret police paving the way for the Insurrection Act and the military takeover of cities and states committed to democratic elections and free speech.

I heard long ago that the American people should never nominate or elect a morally compromised presidential candidate. The reason has become abundantly clear of late. A president with something to hide will go to any length to protect their secret. Thus, they are vulnerable to blackmail and do not act in the best interests of the country. In fact, they will go so far as to abandon our allies and cater to our adversaries to keep their darkest crimes under cover. Couple that with a malignant personality disorder and a penchant for corruption and before long the country is in the grip of a traitor—backed by a partisan Supreme Court with contempt for the Constitution that has given the president unlimited immunity—who has infiltrated an easily manipulated and amoral political party that will not convict a twice impeached and criminally convicted felon who would burn the Constitution to stay out of jail while simultaneously transforming the White House and other national treasures into gilded monuments to his enormous ego. The final phase of authoritarianism—after dissenters, protesters, and scapegoats are eliminated—is to create a permanent presence of illegal troops throughout the country to subvert democratic elections.

The current occupation of Minneapolis is not for border security or the deportation of violent, undocumented immigrants. It is an occupation by a paramilitary organization against the wishes of state leaders, citizens, and local law enforcement. It is white supremacy enforced by violence. The pardoned January 6th, 2021 insurrectionists, Proud Boys, and other low-lifes have been unleashed on American citizens. The paramilitary and federal military must never be used to crush protesters. The Capitol riot would have turned into a blood bath if Trump applied his current tactics to that situation instead of trying to overturn an election. The Justice Department is now the convicted felon’s retribution for his criminal trials. It’s obscene and it’s overkill.

Long before Trump came on the scene, a former student told me I would be wise to stockpile guns for the day the government turned against citizens. I dismissed the notion as paranoia. What chance would we have against the U.S. military? It turns out he had a point, but who knew it would be his gun rights cult leader who would send 3,000 federal agents to cause chaos in our state? They are not here to protect our safety and everyone knows it. Kristi Noem lost all credibility when she concocted a false narrative about the shooting of Renee Good before the gun had even cooled. Trump cynically used his populist rhetoric to win the power to protect the powerful elites his base despises. He made them hate liberal democracy more.

The president could stop this now, but he is inflaming the violence just as he did when his fascist followers attacked the D.C. police. He is not fit to rule. Now would be a good time to release the Epstein files and end the distractions that are threatening democracy and freedom of speech. Now would be the time to invoke the 25th amendment. Oh, and the President can feel free to flip his tiny middle finger at anyone who hurts his feelings, but it’s not a good look. He needs to be removed from office and placed in a care home for his mental decline. There he could shout obscenities at the sky all day. And please take away his phone. Neither event will happen, but history has taught us hubris goeth before the fall. He can be stopped if his ridiculously rich backers, tech bro genetic engineers, religious zealots and protected pedophiles were exposed, condemned, and held accountable for their crimes and conspiracies. Of course, that would take the kind of courage Minnesotans are showing the nation.

In short, “Minnesota nice” is a real thing. Rooted in our Scandinavian heritage of hospitality and helping each other survive a sometimes hostile environment, we like to live and let live. We want to live in peace, but compliance with illegal authoritarianism results in anything but peace if history is any guide. We cannot allow bullies and domestic terrorists to drive us to violence. Non-violent resistance is our patriotic and civic duty. In the meantime—a very short time and a very mean time—I suggest the above photo be Trump’s permanent portrait in what’s left of the White House. There is something about it that captures what Trump has done to America, though I can’t quite put my finger on what it is.

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Trump’s very public statements on the joys of grabbing women and the credible abuse claims of over 25 women, along with his legal liability in the E. Jean Carroll case, lost him nary a single MAGA vote. Trump’s problem is that the vast majority of voters can see through his refusal to release the files he promised to release now that over 1,000 FBI agents have found out what is in them. “Who is he protecting?” we are left to ask, as though we don’t know.

Surprise, no less a personage than MAGA influencer Candace Owens said on her podcast:

“So I think now we're arriving at the unfortunate question here, which is who is Trump protecting? Because he's clearly protecting someone. Is it himself? Is it someone in his family?"

Journalist Tina Brown of Daily Beast noted that Owens had written, “It’s almost as if Trump thinks his base is stupid.’ And I’m thinking, you think? You think? He’s always thought they were stupid. That’s the whole point. That’s been his superpower. You think he wants to hang out with a lot of those people? No, he doesn’t.”

Anyone who voted for Trump in 2024 has a high tolerance for criminality and immorality, but those who are still with him—a dwindling minority—place themselves in the company of the very pedophiles they have famously and loudly decried. They are as foolish as a box of Trumps. Who is going to tell them?

Pardon me but I am feeling a bit disoriented this Memorial Day. Kind of like getting off the Tilt-a-Whirl ride at the fair when I was a kid, but not nearly as delightful. I grew up in a time when those who served in the military were revered and those who served their country were respected. Every day of the current administration has delivered new shocks to the flagpole of Old Glory and most of America feels stunned and sad. The most recent example of normalizing the new regime’s insanity is the hesitation of the press and the public to comment on the deranged ravings of our physically weakened and mentally declined president as he stumbled incoherently through his commencement address at West Point, which he did not so much deliver as inflict on a captive audience. I, for one, was not captivated. He who did not serve due to “bone spurs” has previously referred to our lost soldiers as “suckers” and “losers” while asking “What was in it for them?” Everything is transactional to him. Now he has disrespected the military once again by treating his speech like a campaign rally and refusing to shake hands with the cadets as his predecessors have done. Then he left for three days of golf at taxpayer expense.

I have heard plenty of moaning from the press recently about former President Biden’s infirmity and the failure of those around him to be transparent about it. Fair enough but for the fact Biden is not president now and we have in his stead another elderly man who is far more dangerous and mentally unstable than even he was in his first horrific term, only now without the safeguards of a patriotic Congress, an independent Justice Department, or an objective staff to stop his grasp for total power over the country, starting with his critics and those who are not politically well-connected. In his seriously declining mental health, he believes he is invulnerable and all powerful. Tragically, he still has too many blind followers who enable that notion.

Now, I do not question those who seek to control others; I question those who let them. I do not totally blame Donald Trump for planning a military parade on his birthday. I blame those who will not stop it at a time when millions of Americans have a shortage of food, shelter, and medical care. But one doesn’t blame a crook who can legitimately claim the insanity defense. He is a profane, corrupt, and sinister man-child with advancing dementia. He told us what he was going to do. He showed us his disdain for the military, especially those who gave their lives. He told us how he assaulted women and what he liked to do with their private parts. He told us he would dismantle our social safety net and kill the Affordable Care Act. He told us he would abolish the department of education and destroy our cherished institutions, including our intelligence agencies. He told us he would cut taxes and regulations for big business. He boasted that he would decimate our public lands and natural environment in the interest of private enterprise. He told us he would place tariffs on many of our imported goods. (Check the country of origin on the products you buy at Dollar General or Target.) He is not a serious, intelligent, or moral man. But he did tell us the story of “The Snake” and laughed because he knew his followers wouldn’t take his warnings seriously. In his tragic hubris he really believed his politics of grievance and knack for skirting the law made him better than us.

So who is to blame for Trump’s malfeasance and toxic behavior? Maybe his parents; he clearly has daddy issues. More likely, though, it is those who enable him. I am not just talking about the voters who wanted to “own the libs,” or those who didn’t vote because they couldn’t vote for a “woke” woman. I am talking about the cowardly Republicans who will not hold him accountable. They are the people Trump truly owns and he holds them in contempt for their sniveling lack of spine. These are the same people who speak of transparency while hiding more of his brokenness from the public than Biden’s people ever could. Mostly because he wasn’t nearly as broken. These are the very people who berated censorship of hate groups and who now silence and threaten anyone who disagrees with the far right radical religious agenda. Their hypocrisy has killed all irony.

So, even though over half of Americans think his unqualified and dangerous cabinet appointments—as well as his illegal deportation of human beings without due process—are cause enough for invoking the 25th amendment, they cannot stop the madness until the next election. So who can? Democrats can’t do it; Republicans will not. They are willing to sacrifice the Constitution and America’s leadership in the world because they are indebted to their voters and contributors. And therein lies the problem.

The founding fathers gave us a republic and the checks and balances to preserve democracy. They knew what life under an authoritarian monarch was like. Yet somehow Trump Republicans have managed to abuse our democracy by appealing to the worst in us, by manipulating our anger and grievances to turn us against each other. Democracy contains its own demise as well as its own protection. The founding fathers knew about human nature and our vulnerability to propaganda and self-serving politicians. They envisioned the possibility of a government led by the best and brightest of Americans, not the kakistocracy of treacherous and compromised political appointees we currently face. They must have known a critical mass of voters could eventually use democracy to destroy democracy. Still, they gave us a fighting chance. They must have known smart people could help elect an inferior intellect who appealed to the masses of low information voters while still serving the financial interests of the rich and powerful. Such a leader, however, could corrupt the courts that were meant to be a check on his or her power. Such a scoundrel could appoint a Supreme Court justice and an attorney general with a history of rape. Who could stop such an imperial president? Congress, that’s who.

The House of Representatives could impeach a criminal president who defied the dictates of the Constitution. The Senate could then convict the crook who would thereby be removed from office. If Congress failed to do their duty, the courts could hold a felonious president accountable. If the courts awarded total immunity to a criminal president, the agency with the final word would be the voters in the next election. If the voters chose to re-elect a compromised con man, that would be the end of it until the next election….unless! Unless the thief-in-chief was so mentally incapacitated that he/she was more motivated by vengeance and hubris than by protecting the interests of the American people who could still prevent the worst impulses of the aged president. How, you say? Well, by pressuring their elected representatives to invoke the 25th amendment, a process so complex I will not describe it here. Google it if you do not know.

Why am I even thinking about this today while American men and women are still risking their lives for our freedom? Maybe because I know too many decent and moral people who will give dictatorship and corporate greed no quarter. Perhaps the ordinary Americans I know are simply not prepared for change if it involves a new paradigm where greed is good, liberty is passé, and compassion is overrated. More likely, however, I and many I know are proof you can’t fool all the people all the time. I do not believe that those who voted for the current president—even though they knew his shortcomings—would approve of his forming a government composed of the dregs of humanity. No one in my acquaintance would approve of abandoning our loyal allies and making America a pariah nation. One of the bad actors. No one I know would want the head of the defense department in charge of our sons and daughters in the military to be an inexperienced fake news reporter who could put our military in harm’s way to settle political grievances. No one I know really wants the head of Health and Human Services to be a deranged conspiracy theorist—infected by brain worms and road kill—to reintroduce our children to measles, polio, chicken pox, mumps, tetanus, Covid, and small pox, not to mention rotten teeth. No one I know endorsed the nomination of a sexual abuser to be in charge of politicizing the Justice Department. No one I know really wants a Russian asset in control of our intelligence agencies. No serious people I know want their children to have an inferior education since serious adults believe in science and provable facts. Yet everyone I know has the power to call or recall their representatives and demand the madness be stopped. See, the power ultimately rests in the people, a well educated and morally decent populace. Our ancestors fought and died for democracy, not a theocracy or a plutocracy. We were given the tools. How we use them is up to us because we are a free people. Give that freedom up and we will not get it back.

As for those who like the chaos or simply don’t feel any concern for the rights of others, I would hope they are the minority. As a former teacher, I never liked the idea of punishing the whole class for the naughtiness of a few. The same goes for our country. There are those who have made poor decisions and do not adult well. They would feel better if all of us suffered. They are bullies and cowards. They need therapy and understanding. They do not need to have things their way. We deserve better than this. I, for one, am grateful for our freedom and privileges in America. They are too precious to squander after 250 years of working toward a more perfect union.

I exhort all who feel as offended by the constant attacks on intelligence and logic to take back control of your mind, your life, and your country. Protest loudly, but don’t neglect to write or call your representatives. Tell them you are not OK with an imperial president and his “confederacy of dunces” who are more dedicated to him than to the country. Make some “good trouble” by showing them you cannot be complacent about the consequences of nationalism, white supremacy, radical religious zealotry, and politicization of our justice system. Let the powers that be know where the real resides: inside us. But for today, let us remember all who served America honorably.

We recently returned from two days of the state speech tournament where we saw excellence recognized and rewarded, but were frequently reminded that the activity instills strong character and ethics that are the keystones of rhetorical success. Competition, by definition, relegates thousands of speech participants to the audience that watches as champions are awarded. The real rewards, however, are shared by all the participants who worked to speak well and were not just heard but listened to as they shared their passion for society’s highest ideals. Cicero would have approved and crowned every one with a wreath of laurel.

As Richard Rohr reminds us today, “Dignity is not doled out to the supposedly worthy; it grounds the inherent worthiness of things in their very nature and existence.” I have personally found dignity in every student who took the risk of using their voice to share that which they found important and valuable. I have been blessed to learn something from every student and to honor their worthiness. Perhaps our leaders should do well to attend high school and college speech and debate tournaments. They might discover a better brand of rhetoric that can inspire them to not only be good people, but good for something.

Flash Bang!

Strip mined and land mined, I was saved when you became my lifeline.

Your golden veins guide my way when darkness floods my mind.

I chop wood on a cloudy day and you bring me coffee and sunshine.

I see you smile, I hear you laugh, and FLASH BANG, the world is fine.

FLASH BANG! Your dynamite blasts a dam of tears and opens my soul.

FLASH BANG! Crashes through my fears and makes diamonds out of coal.

You hum away my search for a different past.

You touch me and heal my wounds at last.

You kiss the ice crystals off my cheek.

My heart melts when I hear you speak.

FLASH BANG! The last bonfire of autumn smolders through the night,

FLASH BANG! A heap of white ashes is stirred into flames by daylight.

My soul mate, you brought about my release.

In us are all my parts at home in peace.

The pain was what I thought I should be.

Your love holds me in my highest possibility.

FLASH BANG! Our minds explode and the stars are near.

FLASH BANG! The light at the end of the shaft is here.

I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as a mineral,

And then I died and was reborn as a plant.

I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as a plant,

And then I died and was reborn as an animal.

I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as an animal,

And then I died and was reborn as a human being.

What have I ever lost by dying?

--Rumi (version by Robert Bly)

This is what was on my mind as I came to the end of my career as an educator: I will always be a teacher, as we all are, but I may not be paid for it. Contracts have always had strings attached anyway, not the least of which is a binding obligation to support the status quo and to propagate orthodoxy. Alas, we make a bargain with the devil anytime we sign the dotted line. So why, you might understandably ask, would I resist the prevailing paradigm of privilege when my profile fits the power structure in American society? Good question. Short answer: I have a soul. Never content with the short answer, however, here is why I believe I have rebelled for most of my life: I was born and raised white, male, and Christian. These are a big part of the fabric of the suit of clothes I wear in this life and they have opened many doors for me. I am grateful for those opportunities. They don't fully identify me though as there are intrinsic qualities that complicate things, not the least of which are imagination, conscience and empathy. I am extremely grateful for these and I nearly despair when I behold the concerted effort to "lobotomize" these from our competitive, consumer-driven society. Still, I don't surrender to despair. I defer one last time to the sage Richard Rohr who has become the quintessential source of my contemplative nature: "Prayer is not something you do; it’s finally something you are whenever you collapse back into the very Ground of your being. Unfortunately, we flee into our minds instead—to create and defend our separateness and our specialness. The mind concocts an identity for itself based on our race, our country, our shape, our color, our religion, etc.—the very things which are passing and accidental and not essential. These are the very things that are going to die when we die; you might say we fight wars precisely because we don't pray."

I also find great comfort in modern prophets like John Lennon who remind us to imagine the world we want to live in. It is happening. Love will not be extinguished though the fires of "not love" rage all around us. Those who profit by dividing us have the means to fan the flames, but the eternal flame of truth needs no bellowing. It cannot be extinguished by our slavish devotion to technology or our addiction to power and pleasure. The high and mighty will not step down willingly or quietly, but they will also never win our hearts. Yes, bullies have been the bane of my existence, but they never defeated me. I have been bullied and I have been a bully. “Hurt people hurt people,” as the cliché goes. This cycle can only be broken at the personal level. A slow but determined learner, I eventually accepted that revenge always invites blowback and that the only way to find peace of mind was to forgive myself, then to extend my innate empathy to others. To my astonishment, it has worked again and again. I give full credit to AA and A Course in Miracles, along with a mentor who introduced me to both.

Granted, my personal experience with sociopaths and narcissists have been small potatoes compared to the abuse inflicted on marginalized people. I have fought the law and the law has won, but I never feared for my life or that of my sons when they went out at night. We need merely take the long view if we want to find peace and social justice. For example, we can clearly see the cruel Crusades against the Muslim world were a mistake that bore unintended tragedy that persists to this day. The consequences of persecution cannot be quelled by invading Iraq or Gaza, or by any of our other misadventures in the Middle East. Likewise, the blowback from enslaving and subjugating a whole race and culture in America does not quiet down overnight. We are not forgiven until we sincerely apologize for our racist actions and make what reparations we can. Then it is up to the oppressed to forgive. Gandhi in India and Mandela and Tutu in South Africa can be our guides to societal and international reconciliation. Here, we can truly commit to the dream of Dr. King if we want racial harmony the way we say we do.

Theologian Howard Thurman offers us this advice: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” I discovered early in my career as an educator that what made me come alive was learning. Thus, I approached teaching as a learner. I just had to ask the right questions. My students taught me far more than I could ever deliver once I changed how I saw our relationship. Miracles happened in and out of the classroom when I learned to listen closely and to connect with students as humans who, like me, really wanted fun, freedom, personal empowerment, and self-respect more than anything else except love and acceptance. The best teachers bring about unity, not uniformity. They recognize and maintain the differences among the learners while managing to reconcile them. An engaged teacher feels no pain and never has to go to the bathroom during the lesson. The master teacher often sets aside the lesson plan for the day when the situation calls for it. “Teaching to the test” from the textbook only looks like “time on task.” If nothing is learned, then nothing was taught. Too many instructors survive the system until they retire without ever taking a risk or making a difference. It may be best at times to abandon the text without knowing what comes next, for if we did, we would not live in this moment and be prepared for the next. Breathe in and blessed be. Let it be. Soon enough we will have eyes to see subject to subject rather than subject to object. Parker Palmer posits, “Every atom in the cosmos does and has always done a dance of unending transformation.” If we are not head over heels in love, we have not reached our full potential. How long until we accept our invitation to the dance? To surrender to the sacred seduction? Love is the secret sauce that slowly enfolds me into God Spirit.

I needed to stop relying so much on the very privilege that has opened so many doors to the halls of power for the white, male Christian and hold space for the greater gifts that shared humanity offered. My own small personal example has shown me how hard such surrender is. It usually begins only when our ego causes us to hit rock bottom. For many of us, we are then ready to learn we cannot become good. My message to students: You are good. You can merely stop blocking your goodness with the false belief that you are less than a radiant being. Then you will have the energy to shine and be good for something. I am one with you in the stream of radiant light that dispels the night. You can call the light whatever you will, just acknowledge that goodness exists, for it is all that is real. In the first half of life, I used every advantage to seek approval and enhance my resume, only to realize in the second half of life that my resume dies with me, but legacy lives on. I want to be remembered for kindness to others, integrity with my values, humility in my achievements, and inspiration for those who need personal empowerment. I am far from achieving all this, but for today I can try softer to forgive and release all those who abused their power by taking advantage of others to meet their ego needs. I want the same forgiveness from those I have hurt along the way. So, we must cultivate empathy, equality, and respect to as we hold on to hope, move through doubt, and stand in faith. It will take a field of self-actualized teachers to teach one part information and two parts transformation. They must not be weeded out by a system that demands conformity. To draw on Shakespeare, there are few humans valiant enough to taste of death but once, whereas most of us die a thousand deaths at the hands of our own cowardly egos. Yet, I ask myself, “What have I ever lost by dying to my false self?” To paraphrase Dutch Jewish writer Etty Hillesum, by no longer wasting energy on fear of death or refusing to accept its inevitability, we enlarge and extend life. Namaste.

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens” (Carl Jung).

Once a boy and his cousin set out on their blue Yamaha 50cc and white Honda 50cc motorbikes to explore an abandoned homestead in their township. No one had lived there since the man died of “old age” and his widow followed a few years later. Her body had was found several days after she died, in the summer heat, in the closed-up house, with seventeen hungry cats that had to be shot before they could go feral. After raising summer dust for two miles of gravel road, the boys turned onto the bumpy driveway with tire tracks divided by short but hardy weeds, planted the kickstands of their motorbikes on the edge of the half-dead grove of trees surrounding the old buildings with their greyed siding clinging to a few flecks of dried and dirty white paint.

They carefully forged their way across the overgrown yard, where a few tiger lilies still bloomed among the weeds which had taken over the forsaken garden and entered the house through the opening where the fallen-in door had once stood guard. Window glass and shingles had been the first to give up their posts. The boys walked carefully across the rotted wood floor like conquering soldiers deftly avoiding the soft spots like they were landmines. Shards of left-behind ceramic dishware and drinking glasses mingled with dead leaves and crumbled ceiling plaster. A petrified cookie remained in the closed cupboard. A box of old black and white family photos was left behind in the attic. After smoking a cigarette the older boy had stolen from his father’s pack of Pall Malls when it wasn’t rolled up in the short sleeve of his white tee shirt, the boys explored every sad, silent room of the small, stale shack and shivered at the thought of ghosts that probably still lingered here after a lonely life of hard work and long days with no TV or indoor plumbing. A grotty calendar from 1959 with a picture of an English country garden still hung from a rusted nail on the sagging and faded kitchen wallpaper. It was forever April now. Legend had it that stillborn babies were buried in what used to be the cattle yard beside the barn with the broken back. It was behind this slowly collapsing weathered barn that the boys ambled next to check for junked cars.

There they were, some with aspen saplings growing through their roofs, the envy of every boy on two wheels: four wheels. Four automobiles, made in Michigan of Minnesota iron steeled in Ohio, were abandoned here because they were driven too long to trade in and eventually too rusted to restore. Their lineage began with a greenish 1930s Plymouth sedan and ended with a 1956 faded yellow and black two-toned Chevy Bel Air. Between a 1944 black Buick Super and the ’56 Bel Air sat the sad remains of a 1955 salmon-pink and black Bel Air, tires flattened like all the others, but the windshield broken out and the body wrecked and ruined from a fatal crash the year it was purchased. The family’s youngest grandson, who had borrowed the new car to impress his girlfriend, ran head-on into a milk truck while returning from a date at the drive-in movies forty miles away. Both kids were killed. They were sixteen.

The twelve-year-old cousins decided to sit in the ’56 model since the doors still opened and the upholstery was the least mouse-ravaged. Leaving the doors open to ventilate the stifling interior, they took turns pretending to drive while they daydreamed of the time they would be old enough to drive and have girlfriends of their own. Elvis, the boy who was four months older than his cousin, already had plenty of girls crushing on him since he looked a lot like his namesake. He was keen on Elvis movies and songs. The younger cousin, Dale, preferred Johnny Rivers and Bobby Vee though he too liked Elvis movies which he saw only on television. They both dug Bobby Fuller’s rebellious rock-and-roll.

Dale surprised himself by speaking his dream out loud: “Wouldn’t it be great to be a rock star? Just one hit, to be famous and loved by everyone. Wouldn’t that be cool?” Elvis nodded although he was already admired by everyone he knew for his athleticism and for his “almost Indian” dark skin. His fame and fortune seemed like destiny. Dale was awkward, freckled, and sunburned easil--and severely--at times, but at least he could dream.

The glove compartment yielded paper matches with the faded slogan “Happy Motoring” from Esso’s Oil Drop Man. The boys lit up a second Pall Mall as they sat in the shaded Chevy, their jeans sticky with sweat. (They were not allowed to wear short pants. Nothing religious, just boy code.) Since he was behind the black, cracked, vinyl-covered steering wheel, Elvis had rights to tuning the radio. He turned the left radio knob until it clicked on and twisted the right knob pretending to find an AM station that played rock and roll, though those were few and far between in their neck of the woods. They were even more rare without a battery beneath the half-open hood. To add further futility to the situation, the tuning knob was stuck, so Elvis turned off the radio in a superfluous gesture.

“Here, let me try,” said Dale, the more curious, as the two got out and switched positions. The new driver turned the radio back on when suddenly the mono speaker crackled and came to life:

“All the dreams that I thought would last…now belong to the past,” crooned Bobby Fuller with a tear and a run in his voice.

The boys sat frozen in place as the next song was introduced by the DJ’s gravelly voice: “That was The Bobby Fuller Four with ‘A New Shade of Blue.’ Now we have a flashback to 1956 by Dale Cook. ‘Loveable.’” Gospel singer Sam Cooke’s first popular single was “Lovable” in 1956. It was released under the alias “Dale Cook.” Neither boy, nor the DJ who was hired mainly to read the farm report, recognized the song from the year the younger cousin was born, though Sam Cooke would someday become Dale’s favorite singer of all time. They were not thinking about the song, however, as they jumped out of the car lickity-split, forgetting to slam the doors shut in their shock and fright. Gooseflesh covered their clammy arms even in the midday heat.

“What the fuck?” shouted Elvis. Since Dale had never used this expression, he was speechless in a situation that called for just such a word. He knew what to do though after he shook off the shock.

He made a bee-line for the ’55 wreck and wrenched the buckled front door partly open with a burst of super-human adrenaline. It was just enough to squeeze his head, neck, and arms far enough into the death car to reach the Delco radio power/volume button which he twisted far enough to the right to easily hear the sound of the first rock and roll record to hit the top of Billboard’s pop charts. “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets remained at number one for eight weeks in the summer of 1955. Feeling like he was witnessing the birth of rock-and-roll, Dale was irked when a voice transmitted from a tower with red blinking lights somewhere on September 30, 1955 interrupted the song: “We are sorry to announce the sad news that young Hollywood actor James Dean was killed in an automobile accident in California earlier today. We have no further details at this time but stay tuned to this station as this tragic story develops.”

The boys did not stay tuned, nor did they linger a minute longer as they jumped on their bikes and hauled ass down the hard-baked and weedy road back to the safety of ordinary life.

Dale’s mother was five months pregnant with her second son when James Dean was killed. Her baby would be born an Aquarian like Dean. Perhaps James Dean’s next incarnation was an anonymous farm boy whose only brushes with fame would be having J.K. Rowling in class when he did his student teaching in England and meeting Jeff Bridges at the funeral of his favorite college professor, who was also Bridges’ mother-in-law. Since he peaked so early professionally and died young, James’ spirit may have inhabited the body of someone who would live longer and evolve spiritually, if one believed in such things? What if the fame and fortune Dale now sought was the half-remembered remnants of his past life which he ultimately rejected in favor of anonymity and the pursuit of higher truth? The quirkiness, independence, and eccentricity of the Aquarian may have remained in some measure, but only because they were his best qualities as he pursued absolution for the others. It would explain the frequent premonitions, feelings of déjà vu, instances of mental telepathy, and all manner of psychic energy he had experienced for as long as he could remember, which sometimes seemed like forever. It was not an explanation the young boy could have considered at the time. The paranormal incident itself would die of neglect after the two boys were laughed to scorn whenever they brought it up. It was as bizarre as the tale Dale’s sister and cousins told of the statue of Mary singing “Where are you?” and the statue of Jesus weeping the day they were goofing around in the church while their mothers were cleaning up after the lunch they had served in the former country school-cum-church dining hall. The priest didn’t even believe that one. In any case, it is best to forget unexplainable phenomena in a world constructed of practical experience and common sense.

But how much have we completely forgotten? And if there is no loss of energy in the universe, only transformation, where do the memories go? If we are indeed spirits in the material world, why does it matter if we embalm and entomb our bodies? But then again, if the material matters because Spirit chose to create and inhabit all of creation, isn’t the better choice to free the body’s atoms and energy to rejoin the cosmos? If the mind is obliterated, does that mean consciousness goes with it? If we are writing this or reading it, we cannot know. Unless there is reincarnation. What lessons do we have to learn before we return to love?

One problem with waiting until I am in my seventh decade to write my story is the cruel irony of words failing at this age. Thus, this last was written first. I have looked inside to make peace with myself so at the place where language falls away, I can come to terms with what I’ve lost with more than nostalgia to motivate me to go on living until my time is up. So I summon the sacred feminine that can teach her way of compassion, mercy, and unconditional love. The second problem is that creative juices can dry up when dopamine diminishes and serotonin stops flooding the brain and spilling into the veins. I thirst for that old sense of wonder when everything was new. The drugs the legendary writers used to produce their masterpieces are not an option to one who stubbornly foreswore chemical addiction over forty years ago. Thus, I scribble furiously now while brain fog, low-grade depression, and dimming affect allow some light in through the veil that is dropping over the memories that supply me with joyful joob-elation, devastating sorrow, and all the feelings in-between. They want expressing. In my vulnerability I call out, “Come passion!” Forgive me if I repeat myself, but how many stories have I listened to in my life that were told over and over and over again in my presence because the storyteller was never really present to me? This story is my present to myself. I own it and I acknowledge my part in it. I made it out alive! I never gave up on my goal of living the life I was gifted, much as I considered ending it on many occasions.

I persisted even through excruciating mental and physical pain because I was grateful to Creator for choosing me. What were the odds that my miraculous life would exist anyway? One in one, I guess. It was destined that I be born and live. Christ and I do not exist without each other. Christ is in me. Is me.

Created from the inside out, all living things expand and unfold as they ripen. Good, good, good, good, good.

Now the past being both prologue and epilogue to the time between always and never, it would follow that there is no plot to follow in a life’s story, since the story itself is an illusion. Always has always existed and never never has. Linear life is a lie. It never happened if it cannot be preserved. In other words, life in the material world is not life at all. Our reality is immutable. “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness,” as Thich Nhat Hahn said. Our separation from Loving Spirit was but a dream, but oh what a hell of a dream it has been! Mine manifested as a wrestling match with the dualities of flesh and spirit, faith and works, law and grace, male and female, weakness and strength. Richard Rohr claims, “Dualistic thinking usually takes one side, dismisses the other, and stops there.” I never stopped grappling with the horns of the dilemma, which made life uncomfortable most of the time, but I know no one could have lived my life better than I; therefore, I can surrender the fight and submit to the pre-destined resolution: the glorious reward I ran from, which is no longer being me but being totally free of directing my course and getting lost in the wonder of oneness. The imperial I should crumble pretty quickly in the face of my true self, which is also yours.

So, good morning. I hope you had sweet dreams of the ideals you loved as a child

and woke up with a burning desire to return to that innocence.

I did.

Despite all the false evidence that the world is a fearful place,

I am mindful of its promise today.

Imagination and dreams are but the vestiges of the truth about ourselves

which we have learned to hide from a false world of fierce phantasmagoria

that seems to take the truth out of us.

Time to get up,

stand up,

rise up,

to meet ourselves as we really are.

As we forgive those mistakes which were but great teachers

and reclaim the glory of our origin stories

in a garden

where Ego is a toothless snake.

Where we lovingly but firmly say at last,

“No, I am not a body.

I am free.

I am as I was created to be.

I no longer need the delusions

you offer to protect yourself.

The secret is out.

I know war cannot bring peace.

Defending myself does not bring safety.

Bedecking my body with jewels

sparks no light in my soul.

Your notion of power is no match

for my superpower.

Denying my power is not humility but arrogance

since it is a denial of Spirit’s gift.

Love conquers all after all

because Love is All and All is One.

Now begone.

My small and audacious consciousness reaches out to encompass a universe it cannot yet contain, but when my last brain cell decays, its energy will be unleashed back into radically free deep space and may finally understand. I have mainly spent my time reprocessing the past and worrying about the future, which didn’t leave much time to think original thoughts. Thus, I take this one last chance to fish for a fresh word or phrase, to troll for an original thought or two to feed my soul. Failing that, I may come across some familiar expressions that evoke my sweetest memories. Everything will be sacred then.

Jung said, “Concepts are coined and negotiable values: images are life.” My subconscious gets to choose the images I value, the ones that gave my life meaning and what happiness was to be had. No more thinking as my body shuts down and my mind lets go one last time of the last vestiges of my daydreams, pipedreams, and the American dream. Surely our Higher Power has a bigger dream and I am ready to participate in it.  I long to see through the glass clearly, but how will I stream my consciousness when my body lies unconscious? Imagination has served me well, and now I long to be free to dream with God the unimaginable. I will wake to a higher consciousness where words will fail. We will know each other at last when it is your time to join me. How long? How long until “This perishable nature will put on imperishability, and this mortal body will put on immortality” (I Corinthians 15:52-54)? How many more reincarnations before I am ripe and ready to face my maker? I do not know, but here are some final images to close out this one because I kept them close to the end after raking through the ashes for embers of memories of a few moments in a life full of grace and beauty for which the only response is undying gratitude. My mind is a mosh ball of ever more distant memories now and the ones that pop up are random and come unsummoned. I observe them one by one from somewhere outside my body as they are distilled into the essence of my youth, my life, my truth and my light. If I could not always live my truth, I can at least and at last finally write the delight I found in the cracks in the ice on which I lived. Painful memories are no longer living memories. They are not even memories, but I must still detach from the happy ones by calling them back one last time since they are the pebbles that pave the path back, back to home. The place I was born without original sin.  I am not unaware that my addiction to alliteration has not been cured; nor has my penchant for bouncing between the insipid and the esoteric, or perhaps the delusion that my life mattered in the scheme of things as much as it mattered to me. The stream of consciousness meanders that way. Let’s just hope it cannot be said that I produced, and I quote William Faulkner’s “Flags in the Dust”, “a rambling [epilogue] that seemed to have had no beginning and held the prospect of any end…volitionless, as though entranced with its own existence and feeding on its own momentum.”  

Breathing underwater in a stream of unconsciousness, the random remembrances flow and find their place in the archives of all that ever was before “Step 12 found a way to expose and transform that perpetual adolescence by telling us early on that we must serve others” (Rohr):

Driving the 150 miles back to college on Sunday nights with a six pack of 3.2 beer at my side and Casey Kassem on the radio telling me to keep my feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars as I reveled in the awareness of being young and free.

The heady blend of pineapple and coconut in a pina colada at Fort Lauderdale beach on spring break with J.O. and his brother Tim.

The joy of laughing with my mates as a West Fargo stripper used my cowboy hat to cover her breasts.

Kris Mestad and I putting my stereo speakers in the open windows of my door room in 2nd West Ballard so they faced Livingston Lord Library, blasting “Staying Alive” as students between classes tried not to walk in step with the music.

Drinking and listening to Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty at Buffalo River swimming hole with the good-looking and carefree Scandinavian youth of Ballard Hall.

PBR, pinochle and philosophizing with the Ballard boys on Tuesday nights after M*A*S*H.

Hearing Emmylou Harris’s angel voice in concert for the first time.

Witnessing storm clouds gather and the wind come up as Stevie Nicks sang “Rhiannon” at an outdoor concert in Fargo.

Dreaming of driving down Highway 69 with a hitchhiker named Robert Zimmerman.

Planting trees with Dad for the Soil Conservation Service.

Working as a flag man for a summer job during the daytime and bartending at night.

Standing alone on a barren stretch of highway in The Jack Pines when a “bushy bear” ignored my stop sign and crossed the road too close for comfort.

Receiving a Black Oak Arkansas 8-track tape from J.O. for graduation, along with a Jim Croce album from Susan and Yogi Nelson.

Grieving the death of Jim Croce along with Tommy, my math and science class buddy.

Getting out of detention to hear Olivia Newton-John in Grand Forks.

Deftly shifting from second to third gear when no one else was able to manage it in my quirky car.

Adroitly inserting the key in my car trunk in the dark on the first try while drunk.

Listening to J.O. playing guitar and singing “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” at the end of the night.

Closing my eyes for just a second, then opening them two seconds later on a hundred late night drives home after dropping J.O. off, trying to stay awake to “Stairway to Heaven” on WLS Chicago.

Almost hitting Bullwinkle late at night on the same curve where my schoolmate Rocky would die in a car wreck years later.

Finding Rocky, who was built like a brick shithouse, passed out in the backseat of my car at a keg party and requiring several strong boys to get him out and back to his own car which was parked in Timfuktu.

Attending my first rock concerts: The Hollies (with Tim and J.O.) and Three Dog Night with Styx (with Arden, Tommy, and Donny).

Laying on my bed listening to “Your Song” and staring at the blacklight Jesus Christ Superstar poster on the ceiling.

Freaking myself out when Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” came on both the radio in my bedroom and the one in the bedroom across the hall. I thought how cool it would be if the one that started playing first was passed by the other one, only to stand frozen in the hallway as it happened!

Riding with J.O. in his red and white Mustang II to the horseraces in Winnipeg and camping with the Bit and Bridle Saddle Club in the Feather Campground where I would recount for our tentmates the story of what we saw when we stopped at a roadside rest by a country church earlier in the day:

It seems the window in the front door of the white wooden Catholic church revealed the mummified body of an old nun lying in a glass case in front of the altar. Embellishing the story as we sat in the dark tent by adding that Scott, the youngest kid in the club, was too short to see through the window so we hoisted him up on our shoulders so he could peek in. I added that he screamed in horror, “She’s awake!” and we lost our grip on him in the pandemonium that ensued. (In my account, Scott, sadly, did not survive the fall down the embankment leading to the river beside the church and now he lies in the glass case the nun escaped. The story was equally funny and frightening at the time though Scott did not see the humor.)

Blasting J.O.’s mother out of the backseat of his car where she planned to ride home from Winnipeg with us until J.O. turned Frank Zappa on full volume.

Winning the free throw contest in school because I would practice on the netless rim on the woodshed every night after chores (deep breath, visualize, swoosh).

Dad, wearing his winter cap with ear flaps, shaking the snow off the chopped wood he stacks in my arms to drop in the woodbox in the utility room when I go in the warm house after evening chores, the yard light already on.

Pushing shopping carts around the parking lot of Northland Foods with my brother’s car after Tommy and I saw American Graffiti for the first time. (I would see it at least twenty-five times.)

Watching Tommy confidently swish his side shots at every basketball game.

Smuggling friends into the drive-in movies in my car trunk, getting caught, paying double.

Teenage boys driving around in a V-6 car smelling of cinnamon air freshener, cherry cigars, lemon vodka and Brut cologne.

Picking up the girls and cruising the dirt roads with Captain Fantastic playing on the rear speakers mounted on a swag of baby blue fuzzy fabric.

Risks taken and survived in college and high school:

Taking a detour on a road trip from MSU to Crookston AC during the flood of ’79 and being at a real Animal House style party where two of the guys liberated a sheep from the school barn and brought it up to the apartment where another guy said, “Fry her up.” (She was returned to her pen safely.)

Touring Europe on twenty dollars a day during Christmas break when I was student teaching in England.

Getting drunk on wine in Rome with a group I met at the pensione and missing Pope John Paul II’s first Christmas Eve Mass but rallying in time to get an aisle view at St. Peter’s on Christmas Day.

Taking the train to Munich with an amiable American serviceman who asked me to watch his duffle bag when we got to the station lobby so he could use the toilet. As he walked away he told me to leave the bag if I saw a drug-sniffing dog approach. (None did.)

Filching a beer mug from the Hofbrau Haus by slipping it into my rucksack in the toilet and sneaking past security by leaving with a group. (Drunk again.)

Hearing church bells echoing down the valley on New Year’s Eve in the Swiss Mountains.

Watching the sunset over the Pacific at Big Sur with Ron.

Sleeping in the car and showering at the YMCA in San Francisco without being harassed.

Crashing my Comet on the freeway in California as Ron and I were enroute to see Bob Hope on Johnny Carson’s show, then missing the show and having to hitchhike for two weeks until the car could be patched together enough to get us home. (I was driving.)

Getting a ride back to our campground with a clean-cut but laid-back driver in a yellow VW Beetle who casually informed us, just before offering us drugs, that he had just gotten out of prison for armed robbery. (Needless to say, wee asked him to stop at a liquor store instead.)

Hitchhiking for those two weeks and being offered drugs everywhere we went. (We declined to the extent good altar boys inhale only incense.)

Going off the road in a blizzard near Silverton, Colorado and spending the night with a young mine guard who was happy to have the company. (Ron was driving.)

Getting by with a speeding ticket when my car stalled in a water puddle in Goodridge and all six of us scattered until the highway patrol called for a tow truck and I came out of hiding. (One minor was passed out in vomit in the backseat of my Comet so five of us had been up front. Two other guys were driving, but I had bought the beer because I was the first to turn 18, so I didn’t argue the ticket.)

Earning prizes year after year for memorizing the most prayers in Catechism because an older and smarter Sharon Verbout could not get help learning the Latin versions since girls could not serve the priest.

Riding the elevators of the Hudson Bay store up and down and purchasing souvenirs for Grandma and Grandpa Nash who gave each of us a dollar when we took our eighth-grade trip to Winnipeg.

Buying “Let It Be” and “Toast and Marmalade for Tea” 45 records for myself on the same trip.

Discovering orange kittens among the tabbies hidden in the hayloft, their eyes still closed, their fur smelling of clean, dry flax straw.

Finding Kenny’s stash of Gerber baby custard that we got hooked on when Kathy and Ricky, our younger siblings, were babies.

Tobogganing down the ditch bank around the burst-open brown cattails.

Bandit, our faithful collie, defecating an impressive pile of whole mice as we picked bales in November 1969 while Steam, Mel and Tim, Smith, and Billy Joe Royal played on the pickup radio.

Admiring the wondrous curl on the top of a whirl-a-whip soft serve cone at the drive-in restaurant.

The sweet, creamy taste of same.

Mom cooking fried chicken and mashed potatoes and baking the best bread, cinnamon rolls, and pies: coconut cream, lemon meringue, banana cream, pumpkin, apple, and peach. Mmm…pie!

Dad walking with me up the driveway to the gravel road where he surprised me with my first bike, which he found at an auction sale and hid behind the oak trees on the slope by the mailbox. It was red and white and it had a headlight!

Grandpa Nash gifting me with a pony he bought off a horse “shenie.” A spotted pony with one blind eye.

Me atop that runaway pony as it passed my brother and cousins on their bigger horses at full gallop.

The used, tall upright piano Mom got us so we could take piano lessons. I learned to play by ear.

Neighbors gathering at our farm in the dusk to help fight a fall grassfire that had gotten into our grove and threatened to burn the barn.

Excitedly running back and forth between the fire and a new episode of The Flintstones when Thursday was my favorite night of the week.

Neighbors driving their cars and pickups out to our new stock pit so the kids could swim or wade in the water before the cows were first let in to drink and muck it up.

White poodles jumping through hoops as we watched in delight from the grandstand.

Dime store hoola hoops.

Playing on the swing set and soaking in the plastic pool Mom bought for us.

The ceramic Hereford bull I got for Easter when we stayed with Dad’s aunt and uncle in Little Fork.

Admiring Dad’s cousin Lyle’s tattoo of a naked woman which he got while in the Navy.

Trying to watch Lyle and Fefe make out in the backseat of the family car when we got home from a rare drive-in movie at the Satellite Drive-In.

A braided rag rug on chipped kitchen tile.

Sticky fly ribbons thumb-tacked to the kitchen ceiling in the late summer.

Mom stopping at the cafe after church to buy us 5^th Avenue candy bars and Sugar Daddy suckers that came with bookmarks displaying wild birds.

Pixie Stix, Icees, Nik L Nips in wax bottles, fudge sickles, Fizzies to flavor and sparkle water.

The terrifying chill of watching Midnight Lace on late night TV.

The scary thrill of seeing that episode of The New Breed where the bad guys are shooting up a supermarket and the soup cans are dripping their contents down on the heads of the hidden shoppers.

Six cloudy windowpanes decorated with cob webs allowing just enough light to illuminate the peeling white paint on the barn walls that clung to the rusted iron pipes bringing rusty iron water to the motley milk cows bound by their stanchions and docility.

A green hose filling the wooden barrel that cooled the milk cans.

Spraying the old pig buyer with a squirt gun because he took my pet pigs.

Proudly presenting Dad the check after a later pig buyer had come to buy pigs that looked like they weighed forty pounds.

The fun of catching the pigs by the hind legs and hoisting them over the gate into the pig man’s hands.

Feeding the pigs left behind an extra measure of pellets each day to speed up their growth.

If I could find a hammer hanging where it was supposed to be, I would patch up pig pens in the barn or fences in the cattle yard. If I couldn’t find a hammer, twine string would do for the time being.

Pretending white clover with green stems were people floating in the barrel until they escaped through the overflow holes before they drowned.

Jets flying over the farm and breaking the sound barrier.

The cheerful drumbeat of a red-capped woodpecker outside my bedroom window.

Yellow finches with black trim shining in the sun.

The company of swallows lined up on the electric wire overhead when I was home alone.

The thrill of a whippoorwill.

The glorious weeping willow outside the living room window.

The tickle on the lips when blowing a piercing whistle on a really wide blade of grass.

The buzz in my brain from the brightly colored leaves that made fall vibrant and dear.

The exhilarating smell of exhaust from our ‘62 Impala on a cold November morning as we piled in for a trip to Thief River Falls where I would spend a quarter on “Archie’s Christmas Stocking” comic book.

Being released from school to walk to the Co-op Store where we would spend our twenty-five cent store coupons issued at the shareholders’ meeting.

Buying two twelve cent comics and one-penny Bazooka bubble gum.

Meeting Dad at the hardware store after school and admiring the toy dashboard and steering wheel that sat on the shelf for several years because no one could afford it.

Ketchup on fried egg sandwiches.

Scavenging the community garbage dump in a field northeast of town.

Dumping the sour smelling white enamel slop pail on the edge of the grove of tree north of the vegetable garden.

Team Quest defeating the lizard men in the Sargasso Sea (“Sim Sim Salabim” and “Aye Eee!”).

Walking to the mailbox on a hot day hoping for something new to read like Weekly Reader, The Farm Journal, TV Guide, or Reader’s Digest.

The thrill of getting Publisher’s Clearinghouse magazine stamps or RCA Record Club album stamps in the mail.

The happy laughter of a young girl picking dandelions in her pretty summer dress.

The hum of a distant lawn mower.

The red of strawberries in summer.

Sweet pea blossoms as fragrant and ethereal as cotton candy with the extra beauty of things ephemeral.

Popping a juicy orange wedge whole in my mouth.

“Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid…tastes great. Wish we had some…can’t wait!”

Collecting colorful and unique rocks from the ridge of gravel scraped to the side of the road by the road grader.

Snooping in the varnished cedar box from their honeymoon in Duluth on Mom and Dad’s bedroom dresser and admiring an agate and a buffalo nickel.

A bag of assorted sweet rolls fresh from the Rainbow Bakery in TRF.

Pretending my fingers were people.

Pretending pinecones were people.

Studying the overlapping boomerangs on the kitchen tabletop.

Drinking the sweet syrup of pear sauce from the fruit jar.

Grandpa Key treating us to a “Little Dick” at the drug store soda fountain.

Home baked chocolate cake with thick boiled frosting.

Mom’s cream puffs with fresh whipped cream.

My insatiable sweet tooth.

Grandma Key’s homemade tomato soup served with toast fingers on Christmas night when we stopped at her house after merry-making and too many sweets at out cousins’ crowded but festive home all day.

Those bubble lights.

Their cousin with hydrocephalus whose heavy head wavered on his neck while his hands clapped gleefully to my uncle’s fiddle playing.

Eating Cheerios and toast from dishes Mom purchased with books of S&H green stamps that came with buying groceries at the Piggly Wiggly.

The neighbor kids helping us unload farm supplies from the delivery truck to the grainery and being rewarded by the driver with caramel apples. (How we laughed when we handed one to the girl who had been in the back of the truck and she sheepishly produced an armful of the gooey wrapped treat she had kiped from the supply meant for the Coop Store!)

Seeing carefully coiffed and choreographed girl groups on American Bandstand as the first snowflake of October stuck to the kitchen window, delightful in its brief but beautiful existence.

The specter of those beautiful girl groups backed by a joyful wall of sound as they sang Christmas music.

How we fought over the Sears Christmas catalogue when it came in the mail!

The rich, papery smell of the spotless old post office before we got a rural mailbox.

The nine pines divided unevenly on either side of the rutted path across the front lawn leading to the green shingle sided garage where Dad’s green ’50 Plymouth was stored alongside our International deep freezer.

Skies festooned with gorgeous billowing clouds, falling stars, comets, satellites, eclipses, Northern Lights, and comets (Kohoutek, Hale Bop, and Hailey’s, all in our lifetime).

Orion in winter.

The blue and white Chevy that Dad bought for parts and let me steer as he pulled it home from another auction. It was the only time I ever drove it, but he told Mom it was mine so he wouldn’t get in trouble.

Bologna and butter sandwiches, cheese curls, Keebler fudge-striped cookies, and red Kool Aid in fruit jars for our summer Catechism School lunch pails.

The smell of melting Styrofoam as it was cut into the shape of reindeer heads that would be decorated with green and red glitter in school as a Christmas present for our parents to hang on the wall.

Playing with my plastic horses and dime store cows on the brown, patterned linoleum floor by the light of the Christmas tree.

Kaleidoscopic bovine and pastoral images swirling in cowhide patterns with big, soft eyes.

The moment of silence that interrupts a lively conversation as everyone pauses at the same time.

The quiet wisdom of old men and old women.

The better-than-a-new-car smell of the electric sewing machine Mom got to try out at home for a week before she had to return it.

Grapefruit, oranges, and lemons from Florida to brighten the dreaded dead of post-holiday winter.

Taking turns having Saturday night baths in the tin tub with blue bubble bath from a Stanley home party.

Singing a mash-up from Mrs. Jelle’s songbook as she played the piano in music class: “Johnny Schmoker,” “Green Grow the Lilacs,” “Stodola Pumpa,” “The Old Sow Caught the Measles and She Died in the Spring,” “Oh, Susanna” (“a buckwheat cake was in her mouth, a tear was in her eye”).

Mommy softly singing “Tra-la-la, tweedlee dee dee it gives me a thrill to wake up in the morning to the mockin’ bird’s trill as she held me in her arms.

Daddy nibbling on my ear lobes as he held me in his lap.

The self-comforting thumb sucking.

Only a small fraction of any moment is perceived with any accuracy. How, then, can a memory hold any truth? The magic of a summer evening can be but dimly recalled in the depths of winter. Thus, images can be described in words only so much as incomplete memory allows. In the end, any human voice can speak only of the perceptions, memories, and emotions of conscious life. What came before and after is ineffable. Yes, I once had a way with words but now I say, “Away with words!” I am waiting quietly in the left turn lane as cars turn left in front of me; there is one person behind the driver’s side window in each car and it is someone I used to know. At last, the left turn arrow goes green. I pull a U-turn and follow the familiar vehicles.

“In the Seventh Story, the story of reconciliation, human beings are not the protagonists of the world. Love is” (Brian D. McLaren).

I returned to Colorado and poetry many leaf drops later and a few snowfalls before winter’s silence fell.

These were my final thoughts before my memory failed completely and it was my time to fall silent.

The epilogue for this book had already been written by drawing on my inner predictive text.

(Throughout my life many people had remarked on my “sixth sense” and intuition.)

Full disclosure: The epilogue came to me before the prologue.

Clearly the end is the beginning.

To die, to sleep—to sleep, perchance to dream—to dream, perchance to relive and prelive—to paraphrase Shakespeare.

Those sleeping dreams can be more real than one’s waking experience.

Ah, sweet paradox!

Oh, the breathtaking revelation that simply breathing was my entire vocation,

the common experience that all humans share.

The content is gone; only silence remains as my true calling grows louder in relief.

For most of my life I drew in each breath deeply and learned to appreciate each one.

Now my breath is labored and assisted by a machine but I recall, I recall.

I recall Carl Jung said, “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”

What a privilege to be afforded enough time and grace to shed my false ego self

and all its companion pain by attaining a higher level of consciousness

that involves no thought at all!

Finally aware that my life was a poem and I had written the poem

by seeking and creating beauty,

by refusing to despair in the mundane manifestations of the mechanics

that bedeviled me and manipulated me into conforming, at times,

to that which I was not.

The strongest people I know are not those who struggle

within the prevailing paradigm but those who struggle against it.

Yes, I wrestled the devil himself as he proffered evidence that I was wired wrong,

that being liked was the same as being loved.

Satan, it seems, is fear disguised in an even more dreadful form.

A Course in Miracles teaches, “Fear is a stranger to the ways of love.

Identify with fear, and you will be a stranger to yourself.”

I forgot who I was until I forgot how to fear.

In moments of forced masculinity, I professed love while committing acts of violence.

Committed the sin of refusing to keep growing up.

The violence came not out of being manly but out of fear of not being man enough.

A fear born of putting my faith in false images created by the mind

rather than in the creative power of the mind itself.

A fear of violating the purity code taught by the Christian cult of innocence,

which was anything but.

A toxic theology that emphasized staying pure and soft-pedaled the part

about how to live is to lose that innocence

and to regain it at a higher level of enlightenment,

transformed by passing through a healing purification.

Matthew 18:3 did not admonish us to stay innocent like children

but to “change and become like little children.”

Rebel Jesus was jeered and electric Dylan was booed

by those who could not accept change,

but aren’t we all most resistant at those times when we should be a transistor?

With three connections capable of the amplification and rectification

at the level of Hendrix transmogrifying Dylan:

1.      Life, as we have constructed it, is change.

2.      Eternal life must be changeless if there is no time or space.

3.      Change can wound us here on earth, but we can choose to become wounded healers.

Healing is trusting the immutable laws of creation

just as a little child understands they are dependent.

We must depend on that small, still voice that remembers our real and only function.

Had A Course in Miracles been my Bible, I would have realized long ago that

“My function here is to forgive the world for all the errors I have made.

For thus am I released from them with all the world.”

I believe life is outcome-based and reconciliation is the only outcome.

Reincarnation makes sense if the inevitable result of human history

is getting it right on the personal level,

which is the only ministry that makes sense to me.

This is my belief, not an empirically provable fact.

Not yet anyway.

Rohr explains, “An incarnational worldview is one in which matter and Spirit

are understood to never have been separate.

Matter and Spirit reveal and manifest each other.”

Thus, the birth of one baby two thousand years ago

was not the first time divinity became substantial,

nor was it the last time.

It is in all of us and all of creation, nature itself.

We bring spirit into matter every time we take in a breath.

And every time we breathe out, we return spirit to the material universe.

Steven Charleston, Native American elder and Episcopal bishop,

boldly addresses our divine nature:

Believe in yourself. You are a prophet. You are already

making your migration. You have been chosen because

you have been born. You are a prophet because you are awake.

You are a keeper of revelation: a person with a thought that may

create a new world.

Human unnature, being what it is, will reject or forget those words because they bear

an enormous responsibility that threatens our comfort and deeply entrenched beliefs.

What did Marianne Williamson say?

“Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

I pause now to internalize the implications of being one with Christ Spirit.

Nope, it didn’t happen because my go-to mode is sleepwalking

and pedestrian thinking,

the source of imposter syndrome that kept me from speaking when I had a voice.

New moment. I hold down the SHIFT KEY AND CONTEMPLATE RUMI’S WORDS:

“Though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream

and will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.”

We are part of the evolutionary process, yet by reflecting on it we stand apart from it.

Indeed, we shape our consciousness by being able to act on it.

One’s True Self is not a self apart from the body.

The unitive path, says Rev. Rohr, is one where “No one, including the self, needs be

blamed, shamed, or worshipped.”

Such self-loathing--or its sister narcissism—leads to addictions

that give us another thing to hate about ourselves,

and to hold grievances is to suffer guilt; to forgive is to find peace.

The miracle is that although it may take a lifetime to learn how to forgive,

the results are instantaneous.

It is up to us how long we choose to live in anger, shame, and stubborn unforgiveness.

How long until we deny our ego its false perceptions and delusions?

If all we had at the end of our time was our false self,

the trappings of success that get us through the day,

there would not be much to immortalize.

We do not become magically connected to the Whole the moment the body dies

if we have not released our addiction to illusions.

Creating space for the whole truth, half-truths having availed us nothing,

we claim agency over our life stories which become ours to live and to tell.

Only then can we let go of them and surrender

to the quantum wave of higher consciousness

that pervades all of creation and holds us in oneness for all of time.

All the forms we have known will eventually be atomized beyond recognition

and the universe will be informed by—yet impervious to—our current existence

which is passing away even now.

Full-on conscious contact with our Higher Power

happens for the second time when our particles

lose their bonds and dissipate into space.

If this all seems too cerebral,

remember that science suggests the brain is not too warm or wet

for consciousness to exist as a quantum wave that connects

with the rest of the universe.

Lest this also seem too esoteric, merely remember that you are a student of truth

and quantum metaphysics is your religion.

You may never find transcendence in your lifetime, but the search gives life meaning.

Your current perceptions are not reality when a shift in perception

can make upside down appear right side up.

And as for your facts, they only matter in so far as they lead you

in the direction of truth.

Alas, ignorance is not bliss.

Bliss is the complete joy of knowing perfect love.

Imagine, if you will, the songs of your favorite band bouncing

off the walls of Red Rocks

as you inhale the sweetness of second-hand herbal smoke while looking up at the stars

and down at the sea of humanity vibing as one to the same mellow euphoria

while you transcend being a mere observer of something outside yourself.

Sorry, but that’s as close as I get to describing bliss, which is ineffable.

And the image is woefully inadequate.

Now knowing that both our public persona and our secret shadow self must die,

how can we live?

We must die to live.

We give our life away to keep it.

As we tread the skinny branches trembling above the river,

we call to mind Khalil Gibran:

               The river needs to take the risk

               of entering the ocean

               because only then will fear disappear,

               because that’s where the river will know

               it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,

               but of becoming the ocean.

We must die to all that is not our one true purpose:

to forgive so that we might reveal our True Selves,

our blinding brightness that burns like a star before it becomes dust.

We are, however, miraculously liberated in the holy instant

that the transitory transitions into Truth.

I learned from Thomas Merton that “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory

person: a false self…. This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist,

because God does not know anything about him.

And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.”

“And,” John Steinbeck taught me, “now that you don’t have to be perfect,

you can be good.”

Richard Rohr spoke directly to me when he wrote:

We are all in one kind of a closet or another and are even encouraged by society to play our roles…. Our world is filled with a lot of angry people because they cannot accept their own weeds…. We are not all weeds, but we are not all wheat, either. We have to learn, even now, to accept and forgive this mixed bag of reality in ourselves and in everybody else.

I will meet you in that field of both weeds and wheat.

To live without gloss.

Behold, the instant I learn to forgive and accept myself, I will love you too.

Willing now to exorcise all toxic emotional energy from my body,

I call on Life Force to cleanse me.

My mind is holy and healed the moment I assent.

I will ascend.

Pinched between a hard rock and an unforgiving place,

we try to be good men when trying isn’t enough.

Perfection is a bitch of a standard when one must please both women and men.

In the second half of life, I dreamed a series of long suppressed

and almost forgotten sins.

The disappointment I caused both by pretending to be other than I was

and by leaving behind the imposter.

The deeply painful regret over hurting good people

who resisted my misguided call for love.

Causing emotional trauma in others created voracious guilt

that ate me up in my unconscious mind.

All the regret and cigarette smoke of a Dusty Springfield song.

I now forgive myself for doing the best I knew how to do at the time.

Do you think I wouldn’t have done better if I had only known how?

If I had died young I would have gone to Heaven, but here I am, too old to die young.

So I forgive myself for living.

The floodgates that released all the gratitude and grief I felt in my life

left no regrets behind.

Loving too much and satisfying my curiosity and wanderlust cannot be sins.

Have you ever been so deeply in love you could go no lower

because your heart was broken?

If not, I hope you can experience this once so you can say you lived, but only once.

You can be saved by Grace once.

I want you to know that grief will never go away, but--after a long, long time goes by--

there will be blessed moments when your marvelous mind will find

the pathways to happy thoughts,

first for only a few seconds, then increasingly longer.

You may fight these, but Grace is strong with you and will save you regardless.

Grief, after all, is love finding a new way to express.

God comes to us through the hearts of others.

We have given our hearts away to others,

some of whom we will grieve just as others will grieve us.

As for me, I tend to fall in love with anyone who shares my interests because so few do.

Nobody has all my quirks and kinks.

I have often yearned to meet me along the trail, having had brief mirages in my mind

when my awareness landed on a random joyful memory

no one else has ever experienced.

It was almost enough to dispel those piques of insane envy

when I wanted to be someone else.

Good for you, Mom, for learning how to daydream and defy demands.

I claim my stake in that head space now as I surrender the land Dad left to me.

Land cannot be owned anyway, just as Spirit cannot be divided.

The drama of possessing and owning breeds ennui in the second half of life.

My renter still refuses to pay the sum due me,

but he will not live in my head rent free.

Finding me a bit too prodigal, he sold my fatted calf--the best of its breed--

and accused me of immorality, manipulation, and greed.

Grateful to recognize projection, I can forgive it and hold in mind the full context

within the momentary text of his injured pride and misplaced anger.

Our raw thoughts and feelings are not a fit feast for the soul.

It has taken a lifetime of experiences different than his

to let my mind lower into my heart which will elevate and transform

my experiences before I serve them to a hungry humanity.

A master teacher learns to stand naked and vulnerable before the students

who crave honesty and authenticity, not pretty pink platitudes and peace signs.

I long fancied myself the peacekeeper because I avoided conflict,

which is keeping no real peace at all.

It must have gotten out of hand, this playing the martyr

by stifling the maverick who liked the Beatitudes

more than the Commandments though they were less dramatic.

The pain of pretending to be someone you are not

may or may not be worth the approval.

The cost is our own conversion when we choose to see and hate

our own faults in other people.

Then we are alone in our self-righteousness.

The feeling of isolation grows until a mere feeling has created

an identity so detached from reality

that wholeness is all but forgotten and health a more and more distant goal.

That is just too much individuality when it costs me my soul.

Long ago my antagonists decided that to be saved they had to demonize me

and declare I was insane.

I forgive them for their sanity.

They merely hold me in my past.

But I did not change, I just woke up.

Now I am waiting for someone to walk me home.

I recognize in myself that anger is the expression of fear and a call for love, not hate.

If you hate the one who hates, you risk becoming like the one you hate

when the hater really wants to be more like you.

Stay true and show him how.

Love him more.

I do not understand the religious reasons my brothers and sisters have forsaken me,

or how determinedly they have accepted that I am damned and dead to them.

This is not an indictment of those who hurt my oh-too-human heart.

They slayed and filleted me.

I was gutted.

Yet I love them still with a broken but full heart.

It is painful to release people who write you out of their lives for whatever reason.

It is sometimes impossible to be who they want you to be

or who they thought you were,

but if you have ever loved them, it seems to me you will always love them.

Then again, we are not all in the same space when it comes to love and understanding.

Capitalism has created a consciousness of scarcity along with its prosperity gospel.

The economy of grace invites us to accept what we have not and cannot earn:

forgiveness, unconditional love, and mercy.

Of course, we must also be willing to give these away.

We grieve the absence of loved ones from our lives though they are still alive.

All we can do is weep and send them a blessing.

We do not have to hate them or turn it on ourselves.

We cannot make them love us,

but they cannot make us stop loving them.

Such is the power of forgiveness.

And if we can forgive others, it is because we have been able to forgive ourselves

for not being perfect.

We must own our mistakes before we can let them go.

“People who haven’t come to at least a minimal awareness of their own shadow side,”

Rohr observes, “will always find someone else to hate, fear, and exclude.”

He continues, “We must compassionately accept the strange way

we humans choose to operate and be willing to work inside it,

but never really buy into it.”

Anger is usually a subconscious effort to leapfrog over sadness.

Sadness is open-hearted and attracts miracles; anger only deflects them.

We have feelings, but they need not have us.

Our inability to control our feelings can be seen as a blessing,

an often-necessary way of falling into grace and ecstasy

by humbly accepting our shortcomings so we can beginto forgive ourselves and others.

We can stop fighting the current and let the river of life flow as it will regardless.

Just as our sexuality is a riverbed cut early in life,

and the river will find its way around all obstacles in the bed,

our bedrock assumptions are gradually worn away

as the living water finds our much deeper riverbed.

We can recognize the beauty in our brokenness and learn to trust our wings

when we fall.

We are never alone when we feel alone.

In forgiveness is freedom.

Freedom is simply remembering that we have always been free

to hang on to grievance until we have nothing left to lose.

Our very woundedness is our portal to healing and happiness if we can let it go.

It may be helpful to revisit the parable of the Prodigal Son.

I could work up anger at all three characters,

but I can also empathize with the older son, the younger son, and the father.

When I discover that all three live within my own being,

I have used the parable in the way it was intended.

Cynthia Bourgeault calls it “a tool for personal transformation of consciousness.”

The beauty part is that I first forgive the profligate son

who left home and lost his inheritance.

I can relate to that part, but if I had it all to do over,

I would eat a few more apples before returning,

now knowing how to live and love both inside and outside the Garden.

Fuck it, I forgive myself so I can completely forget the mistakes

that stood in the way of my truth:

I am the artist and I am the art.

Yes, created by the mysterious mind of All That Is to play my part and to get swept up

by the current of timeless wholeness and health.

Medication and meditation will both fail me in the end,

but medication saved me from suicidal ideation

when betrayal caused me to forget my self-of-selves

and meditation was a mini-rehearsal for the hour of my death.

That moment when my identity is given over to the mercy of losing my old life

and all its attachments.

I have eaten the wheaten wafer.

It tasted more like Plato (body and soul are at war)

than like Jesus (body and soul are already one).

God was in me, but it seemed I was not in God.

I missed Him when he was descending the ladder I was feverishly climbing.

Conflicted and addicted to religion, alcohol, sex, drugs, and approval,

I was not aware that “God” is a metaphor for God,

taken too literally while life and love were to be found at the bottom.

My story was too narrow because I did not break it wide open and become whole.

I weeded and I worried when I could have sat on my favorite rock and cursed or cried.

Or written a poem:

My heart is an abandoned woodshed filled with forgotten junk. 

Rusted toys, green pop bottles, and fruit jars fallen and cracked.

Scraps of greyed lumber and firewood stacked in decaying chunks,

A dirt floor, a hole in the roof where the blue comes through, and the door fallen off its track.

My soul is a forgotten country church with its doors off their hinges

Letting in sacred nature to fill the soft mossy chairs and the tabernacle is bare.

Water has turned wild grapes into wine on which binge the finches

Lift up the stone, and there thou shalt find me, cleave the wood, and I am there.

My story let me live comfortably in fear of losing that comfort

instead of living joyfully in compassion and love.

My sin was lack of confidence, the fear that those I love could not love me;

my gift was that I loved so deeply.

Everyone, that is, except me.

I got kicked in the head time and time again but I had agency:

I could forgive the abusers because I knew I was no better myself.

I simply forgot I was no worse.

I forgot my function was to forgive, my purpose to love.

Love is a decision, not a feeling.

It has been looking for me while I was busy loving.

I am here, and therefore so are you.

Where else would you be?

The future is not an hour away,

yet I have been hanging onto the way things were twenty years ago.

How many transformations do we have to go through

when we spend too much time resisting change?

The more memories we make, the more time we spend remaking them

when we could co-create something new and progressive.

And I repeat, sometimes progress is retrograde

if what we call to mind is the ancient truth we know,

not the nostalgia we lazily choose for self-soothing.

I have spent too much of my life remembering the wrong things.

Maybe when Faulkner said, “The past is never dead; it’s never even past,”

he meant a past before time interrupted it.

Maybe when Shakespeare said, “The past is prologue”

he too was referencing a more distant past.

I just didn’t go far enough back in the past, the past that is also epilogue.

Prometheus and Epimetheus were identical twins from one egg.

I will do the gods one better and go back before the womb.

I will leave tomorrow behind.

Now I seek to become nobody, to disappear into the desert

so the person I really am can find me.

With no thing left to lose, no content to protect and project.

I approach the silence as an inner desert which I enter to hear

the womb-truth I had forgotten.

Bewildered, we emerge from the wilderness experience transformed.

There is no distinction between natural and supernatural.

The first time I went to the desert on a vision quest

I meditated atop a mesa in New Mexico.

I sat in the relentless sun until I fell into a reverie

in which I found myself in a pit of dark depression

from which I escaped by falling upward,

drawn by a mystical light and supported

by the roots of a rose bush.

We do not hit bottom in our nightmares

because our subconscious knows we are falling forever

into the deathless depths of eternity.

My native guides had to wake me because I was out of my body

which was exposed to more sun, and for longer, than I could normally tolerate.

I arose feeling renewed and fully hydrated.

They say when you are in the moment, you are in the infinite.

In the sacrament of the present moment,

we need not wait for any supernatural apparition.

Hours later, back in Albuquerque, I opened my bottle of anxiety pills

and a puff of white dust escaped.

My friend, who was also my AA sponsor,

suggested it might be time to forsake the medication

and build on the meditation I received on the mesa in the desert.

Now here I am twenty years later standing at the trailhead

of the North Table Mountain Mesa in Golden.

It is a warm October day in Covid time and I wear a mask

to protect others I will meet on the trail.

I slip it off when I find myself alone, no one in sight.

I rest on a flat boulder and compose a song to express my melancholy

over missing a concert at Red Rocks Amphitheater

by a musician with daddy issues whose blues often pierced me to my soul:

“A Song for Justin”

Well, the rich man has his cocaine

And the poor man has his meth.

Most men have their alcohol

Or pot smoke on their breath.

Depriving himself of oxygen

And exhaling only death,

He could live without success,

But not without meaning, I guess.

We asked him, “What is wrong with you?”

The problem is, he hurt.

We asked him, “What is wrong with you?”

We should have asked, “Why do you hurt?”

The mystery of life is an abyss;

He could never get to the bottom of it.

Free falling upward was bliss

The sky had no ceiling to hit

He sang, “I’m in a lot of pain and I need some help.

I don’t dare tell nobody else.”

Boosting the pleasure would minimize the pain,

But happiness and pleasure are not the same.

Now the blues they come to cover us over,

They numb the loneliness and despair

Of the lovelorn, heart torn, and forlorn.

We can only listen to the pain we cannot share.

I take a drink of water and resume my ascent.

I breathe deeply. I exhale slowly. I step mindfully.

I breathe deeper still.

Inhaling is inspiration; exhaling is giving back.

I will stop when I get to the top, if I get to the top.

My destination is simply this breath, this step.

Now this breath, this step.

Just this.

I pause to take pictures to preserve the moment.

But the moment is gone.

Nature does not cling.

I do.

I trip on a rock.

A random memory flits across my mind

leaving me unmindful of my breathing and walking:

I go to the side barn door and grab the long-handled pitchfork

It is a sultry, stifling summer day after a morning rain

The air is barely evaporated water

Breathing is labor

Brown mud oozes between my bare toes

I walk down to the ditch crossing

To see how much water is flowing through the culvert

Not so much I can’t scramble down the slope

Careful to avoid falling into the pool 

Formed by water frothing from the metallic mouth

That pierces the crossing road

Too late in the season for suckers, I toss the fork aside

And slither into the culvert and straddle the flow

By planting one foot on each side of the corrugated tunnel

Moving robotically to the other opening

Where the water comes in

The circle of light widens until I emerge into it

I climb up the less steep ditch bank

Picking up the fork I head for home

Hoping to at least come across a snake to impale on the fork

But the road is still too wet for snakes

Of course, there are no random thoughts.

Yet I snap out of my daydream and focus on this breath, this step.

This breath, this step.

One less breath of air in my lifetime supply.

One less step in my measured allotment of steps.

But this one is the only one that matters.

I breathe deeper still.

I am still conscious of being conscious.

I am still.

I see the energy flowing through the stirring and the still.

Just as ice crystal holds the sun for a moment,

I am still an instant and I hold the universe.

Wholeness holds me.

I hold, then release pain and pleasure with every breath I take.

Here I am.

I am where my feet are.

I am alive today and I am taking everything in so I can distill all illusions

into true essence,

by recognizing the truth in the silence of the voice

that speaks to me without words.

I am in that liminal space where past, present, and future come together

in a moment of readiness.

Matter itself leaves my mind as I fall upward.

The air gets thinner and my brain receives less oxygen as I begin to huff for air.

The light from a pink/orange sun is diffused by smoke

from a forest fire many miles away.

Time being the greatest distance between places we’ve been,

I find myself not in Colorado but back in Minnesota

experiencing the hottest summer on record.

The days are as hazy as my memory as I lay dying.

The Fort Nelson smoke is the result of zombie fires—also called overwintering fires. 

They are flameless smolders that burn slowly below the surface,

and are kept alive thanks to an organic soil called peat moss

common in North America's boreal forest and to thick layers of snow

that insulate them from the cold.

We debate whether the world will end in fire or ice.

“Nothing exists except atoms and space; everything else is opinion” (Democritus).

In my opinion, our earthly end will happen as we are engulfed

by the fire of the Sacred Heart. 

Jesus said to his disciples, “I came to bring fire to the earth,

and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49).

An epiphany promptly rejected: I am The Christ.

No! Not me. I have been crucified once; it did not make me more loving.

But something in the smoke won’t take no for an answer.

“I can hear music—sweet, sweet music”…The Beach Boys…”High on the mountain of love”…Johnny Rivers.

Just as snow in the high country sometimes skips the liquid phase

and turns straight from solid to vapor,

I am sublimated, a plume of snow lifting from the peak and vanishing into thin air.

I gasp painfully for breath, dimly aware that I am on a ventilator,

clear plastic tubes taped to my nostrils.

Thirsty…slake my thirst.

Three years old…1959…pneumonia…the nurse unties one of my balloons, the yellow one, and ties it to the crib of the child who has no balloons…Old John gives me rides in his wheel chair…I am old now…not visiting hours yet…the oxygen stops pumping…now disconnected… Soon my parents will come and take me home…the tomb will become the womb…thirst…no water… I always filled everyone’s glass…Where is my drink?...“Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain”…The Cascades…“I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day”…Bobby Vee…“I saw raindrops on my window, joy is like the rain”…Medical Mission Sisters…summer of 1969…two weeks of Catholic prep school camp…homesick…praying to the bone fragment of Saint Odelia for Judy Garland at Crosier Seminary…sharing a “cup of kindness” and a snack with the Brothers before a game of war ball.

I was not thirsty when I signed my living will.

I dream a droplet of rainwater falls into a river.

The drop disappears yet the river flows many miles

Until it becomes one with the sea and ceases to be.

The ocean rocks endlessly but one day its surface forms clouds

Out of which a single drop lands on my face and I vaporize.

My level of consciousness goes deeper than the riverbed that once seemed so firm.

It now falls through the bottom of the ocean deep beyond the photic zone

Only to rise up on the side of the world my clay feet never trod.

Emptied, for all was spent extravagantly on love.

Who says dreams do not come true?

My most persistent and recurring night dream has been of flying, floating, gliding.

It is manifest at last.

My rich interior life has replaced the insane conformity of outward appearances.

Memories once became more important than dreams.

Now the dreams have returned, because of course.

The material me was the projection of a mistaken thought.

No longer lonely as Ferlinghetti.

Me, me, me. Gone. No more. Never was. Only us.

The journey from Love to Longing and back again was without time and distance.

“The Doors.”

These were my last lucid words before words failed and blessed silence would come to consume me.

I have read words I’ve never spoken.

I’ve written words I’ve never said.

Now I was saying words I’ve never even heard of, just as my Mother did in the end.

My care team must have thought I was in sight of the pearly gates.

My beloved family, gathered around my bed, chuckles.

This includes my precious wife, my sons and their beautiful wives,

and my beloved grandchildren.

Conscious of how fortunate I have been to have loved

romantically, platonically, and familially,

I am most grateful to have unconditionally loved three sets of babies

who brought me the greatest joy at various stages of my life—

my youngest sister and brother, my sons, and my grandchildren.

I am daffy for my children and grandchildren.

I would do anything for them and never count the cost.

How we played and laughed without inhibition.

My babies made me forget anything else mattered

and time stood still when I was around them.

They break my heart wide open with their sweetness, vulnerability, and purity.

A tear rolls down my cheek.

One of many I have stored up over the years.

I have spent too much of my life learning how to express my feelings

before I got angry or depressed from staunching them.

Baby boys are born as innocent, sensitive, and loving as baby girls,

but we teach the boys early not to cry or show their emotions.

We tell them to suck it up and tough it out.

We accept and even encourage fighting and lack of affection from our boys.

We send them the message early on that gentleness is weakness.

Our boys too often feel inadequate to the task of earning their father’s approval,

if, that is, they are lucky enough to have a full-time father.

The Boy Code is strict, demanding, and toxic to the psyches of our boys.

We need to ease up on them;

the cost of the stress we place on boys is too high.

Too often the result is violent men when the fault line fractures.

Too late I learned that human tears have a scent that eases male aggression.

I sat with my boys, my arm around their shoulders,

when they were up against something they felt they couldn’t express.

I sat with them in unconditional loving silence until they broke.

Their tears contained a paradox that both hurt and cheered me.

They left in a much better place, their shoulders relaxed, their minds relieved.

They would be good men and fathers.

I think it’s OK for even a president to cry when school children are killed

by boys who never cried.

I do too.

My sons shimmer on

Paddleboards on the blue lake

A breeze cools my face

In the next instant, the boys are grown and our grandchildren join us at the lake.

Our yearly week at the lake with the family is sacred.

Waking, I throw open the windows and the morning breeze stirs the leaves,

A balm that refreshes my soul and blows away the night terrors.

The nightmarish mandrake shriek becomes the warble of the amorous loons.

The scent of flowering basswoods permeates the resort like a benediction.

I breathe deeply and with great gratitude.

As I exhale, grace fills the empty spaces.

Anxiety has no place here where we set aside our fears and clear a space on the beach for love.

The blossoms will fall and we will leave here, rejuvenated and temporarily changed.

Sun-soaked days and campfire nights are perennial.

They will return and hopefully so will we.

Still, we glimpse eternity in the sunrise and our souls long for the expansive shore

That disappears in mist as we paddle closer.

We do not lose faith because we are grateful for this holy instant

As we stop rowing and watch the water trickle from the oars.

“Just be still an instant and go home,” the waves lapping at the canoe seem to say.

     Golden autumn days

     Cornsilk sun has lost its burn

     Silver moonlit nights

I am fully aware of my family’s presence and dimly aware of their beautiful laughter.

They get me.

My wife and sons know what the nurses do not:

I was once a trivia geek who specialized in 50s-70s rock music.

Thank you, red radio, for all the hours my father said I wasted listening to you

when you were my only friend.

“Break on through to the other side” could be heard coming quietly

from the room down the hall.

“Oh, The Doors. I see,” one of my lovely daughters-in-law chimes in.

And break through I did.

The gates came crashing down along with my brain waves.

How many people did I give myself away to in my younger years

thinking they would take care of me and give me my identity?

How many green dock lights seduced me like Siren song?

How much blondness and dark hair? How many blue eyes and brown?

How much muscle and bosom, cologne and perfume?

I was a second child having a second childhood.

I just wanted to be held.

I didn’t know the prison door was never locked.

It doesn’t matter now that I have learned to choose my memories better.

My last sight is the gaze of love from the eyes of those who made my life worth living.

My eyes water and my heart swells with the fullness of grace

That delivered my American Dream and love so true it hurt and healed.

My chosen family taught me love is not just the way it makes me feel.

It is an energy that flows, or not.

We must be aware of that which breaks the flow and choose love instead.

When I was in competition, I was not in love.

Love transcends winning and losing.

It is not an emotion attached to memories.

Whatever it is, it makes us more sensitive to both joy and sorrow.

It gives us a sense of nothing to lose and nothing to gain.

All that we have ever loved deeply has become a part of us.

“A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love,”

as C.S. Lewis observed.

Love helps us understand people who seem not to deserve our love.

It teaches us to see them all the way through to the depths of their souls.

We can empathize with them when we are in a state of grace.

Love forgives that which never really held us hostage without our consent.

The best way to witness a miracle, aside from observing how fast a baby learns,

is to forgive someone.

The illusion of powerlessness loses any power we gave it and we set our hostages free

when we accept freedom.

This I learned from the people who made me a person by loving me unconditionally,

a lesson learned in the second half of life.

The time after the career years of analysis and judgment.

The time of synthesizing the parts that remained real and true.

The time I no longer asked but affirmed and created.

When simple syllogisms returned:

               1. God is good.

               2. God is all things.

               3. Therefore, all things are good.

Thus, these teachers are for the most part unnamed in this memoir

because I chose to write mainly of the formative, not the transformative, years.

The time when Jesus’ name was of more import than his teachings.

The time before a whole crowd of voices in my head refused to shut up,

causing me vigor mortis and steady headaches.

It is simply more fun to relive the experience of hearing lyrics like

“Oh, Denise, dooby-doo” and “Do wha diddy diddy dum diddy do”

than any of the more sublime songs written since.

The magic of life before adulthood is just more flavorful

than the more rational preoccupations of no longer growing up.

Much in the spicy way a damp windowsill smelled when I let in

the morning breeze before Covid.

(From my journal: I sit at my desk in frustration because the words are not coming when a big gray fox trots across our suburban back yard and stops at the edge of the trees to look at me through the patio door to my right. Earlier, a bobcat meandered across the patio of my son in Colorado. My wife tells me to put it in the book. I too quickly reject the idea because though it has never happened before, I fail to immediately respond to the miracle of a freaking fox on my lawn or the video of the bobcat.  Wow, when did I get so jaded? I need to actually pause to reflect on the concurrence of the rare wildlife sightings. But what of the daily visit from the charm of goldfinches at the birdfeeder outside my picture window to my left? I do not see the birds as they really are. Their two-toned feathers are from the 60s in my mind. Why is it so hard to let the present be new and wondrous? Fox fled and finches flown, their images remain until I swing upside down again, my ankles in the clasp of dementia. Without segue my wife and I are on the road again between St. Cloud and Moorhead listening to a podcast about mystical awakening, the SUV smelling of the cedar chips and cocoa shell mulch I picked up earlier at the garden center. The lilacs and apple trees along I-94 are in full bloom. The new leaves are every conceivable shade of green. My feelings are bouncing around the car like the balls in a Bingo caller’s cage. None sink deep enough to establish a mood. My thoughts jump from dashboard to rear window in the car that can barely contain them. I switch the Spotify app from podcast to playlist where the folk and acoustic mix is all over the place from Nick Drake to Nikki Lane. Our destination is a Willie Nelson concert at Bluestem Amphitheater. Hopefully his mellow vibe will center my mind and free my monkey mind for a time. “Just Breathe” croons father and son. For a euphoric moment the joy of being there surfaces. The transcendent Within of things. The very life essence before life takes on form and all molecular elements are fixed on the periodic table. If only I can ignore the steady stream of fried fast food and the cold beer carried past me by fans less interested in the music than other addictions. It saddens me beyond the power of second hand weed to reinforce the soulfulness emanating from the stage. I can’t beat them and I won’t join them. I choose to suffer silently the consequences of consciousness with a smile. I will just inject the springtime into my veins obviating any need to drink other than a chaser of roadhouse music. And the beat goes on.)

Where was I? Ah yes, the first year after college when one tends to take stock of life philosophies in one’s journal before settling down long enough to establish some life goals. Ho Ho!

From my journal (1 January 1980):

I have three life philosophies which seem to show up in most everything I write or think. My thinking has been most strongly influenced by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville. These are the big three (ideas) in my mind:

1.      What you don’t have is what you want (“The grass is always greener….”), which relates to:

2.      Unity (“All is One”), which relates to:

3.      Confidence—light and dark, “good” and “evil”, are all parts of the same thing; one can see both sides clearly but to survive must have faith and confidence in goodness and light and refuse to (dwell on) the darkness.

Looking back 43 years later, it is uncanny how firmly these youthful precepts

have held up throughout those years as they, along with their corollaries,

would come to undergird the life I would lead.

All would be tested by the prevailing paradigms of my culture.

All would serve me, none more significantly than developing that

“attitude of gratitude” that would make the dark times more bearable.

And bear up I did.

Until it was time to let up.

I will live on, not in the pages of this book but as an algorithm in cyber space.

A hologram without consciousness.

They say your life flashes before your eyes before you die.

What they didn’t know is that the film runs in reverse,

like cutting through the rings on a tree trunk until the center is severed

and the tree falls, baby and all.

And you end up where you started:  

unconscious that there was ever a dream of a life separate

from the higher consciousness of all the limitless bliss that exists.

Or oblivion. We do not know. If so, we will never know.

Mystery resists knowing while history persists in growing

its ranks with seekers and believers and agnostics and all others.

Tombstones are temporary.

Earth and stars are temporal too.

Whatever is ever?

One last poem—a rap, nonetheless—as nonsensical words collide,

uninvited, in my dying mind even as the felt experience of life dims:

“Univocity”

A nation of vexation.

Conflicted, addicted

The vector of victim and victor.

Opposites attract and distract.

Concave + Convex = Sex!

Yin and Yang in one Big Bang

Create the geometry of symmetry.

Simplicity turns to complexity.

Complexity produces perplexity.

Perplexity yields to harmony.

Harmony is non-binary.

Resolving dichotomy is elementary.

Clarity and mystery are complementary.

Dualistic thinking makes insipid poetry.

While leaving fruitless the Bodhi Tree.

The unitive mind accepts the paradox

That tragedy and triumph come in one box.

The oxymoron of sweet sorrow

Promises reunion tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

So, unravel the tattered tapestry;

Stop the travesty.

Revere otherliness.

Embrace the loveliness.

Accept reciprocated hugs.

Blend the whites and the blacks

Into a new wax.

Dandle the child with the candle.

No longer red and blue,

But a new tone and hue.

See the colors bleed into one.

Homo or hetero or both or none,

One is just sexual,

And intellectual.

Uniformity is not unity.

Peace becomes a possibility

When conformity is no longer normality

And dissent is no longer insanity.

We can ride our distinctions

Into extinction,

Or celebrate the unity

Devoid of personality,

Surrounded by a seductive sea

That crawls and sprawls,

Knocking down walls

Across the land

As we clasp hands

While the ice water displaces

All the spaces

That we stood on,

Drew blood on,

Were misunderstood on.

Led to believe that we were bound

Until death to earth,

Not until rebirth

When we are drowned

And rise,

Not to the skies

But to the end of lies

Where authenticity abides.

The One and only,

Alone, but never lonely.

The infinite “I Am.”

The Lamb.

A song in one verse

Unheard now by a silent universe.

Until then, meet the Flintstones,

Be the Flintstones.

Get lost in your child,

Find yourself in your child.

Forget about your isness,

Like it’s none of your business.

Live in the sun,

Make a mission of having fun.

Live in the rain and the snow,

Listen to the wind blow.

Watch the river flow.

Be still and know.

"You don’t have to be religious in order to open to wonder. You only have to reclaim a sliver of what you once knew as a child” (Richard Rohr).

We long for the good old days and a return to innocence when we are old and world weary, unable to get beyond the feeling our best days are behind us. It is a marvelous design of the mind that we do not recall much of the darkness of those times. I would like to forget the day when I was five years old and my cousin and I killed Grandma’s baby chicks.

One fine spring day Mom woke us up by shouting up the stairway: “Wake up sleepyheads. The day’s half over.” Now Mom never lied, but she had a way of exaggerating. If the day were half over at eight o’ clock in the morning, we would have been back in bed by noon. “Get your gladrags on and make it snappy. We are going over home today,” she announced. “Over home” was her term for Grandma and Grandpa Key’s farm. It was a magical place and my sister and I loved to go there. My older brother preferred to spend his time with Dad at home. Today he was in school, however. Why did we spend so much time wishing we were older?

I pulled on my corduroy jeans, buttoned up my plaid short-sleeved shirt, put on socks and my black and white PF Flyers, then I practically flew down to the kitchen where I ate my corn flakes out of a pink Melmac bowl. Getting ready for the day took my three-year-old sister longer because Mom had to dress her up like a doll and put her hair in a ponytail. I was already in the back seat of our butter-yellow ’56 Chevy when Mom and Suzie-Q came out of the house. A pair of oak trees flanked the end of our driveway from which Mom turned right onto the bumpy gravel road that led to the paved highway. We slowly approached the steel and plank bridge that crossed the Mud River, a thrill that always took our breath away, especially when the river was deep in the spring and the suckers were running. The highway ran four miles west from our county road before it hit a dead end at Six Mile Corner. (It was six miles from our town.) Forty miles to the north was Roseau; forty miles to the southwest was Thief River Falls, both settled on rivers proportionately bigger than the Mud our home town seemed to think of as defense from the north. Mom turned left and we soon left the highway to head two miles south on more gravel (or mud) to our destination. We could see our grandparents’ pair of tall cottonwoods from the highway. At this point our excitement grew unbearable. “We’ll be there in jig time,” Mom would say.

She liked doing crossword puzzles because she knew words. She also had a vocabulary like Lewis Carroll; she called us “blatherskytes,” “nincompoops,” or “rapskallions” when she got flustered. She enjoyed her kids though and she was fun to be around. She would enthrall us with her musical voice reciting little ditties like, “A little bitty tear let me down, spoiled my act as a clown” and “That’s the story of, that’s the glory of love.” We didn’t like it when she went on her monthly shopping trips to Thief River or Roseau and left us with an aunt or a grandma. That could be fun too, but we missed Mom and the days grew long waiting for her to return. She always remembered to buy us some little toy or book. She must have missed us too. Her favorite color was sunny yellow, her perfume was Apple Blossom, and she habitually twirled her blonde hair.

Being “pleasantly plump” during the years she was raising kids was a source of sorrow to Dad who could eat like a horse and stay slim. She was as beautiful as he was handsome, but nothing offended me more than when people were put down for being overweight. The man who graded our gravel road stopped to talk to Kenny, my skinny brother, one afternoon when we were riding our Yamaha together. The maintenance man remarked, “How do you get that thing to go with Lard Ass on the back?” That left a mark, but now I know more about where snarky remarks come from. The man was borderline obese himself. Skinny people like Mom’s sister-in-law who once taunted, “I wonder how Arlyne would look in a party dress,” would have been lucky to have half Mom’s heart.

Mom had the most beautiful handwriting, which I copied even before I started school. As a result, the compliment I have received most in life is, “You have really nice handwriting…for a boy.” (I would blush feverishly every time.) She bought us a Brother manual typewriter one Christmas, so I typed “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country” so many times I was the fastest typist in the class in high school, which elicited high praise from the business teacher who once said my typewriter was “smoking” during a timed test. Sure, I was jealous of the golden boys who could dribble a ball and got the highest accolades from the community, but I compensated by developing perfectionist tendencies. For example, I never missed a day of school in my life and my tiny Perfect Attendance pin meant more to me than the trophies the athletes won. Their trophies tarnished and they, of course, had troubles of their own. They peaked early in life because they did not need to study to get approval. We “losers” were forced to develop a fellowship based on a belief that everyone matters. As my guru Richard Rohr has written, “It’s not the kind of belonging you find at the top of the ladder among those who think they are the best, but at the bottom among all the rest, with all the other failures and losers who have either climbed the ladder and fallen, or never gotten up enough gumption to climb in the first place.” Unfortunately, that sense of belonging often only comes later in life—if it comes at all—when we develop the tools of self-acceptance and tolerance of others. I would spend many years audaciously trying to join the cool kids, which I attained to some degree, but at a terrible loss of innocence and authenticity that hurt my mother more than it did my father. Her religion required she save my soul.

As a child, the worst thing I could imagine when I felt like torturing myself was losing my mother. We felt guilty when we disobeyed her and almost preferred getting caught and punished with the wash stick. It never hurt much when she smacked our bottoms with it unless we tried covering our butts with our fingers. The two siblings who were not being punished would be struck with high level Schadenfreude when the offending kid caterwauled from the sting. If we cried too dramatically Mom would scold, “Oh, for crying out loud. You’re just putting on now. Stop this rigmarole you numbskull or I’ll give you something to cry about.” But she never did. Her anger was brief and watered down by love. She worked hard inside and out as farm women do: painting the farm buildings, gardening, sewing, quilting, washing clothes and hanging them out to dry, keeping house, redecorating when styles changed, cooking full meals, and baking the best bread, pies, cakes, and cookies around. Her only guilty pleasures were maple nut ice cream, watching her “stories”, and smoking when Dad wasn’t around. She also drove over to see her folks and her sister more often than Dad liked, but then he did get to see his mother almost every day as his folks lived only a mile away. Who wouldn’t want to see a mother like his who gave you big hugs and the feeling she was genuinely happy to see you?

My mother’s birth certificate has her name typed out as Arlene Ida Kiesow, though her real name is Arlyne Ann Kiesow. Grandpa would have gone to the courthouse to apply for the birth certificate. He could be a stubborn German and he probably tried to put one over on Grandma by going with the alternate spelling of the first name and giving his mother’s name for Mom’s middle name. Needless to say, Grandma would have corrected that on both counts when she took charge of the baptism certificate. There is no way one of her children would not have had a Christian moniker somewhere.

Late in life, my mother had a terrific sense of humor as her nurses could attest. When she stopped fighting her memory care placement, she delighted the nursing staff with her wit. When they asked how she was feeling, her retort was, “With my fingers.” One nurse who was especially fond of Mom playfully asked, “Who’s better looking, you or me?” When Mom said, “I am,” the nurse teased, “You’re supposed to say me.” Mom quickly replied, “You want me to lie on a Sunday?”

On one of my visits to the memory care unit I heard Mom say to another resident, “I’m sure there’s an answer to that, but I can’t understand what you said.” I wish I had thought of that.

My sister Susan asked her one time if she had slept well. Mom: “How would I know? I wasn’t awake.”

Of course, it was a fall that put her in the nursing home to begin with, just as it had been for Dad a couple of years earlier. No wonder the elderly fear falling. Mom bravely tried to conceal her pain as she held on to the counter while getting around the kitchen. She had lived independently since Dad’s Parkinson’s had advanced beyond being able to stay on the farm. Mom was already struggling with dementia and could be quite cross at times, which was out of character for her, but quite understandable at that time when one feels they have to deny their memory loss. It broke our hearts when she had to be hospitalized because for some time she was under the delusion that people were coming to take the house she cared for so lovingly. Thus, it was with a combination of that anger and wit that when she said to me in the hospital, “Get me out of this bed,” and I told her, “You just had three screws put in your hip,” she came back with “I didn’t ask you to pull my leg off.” When she lost her sense of syntax, her word salads were still delicious, never more so than when she self-soothed like a baby with the babble of late-stage language loss: “yodayodayodayodayoda.…”

My Grandma Nash was pretty feisty and surprisingly funny too when she told us about a conversation she had with her roommate in the Karlstad Nursing Home at age 94. Her sons had arranged for her to have a television in her room so she could watch her stories. Apparently the “Old Bag,” as Grandma referred to the woman in the next bed, was afflicted with dementia which left her cantankerous and deluded. One day she told Grandma the TV was hers and Grandma said, “No, my sons got that for me.” The other woman then yelled, “Well, shove it up your ass!” Sweet Grandma Palma calmly said, “No, thanks, I think it would fit better up yours.”

Mom never fully came out of the fog from the anesthesia and I cannot bear to think now as she lies here serenely across the hall from Dad five years later how neglected and abused she was in the first nursing home before we found out and could get her into the same facility as Dad.

At first, they had committed her to a cold and largely empty psych hospital when she unknowingly broke too many rules in the nursing home as she searched for the cigarettes that had been taken from her so abruptly. After lengthy and costly testing, it was determined she had “dementia” as we already knew. When she was returned to the nursing home, she was placed in the locked memory care unit and overmedicated, then ignored as she missed meals sleeping in soiled sheets with an untreated urinary tract infection, high fever, and dehydration. Twice she was discovered in this state by a visiting niece and had to be admitted to the hospital.

Dad was also neglected at the nursing home after his fall when his doctor decided, without asking the family, that he should be put on a DNR since he was failing to thrive. When my brother found out he was being denied food and water, he quickly arranged for an ambulance to transport him to a better care facility close to where my sister lived. It was a great blessing when Mom joined him and my sister could keep a close watch on them and they could sit together in their wheelchairs to eat or watch TV.

I also lived close enough that I could visit frequently as I am today, sitting with Mom while she sleeps and my mind turns back to that day many year ago when we went Over Home.

When we finally took the right turn into Grandma and Grandpa’s farmyard we would look to see if Grandpa was sitting in the shade of his enormous boxelder trees. Today he was not home. Most likely gone visiting one of his five brothers in his Model A. All six brothers had their own small farm within spitting distance of Grandpa’s farm, which isn’t much of an exaggeration given Grandpa’s skill at ejecting snuff juice after years of practice. When the Chevy came to a stop in front of the small white farmhouse, we were admonished to scrape our feet on the blade embedded in the cement sidewalk before going into the house. We stepped over the angle worms dried like crispy noodles on the crumbling sidewalk.

“Say, Mom’s lilacs have really come to time,” our Mom remarked as we stopped to admire the oversized purple heads on Grandma’s prize flowers. We couldn’t resist taking a sniff of their sweet perfume as well.

The entry to our grandparents’ house was enclosed by two doors, a necessity in cold climates. It was a drop zone for barn clothes and boots. There was a collection of Grandpa’s wooden walking canes in the corner by the two concrete steps leading up to the inside door. The smell of that “porch” was a good, clean smell emanating from cool cement and whatever fresh vegetable was in season. In late summer there would be dill hanging heads down from the ceiling. The entry scent was just a teaser for the wonderful smells of whatever Grandma was cooking, and she was always cooking something on her deep well stove. Grandma fairly lived in her kitchen when she was not in her garden, feeding chickens, or in her bedroom on her knees praying the rosary in the twilight after supper.

To this day when I hear the song "Let the Children Pick Flowers" I think about my beloved Grandma Kiesow. She would have been made a saint today too if the Pope had known her. Aside from being devout, loving, and the most humble and hospitable person I have ever known, she had a green thumb and grew the biggest, most amazing vegetable garden every year. It was eye-popping. It was the miracle she performed on earth, year after year. As a small child, the part I liked best was her spectacular flowers. She had a wonderful flower bed, but she also grew rows and rows of zinnias, marigolds, and sweet peas among the potatoes, beans, tomatoes, etc. I can see her in her straw hat and her apron with big pockets. I can still hear her chuckle as she told us her funny stories as she let us pick eggs with her once the chickens were fed. She would also let us help pick the fresh peas and cucumbers she would cream to go with her homemade bread and fried chicken. That was great fun, but one of the greatest joys of my life was that she let me pick her flowers because she knew I appreciated the magic spell they cast with their heavenly fragrance and gaudy colors. Yes, I guess you could say I was a gramma's boy, and I am proud of it. I think of her even now as the tulips, daffodils, and peonies send up their shoots, a living legacy of Gramma Key who personified Toni Morrison’s adage, “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough.”

Today she was baking bread and her arthritic knuckles were buried deep in bread dough resting on the kitchen table which was coated with flour she had sifted like heavy snow. She loved having company and neighbors came from far and wide for her country cooking. “How are you little dickens?” she greeted us as we hugged her waist before dashing to the kitchen table to hug our teenage aunt, Fifi, who was polishing her nails as she smoked a Salem menthol cigarette. An unmarried aunt could be counted on for words of wisdom. Ours didn’t scold when we made mistakes; she merely remarked, “Every little pig has to poke its snout in the hot slop.” Mom would soon pull up a chair and the two sisters would start playing Canasta while gossiping not unlike Victorian dowagers discussing whoever among their coterie was the biggest “battle ax” that week. We could have sat and listened all day, and when we were out of their sight we would pretend to smoke anything longer than it was wide. Cold cigarette butts were the best.

Grandma would cut her bread dough into potentially loaf-sized hunks and place them in greased bread pans to rise  just in time to offer us lunch. She was flavoring cold pork sandwiches with salt and pepper for my aunt to take out to my uncle who was preparing the fields for spring planting. As she opened a jar of peaches my aunt started laughing loudly and said, “Say, I’ll bet you those are the peaches you canned last summer. That day you sent Dale to the outhouse with the peach papers. I looked out the window just in time to see the peach crate thrown into the air and the pink papers floating down like peony petals.” Here she stopped to catch her breath and dry her eyes which were wet from laughing before continuing the story. “I ran out to see what was happening and all Dale had to say was, ‘I seen a bee.’ Oh my, I can still see those papers flying around. Funniest thing I’ve ever seen.” Everyone in that kitchen seemed to agree by the level of laughter at my expense. Now it wasn’t that Grandma and Grandpa didn’t have a small indoor biffy by then, but old habits die hard and the wrappings from fresh fruit were far superior to the pages of last season’s Montgomery Ward catalog which must have contained 3M abrasive.

“Oh my garsh!” Aunt Fifi was still laughing as she took the big lunch bucket and headed out the door to take it to the field. Then Grandma turned her attention to feeding the rest of us. As she was laying out homemade bread, churned butter, spun honey from the hives on their farm, her special strawberry preserves, saucers full of canned peaches from her root cellar, and a cold jug of whole milk, I couldn’t wait any longer for one of her sugar cookies, so I was sneakily removing the top from Grandma’s chicken-shaped cookie jar when Mom called from the small living room where she was watching The Guiding Light, “What’s going on out there?” I sheepishly sang out, “I’m just a lookin’ for a home,” a line I remembered from a song I had heard on Grandma’s kitchen radio. Grandma and Mom both burst into fits of laughter. When Grandma wound down to just a chuckle, she asked, “Where did you get that song from?” I quickly quipped, “Oh, it’s just a little ditty I’ve been working on.” She and Mom howled even louder than before. I liked making people laugh.

After lunch, as Grandma’s bread was popped into the oven to bake and cool in time for supper, my sister and I raced for the best place on the “davenport” to rest in the cool quiet broken only by the pendulum clock on the wall as it kept its comforting rhythmic ticking. Before long a car pulled into the yard and my other aunt with her flock of young kids burst noisily through the kitchen door without knocking.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” Auntie T. exclaimed when she saw us. She was always tickled pink to see her nieces and nephews. I knew Grandma would soon be laying out a second lunch for them. This is where Aunt Theresa got her love of feeding anyone and everyone who showed up. Guests could always count on a lunch of goodies from her garden along with her famous potato salad and a jelly roll or tray of cinnamon twists. This despite doing the laundry, milking the cows, leading the daily rosary, and raising ten kids, two of whom were our favorite cousins. Mary was Suzie’s age and they loved playing dolls; Jane was my age and she was my earliest best friend. (Sometimes we played with dolls too.)

The decibel level quickly passed Grandma’s comfort level, so Mom yelled at us, “Get off your duffs and get outside. It’s hotter than Hades in here.” (Now my parents never swore in front of us, but they sure came close at times. If it were winter, Mom would say, “Spring has sprung, fall has fell. Winter’s here and it’s cold as H-E-Double hockey sticks.) At this point Auntie T. chimed in, “Crimanently you kids. Goodness gracious, sakes alive. There’s more people in this kitchen than you can shake a stick at. Go out, but don’t get into anything.”

Banished from the adult world, Mary and Suzie took off in one direction and Jane and I decided to go check out Grandma’s new baby chicks. They had been delivered in cardboard crates with air holes by the mailman just days before. There in the brooder house just past the large vegetable garden, freshly tilled and ready for planting after Memorial Day, we opened the little wooden door and saw the cute puffs of yellow sleeping in a pile like an oversized downy pillow.

When I was alone in my grandparents’ grass and gravel and garden I would play with the plentiful chicken feathers that blew around the yard. At home I had only pinecones for pretend play, sans chicken feathers. When Jane was around the possibilities multiplied. There was an opportunity for mischief. I don’t know whose idea it was or why the other followed along. We were five. Is that old enough to know better? We were not bad seeds, nor were our brains developed enough to know the difference between killing chickens and killing chicks. We had often seen Grandma and our mothers gut and clean laying hens after Grandpa had chopped their heads off with a hatchet. We had run from the bleeding birds as they chased us around the lawn with some uncanny headless sense. What an uncanny law of attraction! (The closest modern parallel is the Roomba that trips me up no matter which direction I choose to get around it.) We watched in fascination as the grown-ups scalded the feathers loose and denuded the birds down to the pesky pin feathers we had to help pluck.

So, of course, we played grown-ups, my cousin Jane and I, as we took turns with the little metal shovel we found inside the feed sack in the corner of the brood hut. I don’t remember how many little chicks Grandma lost that day, but it was enough to break her heart I’m sure. We must have known we did something wrong because we did not confess to the slaughter though it was easily determined who the culprits were. At five we were not punished harshly, but we eventually developed a conscience and the thought of letting our adored Grandma down would be hard to bear.

There were to be other acts of violence on animals that haunt me to this day: the first time I aimed a BB gun at a barn swallow on the highline wire and shocked myself by hitting her when I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn; the calf that strangled when I was told to tie it up away from her mother so she wouldn’t accidentally lie on top of her and I used a slip knot because it was the only knot I knew; the time I pointed at our neighbor’s dog when my dad threatened to kill the mutt that knocked me down in the mud by leaping at the jug of milk I was carrying from barn to house in my school clothes. (It was our family’s pet dog that knocked me over, not the innocent dog that was beaten to death with the crow bar in the woods behind the barn. How early we learn the biggest reason we do not tell the absolute truth is that our ego tells us if we did, we could not control other people.) The ASPCA would have also taken a dim view of the way my brother once punished the cow I called Barbra due to the shape of her face—I could distinguish differences in cows with the same facility with which I could find similarities between livestock and humans—which roughly approximated that of a neighbor lady by that name. To his eternal shame, my mild-mannered brother stuck her in the eye with the tine of a pitchfork just for doing something cows do. (I don’t remember what.) Yet none of these horrors compared to the guilt compounded by Grandma’s tears.

Years later when I was old enough to help Grandma with her chores, I would shovel feed into a tin bucket from the old one-room schoolhouse Grandpa had moved to the farm to use as a grainery, then tote the feed while Grandma carried a bucket of water we pumped from the well house. We took our pair of pails to the hen house where we fed the laying chickens and gathered the eggs. How exciting to open a hen’s nest and find a rare brown egg among the white ones!  They were as alien as food that wasn’t white at a Norwegian meal. Grandma would sell the eggs she didn’t use to neighbors and save the money for next year’s chicks. (Cloacal kisses were forbidden among Grandma’s Catholic chickens so they did not reproduce.) I see her even now in her straw bonnet tied below her chin, wearing a bib apron the bottom of which she would use as a bowl to hold the eggs she gathered or the berries she found on the bushes. She was humble and she was gentle, a saint in my book. As saints are wont to do, she stayed in the cell of her home and church, much as a hen sits on her eggs unperturbed by that which is not right in front of her. Her daily trips to the henhouse were a pilgrimage, every step a now…now…now across sacred land. The rosary was her daily prayer; gardening and cooking were her meditation.  She encouraged me to read as did my mother and I have loved books for as long as I can remember. Grandma took me from 50 Famous Fairy Tales to Black Beauty. She would take the Sunday paper, which came in the mail on Mondays, and we got to read the funnies which, for me, were a gateway to comic books. What better fuel for fantasy? We were superheroes living our origin stories unaware how even humble roots can produce phenomenal fruit.

If pain and beauty constitute the two faces of God, Grandma knew God intimately for she knew both abundantly in her lifetime, losing a grandson, and a son, and her husband, in that order. The rosary was her shock absorber. Grandma also suffered from chronic stomach problems. The woman who fed everyone who entered her house would often get sick when she ate. She always had a roll of TUMS nearby. Grandpa loved her and took good care of her, but he could be moody and he would go on “sprees” from time to time. At those times he would hound Grandma for her religion, but she never missed church and she brought her six children up Catholic. None of them strayed. Just days before she passed, Grandma talked of sitting alone at her kitchen table with her head down when she heard the door open and looked up to see her deceased son Paul enter the kitchen and say, “Come on, Mom, it’s time to go.” Fittingly, she died in church the following Sunday. Her funeral was on my birthday. I was honored to do the readings. (“How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…”—Luke 13:34.)

When Grandma was raising her brood back in 1950 there was an incident that brought out the mother hen in her.

Anna Mathilda Kiesow was born in Todd County, Minnesota on January 8, 1898. She would die in Thief River Falls Hospital on July 15, 1962 at age 64. Her modest headstone can be found in Jerusalem Cemetery in the heart of “Kiesowville” just a couple of short miles from where she performed the heinous act for which she was to become a local legend.

Annie, as she was called, was not a poet or a musician, but she was a dramatic protagonist who became an artist with the one act of her life in which she had agency. The rest is a story of pain and powerlessness few of us can imagine though maybe it is our duty to try.

Annie was Grandpa Key’s cousin. At age thirty-five she came to live and keep house at the farm of Grandpa’s brother Richard and his son Walter who had hitched a ride on the rails back to Minnesota after his parents divorced and his mother moved him out of state. There was precedence. Grandpa’s brothers Herman and Bill lived as bachelors in the big farmhouse on the original homestead a half mile away from Richard’s place until Bill married Grace, the unwed mother whom they had hired as a live-in housekeeper and cook. The difference was that Grace got to keep and raise her son at the Kiesow farm. Alice had also come to escape though it was to live with kin. A remote farm “up north” was a handy hiding place for a shamed woman. Annie had a child out of wedlock and her parents quickly put the girl baby up for adoption against Annie’s protestations. Still, people knew. And they no doubt talked. Naturally, Annie and Grace became best of friends. Grace had a huge heart and, no doubt, had great sympathy for her new cousin-in-law. But what is it they say? We only hurt the ones we love most.

Annie never got over the separation from her infant daughter and her own abandonment. She developed an untreated mental illness that manifested in bouts of madness marked by violence it took both Richard and Walter to restrain. In a time before rural telephones were widespread but families lived a stone’s throw away, the two men would get the word out to their brothers when Annie was having a “spell.” During these times Grandpa Kiesow was known to sit up at night and keep an eye out the living room window from which Richard’s place was visible by daylight being situated not a mile down the road.

It was during one of these “spells” that Grandpa and his sons Lawrence and Charlie took the farm truck to pick up a load of machinery before getting the message that “Annie is sick,” which meant “Watch the kids.” In fact, no one got the message. Grandma Key was doing barn chores in the low red barn with Mom and her brother Paul when she heard a distant scream. Grandma yelled at her eldest daughter Theresa to grab a stick and keep lookout while she ran to the car shed and started the Model A. She wasn’t yet accustomed to driving the newer 1949 black Buick that was parked in the same shed. Theresa ran to the house to grab six-year-old Phyllis and she carried her quickly to the car while Mom and Paul sauntered from the barn carrying on with no sense of urgency until Grandma shouted at them to get a move on.

The plan was to drive to Great-Grandma Cullen’s place to pick her up and then drive to the next farm which belonged to Grandma’s brother Pete and his wife Helen who was alone with her young children that day. On the urgent drive to Great-Grandma’s the passengers in the Model A could see a figure in a white night gown and night cap running down the road from Richard’s farm with two men on foot in pursuit. By the time they got close to the intersection where the neighborhood mailboxes were lined up, it was clear the woman was Annie and the men chasing after her were Walter and Richard, who was slowed somewhat by his need to use a walking cane. As the Model A grew nearer the mailboxes, Grandma and her kids were horrified to see Annie raise up a shining kitchen knife and slice her own throat. As they slowed down to pass the figure bleeding on the ground, Richard and Walter had caught up to Annie and were working to save her life. The car and its shocked motorists kept moving on its course to Great-Grandma’s farm where they would later learn that Annie had survived and her mission had been to kill her friend Grace. How close she came! Just feet away stood the old homestead.

Grandpa’s hired man, who had been away from the farm on the day of Annie’s desperate act, would later take the kids on go-cart rides to the mailbox where they would stop to examine the blood-stained spot which nature was slow to wash away.

Annie’s insanity was even slower to eradicate, but mid-century medicine found a way to extinguish her imagination and passion. After a period of treatment in the hospital and sanitarium Annie returned to Richard’s farm to cook and clean and do laundry another twelve years before her death almost thirty years after the birth of the daughter she would never see again in this world. All my aunts and uncles waited until matrimony to have children.

“We’ve turned the wine into water, and then let the water go stagnant and lukewarm” (Brian McLaren).

As an Aquarian I bring water to the thirsty. I am haunted by not being able to give J.O. or Dad a drink of water lest they aspirated on their deathbeds. As a bartender I kept everyone’s glass full. As a teenager I began a lifelong practice of taking a glass of water to my bedroom every night. This is remarkable only in that I had an ambivalence about water growing up in a place where the fields often flooded in the growing season and was buried deep in snow the other half of the year. I despised the wet and the cold air. Of course, what we resist persists until we accept it for what it is. As Stephen Levine put it:

               But water is water, no matter its shape or form. The solidity of ice imagines itself

               to be its edges and density. Melting, it remembers; evaporating, it ascends.

Before its ascension, however, water seeks its own level, and I feared those depths. I didn’t learn to swim until I was an adult. I would wade in shallow water much of my life. Eventually one must swim in the stream of higher consciousness though foolish fantasies will tantalize our human fancies and we must swim harder until, exhausted, we surrender and float effortlessly again in that deep place in the underground stream we all share. Held in a deep place that is not hell but an ample space where paradox is reconciled at last.  No longer dreaming of rivers in the sky flanked by rainbow banks. Then I will finally stand up and walk on the water; that is, I will offer the world my gifts. My poem will be for you, along with water in its many shapes and forms:

Walking in new snow

Sundogs circling

Around a sun with no apricity

A season of hibernation

But not for mammals

That need to nourish, replenish, and refresh

Lest winter suck the marrow from their bones

Frozen oxygen knifes the front of my brain

After painfully filtering

Through sinus cavities and lungs

Blood congeals as I bend to

Duck low hanging pine branches

That sift snow down my collar

Stiffening my shoulders

Like a hunchback with no feet

Snowblind

I trudge toward the smoking cabin

In suspended animation

As in a dream

Fighting to flee

The wolves of winter

That do not hibernate either

I break through the wood door

Icy eyelashes, snotsickles and all

Chunks of snow track

Across the wood floor

Leading to the potbelly stove

Where I thaw

Until I skin the snowshoe rabbit

That did not hibernate

But will nourish, replenish, and refresh

Fresh snow is falling

Obscuring the weak tea sun

When the snow blows

Past my window

I will nap for a minute

My head is heavy

With no thoughts

Prisoner of gravity

Pillar of salt

Preserved in the past

Powerless to fly

The sky is a dropped ceiling

Windows wrapped

Curtains drawn

Spirits dormant

Feeding on body fat

Eyes dimmed

Tear ducts dry

Brain clogged with spider webs

Vaguely dreaming of wings

Between clots of questions

Whether to give in to the grave

Or to weather the winter

Waiting on grace

The shotgun hangs on the west wall

Opposite the crucifix to the east

Victim of fate

Or victor of faith

Despair falls

Hope springs

In the shadow of Great Spirit Moon

One can resist winter all their life without shortening it by one minute. “April showers bring May flowers” is off by about a month in Northern Minnesota, as is any optimism that the groundhog’s shadow means only six more weeks of winter. April is the cruelest month here. It usually comes clothed in deep, dirty snow, followed by weeks of freezing rain, then eons of mud and flood. When the sun finally becomes strong enough to light up the frozen branches like sparkling diamonds, we walk on broken glass as fragile shards fall to the ground like leaves in the fall. Yet I have chosen to spend every winter in Minnesota although I have had the option to leave. I learned early that zero does not mean none. Zero degrees is not no degrees and zero to the zero power is still one. There is something here that I cannot live without. It is like my story is part of the same story that starred my parents and their parents before them. The story changes, but the setting stays the same. Over time I chose to suffer the cold sustained by those moments of brightly lit pale yellow moon atop a thick pink layer of sky that deepens into mystical blue above a line of trees coated with hoar frost behind a flat white field of pure, drift patterned snow. Winter can be deadly here, but it is not death. “All the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12) when their branches thaw and we discover how strong a snowflake has to be. “No one like you had been before you and no one like you shall arise after you” (1 Kings 3:12) pertains equally to the snowflake and to us both in uniqueness and the ability to endure harsh conditions. A snowflake is both fragile and indispensable. Therefore, after spending lonely years looking for someone like me, I accepted I am the only one just like me. Granted agency and free will, but willing to choose wrong until I get it right. Free at last to bond securely with all the other flakes into the snowball that rolls and grows undeterred from the glacier to the sea. I am not the ocean, but the ocean is in me.

I notice after a time that Mom is sleeping peacefully, so I get up off the rug and quietly cross the hall to Dad’s room where I can hear him moaning. His attendant has gotten him into his chair so he can look at the television. He doesn’t care what’s on. He doesn’t notice me yet. Hallucinating from his medication,  he grabs at something in front of him that only he can see. I see something different: my seventeen-year-old self parking my candy apple red 1967 Mercury Comet Capri beside the sagging detached garage with the crumbling foundation and taking a deep, sharp breath of cold winter air as I walk toward the warm farmhouse. Pausing on the front porch to stare at the stars glittering for attention like firefly synchrony, I recite my magical mantra: “All for thee, Oh Jesus,” and I feel invulnerable. Life is magical and Jesus is my best friend. The now frozen soil is the womb of life as God breathes still into the very soil that became Adam (Genesis 2:7). I breathe the very air through which Spirit flows and my mind detaches from my material body just long enough to observe the sublime connection between the body that sows the seed and the soul that inhabits the seed.  I like to breathe. I mean I like to breathe properly. Consciously. I take another deep breath and it gives me pause as I continue to dance with the mysteries of life. It seems like God has flung glitter at the darkness just for me. It is easy to believe the universe is always conspiring in my favor. Sometimes Grace, invited but unexpected, comes when I least expect it and sunblinds me. It is too much, too much, too much. Beauty, truth, love, and eternity are too big for me. I have to fold in my soul so it fits in my physical container. Fully aware that I am leading a charmed life and these are the good old days, I open the back door and step into the house, fumbling for the first of three light switches in the dark. Then I turn off the middle switch which turns off the yard light. The third switch is not connected to anything. The comforting smells of home greet me as I draw a glass of well water from the faucet with the help of window moonlight. I stand at the bottom of the steep wooden stairs as Mom and Dad call to me from out of the darkness of their bedroom: “How did it go?” “We won,” I reply proudly as I did so many times that championship season. “Alright! Go, Huskies. What was the score?” (To this my reply varied.) “Good night, Son,” said Dad. “Good night. God bless. I love you, and say your prayers,” said Mom. “Love you,” I said softly as I began my ascent in the dark, easily navigating each uneven step by muscle memory.

In less than a year he will be gone, five weeks to the day after Mom passes. A Herculean effort by my brother and brother-in-law will get him transported to Mom’s funeral in her church 200 miles north of the nursing home. After her death he will stop eating and his health directive will go into effect. The hardest part will be watching him beg for water. He always drank lots of water. No coffee or beer for him. Living and working was stimulating enough, which is not to say Dad didn’t find the aroma of coffee stimulating. He liked the smell because it meant there would be something good to eat.

He wasn’t always kind to Mom or me. He did not understand us, and he never gave up on trying to change us. But then again, that worked both ways. He did love us, there is no doubt. Once she arrived in the nursing home, Dad could not settle down at night until someone wheeled him across the hall so he could see that Mom was OK. When I came to visit he did not want me to leave.

I was the only one in the room, aside from the two nurses who sat him up to wash him, when he took his last breath. My wife and sisters had left the room for his privacy, but the staff had asked that I, being the only son present, remain. I had just quietly told him to let go and be with Mom before the sponge bath began. I quietly assured him we would be OK and we loved him. That was all the permission he needed, and the man I thought would live forever was gone. His children and our spouses would take turns sitting vigil with his body at Grace Lutheran Church in Grygla on that early April night before his funeral as a cold, howling wind blew eerily outside the church. I didn’t dishonor Dad by crying, but I could have used a fat nun to hold me to her bosom and let me know without words that my childlike drawing is perfect. To ease the creases in my brow--the mark of Cain that can only be erased with tears that soften the heart and silence the brain.

On this warm August day, however, I sat beside him in his room and thought about a sweltering August night when I was a child….

It was too hot to sleep.  Imagine a family of five sleeping in the one upstairs bedroom in the farmhouse after a hot, muggy day. The only window was on the west wall where the sun had baked the house all afternoon. Add ninety percent relative humidity and moist mosquitoes big as vampire bats buzzing your head and other exposed parts, since sheets were out of the question. My little sister slept in the crib in an alcove with Mom and Dad sharing one bed and my older brother and I sharing another. I don’t know if anyone else could sleep or not. I doubt it, but as I lay sweating in the silence, I noticed the noise of a dredge just down the road. The diggers were working through the night to clean the clogged ditch that ran past our farm. Strangely, that sound comforted me and made me less anxious just knowing there were other people awake and life was going on, just as it was earlier in the day when I had ridden my bike down the gravel road to watch the crane dunked into the dirty ditch like a prehistoric creature that raised its head with black water and slimy green weeds dripping out of its jowls.

The Homestead Act of 1862 brought a flood of mostly Scandinavian pioneers who could claim 160 acres of land each if they could improve the land and make a living on it. Not very many did since the bogs and wetlands proved more formidable than the indigenous people they dispossessed.  It is said Norwegians and Swedes were drawn to the area because it reminded them of home minus the fiords, mountains, and reindeer. It must have been the moose, the snow, and the dense forests. These immigrants brought with them their schemes to drain Eden. These men of imagination with names like Lars Larson, Ole Olson, and Hans Hanson presumed to inflict the Adamic myth on America’s underappreciated lowlands.  A natural slope of the land from east to west of about two feet per mile drained the lands in our area toward the Red River of the North aided by a huge ditching project during the decade of 1910 to 1920.

The water in the ditch that ran past our driveway trickled into the Mud River a couple of miles to the south enroute to Mud Lake twenty miles to the west before eventually finding its way to the Red River.

Mud Lake was just the homely name we called the remnants of the once glacial Lake Agassiz. That same area became Agassiz Wildlife Refuge which became a reservation for the wildlife driven from the millions of acres of farmland ceded by the Ojibwe when they were confined to human reservations. Many of the original homesteads, however, reverted to the government in areas where the land was heavily wooded and resisted drainage to the point the owners couldn’t pay their ditch taxes. These areas became state forests and refuges. Beaver dams turned many homesteads back into peat swamps.

Though the caribou and timber wolves were long gone by the time I was born, it was not uncommon to see moose, bobcats, bear, elk, and lots of deer in our area. Big game hunting was a popular sport both in and out of season.  As one can imagine, waterfowl were plentiful.  Game was abundant as long as the wetlands were not yet all drained and groves and forests of trees had not been denuded.  Wolves, a two-million-year survivor of North America, had largely disappeared from Northwest Minnesota by the 1960s. In 1849, Minnesota legislated a bounty on all four-legged predators, including wolves. The gray wolf gained protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1974 and has since made a comeback owing also to the explosion of deer in the area. Black bears, too, have thrived and the elk herd which roams just a few miles from our family farm is kept to a manageable number after an unsuccessful attempt to move the herd to the Red Lake Indian Reservation in the 1980s in a bid to placate area farmers. The Department of Natural Resources exhausted their $20,000 budget for relocating the 35-40 animal herd. They managed to move nine elk, but one big bull drowned in a wetland after being tranquilized and two cows were injured and had to be destroyed. Oh, Earth would have been a proper setting for Heaven if we didn’t think we could own it; of course, we thought the land belonged to us and always would despite all evidence. It is astonishing that the great white hunter could so confidently assume the mantle of he who is predestined and entitled to subjugate and destroy any and all species, races, and genders that challenge his supremacy. Then to cry like a trapped rabbit when his hubris and guns fail him!

Growing up, I felt fortunate to have a big grove of trees surrounding our farm on three sides with plenty of other woods in the neighborhood. It thrilled me to see an elusive bobcat in the trees behind the barn or when a half-blind moose plowed through our cattle fence close to the home site. We raised cattle mainly since wetlands and wooded areas made good pasture. We still had enough drained land to grow oats that we ground into pig feed. The rest was hay meadow. So basically, “rocks and cows” was a fairly apt description of Northern Minnesota though the phrase would wound a future governor of our state which is politically deep red outside of the major population centers. Upstate eventually became fertile ground for political extremism once cynical politicians and conservative media discovered a bumper crop of votes and ad dollars could be harvested from the farmers who were sustained by subsidies from the government they hated.

My father was a devoted farmer. His surname was a German nickname for “someone farming or occupying newly cleared land.” It is likely our German ancestors came from the village of Schwangau in Bavaria. An astute former student of mine informed me the name "Schwangau" is derived from the Old High German language. It is believed to have its roots in the combination of two elements: "swang" and "au." The term "swang" referred to a meadow or a wetland, while "au" denoted a water meadow or a floodplain. Therefore, "Schwangau" can be understood to mean a meadow or floodplain situated near water. It could be said Dad was married to his land located only a couple of miles from my grandparents. He never took us hunting or fishing. He seldom said yes, but “We’ll see” came close enough most of the time, like when I regularly asked him for a dollar so I could order horse stories and mysteries from Scholastic or Tab Books at school. (The anticipation was unbearable when the teacher would open the box of new paperbacks and sort them out by order before handing them out at the end of the school day.) Dad took great pleasure in milking our six motley dairy cows with his sons. He milked the ornery black cow, the old brown Swiss, and Big Ethel, the tall red cow I named after an Archie Comics character; my older brother got a mean Guernsey and a Milkstrain Shorthorn; I was assigned the gentler Guernsey cow. She had long, soft teats that fit my young hands perfectly. She never kicked even when I would twist a teat in the direction of my brother when Dad wasn’t looking. If the stub-eared tabby was around mewling for food I would sometimes direct an arc of warm in its direction and watch it jump up to get a warm mouthful before it lapped the remainder off the cool concrete floor.

It was a treat when Dad took us along to the livestock sales barn in Thief River Falls (“Thiefivver”). He would stop at the bakery and bring out a bag of jelly doughnuts as he sang Johnny Horton’s “Sink the Bismarck.”  Once we crossed the business office/lunch counter in the partitioned-off front of the sales barn and entered the arena, we were spellbound by the auctioneer’s lingo and the anticipation of what animals the wranglers would whip into the sawdust-coated show ring next, as the cattle buyers smoked their fat cigars which mingled with the smell of sawdust and the hamburgers and onions frying behind the lunch counter next door.

Grandpa Nash once took me along to the Sales Barn when Dad asked him to haul a steer in our old yellow pickup truck with the plank side and end rails boxing in the bed. I recall my embarrassment when the beast entered the ring setting up a howl of laughter from the big-bellied, overalled men sitting in the stands. It seems this steer was born with a deformity resulting in one shoulder being higher than the other. The auctioneer heightened the hilarity by announcing, “Boys, that hump is just an extra roast.” Cringe.

Grandpa Nash, like Dad, did not have much time for kids. He liked to work in the barn in the winter and the hayfield in the summer, so it was memorable to spend a day with him. He was quiet and stoic, the quintessential manifestation of jantelagen, but he was kind to us. Sometimes he would fetch a cold watermelon from a metal water trough full of cold water and we would eat it outside so we could spit out the seeds. His and Grandma’s thing was driving around the countryside in their red pickup after chores. They would often stop by and sometimes get out and come in the house if Mom and Dad were both at home. Then we would have Land O’Lakes ice cream. If we went to their cozy house, Grandma would have sugared lefse or raised sugared doughnuts for us. We weren’t so fond of the pink circus peanuts she always had in generous supply. She was a great cook though and always hosted the Christmas Eve supper for her three sons and their families. Even now I can smell the ham baked in her cozy country kitchen decorated with pictures from magazines and calendars. The men and kids would wait in the living room while the women worked to get all the dishes hot at the same time. We would stare at Grandma’s small artificial Christmas tree propped up on the cedar chest my Uncle Floyd made. It was surrounded by presents concealed in reused gift wrap. There were also black and white portraits like the one in the oval frame of Grandma and Grandpa when they were newlyweds. I was flabbergasted when I first noticed Grandma had pants on! I never saw in anything but a dress the whole time I knew her. An unknown man with gray hair and mutton chops stared down at the festivities from an ornate frame. “In Heaven a noble work was done when God gave man a mother” was appliqued along with a spinning wheel on another wall decoration. Christmas Eve was the best night of the year. The Catholics that married into this Norwegian Lutheran family would go to Midnight Mass at ten o’clock, then return for pie, after which we would bundle into our winter wear and fall asleep in the warm car during the mile and a half drive home.

The highlights of our year were the Roseau County Fair and maybe a daytrip to Pine Lake where skeletons of fallen cedars levitated above the shallow water, their broken bones bleached and beached. We would get chores done early at fair time and take a bath before Dad got home from his town job. We went to the fair as a family, each kid clutching their strip of ten ride tickets—one ticket per ride, ten cents per ticket. The anticipation grew until we could see the ferris wheel rising above the skyline of Roseau several miles before we got to town. Few things in life, aside from good music, live up to our wild expectations, but the promise of the lit-up carnival rides and the smell of the lunch stands never disappointed. We would sleep happily in the backseat of the car on the way home after we had inspected the 4-H livestock barns.

Our off-the-farm adventures included frequent visits to Grandma and Grandpa Key with Mom. Grandma had the biggest garden in Moylan township and her memory still smells of sweet peas and dill. Grandpa liked to sit in the shade and listen to the Minnesota Twins on his transistor radio. His memory conjures the earthy scent of old oil and the dirt floor in the shed where he kept his prized Model A. He would eventually develop what they called “hardening of the arteries,” which would manifest as anger and delusions. It was a foreshadowing of Mom’s vascular dementia, and perhaps even our own someday.

Uncle Paul lived with Grandma and Grandpa Key. He was the bachelor uncle who let us ride along as he collected cream cans on his milk route when we were kids. He would always buy us an ice cream bar when we got to the creamery. He also hosted the best barn dances when we were teens. We would clean the hay loft before and after the dances. I loved the smell of stale beer and hay bales, as one does. People would come from miles around and pass the hat to pay for the keg beer and midnight lunch of sloppy joes and bars served by Mom and my aunts. Paul would die young of a heart attack hastened by his inconsolable grief over the death of his nephew. My boss asked me to drive my aunt home when the phone call came that my cousin had died in a work accident. My aunt worked in the kitchen of the steakhouse where I bartended. All the way home Aunt Irene, in a state of shock, wept and prayed repeatedly, “Heavens to Murgatroyd. It's not true. It can’t be true. Dean is OK.” That ride wrecked me as much as trying to get Uncle Paul out of the bar to attend the burial. He kept repeating, “It should have been me. Why didn’t God take me? I’m old and ugly.”  I miss him still because bachelor uncles were the most fun. He gave us free reign of his house and barn. That all stopped after Dean died. Cousin, uncle, grandpa. All three died in short succession. The women stayed strong, but how my grandma suffered until she died peacefully a few years later. Dammit, I miss them all to this day. Always will. Just as I will always grieve all the people I love who are still living but who have left our lives. The heart that survives life’s countless piercings is a formidable organ.

We were not aware that our colloquial expressions and rural Minnesota dialect were like a foreign language until we left home. My wife would later point out on long drives back to the farm that I slipped more and more into my native accent and dialect the closer we got to home. My folks’ vocabulary was colorful with idioms like “tickled pink” (happy), “purple passion” (disgusted), “beet red” (embarrassed), “blue language” (curse words), etc. We never heard our parents curse, however, when we were growing up. Apparently, Mom didn’t even store forbidden words in her right temporal lobe where many people with Alzheimer’s are redirected when their brain’s left temporal lobe can no longer retrieve the language they want. Dad, on the other hand, must have heard plenty of salty language in his day and just stored it away to let loose a loud lingo when he had horrific nightmares and Parkinson’s hallucinations.

I wonder what forbidden words I will utter when my vocabulary starts failing me. Egads!

Within the family our speech was homely but never vulgar, except for the time when we were kids and Dad had to come up the stairs to sort out a fight my big brother and I were having in our bedroom. I must have been screaming bloody murder as my brother pounded on me laughing, “Help! Murder! Police! Dale fell in the grease.” When I saw Dad at the door, I blurted out, “Kenny kicks like a cocksucker!” (I didn’t know what that was. I had heard it at school. Dad somehow knew what it meant judging by the way he grabbed me off the floor and slung me into my bed with a strong admonition.) We really didn’t have a word for penis or vagina. Body parts below the beltline were referred to as rump, haunches, crotch, or buttocks. (Yeah, sometimes the euphemism is worse than the explative.) I guess you could say we were rustic rubes living a bucolic life back then, but we never felt poor. The philosophy was no one is too poor to at least be clean. (“It is cheap to warsh up with a liddle soap and wadder.”) We took regular baths and we always had enough; my imagination provided the rest as I read and explored nature and did my chores when I was not in school.

A chicken feather could be transformed into a superhero as my imagination could either dramatize or normalize the life I experienced. Where cow hooves and rivulets of rain wore the sod away from the sides of the shallow drainage ditches in the pastures I could simply imagine the great mesas and canyons of the west. I also planted and tended the garden, a skill I gained by studying my grandmother’s green thumb. I grew great rows of zinnias and marigolds, and I always stopped to smell the roses and experience earth’s delights because it would have been a waste of life not to. In the winter when the house got overheated from the wood stove, I would put on my parka, long-john underwear, overshoes, and wool mittens and walk out to the end of the driveway where the grove opened up and the sky grew bigger. I would take in the vast darkness and feel the stars on my face. Sometimes the Northern Lights danced just for me, dressed in green, gauzy fabric. I gulped big breaths of icy air and infinite possibilities until I could not take any more frigid beauty and ran back to the house, eyes watering, lungs stinging, and heart happy. My skin would tingle and grow hot as the freeze wore off. I knew in those moments that creation was the place of salvation.

Heaven couldn’t be any better than earth and sky, home and hearth. After all, purpose didn’t matter; there was only today and many more where this one came from. I may have been afraid of the dark in my early years, but by daylight it was clear that reality was today and it was safe and it was good. There are only a finite number of atoms in the universe, and since no energy is ever lost, just transformed, I took it for granted that a random congress of atoms from those stars that no longer existed, but still blinked brightly, had shaped who I was now in this moment. Matter was all that mattered to me then and natural resources seemed endless. Even today I like to quote Thich Nhat Hanh:

When I hold a piece of bread, I look at it, and sometimes I smile at it.

The piece of bread is an ambassador of the cosmos offering nourishment and support.

Looking deeply into the piece of bread, I see the sunshine, the clouds, the great earth.

Without the sunshine, no wheat can grow.

That is why the piece of bread that I hold in my hand is a wonder of life.

It is there for all of us. We have to be there for it.

The tasteless wafer I ate as a child didn’t elicit much smiling. In fact, woe to the altar boy who didn’t hold the communion plate close enough to catch the host if the priest’s fingers faltered. Church was serious business, but the age-old rituals were also a great comfort at times. Until Vatican II when the priest got to face the congregation and speak English. Eventually we got used to it. Even conservatives couldn’t fend off guitar masses and new technology forever.

We didn’t get our party line telephone until I was in high school. Our first black and white Philco television arrived in 1961 when my great-uncle Larry and my favorite great-aunt, Marg, brought over the nineteen-inch TV screen set into a fake-mahogany cabinet. For several years the only station our rooftop antenna could pull in was the ABC affiliate in Winnipeg. We were all delighted when KTHI out of Fargo built what would briefly become “the world’s tallest tower” (also ABC). It broadcast a stronger signal, but our Philco was still beset by the daily plague of rolling horizontal pictures, vertical fuzz, TV ghosts, all of which had to be adjusted by turning buttons behind the TV set. An additional aggravation was the interference caused by other electrical appliances like Dad’s electric razor raising heck with the TV picture. Then when the wind blew, which it usually did, the antenna would turn the wrong direction and we kids would ask Dad to climb the ladder and turn it. “Make it come in,” we would plead, and he would oblige. The first TV programs I remember seeing, between pauses for commercials and station identification, were westerns like Cheyenne and Stoney Burke; sitcoms such as The Hathaways, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Honeymooners, and My Little Margie; dramas and adventures including The New Breed, Hawaiian Eye, The Naked City, Route 66, 77 Sunset Strip, Everglades!, and The Untouchables. We saw a variety of movies, mostly westerns, teenage beach movies, and musicals like State Fair. I vividly recall seeing Bus Stop starring Marilyn Monroe. Mom had a low regard for Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor because they were “man hungry” and Mom was possessive of her husband. One of a kid’s greatest fears is their parents divorcing, although there wasn’t much danger of that if one of them was Roman Catholic. Still, there was something about Bus Stop that haunted me.

Besides all the old western series like The Rifleman and Fury, I enjoyed American Bandstand, The Flintstones, and Leave It to Beaver the most. It was the latter that got me to dreaming of living in town in a white two-story house with two clean-cut sons and a beautiful wife. (That dream would come true; being a teen idol like Ricky Nelson or a cowboy like Heath Barkley never did.) My father’s influence got me interested in politics at an early age. I watched every moment of the Watergate hearings rooting for Richard Nixon all the way. I had a poster in my room that proclaimed “GOP: LET IT BE!” I argued with the first liberal teacher I met, our high school chemistry teacher, who, it turns out, taught me to think critically. My chosen role model for the careers unit in social studies was Ronald Reagan because he embodied the two paths I could see for myself: politics and acting. The acting part gained me the unaffected scorn of the civics teacher who wanted us to be practical like him. He would also admonish his basketball players to tuck their shirts in so they wouldn’t look like “sex maniacs.” I learned not to think too critically from him.  I would join the Campus Republicans in college, but my politics slowly shifted as my liberal arts education began to pick up the momentum of progression. This would be another source of contention with Dad.

How sad he must have been when my normally sunny disposition gradually morphed in his presence into a strange son who cast a shadow even there was no sun. How awful to realize your own son was embarrassed of you. It would take many years before I could accept his love at the level of consciousness from which it was given. Generational trauma is a bitch. You see, once you have accepted, even for a moment, that your life is a mistake, you have to get creative. The longing, yearning, desiring does not die along with your self-confidence. The stardust may not realign immediately into a new person, but your mind must morph if it is to survive. And survival is, after all, the mind’s mission. Slow down the dying process by accelerating the coping mechanisms. Living small is not living at all. Go big cause there sure ain’t no going home again in this world.

If I had to identify a single moment that recalibrated my compass in life it was getting back a personal essay I wrote after reading The Great Gatsy in Freshman English. The professor, a sophisticated woman with whom I was completely enamored, had written on it in her perfect penmanship: “This is a remarkably open, honest, and delightful theme. A, as usual. I feel I must add a personal note. You sound almost exactly like my late husband would have sounded thirty years ago—except that he had no family and found his Ivy League at West Point. And Col. Hansen dreamed his dreams and amazed me during the ten years I knew him by making every one of them come true. There’s a little Gatsby in all of us, but some remain ‘true to their Platonic conception’ all their lives, and thus they live every moment. I’m sure you’re going to be one of them!” There was no turning back after reading that, I can tell you. The green light glowed brighter than ever. Someone believed in me! That someone, it turned out, was actor Jeff Bridges’ mother-in-law. Zowie! My mind could continue to romp with the mind of God. Many years later I would drive over 150 miles in a blizzard to attend Mrs. Hansen’s funeral. Jeff gave a beautiful and moving speech and we got to meet and chat about the Coen Brothers after. Thank you, Mrs. Hansen. Almost all the lessons of abiding value I learned from women because I was not one and I was drawn irresistibly to their intuition, empathy, and unconditional love.

Whether leaving home for summer camp, college, or traveling to Europe, I got gut-shot homesick every time I left the farm and my family. I didn’t cry since I had learned not to early on at Dad’s hands. (“I’ll shake you until you stop crying.”) Have you ever tried to not cry when you were being shaken and your father was yelling at you with a fierce and terrifying anger because you hadn’t done what he wanted to his specifications, when he couldn’t articulate those specifications clearly and didn’t have the patience to explain how to do something? I tried like the devil to please him until busting my ass got me none of the approval I so desperately sought. To top it off, we weren’t allowed to feel sorry for ourselves. At some point tears give way to a lump in the throat. That is where I stored my pain. It developed into frequent sore throats culminating in a wicked case of strep throat my first year of college. I haven’t had such a flaming sore throat since, but the pain moved up and manifested into chronic headaches, especially when I felt I wasn’t 100 percent correct, which is almost 100% of the time.

I have seldom achieved that level of performance perfection. For example, I took college algebra to fulfill my math requirement. Of course, it came much more easily since it was nearly the same as the algebra class I took in high school. I had a B average in the high school class; I earned 100% on every test in college up until the final exam where I made one minor mistake on the last number in the decimal on the very last problem on the test. And it was a careless subtraction error at that! Nothing a few beers wouldn’t help me forget. Alcohol was no match, however, for life’s deeper traumas.

A gallon of alcohol wouldn’t have been as potent as a thimbleful of tears had I been able to produce them, had I not scrupulously avoided opportunities for the healing vulnerability offers. A landlocked lad, I could not know that the ocean and tears taste the same. Separated from the sea and surrounded by lakes, I would develop wrinkles, the rivulets formed by dry crying that paved the way for salt tears that would not come until the dam broke during midlife, the liminal space between the two halves of life, when one is most vulnerable to the lamentably inevitable consequences of challenging fear-based authority.

Salt tears may be biologically designed to cure raw wounds, be they physical or emotional. Boys don’t cry was part of our code, a code so strong it was not so much rationally assented to as it was the immutable way things were, fixed forever like the stars in the sky. I learned to let my feelings out by drinking or raging—throwing pails full of water and wooden milk stools halfway across the barn and swearing a blue streak.  I was always a good student and I learned quickly how to act tough, in public. Privately I listened to Eden Cane sing:

Boys cry when no one is near them

When no one can hear them cry….

When he acts tough, sure enough

It’s a sign he’s soft inside.

I knew what it was to be a sad boy. I suspect most boys deal with this dilemma before they become men. Tragically, too many turn the sadness into anger. To wit, 98 percent of mass shootings in the U.S. are committed by males while the suicide rate among U.S. men is 3.5 times higher than that of women. ‘Nuff said. My plight was not that I was growing violent. My dilemma was that I was not tough enough to stay on the farm, but I was barely strong enough to leave. I would get homesick when I left because I had no other home. The Golden West kept calling as it has so many Midwesterners who dream big. Perhaps it was attainable now. Heck, Gatsby traveled the world. I would too. The Colonel was a hard act to follow, but his memory opened up new possibilities. Ironic that I would someday write these very words from the foothills of the Rockies betwixt the peaks and valleys of the western range in a state of mind somewhere between the rational and the mystical.

My best high school buddy, J.O., inadvertently fostered my rebellion by transforming my taste in music from pop to folk and rock. As we caroused the back roads our 8-track accompaniment consisted mainly of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, and—best of all—The Beatles. We had just barely missed the war and Woodstock, but the zeitgeist was strong in us. I learned to talk back to my father though I would never have considered doing so to my sweet mother. My folks considered a heavy sigh talking back. I learned to argue from my father. He would often tell stories during supper of how he had bested some Democrat in an argument because eventually his sparring partner “didn’t have another word to say,” which always killed me because our arguments would always end with my trembling rebellious voice faltering as he said, “You always have to get in the last word,” so he got in the last words which were literally “last word.”

Now I could look at my father with a heart full of love after decades of resentment, and as he fell back asleep in his nursing home bed, no longer scary but sad, my mind kept returning to the place I grew up and learned to call home for the rest of my life, though back then it never felt completely like home. It was as though there was something before and that would be again.

My mind jumps around--as it does in non-linear dreams—and I dream of the house where I grew up warmed by images of Christmas trees sawed in the vast woods to the east, now positioned with the thinnest branches to the wall and trimmed with tinsel, ropes of shiny garland, plastic ornaments, glittered balls, and colored bulbs that reflect off the shiny linoleum floor. My mood changes as I study the color of each bulb. I can feel the blue then green then red then yellow emotions. Eventually I focus on the burned-out bulbs and wonder why no one notices my feelings. Don’t they have them too? Suddenly I breathe the spicy scent of pine sap and forget all about it. I felt seen when I got out of my melancholy moods. After all, it was the middle child who got the honor of sitting by himself on the small wooden bench behind the table as we ate our tuna noodle hot dish, buttered toast, and canned peas or other simple but tasty suppers. There were only four kitchen chairs, so I got the special seat. I gleefully gathered evidence that I was special wherever I could find it.

Then I think of the wild rose bushes that grew at the edge of the grove out of which a space had been cleared for our homestead just two generation before. When we sons were driven from the farm each in our turn by our father’s anger at his father and the order we created slowly fell victim to neglect, the woods seemed to encroach and close in on the farmyard, despite our father’s single-minded efforts to cull out healthy trees even while leaving the deadwood standing or fallen. I guess the vision was to eventually turn part of the grove into pasture, but oh the rage I would feel every time my friends, the trees, were cut down to make room for a new shed because the old ones were full of junk. I was a tree hugger back when trees were anathema to grain farmers, but I could only impose order on a portion of our farmyard, and then only for a short time before Dad parked machinery or dumped auction-sale treasures on what I had cleaned up and mowed. There was disorder beyond the house lawn most of the time and even that was disturbed from time to time by the pigs that escaped their pens and rooted up the grass. At times like that Mom would remind me, “Into every life a little rain must fall.” Indefatigably would I look for a hole in the clouds blue enough to drive through like a drowning man searching for thin ice to break through.

We can share our experiences with others, but our interior life is a dark and lonely place if we are not friends with ourselves. As Carl Jung so aptly expressed it, “Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.” Peace became not so much a goal at the end of my struggles but a state of consciousness along the path. I wandered the woods and pastures of home with only a farm dog and a heightened sense of consciousness for companionship. Sensory experiences became spiritual as I gently lifted the veil from the ordinary and learned to participate in my own life by feeling the awe that is due the commonplace. All matter mattered, after all, both through its usefulness and in its inherent awesomeness. Thus, as both observer and participant, I let myself feel my connection to the air, to the trees, and grass, and everything from glinting green to dully dun to brilliantly sunlit to mysteriously shady. I wandered, I wondered, and I walked in peace. Listening to the moss on the decomposing tree trunk, I would hear the small, still voice inside myself. Those moments are vibrant to this day because some vibrations are just that resonant. Anything one allows to reach soul deep becomes immortal. The natural world can be seen as both illusion and allusion. The illusion lies in our mistaken perception that the world of forms is merely temporal; the awe-inspiring instances of connection to nature are an allusion to Godness and eternal truth. Still, no object we look at with human eyes means what we think it does. So maybe we stop thinking about it and participate with it:

Marvel in this moment.

Wonder is the womb of wisdom.

Stand in awe of life.

Be amazed by the mysteries of the world.

Venture into the mystic.

Just to be is a blessing.

To live is to be loved completely.

In the small spaces between the beats of the heart is what alive feels like.

Mary Oliver graciously inserts herself here with a stanza from “When Death Comes”:

               When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

               I was a bride married to amazement.

               I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

In the light of day, the wild roses and the woods might have seemed eternal while nighttime brought premonitions of the fate that would eventually befall our beloved farm, a fate which will eventually claim our whole rural community and small town when foreign investors and corporate farms displace the family farms and small businesses as they bring in the dozers to eliminate any relief from endless fields of soy beans and corn devoid of wildlife, cattle, and trees. They will spray the mustard, drain the pastures, and grow GMOs.

 I get homesick thinking about the way it was and I can only imagine how Dad feels about it now that he has lost control of his land and will never see it again.

I long for the days when Dad was strong and his always clean breath smelled of the pink peppermints that littered the seat of his old yellow pickup truck along with the store-bought treats he found in town to supplement the hearty lunch Mom would pack in his silver lunch bucket. The same yellow pickup we would load with oats to take to the elevator in Thief River Falls to be ground into pig feed, a forty-mile journey broken up by Dad’s silly made-up ditties and the occasional “How goes it?” A question that required no answer.  The first to spot the elevator would shout, “I see Thief River. You have to buy!” Yet Dad always bought. He would take me to Johnnie’s Café for a hamburger and a bottle of Orange Crush then give me a dollar for comic books at Ekeren Drug. His hogs would get out of their rusty-nail pens and root up the lawn and garden I tended, but he also gave me the white calf that I raised to be a “rip snorter” and the most valuable animal we ever sold.

The small farm was a sublime slice of heaven at times and Dad was my hero back then. He would take me along to look at the neighbors’ cattle because he knew how much it meant to me. I remember vividly driving a few miles to the yard of Slug Lansrud, a very private farmer we visited only once. The cows roamed the entire building site which fenced in the rusted machinery, the shabby sheds, and the dilapidated house. I can still see the roan bull that matched the odd hide that stretched over the protruding hips of our oldest cow at the time, the venerable leader of the herd when we would drive the cattle across the road to pasture “out east” for the summer. And I’ll never be able to forget roaming over to the house while the men talked and looking in the front porch screen window where I was surprised to see a heavy old lady in a long, faded cotton dress soaking her swollen feet in a tub of water. Her toothless mouth bellowed, “Get outta here!” So I did. Quickly.

I would inherit as much of the farm as my two sisters, but not as much as my two brothers. If the gender math seemed a bit fuzzy, I accepted it for the gift it was. Land ownership doesn’t mean as much as growing up on the land when one goes away to college and makes his living in academia where the past, not the property, make one yearn for “home.” Unlike my sisters, I never received a penny of rent from my younger brother, but that is the price I gladly pay for the closeness we shared before his disappointment found its natural enemy. No hate is as intense as hatred forged by perceived betrayal. How could anyone truly hate someone they never loved?  Few people have as much power over our lives as those we trusted implicitly. How, on the other hand, can some who are hated grieve a lost relationship and forgive the hater? And isn’t that the point—learning to forgive those who do not like us as we go about our business with fidelity to our calling?

My hometown was named Grygla. For some reason when people first hear the name they garble things like, “Argle Bargle. Is that somewhere up near Argyle and Bagley?” According to “The History of Grygla,” as reprinted in the weekly newspaper The Grygla Eagle:

The Postal Department sent out an inspector from Washington, D.C., to check out the community. The inspector’s name was Count Gryglavitch. Because no one could agree on a name for the town, the inspector signed his own name to the request, and “Grygla” became the name of what is called “The Biggest Little Town of Its Size.”

It seemed like a town when you were in it; neat and orderly, it carried the sights and smells of civilization once you got there, but it didn’t take too long to drive through it. The welcome sign wryly boasted it was “The biggest town of its size,” yet in a few seconds one would arrive at the far city limit with a sense of how assailable an outpost it was.

Our churches were fortification enough to provide a sense of protection from the wolves at the gate. Jesus was easy for me. He was in the communion, and I could visualize him in human form because he looked much like us except for the long hair and brown eyes. There were pictures and statues everywhere. He was my friend. God was more challenging. From our farm three miles northwest of town it seemed as though God’s terrifying beauty hovered over the town. It was easiest for me to visualize Him behind the ominous purple and yellow clouds that billowed in the east after a summer storm.  Something palpable and threatening surrounded our town on all sides at the best of times. I often thought it was God; now I’m not sure since I’ve gotten a bigger view of the world. During our two weeks of Catechism School in June each year, we learned from the black and white nuns that “God is everywhere,” so during recess I looked everywhere outside the one room schoolhouse our church had adapted for education and church dinners for replicas of the imagery in our Baltimore Catechism.  All we ever found was a tattered newspaper article about the decapitation of Jayne Mansfield. It was tangled in a thorny rose bush and it haunts me to this day. Where was God in that? If Jesus was loving, God was frightening, but at least there was logic to his punishment. We knew we would be rewarded in Heaven for our good deeds, whereas earthly fathers wouldn’t even notice. They could raise hell on earth when they felt like it. The Holy Ghost was a nonentity because how could anyone make that understandable to a child? It was a mystery, a word that ended many a theological debate.

Town was three small churches, (The Lutherans who met in the middle of town tolerated the Pentecostals and the Catholics who worshipped on the edges. If Wisdom had built herself a house at the edge of town, she had long ago abandoned it to Superstition.), a rowdy saloon called Diamond Jim’s, the elementary school—the  hub of most social activity in the winter—, the creamery where the butter maker worked and to which was attached the meat locker where we would bring our slaughtered pig or steer to be cut up, wrapped in white butcher paper, and stored in our rented freezer, the café and pool hall, a blacksmith shop where you could get warm on the coldest winter day, a community center where we roller skated on warped wood floors, two gas stations—one a Farmer’s Union station, the other owned by a friendly limping man who would wash all your windows, a cigarette hanging from his lips, while he pumped “a dollar’s worth” into your gas tank, the Co-op General Store where Charlotte, the spinster storekeep, would sometimes give me a stack of unsold comic books with the top half of the cover cut off to be returned to the vendor for a refund. (Once she set aside two unmutilated copies of Rawhide Kid when they came in sporting a fan letter I had written. Mom had alerted Charlotte to my first published words when she opened the mailbox to discover the notification on a postcard signed by Stan Lee), the tiny Hartz grocery store above which lived the owner’s family, Dad’s soil conservation office which smelled pleasantly of old maps and file cabinets, a transplanted railroad depot turned into our post office, and that’s about all. We thought we lived in God’s country, and by making one place sacred many in our community considered all others profane.

They never left. I did, but I regretted taking for granted growing up having horses, open spaces, bright night skies, clean air, wildflowers, pets, livestock, driving cars and motorcycles around the countryside without seat belts or helmets, chores and hobbies, racing each other like we were on horses, and the physics of being a boy with all the freedom and spaces available. Many of us who made the break would come to realize that we all dreamt of leaving then spent much of our time trying to get back home again.

As for the adult denizens of our town, they were quite nice for the most part. They were good to kids but sometimes vicious to each other in the gossip they would tell or the passive-aggressive way they communicated. Compliments were often close kin to criticism. There really is a way of killing with kindness and it occurred more in church-goers than bar patrons who were more honest in their disapproval of their neighbors. Both groups had to live with each other, however, because this is where they were planted or transplanted and took root.

Fifty years later the rural ethos would devolve into a more divisive and radical worldview:

Random Reflections on Visiting a Small Town During the Holidays

There is something heartbreaking about the budget hotel guests—clad in drab shorts, wrinkled tee shirts, and cheap flip flops—queued up at the overworked waffle maker with a mix of anticipation that the machine will eventually yield up their crispy breakfast treat and the dawning realization that the plastic pitcher of batter may not hold out. I sincerely hope this is not the highlight of their day, as I grab a mini-muffin and a cup of coffee and retreat to my room.

After dark the morbidly obese come out to take a short walk in the ghostly white moonlight.

They wear Walmart stretch pants and they carry dim flashlights against the subzero windchill.

A brief break from their diet of corn syrup and porn.

The holiday table consensus still runs through their veins: alcohol is safer than marijuana.

You must pick your poison because no drug at all will not get you through a single day of the nightmare your mind created when you first chose to make the material world your home.

So, we must treat the symptoms, not the cause of our loneliness.
The poor pass warm houses where toy people drink from plastic cups and loudly mouth popular platitudes as they flash impossibly white teeth that prove their moral superiority.

Men speak with the supreme confidence that accrues to being tall and good looking

when they should be struck dumb as a tax on their white privilege.

They are not happy, but at least they are not this.

Those who are this are at least not that, meaning persons of color.

But even privilege has its limits.

A social bubble is thin as the skin of a soap bubble and it shifts shape with every inevitable betrayal.

Better to be a poor white person of faith comfortable with contradictions.

Blessed are the poor who believe the pope is infallible, yet refuse to eat meat on Friday for the rest of their lives despite a papal dispensation.

Performative patriotism is a cheap substitute for those who never served.

What is virtue signaling if not a cover for deeply guilty shame over being human?

The zombie crawl continues as a few night people look past each other in the cigarette lit midnight pub where the tired bartender's longest hour is the one before last call.

It sucks to feel 100% of our feelings 100% of the time, so we drink the numbing wine and feel so feebly we cannot cry or yell like humans anymore.

We barely speak, which is just as well.

“Um, yeah, no, so yeah, I don’t know. I mean, whatever. So, it’s like, you know, and whatnot, so….”

We are loyal to our faults and would give you our blood alcohol if you were one of us.

The jukebox still plays “The Boys are Back in Town.”

Did they ever leave?

They pulled the smart girl’s hair and were primed to hate Hillary when she came along.

They kicked sand in the faces of the two boys sharing a rainbow towel on the beach.

They beat up the new kid for using the wrong bathroom because they were not them.

Taking a poke at being “woke” helps them avoid any real awakening.

They lit fireworks and gunned their engines when they heard fifty immigrants suffocated in an abandoned truck.

They skipped class and drank liquor down by the railroad tracks.

They drank to the kid who got the lowest grades in the class and was voted homecoming king.

They kicked the old vagrant veteran in the ribs.

They gang-raped the town feminist because who would believe her?

They danced around the bonfire of banned books, glowing scraps of burned pages screaming in midair.

They saluted the Nazi flag in the small-town 4^th of July parade.

They hated the police for giving them speeding tickets but supported law enforcement when black lives were involved.

They outgrew their air rifles but never really grew up; the weapons just got more deadly.

They went to confession on Sunday and were absolved of all the above though they only copped to sticking a firecracker up a cat’s ass.

Dissolution has its own set of rules including absolution for all of it.

Yes, the bullies are back in town and they will stick it to you if you step out of line.

Step out of line.

Bright gaslight from the big screen TV holds the empty promise of deliverance if one can tune out the rapid-fire delivery of side effects from the marvelous medicines it hawks on the FOX trough of fodder for the anger and grievances it feeds those who find pleasure in judging that to which they futilely aspire.

It seems they take a perverse pleasure in perpetual anger.

The home boys shout gleefully when the TV shows a group of Trump supporters beating up an anti-facist counter-protester.

They quiet down when the bow-tied talking head editorializes:

“Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight.”

Yes it is, Tucker.

We have all seen it.

Will they ever regret it?

They’ll never even admit it.

And we’ll never forget it.

All the while, we objects of MAGA contempt watch at a distance, amused that haters take such a strong interest in what we do.

Turn up the volume so we can feel as we did when we were children who crawled under the card table and never interrupted the adults who knew everything except what it is like to be a child.

We had thoughts, but we learned to listen to those who talked big and long without a comma.

Now we sit outside the circle around the campfire like we don’t belong and listen to the old people talk about nothing stronger than the problem of delivery people leaving their Amazon boxes in the wrong place outside their houses.

Sometimes it evokes our compassion when our minds are not drifting.

Oh, not because their boxes are getting wet, but because it means so much to them.

Because it brings up such anger.

Because the crappy camper they vacation in still has an oversized and tattered banner,faded from the sun and now soaked by today’s rain, that barely reads “Trump 2020: Make Liberals Cry Again.”

It’s nearly 2024 and we all feel like crying.

Trump lost, but so did we all.

For what is left to win when the goal is to stick it to your countrymen on anti-social media?

They ended up voting for Trump so they wouldn’t feel like losers.

The temptation to win without effort, without changing or growing, was strong.

A shambolic existence can be endured when the rich ride down a gilded elevator to our level and hate the same people we hate.

The bullies were back in town and spoiling for a fight.

They would muck up the mechanisms of democracy

Until the Trump flags, dripping in blood, fell to the ground

And the oak tree they were nailed to died.

They are us, you see.

We chose it as our new pronoun, you and me.

In this place where irony went to die

we voted to kill democracy, you and I.

There is no therapy for cultists but church where we sit in the back on the far side where the holy water, incense, and forgiveness do not reach us.

We are furniture as cold as the icons crowding in on us.

And yet we pay our pew rent because our generic obituary will one day be read here:

“He enjoyed fishing, hunting, ATV trail riding, and snowmobiling. He also enjoyed camping with his family and friends, road trips with his wife, and playing cards with his friends.”

Falling in love put a loaded gun to our head.

We couldn’t love ourselves, so we ended up sitting on a rock sobbing in deep, deep pain.

Forfeiting the gut-wrenching, heart-throbbing, mind-bending life of authenticity, we sabotage love.

Our only salvation is the thought that we can kill ourselves slowly as we slowly do so one bite, one drink, one pill, one toxic thought at a time.

Incipient hopelessness, incessant judgment, and incorrigible feelings of failure walk us home in the dark.

Blessed weariness carries us to bed where we seek to minimize the time we are awake and alive.

We are most alive in our dreams of a childhood that grows smaller with each passing sleep in our bed as we drift inexorably in the direction of the sharp rocks and hard knocks ahead.

If we are lucky, we become like misfit toys in a wooden chest.

We occasionally rise to the top and feel special again.

Grace may yet still be available.

We just want someone to tell us we belong, but we fear the responsibility that would entail.

It’s not that we don’t still yearn for beauty, but when we find it in the authenticity of people who are at home in their vulnerabilities and who embrace humanity, we feel the need to destroy it.

We fear the pussification of America was complete when men replaced thumbs-up with heart emojis.

The Turnupseeds in their Fords block the rebel’s road and break his neck.

We are more comfortable with those as shabby and lost as we are, so we stick with pride to our tribe.

We swim in a turgid sea of sick humanity, hoping to rub up against the antibody that saves us all.

We too would destroy our own mansion if we won the lottery while we waited to be told we belong, because we don’t know how to tell ourselves the truth of our kinship with the truly Christ Spirit.

We are the All That Breathe, part of the plan, the star of our story which is the one of The Prodigal Son, and we are dying to believe that, but we don’t.

We won’t.

We were told an open mind allows the devil to get in, not that it allows the light of love in to chase away the devilish darkness of ignorance.

To believe all the same superstitions at seventy that we believed at seventeen is to have not lived in between.

We have not grown if we have not changed.

If we cannot find intimacy, cannot find our way back to unitive consciousness, we become small and dry like fruit dead on the vine.

As the lonely subject of our only life

We gasp, rather than breathe, in a fruitless effort to magically enter the kissing gate with the object of our true desire.

Fearfully, we grasp the cup of wine even Dionysus rejected.

Afraid to part with a bloodless god that has no power to redeem us.

Life with God will be one long goodbye when that God has been created in man’s image.

Else the tension between faith and failure makes old age dreadful.

Our grievances outweigh true gratitude eventually.

Wakened by pain and phantosmia in the dark early hours, we entertain a running highlight film of a few of our many faults.

They are held too long in storage, much like the boxes kept in rented sheds to relieve our overstuffed houses.

Everything that can be lost will be lost.

Transformation is retrograde.

Certainty becomes our enemy.

Vim and vigor, piss and vinegar, succumb to rigor mortis when we become powerless, apathetic, dispirited automatons.

The rational brain breaks from the persistent mystery of life.

Even a free spirit can find itself a slave to other free spirits

When intellect closes itself completely to mystical and spiritual energy.

Denying our intuition is insanity and the rational mind alone will not cure itself.

Depression is the bitter fruit of justifying our illusions.

Our epiphany is that we are a manifestation of the Divine, a conceit no more fanciful than the Big Bang.

Fortunately, the soft light of nostalgia informs my memories of the neighbors of my youth as mostly good and decent people for whom I still hold great warmth and affection. Living three hundred miles north of civilization made us all natural born losers. That shared experience was a great leveler, though—being human—we created our own social strata which my Aunt Lois would wisely cut through when we kids would criticize someone else: “You ain’t no better yourself.” It was a simpler time with clear codes and standards of behavior that I often chafed against as a teenager, but as a child it was all comforting and the norms provided an important security blanket of predictability. Divorce was rare and nothing we had to worry about. Our parents openly displayed affection in front of us and liked to waltz around the kitchen together. Family outings were mainly “visiting” the neighbors where parents would talk, kids would play, and all would enjoy a “little lunch” that was really a feast of summer sausage, American cheese, fresh bread, pear sauce, and chocolate cake. There was no better place to start out life, as a boy especially, than on a family farm. The outdoors offered endless exploration while the house held music, books, toys, and TV.

Our films and television were pretty tame fare, but the escapism from an ordinary day was a blessing.

The only movies we saw besides the Elvis Presley, John Wayne, and other adult fare on TV were the Walt Disney flicks like Old Yeller shown in the small gym at the school. (Bring your own popcorn.) It was the same gym where we boys got an extra phy-ed class when the girls in sixth grade got to see “the movie” they couldn’t talk about with us boys. Yes, most of us lived on farms and often saw cows and pigs mounting each other, but it never occurred to us that it had anything to do with reproducing. I don’t recall what, if anything, we had made up about how babies were born but it had something to do with kissing. We just knew at that age shortly after Santa was dead to us that it couldn’t be the way the older neighbor boys described it. That would be impossible. Even more sickening was the unthinkable notion that men could kiss other men. An older neighbor boy called them “homos”, but that boy was notorious for lying. He said Dusty Springfield was a lady homo, but he could change that. He even went so far as to claim that we had a queer in town. They called him Buck.

Buck moved to town after his old farmhouse along our bus route burned down one night “with his old man in it” as we were enthusiastically informed by the kids who got on the bus before us. He built a shelter of trees and shrubs around his new house in town and became more separate from his fellow townsmen than the most confirmed hermit in his cabin in the jackpines east of Fourtown, which was a combination 3.2 beer joint, grocery and gas station where the corners of four sparsely populated townships met near Beltrami State Forest.  

Buck was no Boo Radley though he was every bit the town pariah. He seemed nice enough when he came over one night with a map of Winnipeg to show Mom and Dad how to get to the dentist office on Notre Dame Avenue in Winnipeg where Mom could be fit with false teeth far cheaper than she could get them in the states. Sadly, over the years he became bitter and quietly exacted a more creative revenge on the town he felt he could not leave than even the most creative gossip could have conceived. He simply refused to move. Aside from his annual forays to the state fair in St. Paul where he claimed to sell beef steaks, he stayed inside his dark, heavily shaded house with the curtains closed doing…well, God didn’t even know what.

His overgrown lot stood in offensive contrast to the neat lawns surrounding him and it was just off the only tarred road in town, the state highway that ran through. The house was painted pink and white, but the light colors seemed incongruous considering the horrors they reportedly hid inside. There was rampant speculation that the teenage strangers seen in his company were runaways from the Twin Cities that he would lure to his home with “Help Wanted” signs. He would tell the locals he needed help digging graves back when they were dug by hand. Rumor had it that the boys would end up in the graves after he had his way with them. Where else would he have gotten his ubiquitous neck hickies? Still others insisted he hid the bodies inside his house or in his secluded garden. Who would know? Occasionally Buck would visit Diamond Jim’s Saloon and if he drank a bit too much he might start flirting with one of the lumberjacks in the bar. This would get him knocked off his barstool but never badly beaten. So where did those hickies come from?

Fortunately, the older ladies seemed to like him. Mrs. Solem once said she refused to cut his hair because, as she put it, “I couldn’t bring myself to harm one precious hair on that handsome head.” Those who would cut his hair or sew for him were paid with baked goods he brought home from his job as cookie for the railroad crew who maintained the tracks and bridges in western North Dakota. They referred to him as “The Fruit” behind his back. He did what he could to show the town it would not change him. He laid sharp broken bottles around the perimeter of his place to keep hoodlums from driving onto the easement.

When I was a bartender during summers and on weekends when I attended college, he once asked me over to pick up a part from his ham radio on which he liked to listen to Radio Moscow. I was soon heading off for my first trip overseas to student teach in a British school and he asked could I look for a replacement part since it was made in Sheffield, England. I never found the part nor did he make any passes when I went inside his house with trepidation and more than a little shiver of morbid curiosity about the bodies which were never found, even after the house was razed and the lawn dug up upon his death years later. He merely wanted someone to talk to and I got an earful about how much he hated the citizens of our town, for the town was intent on showing the world it would have no effect on the way things had always been.

Though our teenagers saw The Beatles’ mop tops on TV, the town barber would offer one style of haircut for the youth until he died at age 90. He called it a heinie, which was a crewcut named after the haircut of the stereotypical World War I German soldiers. Buck was bold enough to sport Elvis hair and eventually many of us confounded our parents by opting for the mop top, but our barber never went broke. Dad hated long hair on a man and he didn’t have much time for Buck. He warned me to not go around him and I didn’t except for that one time, but I never refused service to anyone who came in the bar unless they were profane, abusive, or dead drunk. I once had a tray of fruit thrown at me by a patron who was harassing a table of teachers, as one does if one is uneducated and a drunk to boot. Mostly, though, people liked me because I listened well, kept their glasses full, and poured a mean shot. I liked being liked. I would laugh at a dirty joke the twelfth time I heard it as lustily as I did the first. I would listen sympathetically to the mailman’s sob story about the indignity of being caught by his wife when he was paying a conjugal visit to the neighbor lady. “She’s a fuckin’ bloodhound,” he sadly muttered into his cups.

One summer night I closed the bar down after work while the other bartender hung around and said he’d lock the back door while I hid the money drawer in the walk-in cooler. I locked the front door behind us as we went to his car to smoke a joint before going home. The next morning I was woke up by calls from the bar owner and the other bartender’s wife. He hadn’t returned home and the money tray was missing. I was an unwitting accomplice!

The only night I ever spent in jail was when I was student teaching in England and took a trip to Scotland one winter weekend in search of the Loch Ness Monster. There had been report of a recent sighting and I was up for an adventure. I took the bus from Inverness to Loch Ness. As I was stepping down off the bus, the driver informed he wouldn’t be back for a few hours. (Gulp!) As the bus pulled away, I realized I was the only person in sight. Loch Ness is no tourist destination in the winter and there was no warm gift shop or pub around. By the time I had walked down to the ruined castle and had a look at the frozen lake, it was dusk and I was shivering. Hazzah! There was a cottage with a smoking chimney in the distance to which I hiked, not too proud to knock on the door and ask for succor. Alas, no one came to the door, so I peeked inside the window and saw a table set for dinner, but not a soul in sight. What could I do but dejectedly head back to the deserted highway and wait for the bus? Well, I am here to tell you I did survive another misadventure by hitching a ride with a friendly lorry driver who warmed me up with a dram of Scotch whiskey. He deposited me at a pub in Inverness where I awaited the arrival of my train back to Edinburgh. I returned to the Scottish capital around midnight, half tipsy but warm. To my great consternation there were no hostels open at that hour, so I milled around the Saturday night crowds of bar patrons until I got up the courage to explain my plight to a policeman who took mercy on my naïve American soul and gave me a ride in the paddy wagon to the police station. A kindly expatriated Irish policewoman offered me tea once inside. Then the jailer ushered me down the dark stone hallway of the Scottish version of the Old Bailey. I found myself locked in a cell in an ancient, decrepit ruin.  “Is the lock necessary?” I asked. “Oh yes, responded the jailer with an ominous warning: “These old castles are haunted. You don’t want any ghosts getting in to bother you.”

I laid down on the cot and covered my head with the scratchy green wool blanket and fell asleep thinking I was through with adventures. The next thing I knew, I heard the key opening the lock. It was morning and I had not been visited by Dickensian apparitions in the night. The policeman led me back down the hallway to the office where the same Irish woman cordially offered me more tea and toast before I departed for the train station back to Bristol as my Scottish hosts chuckled about taking the mickey out of me. I still laugh about my time in jail.

One thing I shared with Dad was a quirky sense of humor. He was always telling jokes and making up little jigs and silly tunes. To the outside world he was a “Hail fellow, well met.” I recall when I first noticed the town was not laid out in alignment with the square miles every country road obeyed. It just seemed odd that once one got to town none of the four directions applied to any street. It turns out one of the town founders moved his country store to the present town site in 1903. He wanted his store lined up with a large grove of trees, thus the store was placed at a slight angle to the surveyor’s findings and the rest of the town grew up around the store. I quipped to Dad one time, “This town just doesn’t sit square with the world,” to which he wryly replied, “In more ways than one.”

“You make a great mistake if you think you can be romantic without religion” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise).

There are some summer days in northern Minnesota that I will recall exactly as they were until the end of my life and I hope to revisit them even in the afterlife. The smell of a wild rose evokes a thousand of these days and the green glint of phosphorescent fireflies captive in a Mason jar lights the nights to a thousand days just like this one. In my personal mythology lightning bugs are the solid children of Aurora Borealis fallen to earth. Would that I could have bottled that abundant diversity of the natural world before it was lost to the generational amnesia that my grandchildren experience. Ruby throated mornings were the prelude to those golden days; bright starlight their postlude. Ah, but the interlude:

Effulgent morning sunshine

Flutter by, butterfly

Green dewdrops sparkle

Hello Solstice

I will mow the grass

Then walk barefoot in its lushness

Schlurp on a chunk of watermelon

Let the juice dribble down my chin

Play Ante Over until moonlight

It is the first day of summer in the hay meadow and the sun is strong. The sky is soul blue and the trees that green, green, green of late June. Natives of the North can be ambivalent about winter, but summer is too magical and short to be spoiled by pesky mosquitoes and stifling humidity.

There truly is nothing so rare as a day in June, and this one will be bug-free in memory. The air is so clean that it is without smell when it is still, and that is the sweetest smell. Sweet like the taste of tasteless, pure, cold well-water from a silver cup.

The adjacent pasture holds within its electric fence a grove of elm, oak, ash, cottonwood, and popple, mostly popple, all heavy with still-fresh, full leaves. An occasional breeze wafts with it the subtle commingling of purple alfalfa and yellow sweetclover. The silence is broken only by birdsong which fluctuates between cacophony and concert. In the distance could be heard the plaintive call of the hoot owl were there anyone here to hear it. Memory, however, is consciousness that observes and experiences without a physical presence. Silence has a presence absent sound, as it were.

There once was a boy who once was one with this scene; the boy who made the memories the old man holds. The boy who swung a red Model B Farmall tractor around three hundred and sixty degrees after finishing the back swath between the fence posts, then lowered the cutting bar hydraulically, came to a full stop, and jumped lithely off the tractor. With a grease gun he felt out nine zerks on the mower and pumped grease into them until dark purple gel oozed from every crevice. This done, he pulled his thin grey graphic tee shirt (“When You’re Hot, You’re Hot”) off over his head. His wheat-colored hair fell on his brown shoulders. The boy’s belly and arms were already hard and lean from summer work.

There was freedom in the hayfield. The boy was in charge and his thoughts were uninterrupted except for when his father would drive out in his pickup truck after his town job and he would have to disengage the power take-off (PTO), idle down the tractor and reply “Pretty good” to his father’s stock question, “How goes it then?”

“Hay looks tick as the hair on a dog’s back,” his father exclaimed in his Norwegian/German brogue with a spear of green timothy between his teeth. The boy nods his head once without betraying any affect or desire for conversation. The man would offer the boy a drink of cold water from the thermos jug he carried around all summer.

“Be home in time for chore.”

“Yah. There’s a dance in Highlanding tonight. Can I go?”

“How come?” (Now how does one answer that question when he himself is not allowed to ever ask “Why?”)

His father seemed not to listen for a reply as he inspected the sickle bar maybe looking for a broken or loose blade while muttering something to himself along the lines of “Well, I’ll be switched.”

Instead of asking why he would be “switched,” the frustrated boy repeated, “Can I go to the dance?”

He didn’t mention the dance would be followed by a keg party in the grove of trees between home and Highlanding Hall called The Tabernacle after a church that once stood there. It was far enough off the highway to escape the local constabulary’s patrol. The next day he wouldn’t mention getting drunk and stealing a kiss from a girl he was crushing on when her macho boyfriend went to fill his plastic beer cup, nor the beer her boyfriend threw in his face when he caught the kiss out of the corner of his eye.

All the popular girls went with tough guys who were ten years older. They called boys their age “candy asses.” A sad fact of life for celibate wet-dream boys everywhere.

After a long pause his father grudgingly replied, “We’ll have to see.” As unsatisfactory an answer as “It depends on,” the other vague reply the boy hated. He never asked, “Depends on what?” because his father would have said, “Don’t get persnickety” and the permission process would have been ridiculously prolonged. Do all German-Norwegians make a kid wait a half hour for an answer to every question, he wondered. Left in limbo, the boy watched as his father pressed one side of his nostril with his index finger and blew out the dust loudly before repeating the ritual on the other side of his nose.

“Keep it greased ever’ so many rounds,” the man would command before saying, “See you later then,” and settling into the worn out mesh seat cushion and closing the door of the International Harvester pickup by clamping one hand over the opening where the rolled down window had disappeared.

When he could see the pickup truck trailing a cloud of dust back on the county road, he pulled a Kool cigarette from the toolbox and lit it with just one match despite the light breeze. Menthol.

He smoked only when on the tractor and even then felt some shame because he was sixteen and enough a mama’s boy to still feel his sins deeply because they were new. That is, these sins were new: smoking, drinking, sexual exploration. There was nothing new about sin itself; he was taught it was the original condition. He would hide his shame in the dark shadows of his mind as long as denial and delusion could be chased with cheap beer.

For now—and there was only now at sixteen—he was still early in the first half of his life, happy and sweet, but not without the ability to bully the weaker boys as even good boys do. It was either that or be bullied. Like the time in sixth grade when he threw a punch at Thor Thorson’s doughy face and accidentally tore his soft flannel shirt when the smaller boy fought back. This all transpired in the boys’ lavatory since it was the only place Mrs. Engevik, their sixth grade teacher, couldn’t go. Fortunately for Thor the bathroom break was as short as the gauntlet of boys in the small class, but Thor could certainly have used his namesake’s hammer and shield. Our protagonist had taken his place reluctantly at the end of the line, for he had a soft spot for the unwilling antagonist. They were the only boys who took piano lessons and they were nearly friends at times. Besides, it was not like Thor was really “asking for it” just because he was such a “turkey.” Odd yes, but that designation becomes relative as one outgrows middle school mentality. In any case, it was assault. Simple as that. Terrible as that.

“This wasn’t just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it,” Dorothy Parker once wrote about the kind of terrible incident one can’t look away from. The boy immediately turned away from the beaten boy’s look of betrayal, but he would often look back on it and torture himself with the memory. Violence is always a failure to see the other person as a person. It is the superpower of a bully. It is kryptonite to the hero with moral courage. Karma being what it is, the boys in the bathroom chose to pick on the one among them who would grow up to be the richest, most successful man ever to leave that place. His resume would be longer than this book. Motivation can be murky and baffling. Google any of the other boys and you will find their obituary, or nothing at all.

When he was in junior high, our boy ordered the Charles Atlas program from the back of a comic book so he could be the one kicking sand in the face of the 98 pound weaklings on the beach. When a bigger classmate challenged him to a wrestling match on the playground, he put him off by saying, “In two weeks.” Well, Charles Atlas had promised that was all the time it would take to develop a buff body and how was he to know Atlas was a myth? Two weeks came and went and the challenge was forgotten, which was lucky since the body building died faster than the Sea Monkeys he had also ordered. No matter; what is a body builder but a well-muscled but still insecure human who had a dream? There are many ways to compensate. Many ways to change our origin story; that is, until our true strengths begin to serve us. If one cannot condition his body to perform like a professional athlete, he may find his mind has grown from being a voracious reader and an attentive student. He can dream of writing the great American novel until he sits down and faces a blank page late in life. A good story needs a hero and few memoirs can realistically deliver one. Memories of his own childhood cruelty would disturb his sleep in the second half of life which is about our inner work, not our chronological age. The second half roughly begins during that time between splaying and crossing one’s legs.

On this midsummer day, however, he felt as though he was in a gadda da vida and he gave no thought to the Fall for he sensed only the youthful intimations of immortality that precede the grievances of aging and resistance, which must themselves be surrendered at the gates of Paradise in exchange for the return of the innocence thought lost.

Today was another summer day filled with the unadulterated lightness of knowing there were many more to follow, too many to count yet. This day would be the source of that summer feeling that haunts one later in life when it is unrecoverable and the best we can hope for is that pleasant brain-tingle we get from hearing certain songs.

Finally, he engaged the power take-off, disengaged the clutch and was off and mowing. He contemplated the spectacular weeds as they fell to the mechanical scythe. Catch fly, thistle, fox tail, and wild mustard all mixed in with the quality grasses: timothy, alsike, alfalfa, and sweet clover. He was enamored of their loveliness as they dropped neatly to the ground. Watching the tall soldiers fall to the scythe he momentarily took his eyes off the thick hay coming at him. His heart nearly broke for a minute as a downy fledgling bird met the teeth of the relentless sickle bar. A hay meadow can be as gruesome as it is winsome. The regret would be forgotten before he made another full round.

When he turned his head to look behind at the falling grass, he cursed when he noticed a couple of sections on the sickle bar were plugged, leaving a strip of hay still standing. He disengaged the power take-off and jumped off the tractor to clean the machine. Back on the tractor, tortured by the ragged fifty feet of cutting behind him, he moved the accelerator away from the turtle symbol in which the tractor had been idling and toward the rabbit decal to keep the tractor from killing when he engaged the PTO.

When he was back in the groove, his mind shifted back into neutral. Mesmerized by the mowing motion, he went into a reverie about the romantic possibilities of a future blessed by the white ceramic statues of Jesus and Mary in the small church he attended every Sunday and holy day of obligation. He would listen to homilies on faith that never once contained the word love, wondering who, then, is this God we are to put our faith in? He had some wildly conflicting choices: the radiant, joyous Jesus etched into the round glass window behind the altar or the crucified figure on the wooden cross glued to the same window. He chose the former with a great fervor.

How could he know that religious zealotry is a good indicator of an overly repressed shadow? How could he know the great power of zeal could be expressed shamelessly in the ardent lover? That the physical center of zeal is the brain stem, that denying it could lead to great pain in the back of his neck. How can one feel so intimately and innately in love with art and nature and humanity at times and so not at home in the world at other times?

He truly felt he was God’s favorite son beloved in this moment and destined for some gaudy fame and fortune. Fortunately for him, “God has no favorites” (Acts 10:34). Somewhere between altar boy and cowboy, he had been churched by his motherand worked by his father. His mother loved her children and her church; his father loved his land and his children. The boy felt torn at times between his mother’s desire for him to be a priest and his father’s strict definition of manhood which involved agriculture. Heck, he could recite The Suscipiat in Latin as easily as he could back a tractor hitch into an implement’s towbar and drop the pin in the holes by leaning back from the tractor seat.

His father never drank liquor, smoked, nor swore in front of his children, but he was coarse, inarticulate, and alternately funny or angry. He never said ass when rump or hind-end were equally as funny or debasing. He never raised a hand to his wife and he didn’t beat his kids, but he was verbally scary when he was defied; thus, he left some invisible scars. Oftentimes his entitlement as the eldest son manifested as passive aggression; for instance, he would track across Mom’s clean kitchen floor in his muck-caked overshoes like some character out of Faulkner en route to foraging the fridge for a cold potato to slather in butter. His own father never cried and he would shake his sons by the shoulders, when they were no longer babies, until they stopped crying. 

Pity those tear ducts dried out so early when they would be needed later in life to express what Cynthia Bourgeault calls “that vulnerability in which we can endure having our heart broken and go right on loving.” When they were too big to shake, he would just yell louder and criticize his boys into perfectionism though his own jobs often failed or went half-finished. After being gone all day, he would inspect the farm with a keen eye looking for any unfinished chores without acknowledging the hours and hours of hard work the second son had put in trying to please him.

“Who didn’t haul water to the pigs? Their barrel is nearly dry.”

The boy would bite his tongue bloody to keep from shouting, “EVERYBODY! Not just me, EVERYBODY didn’t do it!”

Now, his siblings would tell it differently, but they had a different experience of their father than the middle boy did. He would inherit as much of the farm as his two sisters, but not as much as his two brothers. Thus, this sensitive and emotional boy was primed for alcoholism at the first opportunity.

That opportunity had presented itself at a country dance with his friends earlier in the summer. His first date with brandy and Coke was as liberating and yet as addicting as his first platonic love which was in its early stages that summer of ’72.

“Summer Side of Life” by folk singer Gordon Lightfoot played on CKRC AM from Winnipeg as the tractor’s radio and engine fought each other while he bounced on the hard tractor seat:

He came down from fields of green

On the summer side of life

His love was ripe

The melody of some songs might remain in his head for the rest of his life though he would forget the words and who sang them. A lovely song he wouldn’t hear for fifty years after he left the broadcast range of Canadian radio turned into a delightful ear worm that he would doggedly research until he found it on YouTube: “Anna Marie” by Susan Jacks. Lobo, Jim Croce, Elton John, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and Olivia Newton-John provided the sound track of his earliest lovelorn days. “Too Late to Turn Back Now” by The Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose left the most indelible impression on his highly impressionable brain.

In compliance with the MAPL system that required twenty-five percent of airplay on Canadian radio be devoted to Canadian music, he heard a lot of songs that would fade from his life when he moved farther from the border, but “I Wish I Were” by Toronto’s Andy Kim was next in the rotation that summer day:

You know what I do now every night

While laying in my bed

Take back all the things I did

And half the things I said

Love, a new emotion to him, made the boy look at the sky with a new awareness and appreciation for the mysteries of life. The boy would fall in love three times in his life; fortunately, the greatest of these was with his wife. He also had many crushes by the time he was sixteen. His first was when he was six; she had white cotton candy hair and her name was Doreen. Now, at sixteen, he had fallen in love for the first time and, as most people know, there is no turning back from first love even if it is unrequited. Especially if it is unrequited. One-sided romance has no expiration date. It changes everything. How quickly passion can turn to obsession, crowding out a large volume of childhood interests. Food seemed less interesting, but music took on whole new levels of meaning.

George Jones, one of his father’s favorite country singers, once said, “When you’re happy you enjoy the music. When you’re sad you understand the lyrics.” But what of the exquisite pain created by a symphony of strings? The effect of lonesome lyrics underscored by a piercing violin is to fall backwards into the arms of one’s angels and give thanks in all directions.

Confused, not knowing what to do with his longing, he would sob and gasp at times but he refused to cry. Just hearing the heart-broke songs was somehow consoling. Most men would rather be angry than sad, yet life without the blues would not be worth living, even in the summer side of life. He dreamed of being a blue-eyed soul singer before he learned not to sing, which was before he was told he could not carry a tune. He had not yet come to appreciate the voices of Sam Cooke and Etta James as he would as an adult, but Elton John’s “Your Song” was his song.

Sadness could be a superpower, the antidote to the toxic positivity of the superficial cool kids. Longing, yearning, and the blues hurt so good. Bittersweet emotion is at its peak beauty when the melancholy is cut by possibility. We all do better in part sun, part shade. Besotted, but not yet jaded, a young man can cheat despair if faith in love is still there.

He took a drag off his cigarette and enjoyed the slightly dizzy feeling one point more intoxicating than gulping pure country air. Perhaps because of his childish dedication to his chastity he burned with an intense lust that would not have been as painful in some of the more experienced boys his age. He had simultaneously shuddered and felt aroused when one of his oversexed schoolmates had unabashedly confided to him in the school locker room that he had lost his virginity at fourteen.

“The only bad part was that her mother walked in on us,” confessed the friend.

“What did she say?” the boy asked in shock.

“Moooo!” replied his friend facetiously.

Thought leads to thought on the tractor as the boy silently chuckles at the memory of the day last school year when the economics/psychology teacher who never got to psychology was allowed to show an innocuous portion of a sex ed film. The young male coach/teacher turned the projector light and sound off during the part of the film banned by the school board. Hilariously, he accidentally resumed the film too soon and the class got to see a rubber stretched over a banana as the narrator cautioned against using plastic bags in lieu of condoms. “Better Glad than mad,” the normally shy boy piped up to the rowdy and raucous glee of his classmates. It was the boldest thing the boy had ever said and the response made him feel accepted and happy.

He was looking forward to wearing his new skin-tight pleather pants and white muscle shirt to the dance that night. He was old enough now to pick out his own clothes and pay for them with his “pig money.” He bought this hot outfit at Bjorkman’s teen shop in Thief River in the hopes that this might be the night. Ah, the optimism of a horny teenage boy; alas, it would be several more years before his services would be in demand. Do we need a better example of the saying “Ignorance is bliss?” As the exciting reverie faded he found himself back in the hayfield. He cleansed his mind by breathing deeply until he felt holy again. Pity the poor boy who is both zealot and sensualist. The boy crushed the hot cherry of his cigarette on the moving tractor tire and felt the sunburn on the back of his neck as he raised his eyes to look upon the cloudless sky and mumble a prayer as he turned westward down the field.

Pull back, now, the camera and observe the boy as he grows smaller in the more panoramic landscape. Lest one feels a sharp poignancy that he seems small and alone in the field, remember how he himself feels: invincible and energetic as a spring colt. He can be happy in a party of peers like the pine siskin that arrives at the bird feeder in legion, and he can be content alone in the field like the solitary chickadee that swoops in to chase away the smaller finches. Better to save one’s tears for the friendless child on the playground who is truly alone because she does not want to be. May she turn her longing into a creative and spiritual life.

My mother interrupts my dream state as she restlessly vocalizes seemingly random images from deep in her dementia that make her laugh.

Yellow. I hope she can see yellow with her eyes closed. Mom was daffy about yellow. She loved yellow sun dresses, yellow flowers, yellow finches, and her yellow ’56 Chevy.

Her voice is as comforting now as it was in those Sunday night phone calls after I left home, though “home” to her now is where she grew up, or perhaps some place more ancient. She always made the best word salad, but her sentences are now fragments where names and places and situations shift among moments of glossolalia and repeated phrases like “those pigs” that she finds so funny. When she stops laughing, I decide to recite a verse by Galway Kinnell:

Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow,

and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow,

and the sow began remembering…

the long perfect loveliness of sow.

“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” Mom giggles.

I smile and stare at the ceiling until I become a boy again.

It is one of those rare, warm, early-autumn afternoons when the air is low in humidity and smells of an ancient dream of childhood innocence. The birdsong, so remarkable in early spring, is now unnoticed white noise. Second cutting is finished, the grain is ripe, and the boy’s junior year in high school will begin soon. He rides Roby, a one-eyed spotted pony his Grandfather bought for him from a horse trader locals disparaged as a sheeny, past farm buildings that have not yet become gray abandonings, through the stand of sturdy oak trees where the grove south of the house petered out.

Weaving around a small pasture dotted with cow pies, log piles, and several mysterious sink holes as long as graves but not as deep. Rural legend held they were the sunken graves of “The Indians.”

He rubs the whorl of horse hair on the spotted pony’s forehead, then smells his hand. The rich, earthy fragrance like that of purple petunias emanates from long, slender fingers. His arms and shoulders are now deeply brown. He rides through the third crop of blue alfalfa, stunned by the bewildering beauty of life.

His stomach is in love. Lovesickness. First love is confusingly and exquisitely painful. Now he knew what loneliness was, being alone in an intensely passionate emotional affair.

Then a sensation as unexpected as a snowdrop on one’s face when the sun is still shining through a break in the clouds. A pleasurable tickling swirls outward from inside his navel. A oneness with the pony and the earth beneath his hooves.

Present and free and open to the possibilities of a day without plans or apparent purpose, boy and horse gallop to the yellow popples and weathered oaks with spookily twisted branches. There he swings his long left leg over the pony’s back, dismounts, opens the gate, unbridles the pony and returns him to the peaceful pasture he shares with the rocks and cattle.

Ambling back to the fence, he sidesteps the cowpies he would have let ooze between his toes when he was a barefoot kid. He closes the gate by grabbing the insulated handle attached to the barbed wire and stretching it far enough to hook onto the loop of wire that connected it to the electricity. He had long ago mastered the art of dodging hot wires after receiving more than a few stunning shocks. He could duck under a low fence by slithering like a snake.

The distant sound of a tractor draws his attention to a far field where his older brother is plowing a recently thrashed oat field. The fresh dirt had already attracted a substantial flock of landbound seagulls that had mistaken the furrows for the waves of some distant sea. He was aware it wouldn’t be too many days until he was out there picking the newly upturned rocks with his brother while his father drove the tractor pulling the wagon just a little too fast. It was dirty and exhausting work, but no worse than riding the hay wagon behind the bailer, crusted with chaff and sweat while trying to keep up with stacking each new bale five or six rows high before the next bale was birthed.

Ugh, his mind needed a cool, clean escape.

Contemplating the ripe and still leafy grove where photosynthesis has largely finished its work, his loneliness leaves, along with the separation between observer and observed. He gives himself to the scene, devoid of responsibility but rife with invincibility. The hum of the tractor is replaced by a silent sleepy indolence, his breath deep but quiet, his heart filled with deep tranquility as pleasant and peaceful daydreams arise in his awareness. Once every sight, sound, and scent has soaked into every pore of his being, his eyes turn to the west and the possibility of one day going to California.

California. The word was gorgeous with gold. Hollywood, horses, mountains, California girls, orange groves, and water that drinks like cherry wine.

Flash forward to his first road trip to California with his best college friend, Ron. They were both English majors who took a class in Steinbeck from Rosemary Smith whose account of the Dust Bowl migration, aided by the Library of Congress recordings of Woody Guthrie songs, made skipping a semester of college to go west irresistible. Her guided tour through East of Eden was filled with the images that enticed these two 21-year-old Aaron Trasks to load up the boy’s old Mercury Comet and cross the bridge between Moorhead and Fargo that Steinbeck and his dog Charley had taken in search of America. The following is a Facebook exchange between the friends-for-life thirty-three years later:

Ron: I have a hazy memory of taking the spring quarter off from college in our Junior year, me and Mr. Neuschwander lighting out for the territory in his little red car to see the West Coast. It was 1977, and the Eagles' "Hotel California" was ... still new. We wore out the eight track (or maybe it was a cassette -- Neusch was avant garde that way). The scene was part Wayne and Garth head banging to Queen and part Chris Farley and David Spade in Tommy Boy singing and crying on their road trip with the hood flying off the car. We were headed west for Paradise, the place to be, to watch the lazy sun sinking in the sea. By the time it was over we were broke from getting the car fixed after the accident (en route to see Bob Hope and Johnny Carson in a taping of The Tonight Show), and after getting it towed off the cliff where we slid off the road in Colorado in a blizzard, hung over, pissed at each other, limping home. Desperados, not quite come to our senses. Not such a fine sight to see by the time we were standing on the corner in Winslow Arizona on the way home. The girl, my Lord, in the flat bed Ford didn't even slow down to take a look at me. I don't know. Paradise wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

And you can see them there,
On Sunday morning
They stand up and sing about
what it's like up there
They call it paradise
I don't know why
You call someplace paradise,
kiss it goodbye

Dale: A clever and highly evocative ode to an epic journey, Ron. It was an eight track. I still have it. I guess we were just not ready for life in the fast lane. We were more like the new kids in town when we rolled into the city with our Midwest ways. Still, I recall some peaceful, easy feelings as we watched the sunset at Big Sur. I also liked the way your sparkling earrings laid against your skin so white. It's been a long run now and we are too old to live, too young to die. Bye bye.

Ah, the power of a dream! Haha. Now my stream of consciousness flows back to “Mr. Neuschwander” in an earlier time:

At the edge of the woods where the goldenrod—that forerunner of the first frost of fall—and saplings grow, he strips back the greenish bark on a young tree to reveal the white watermelon wood still in its virginity. He sits in the first-fallen leaves with his back leaning into a tall oak, the rough, rusty bark protecting the sweet, sappy pulp within. In a moment of Zen, the guiltless boy becomes the epitome of what Alan Watts would call “…one who manages to be human with the same artless grace and absence of inner conflict with which a tree is a tree.”

He drifts off until the chill wakes him. The sun is westering behind a towering cottonwood adorning its still shiny green leaves with glistering white diamonds as he bounds through the woods like a deer on the run until he slows for the riverbank that leads him down through thick weeds to a thin trickle of water. His light feet quickly find the rocks that help him effortlessly across the muddy bottom. Blood pumping, adrenaline flowing like the sap in the trees, his brain infused with spicy air, he comes to the far end of the woods which shelter the small white country church. It is not his church; it would have been his father’s had his father gone to church. Here the trees lean over the edges of the graveyard on three sides, ready to devour the headstones. Moose have left deep tracks in the dirt when the ground was wet from the spring overflow.

One monument in particular catches his eye: the moss-topped white stone memorializes a woman who was murdered in a Fargo hotel at age 18 on her first train trip away from home in 1921. The boy could not have known that she once had dreams of leaving the wetlands just as he did. But she could not hope to escape her history; it was her future as well. The rail she rode west had brought her back for burial in the ground she shared with atoms from her long dead ancestors. Two generations later her relatives would move to higher ground her remaining hair, bones, and clothes from the rotted coffin ensnared by creeping tree roots. She would at last rest beside her parents who survived her.

If at least half of the Neanderthal genome is still found in living humans, what is extinction? If we survive our ancestors, do they not also survive? Such ghostly thoughts buzz around his young brain as he studies the faded inscriptions on the mossy tombstones and his body shivers.

Late in life the boy would shiver again as the words of Patty Krawec, an Anishinaabe writer from Lac Seul First Nation, would resonate in his soul:

The land itself and the conditions of that land, like altitude and climate,

impact our genome just as our human ancestors do. We are born on it, die on it;

we come from it and return to it. The land and the waters, oceans and rivers,

are part of us, relatives and ancestors in a very real way.

Unbeknown to the boy, the small river which had been dammed at its source so the farmland could produce grain would one day submerge the graveyard and reclaim its bed. He could not know that his roots in cold, hard flatlands would not transplant well in sunny, hilly cities where he hoped to bloom.

He shudders like an aspen leaf quaking in the Indian summer breeze as he reverently approaches the sunken marker of a friend dead these five years. Loosening a stone from the hard-packed ground with the tip of his tennis shoe, he fills with the melancholy that infuses the forest shade that creeps across the grave marker.

The sun is setting whiskey yellow in the northwest as the wind changes direction dragging with it peat smoke, the early chorus of crickets, and a big chill from the memory of his first funeral. He can clearly recall the reflection of the overhead light in the eyeglasses of his great-aunt lying in a gleaming casket in the lobby of the church, an image fraught with foreboding.

He was as yet unaware that in one month 27 Uruguayan rugby players would be fighting for their young lives after a plane crash in the Andes while he would be partying to The Raspberries and The Moody Blues during the school break for the Minnesota teachers’ convention. We, the privileged, would hear of the 16 survivors that were rescued 72 days later and thank God for the miracle, unmindful that the 29 who died looked to the same sky and prayed the same Lord’s Prayer.

Mercifully, our boy was too young to consider the randomness of life. For being such a big state, Minnesota was a small vantage point from which to view the world. Every secluded life, even at a young age, knows something of tragedy, however.

“I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you” (Joseph Campbell).

The kinesiologist could tell I have a fear of being left alone and a fear of losing control.

Oh, and a wheat allergy.

I always thought it was rag weed in late summer.

Let’s stick with that; I could live by bread alone.

To a native of the North it feels like late summer now in Denver even though the crocus still blooms through concrete cracks.

I glance at the purple crocus as I walk by, then I turn back to re-spect it by looking again and listening to what the little flower is telling me.

“Just be still,” it says, on this Holy Saturday.

To paraphrase Jane Austen: But now I love a crocus…. I have gained a new source of enjoyment, and it is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible.

After nightfall the church organs will play “Gloria” and the bells will ring for the first time in two days.

The vigil will begin with the ceremony of darkness and light.

I stand now in that liminal space and contemplate the paradox of the Triduum:

There would be no resurrection without death, no compassion without passion.

And if the Resurrection is a myth, then it is not fiction, but something that is always true.

Death and resurrection are the cosmic pattern.

Look to the crocus which will soon disappear only to bloom again next year.

We come to God by doing it wrong, not by doing it right.

Apatheia is attained when we bear then unburden ourselves of our disordered passions.

Jung assures us, “In all chaos there is a cosmos. In all disorder a secret order.”

I have a memory of the future; you can relax, all is well.

I sit now outside the coffee shop watching colorful white people pierced, tattooed, and plugged in.

They do not know just how short spring is.

But it is sweet.

I may come back here when my summer ends.

To smell the fragrant Frasier fir.

To hear the tumbling creek.

Before winter’s long hush.

There is a time to be cozy and a time to be astonished.

Certainty must allow for surprise.

To quote Helen Luke: “The coming to consciousness is not a discovery of some new thing; it is a long and painful return to that which has always been.”

I see a lovely butterfly born of a lowly caterpillar performing an ancient program of forward movement.

I am still like a caterpillar slowly slogging along toward God-knows-what metamorphosis,

Propelled by a longing to return home that is more than nostalgia.

Spending my life looking for a God that has never left home.

That has never named itself because spirit cannot be named or limited.

That cannot be known until we remember it in ourselves.

A Course in Miracles speaks to us thus:

               This world you seem to live in is not home to you. And somewhere in your mind you

know that this is true. A memory of home keeps haunting you, as if there were a

place that called you to return, although you do not recognize the voice, nor what it is

the voice reminds you of…. Heaven is not a place or a condition. It is merely an

awareness of perfect oneness.

(Pause)

Do you ever just stop and wonder?

What about?

(Pause)

Have you ever undivided your attention?

Did you concentrate it on the fuzzy white seed sheath

Floating in front of the green juniper?

Have you lost yourself in the alpenglow of the sun setting behind high mountains?

Or were you captivated by the light and motion animating the yellow leaf on the tall oak?

Did you mind the wind?

Or no wind, just air so pure you were loathe to leave it undrunk?

Maybe your senses were arrested by the petrichor aroma that fills the air after the rain that ended a dry spell?

Have you just once gasped like St. Augustine when someone beautiful lavished their fragrance?

Then you must remember that smell as I do to this day.

A potpourri of Brut cologne, cinnamon-gum breath, and a red rose boutonniere is all that’s left of High School Homecoming.

So, one can access smells long past as though they still exist.

Have you ever really heard a dry leaf skating across the frozen pavement?

Did you follow the leaf with your eyes until it reached its destiny?

Maybe it never happened if you did not bear witness.

I mean, if humans have only been on Earth for 0.0067% of its existence,

What did God do for entertainment before that?

Talk about infinite patience if humankind is the crowning achievement of creation.

Or is it?

Anthropomorphic God must have taken his eyes off the ball for millions of millenia,

Or He was mindful of every moment before minutes existed and was satisfied.

Did timelessness slip away at the dawn of time, or has it always been behind the clock

Like the immutable consciousness behind our limited perceptions?

How do we cleanse the lens of perception that we might see God in everything?

I don’t know when the small birthmark on the back of my left hand disappeared;

I stopped paying attention to it.

The paisley floaters in my eyes have never stopped though I seldom take notice of them anymore.

Do you still see movement when you close your eyes?

Does some light still get in?

Bread and wine, human and divine.

We live in mistaken identity most of the day.

A glimmer of our truth still lights the way.

Morning mist, evening fog, driving into snowflakes with headlights on.

Until it is safe to switch to high beams that make the moon-eyes of the moose on the road ahead glow.

Who told you to dim your lights when you are driving alone in the darkness?

You are the driver.

It’s your car.

What are bright lights for?

The big picture doesn’t fit the small frames we choose to define our reality, so we keep crashing into the unseen and unexpected.

Goings-on in the larger world of which we are unconscious affect us

As surely as the motion of the moth’s wings changes history.

Meaning my small, peculiar experiences are all the more special.

Philosophers deal in universals while poets delve into the particulars.

The mystic’s vision encompasses both the microcosm and the macrocosm.

The large garment is different from the small only in size, not in essence,

But I will wear the world like a loose garment that my love might flow more freely.

My soul is painted in all the prettiest of blues and all its most heartbreaking hues.

Beauty breaks us so we can see it in ourselves.

The energy of repurposed star dust is essentially all the same.

Everything is beautiful if Spirit is energy for everything is spiritual.

The philosopher, the poet and the prophet are so grateful for humanity’s gifts

They give back what they have done with those blessings.

Thus, my poetic life joins the body of world literature

Just as my individual identity flows into the sea of human history.

I choose to awaken the song of love in my heart.

If I have not saved the world, I have at least done my part.

Every city block here boasts a craft brewery and a marijuana dispensary, but not for me.

Just strong black coffee, which smells a bit like weed if you don’t think about it.

If the pain becomes unbearable, all bets are off.

Back home there is a dental office across the street from the holistic healer.

Sometimes I find euphoria there.

I am allergic to alcohol too, I am told, so I gulp the gas greedily when it is offered.

I think brilliant thoughts then: I should write poetry while under the influence.

Better yet, people should read it while they are high.

And why is Miller the top selling beer around here?

It’s the clear bottles.

It may be the clear bottles.

God I held that thought a long time.

Like since 1979 when I wrote it on a cocktail napkin during happy hour.

Day drinking alone at the Best Western lounge after finishing the mail route.

Chilling to Randy Meisner singing “Hearts on Fire” from the jukebox.

I feel my definitions fading as I let go.

Let them go.

Life may be hard for those without scrupulous boundaries; judgment is harsh, stifling, and unrelenting.

The worse curse, however, is thinking we have to earn love.

Being defined by one’s work ethic deprives us of any sense of inherent worth in space and time.

Odd moments of beauty and pleasure pierce the despair when love is not there.

The always among the never is not apparent to the poorly trained eye.

Because the painful seemed interesting I explored it like a tongue probing a sore tooth.

One beer becomes too many when twenty is not enough.

I have connected, been rejected, disconnected, accepted again—by the grace of God.

Addicts are but frustrated mystics seeking perfection, not correction.

Oxygen fuels a false consciousness, but nitrous oxide rounds the rough edges.

It will also speed the onset of dementia I will inherit from my mother.

Forty years sober; twenty-two of them on Clonazepam and Venlafaxine for anxiety and depression.

From whom did I inherit that?

Depression, not insanity, for what most call insanity, I call imagination.

It saves me from trying to be well-adjusted to a neurotic culture.

Which is not to say any of us completely escapes the neurosis of the liver.

I just find society’s sane person a bit of a dullard, as well as deaf.

Some would say extreme misophonia can affect one’s sanity, but again, chicken or egg?

Causality is tricky quicksand.

Of course, some anti-depressants have been linked to severe memory loss and can lead to dementia.

How will l know?

Depression can spawn dementia too.

Mother managed low-grade depression without drugs.

Carotid artery blockage? Yes, she had that; I show early stages.

Memory slips, verbal bumbles, and dizziness are becoming more common.

The thought of forgetting everything after childhood is not daunting; life does not get better.

Still, I have enjoyed great grace and beauty in the second half of life

Though the grace comes through the gross

Like the pain relief that came from the adult aspirin my mother mashed into a tablespoon of ketchup.

As long as there exists the possibility of perceiving Earth’s ineffable beauty, I will linger.

Memories crowd out dreams if one lives long enough.

And my purpose has become one of living liberated of expectations and striving.

To live in the Grace of my creative decisions born of the love I am left with.

I do not wish to lose those memories; no one else has access to them.

It’s not that I want to go back to those days as much as I want to return to the way I felt.

That hot tear that just found its course down my cheek is the physical form of grieving for past beauty,

Gratitude for the beauty of the azaleas blooming along my front porch on the first truly day of spring,

Every phase and face of the moon,

The ululation of the loon,

The sonic booms that disappeared one day when I wasn’t paying attention,

The slap in the chest by a shockwave when a rock band hits its peak groove.

One decibel below what we can hear is the call of the wild;

One decibel above is the song of the angels.

Between is all the beauty we can bear.

The beauty that is the only truth we need to know on earth, according to Keats.

Useless beauty we cannot capture or commodify waits for us beyond.

It can wait; true beauty has no sell-by date.

My mind shuffles to Minnesota where I recently visited my parents in the care facility.

Home was where they summoned my troubled soul to sit in long silence in an over-heated house.

To inhale the soothing balm of burning logs and perked coffee.

My mother would pick weeds and put them in fruit jars like flowers that year she lived alone on the farm After Dad was placed in the nursing not-home.

It made perfect sense; she saw the beauty in all things and people.

Fredrick Backman wrote, “Almost everyone love too much, hates too easily, forgives too little.”

Almost everyone; Mom was guilty of only the first part.

Her love was extravagant.

I must have inherited that loves-too-much gene.

The pain it causes is extra: excruciating, exhilarating, and exhausting.

As a child I cried when the upstairs window slammed shut on Mom’s hand.

Now I cry just thinking of it.

That ancient lump in the throat from loving too much for this world.

She saw the virtue in her children which was important when we felt we were “no earthly good.”

I wish I could reach her now.

I am holding Mother’s shrunken hand that used to make the pies and knead the bread dough, listening hungrily to the familiar voice she has been reduced to, coming from a place far from here.

I hope the random memories that now choose her are the ones she would have chosen.

They seem to be.

I look at her face with a heart full of love and I see the maternal face of God.

I return the divine gaze as it was reflected to me.

She smiles sweetly and closes her pretty blue eyes.

She seems less anxious when she is half asleep.

She doesn’t have my father’s night terrors.

But then he has not let go of control yet.

Parkinson’s.

He cannot feed himself, but he still has the iron grip of a farmer.

Skin like rough bark, the brown back of his neck is still scored with criss-crossed crinkles.

Like fork-pressed peanut butter cookies stacked in Grandma’s square green glass jar.

What happened to the strong young man in his white sleeveless tee-shirt spashing water from the white enameled basin with the red rim onto his farmer’s-tanned arms to wash away the honest sweat?

Raised in the tension between mystery and earthiness, I felt most comfortable in the ordinary.

I would pick blueberries with my mother and I would hold pink piglets so my father could clip their teeth lest the sow not allow them to nurse.

 “House puppy,” Mom would tease if we stayed too long inside when the sun was shining. “You’re going to get rickets.”

Dad did not have to say anything; I would tense up when I heard him coming up the front porch steps while I was reading or daydreaming in the pleasant farmhouse.

“Don’t sit. Weed,” was the unspoken command that motivated me to pursue an impossible transformation of the farmyard into a palace garden with a push mower and Gurney seeds.

I would put away my marbles and get a little dirt on my hands.

“Cause,” as Sixto Rodriguez asks, “how many times can you wake up in this comic book and plant flowers?” 

One cannot serve two masters for long; however, I would need to learn to plant crops as well.

At least Mom appreciated the fruits of my labors.

And when one is young there are many refuges from disapproval.

I learned the satisfaction of work and the peace of a well-earned rest.

I would, if I could, hang on to those times forever.

I do not know how I will encounter Mom and Dad in the afterlife,

But I hope that we will share one spirit composed entirely of the overwhelming love we experienced living off the land in our time on Earth.

The lessons I learned from the earth were so different from those I learned from the world.

Maybe when we are finally forced to let go, we are blessed with a blissful fugue.

“Continuous epiphanies and moments of nudity,” as Larry F. said so elegantly.

Maybe life is not prose but poetry and, in the end, we catch the rhythm in that moment when the terminal becomes the eternal.

Yet, how many of us set out on a quest for salvation without knowing what the questions are?

I have come to the mountains not to escape but to surrender.

I am still, after all, enough my father to try to control even detachment.

Here is my wish. These are my conditions:

1.) I will go gently if my delirium is sweeter than the memory of my first bottle of wine at sixteen.

2.) I get to choose the images and memories that take root in the darkness and let the shame burn off like summer morning mist in the low hay meadows.

3.) I can finish the most beautiful but evanescent dreams that were abruptly ended by my alarm clock.

What I really fear, just as you do, is being old, not growing old.

They say when you become one with the Source, fear becomes a strange word with no meaning,

And I expect to end up where my soul came from.

My addled mind will hold only memories of nature, the weeds and the wheat, as long as my body holds my soul.

Then, in a journey without distance, I will be still and go home.

I will forget the things that need forgetting as I finally remember why I was born.

My thoughts will be my prayers, prayers of gratitude for the glory of living.

Not the needy knee-prayer at blue taffeta twilight with the lights off and the bedroom window held open by an empty can of Mom’s AquaNet hairspray.

Not a desperate dictate that healing and peace come about in a particular way,

but a release of any doubt that it is God’s will that we be healed and at peace,

Whatever that looks like.

Perhaps I can simply say, “It is me, Dale, what more need I say?”

First, I must face down the dark night of my soul by staying in the places that are haunted.

Like the Psalm says, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning….”

Darkness and daylight do the same dance every day

Like passionate partners becoming one in the act of lovemaking.

An act of excruciating pain coupled with ecstatic, orgasmic pleasure.

The false evidence of my inadequacy forgotten, lessons learned, I will rest in the gut-stirring, heart-throbbing, mind-bending reality of my True Self.

Then I will wake to the birds outside my window announcing the dawn with their little hearts full of the joy that is offered me.

I will receive it as I breathe the sweet morning chill,

Then look softly into the mysterious eyes of my beloved and kiss her soft lips with a deep and grateful blessing.

The cool breeze will shake the quaking aspen trees outside the cabin window.

Filtered through the blinds the green leaves dancing with the crazed frenzy of a strobe-lit, club-drugged crowd of revelers.

I shall immerse myself in the madness

Then be still, for He will be there in the wind that cools my skin

And the birdsong that delights my ears.

If I closed the windows, I could not shut out the Love I Am.

In the economy of grace nothing is wasted, not even our demons.

I look forward to being reminded of them without judgment and shame.

Shame makes truth elusive but not escapable.

I shall heed Nietzsche and be careful not to cast out my devils lest I cast out the best thing about myself.

I will explore the woods and the shadows until they give up their secrets.

The tree roots cling to the soil; the vine does not let go its grasp on the trees.

Yet the thought of all the toil it takes to resist gravity can drop me to my knees.

My tormentors become my mentors when I say “Here I Am.”

I can, in the end, but choose the light for it has no alternative.

Darkness is not the absence of light but the illusion there is no light,

Even as the memory of light leads me blindly toward itself.

There is no other way forward and there is no turning back.

And yet I cannot seem to let go of this feeling, this fear of nothingness.

How can I exist if I can never smell another lilac, if I can never make love again?

How do I detach from this world of emotions and illusions?

Everything I thought was me, everything I clung to desperately,

All the dramas, traumas, grievances, passions, dreams, hopes, certainties…

I must, I must let go of a lifetime of attachments.

It is time for subtraction, to embrace a new attraction.

Consuming and competing is all I know how to do, but perhaps there is beauty in not always knowing, just as there is delight in loving a melody before one learns the lyrics.

Or not knowing for your whole life which bird sings that magical and mysterious tune that haunts you.

Uncertainty is my path to freedom.

That is why one needs to make the unknown a mystery instead of a terror.

Does the bird sitting on a hot wire know it will not be electrocuted quite simply because it does not give the electricity a pathway?

Just as our subconscious protects us from hitting the ground in our nightmares because it intuits what our waking mind does not:

We are falling for all eternity into the depthless depths of God.

When faith falters, hope persists for some unknown reason.

Ah, to hope without goals or expectations,

Just thrilling possibilities that are never disappointing since you cannot feel both at once.

To let my truth be the God in me loving God

So the love I am flows like a river toward everything in its path.

“Be not afraid,” I tell myself.

Then, “Be not afraid of fear,” for I will be very afraid at times.

Fear, however, is irrational when it has already been decided that I will find my way home.

We know, somehow, where we came from and where our hearts call home.

“This too shall pass,” I comfort myself.

By grace I can trust the eventual passing of all things, and where they are heading.

“Never be afraid of defining who you are,” I remind myself.

But I am not a thing. I am nothing. No definitions, no boundaries, no differences.

It is this deep trust that encourages me to take notes on the life I experience

And the choices I make when my body is alive and awake.

Only then can I live as Thoreau instructed;

That is, “with the license of a higher order of being,”

The license to “Be curious, not judgmental,” as Whitman wisely advised.

Why be a senseless clod while living on this side of the sod when we can be a flower floating on the flowing water from the deep wellspring of life?

I must surrender to the promise experience has stripped away and toss aside the world’s illusions.

I need to strip naked to God without flirtation or filtration so Love can make love to me as I really am.

Here I am.

I am.

I am going to turn these emotions into images.

Images that will lead me home because they are not—and I am not—a bundle of perceptions

But a consciousness that does not decompose when the body dies.

A consciousness so breathtaking we choose to give up being innocent and unwounded to gain it.

We make a great mistake abandoning childhood because we think we can improve on it.

The suffering requisite for enlightenment comprises the greatest fiction of all.

But it is still fiction; the reality is that enlightenment is always available.

We have merely made up that we can earn it or learn it.

“It is not because you do not know the truth that I write to you, but because you know it already” (1 John 2:21).

My current consciousness is a riverbed from which I watch the flotsam and jetsam of life flow over me,

My greater emotions keeping the lesser ones in perspective.

Magical thinking would separate childhood cancer into illusion and perfect rose gardens into reality.

A miracle is the realization that all matter is illusion because it is not permanent

And it is not what we perceive it to be.

Not even earth and sky will last forever.

My perceptions are only as coherent as the quirky personality they created,

Yet my life and poetry are entirely cohesive.

At their core is my truth.

My memories and dreams are the stuff of which I have built a life.

They informed all that was possible for me.

Thus, the urgency to keep exploring the past and the future simultaneously.

Realizing that the great paradox is that they lie in the same location,

Which is here as it is now.

Beholding the paradox that my nostalgia is homesickness for the past,

Which is the future as well.

Discovering one’s truth involves traveling both directions concurrently

And probing the multiverse for the images that stick to one’s soul.

Lonely as a rotted fence post long disconnected from the rusted barbed wire at its feet

Yearning for the lost connection, yet joyful in the awareness of still standing

Still rooted in the pride of endurance

While dreading the last gust of wind

A stake in the heart of Mother Earth the natives said

A cross that bore its weight for a season

Trace the worm tracks in the soft pulp with your finger

They will melt into a chunk of charcoal forged by prairie fire

All in the lifetime of a man whose father dug the posthole

The tree from whence it came spanned the life of his grandfather

The atoms and molecules that existed at the Big Bang

Are the same atoms and molecules here right now

All they’ve done for 13.8 billion years is change form

A jet lays white tracks in the September sky as it flies above my tall cottonwood

The neighbor’s maple tree has one low-hanging branch tipped orange

All else is still green

Nothing here has fallen

Nothing here looks old

Except maybe my cottonwood with a few dead fingers between the living limbs

My family is not here today

I have Covid

They are well

That is what matters

So does loneliness

It helps us detach

It allows us to hear the ancient call to communion

And connection with all that is

Not just the special relationships we lean on

The peace is real when the world holds us

So we can let go

Like the rustic post that abides all seasons

Senselessly

Stoically

Lonely but not lonesome

The burlap-wrapped jug Grandpa Key filled with cold water from the well house before he took us for a joy ride in the Model A.

The silver scupper Grandpa Nash pumped cold water into on a hot day.

These remain as true as the North Star in the moonlit sky.  

At least this is what I must believe.

I believe in science, and I believe in mystery.

Holding the tension between the two creates the fullness of reality.

It’s not either/or, two of the most overused words ever minted.

Non-dual thinking does not make one irrational any more than it makes one irreligious.

It makes one whole and holy; extremism is irreverent.

My head and my heart are often miles apart.

The third way is transrational and radically inclusive.

We are all invited to attend the marriage of science and spirit.

The images we have perceived contain illusion and truth.

I have idealized peonies with no awareness that ants eat the sap that encloses their bloom.

My life has been lived in a field in which wheat and weeds grow alongside each other.

We are told to not rip out the weeds lest the wheat be pulled out too.

They have grown alongside each other until the harvest.

I will now pan the gold from the dross as I leave the false behind and awaken at last.

Standing up too fast, I feel a delightful dizziness, so I sit again, listening to her breathe.

I look out the window as the swirling, twirling, twisting, dancing snow ghosts

float and crash into each other, drifting away like smoke.

Outside, a wraith of snow blows off the bare branches of an old oak tree.

Inside, the room humidifier creates beads of water that race each other down the window glass.

I close my eyes and breathe, aware that I live now.

I breathe deeply and gratefully.

Sharp, fresh air cools my hungry lungs.

Inhaling peace, exhaling pain. I do it again.

In that holy instant I say yes to the cosmic dance that is boundless grace.

I accept the embrace of that grace I receive when I breathe in, and I return it to the universe as purely as it was given when I breathe out.

Inhaling peace, exhaling peace.

I sit in the gloaming by her bedside until I join her in the distant memories she mumbles about in a strange language between chuckles as though she knows who and where she is.

Who knows? She seems happy, so why not?

If forgetting is sanity, dementia may have an upside.

Forgetting the idols of the ego with their attendant pain might make a space for the truths of the heart.

In my early-onset dreams I lose myself to find my Self.

Someone said there are only two themes in all of literature: love and death.

I believe the poem that I have lived manages to capture both in a single breath.

“And this ain’t no novel but a kind of extended epiphany […] and there is no plot as there is none in life […] only the stutter of wording between waking and sleeping…” (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Little Boy).

From my handwritten journal:

Oblivion. As a person of fai…

See that! My pen could not even finish the thought.

So I sat on the dock awhile lost in waves of no thought.

Then back to the cabin for a new pen.

See how easily a story can change?

I am not the same person I was when I began writing this sentence.

How can any story be true?

This one isn’t, yet I thought it was.

Tells you something about my thoughts.

Thoughts that brought me this far, but no farther.

From early on I received messages that I was special.

I chose to believe this until enough other special people disabused me of this notion.

Still, I write.

John Irving recently wrote “…writing about your own pathetic life,

And calling it fiction, is masturbatory,” but his narrator may have been a bit unreliable.

As an old friend asked, “All novels are memoirs?

Perhaps there is a scene with good friends driving the country backroads listening to Elton John?”

Perhaps.

We shall see.

Jo Rowling advised me to “Write what you know,” then she wrote about wizards.

Personal poetry no more permanent than the air finger cursive I still use to check my spelling

Will serve for the events that are no more reliable than my failing memory.

This is, after all, a book of mind and muscle memories.

One of my gifts, and curses, is that most of my memories are living memories.

They are not just a feat of recalling; they pulsate with sound and sense, so they are never really past.

Which makes it exceedingly difficult to live in the present.

Like that thing where every time you hear “Stairway to Heaven” you get the exact same

Buzz in your brain you got when you were seventeen.

Only much amplified and more momentous.

Muscle memory has few feelings attached, but I recall vividly the sensation of swinging a hammer.

When I got into the swing of it, I could nail the spike until it disappeared without a miss.

Just as Jung nailed us to a cross of conflicting realities when he said, “Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”

I submit into evidence my experience as a dreamer seeking to atone for imperfect success as a human

By seeking internal and eternal transformation.

Not having let go with both bloody hands yet, I hang to the crossbeam clutching the living memories

I must write out with the intention of relinquishing.

There is no more need to create success stories about myself.

Human for so long, I have stopped climbing and begun to fall upward.

Success doesn’t matter when one hasn’t failed.

Having spent my whole life in the past, I desire no more than I now have,

Which is everything my heart desires.

Family, community, travel, career goals achieved,

I have enjoyed love, freedom, fun, and power.

My bucket list is down to enjoying the pleasure today offers.

Memories become more important than dreams if we live long enough.

They map our future, so we pay attention to them, honor them.

We create our own stories.

So far, so good.

Now how do I want it to end?

What if I’m not writing the story

And I’m just a character inside of a story

That is being written through me?

Sometimes I feel that way.

That it has already been decided I will be successful.

I have not failed, I have just stopped plowing up rocks.

That pile of stones where I once tossed a thermos bottle run over by the tractor isn’t worth a dime,

Much less a minute more of my time.

One can pick rocks in the same field every spring though the day the plowed furrow is clean eludes us

While the landlocked sea gulls sail over our heads.

Perhaps I will put that land in CRP for the wildlife, or what my father called “soil bank.”

Maybe pasture, since rocks and cows grow well together.

I will account for the time I spent proving myself, but I will proffer no proof.

This is my story and I have plenty of pens.

Forgive me if my hand cannot keep up with the dialogue in my mind.

I have always had in my head an ongoing lover’s quarrel with myself.

As Yeats said, “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric;

Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”

We equivocate until we learn to embrace paradox.

Living in contronym we cleave reality

Both by simultaneously splitting apart and sticking together.

When earth seceded from heaven we created a living hell.

In truth we still own dual citizenship in Heaven and Earth.

Our world is not separated into natural and supernatural,

Or sacred and profane.

All is supernatural and sacred.

We live in an enchanted universe.

The cosmic egg I lived in has broken open.

I am not nowhere; I am everywhere.

Would that I could write this strange narrative in the royal we.

I am not the subject and you are not the object.

We are not separated by any preposition I can see.

As Robert Penn Warren wrote in All the King’s Men,

“I eat a persimmon and the teeth of a tinker in Tibet are put on edge.”

As the authors of our life stories, we would all write the same book

If we could but ignore the particulars.

A life of authenticity leads to its own forms of crucifixion.

We learn to absorb pain without passing it on to others or to ourselves.

And the appropriate response is reverence and appreciation.

The statio between steps on our spiritual pilgrimage.

This I know in my soul until my worldly role takes control.

Then I grapple with the paradox as I fall out of the embrace and reject Grace.

Full disclosure: It will happen at times as I give voice to those living memories.

Thus, I begin with the most problematic paradox I signed up to resolve in this impossible life:

My internal debate was often male versus female voices.

A former student once said I was really in touch with my feminine side.

As though that were a disability.

Masculinity is the real prison.

A wise woman taught me Indigenous people honor their Two-Spirits, which I find affirming.

My culture whitewashed my Midwest experience.

My Spirit Guide, however, speaks to me of a Teacher who came from the underclass

With darker skin and a male body with a female soul.

No one owns him, and no one ever will.

My Own Personal Jesus once messaged me on social media:

Everything is designed to destroy your empathy because if you suddenly

Understood all the suffering and your interconnectedness

You’d fall to your knees and weep in the streets instead of developing a grating sense of humor

And fighting each other and buying stuff.

Sick of the sarcasm and arguments and distractions

I set out to capture a piece of that equi-vocal voice of my queer childhood:

Queer not as being about who you’re having sex with…;

But queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it

And has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.

(Bell Hooks)

Queer as in quirky and curious—uncommon characteristics in any survival culture.

I could change my own oil, which was a source of pride,

But I was ashamed that I couldn’t tell you anything about the engine.

Other boys naturally knew what they had under the hood.

They did not know what I had in my heart or my head.

That is the part that needs to be read, not said.

There was a code.

Talk of love—the strongest force in the universe—was seen as a weakness.

A man dared to eat a peach, but not an uncooked vegetable,

A biscuit, but not a scone.

Beer, but not wine.

It was strict, mind you.

And impossible to follow, try as I may, which is not to say I was not a bona fide redneck.

I have driven pickup trucks down a dusty road, shirtless, a six-pack by my side,

George Jones on the radio, speeding down Oink Joint Road enroute to the bar in Nimrod.

There is, blessedly, a remedy for rednecks:

Imagination and education.

We can change and we can choose.

Betwixt and between a rural upbringing and an urban career I rounded a steep learning curve.

I have been shocked by an electric fence more times than I’ve been bee stung, which is a lot.

And I cannot remember how many times I was hit in the head by a baseball bat while daydreaming.

Yet I have never stuck a knife in a toaster without first unplugging it when the bread got stuck.

There are experiences a redneck can be too smart to risk.

There are worse things than being a redneck.

Some people wear it like a badge of honor that preserves their contact bias.

Fine for them, so long as they do not force anyone else into the lifestyle or encounter difference.

As The Prophet Mohammed said, “There are as many paths to God as there are human breaths.”

I could pretend to be the character my people wanted me to be,

But I was no character, even in my own life.

Character requires unwavering consistency and stock idiosyncrasies, or so it seems.

As for me, I found being a cowboy exhausting.

It confounded others and disappointed them as I slowly morphed into a secular mystic.

I often regretted what felt like a betrayal of the people I truly loved.

They were quick to point out that book learning made me inauthentic and lost

Though I never renounced my religion or my roots.

Furthermore, I would posit that we are all a little more complicated than the roles we choose.

Why can’t we let them choose us and then just ride with it?

Cause baby I was born to run.

Allow me to cop to the kinks and twists that the Fifth Step requires us to admit to

So our Higher Power might remove our defects of character.

In my desire to be a more reliable narrator, I will call this part Confessions of a Confidence Man:

I have been an approval suck terminally embarrassed by much of who I am and what I have done.

Shy and bashful, I would blush beet red when my father danced the jig in public or when I was teased.

I developed a sickening jealousy over things I was not nor would ever be.

Disgusted by my avarice, I would double down on the duplicity by developing a toxic positivity without

To disguise the negativity within, thereby feeding my original sin of shame.

This led to a personality disorder that produced chronic low-grade depression

As my inherent shining spirit was overwhelmed by shadows and lack of confidence.

I became what I resisted and turned into a dry drunk embittered by a growing lack of self-worth.

I would tell myself my dishonesty didn’t count as long as I was honest with myself, but that was a lie.

Turning into what I least wanted to be, I could no longer turn away the mercy that would save my life.

Each day I needed to take my personal inventory to forgive myself and, thus, others our shortcomings.

I am sustained and healed by mindfully observing the beauty and blessings that fill my sunnier times

With gratitude, humility, and confidence.

Many have said most of our problems tend to be psychological, but the solution is always spiritual.

If Spirit is simply Love, then love is our decision when our ego is worn down by the persistence of truth.

I was the co-creator with a front row seat to my life’s story and only half committed to the role I played.

In fiction, heroes learn and grow from encountering their shadow, whereas villains never do.

Since my story is still being written, I am still engaged in life’s only real battle,

Which is between hanging on and letting go.

Show me a sensualist and I will show you an addict.

Our senses perceive only illusions, but that does not mean they are not useful.

They can be our passport to the sweet spirit land we seek.

We can find comfort in The Wayseer Manifesto:

Your addictive personality is just a symptom of your vast underused capacity for heroic

creative expression and spiritual connection.

It is cold comfort, however, if we are among the unfortunates unwilling to change course.

Lacking the courage and motivation to transform our lives, we are unable to stick the hero’s journey. There is no other option; no easier, softer way.

It requires using all the provisions in our store—the gold and the dross—along with amazing Grace.

We are in the Creator’s dream now, which is our reality.

Day after day making a more spacious future through the interminable process of letting go.

Making room for something new from the promptings of our heart.

The only real sin is idolatry—making God something God is not.

“Our body embodies the presence of God in our nothingness without God” (James Finley).

Making ourselves small and unusable is not true humility.

“Election,” as Rev. Richard Rohr claims, “has nothing to do with worthiness but only divine usability…[which] normally comes from having walked through one’s own wrongness or ‘littleness.’”

Littleness is our superpower.

It is walking like a child taking those first tentative steps and stumbling into our own arms.

Usefulness is catching and guiding our inner child instead of making God responsible for our lives.

Any concept we have of God is just a concept, after all, it is not God, whatever that is.

In fact, “God” is a metaphor for God, as the modern-day prophet Richard Rohr points out:

The Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness;

it is not a place you go to, but a place you come from.

I need to finally let my Higher Power out of the God box and let God be God so I can be me.

We may not be so different after all.

Unable to conform or reform, I can but ultimately transform.

When transformation is the resolution of a story’s conflict, the story can be very long indeed.

Christ is in me, but I am not Jesus.

The compassion and patience that comprised his spiritual authority were baked in.

I am a slow learner.

Fortunately, lessons keep presenting themselves until mastery is achieved.

My dad always said, “You never listen,” by which he meant “You do not obey.”

Oh, I did and I couldn’t.

Between the feelings that accompanied the ups and downs of my days

I found the peace of that place where the pendulum of my existence naturally came to rest.

My body lived and worked in the prosaic reality the community created,

But my mind created a different world in which I already had one foot from birth.

All the moods that ran through me like the psychedelic colors

That ran through my hidden tie-dye tee shirt which I now wish to tie to a flagpole fearlessly.

Or maybe not without fear or shame but with the blessed knowledge of how it feels to be

Free of the yearning for male intimacy that left me so lonely I could have hugged a tree.

George Santayana said, “Waking life is a dream controlled.”

My dreams were so wild I could barely control my waking hours.

So I did not speak about them, the waking ones or the sleeping ones.

I do remember them though I have forgotten much of the triviality that clogged my life.

The fictional persona I chose to project was highly intelligent, cheerful, and masculine.

If this projection was inauthentic, it was at least helpful to my survival.

I am not sophisticated or even as smart as I once made myself believe.

Aspirations and inspirations will only take you so far from who you really are.

I would rather pray for wonder and awe and desire than for supremacy.

I can live joyfully believing God’s love for me is made to order.

The lone pink iris among the patch of purple catches my eye

As the white calf among its cohort of red ones draws my attention.

The rare can be interpreted as the most beautiful,

So, if we focus on a purple flower or a brown calf and make it the unique color, we will favor it.

Imagine the power to favor every color and every common creature in the crowd.

As my two-year-old granddaughter says, “Everyone can be on my team.”

She gets it, so why can’t I?

Adult intelligence seems to be mostly an artificial construct of our perceptions and experiences.

We cannot create outside our boxes.

Science is an art that mysticism leaves in the dust.

Technology can produce art, but imagination is not artificial.

Artificial intelligence can be more creative than I, but can it feel those fancy words it uses?

AI would be put to good use if applied to interpreting dementia aphasia and hallucinations.

Perhaps that will happen after I am unable to finish this book.

What if it could take my notes and predict my final memories as I go back to my birth?

Before my birth?

BARD can write a book in jig time, but it will be composed of predictive text,

Whereas authentic writing is unpredictable—comprising intuitive creativity, true inspiration,

And the seemingly random digressions that provide the subtext of the story.

There is no ghost in the machine, but Spirit abides in the body.

Truth is not a human construct, but how can we blame those who need to think it is?

The false evidence is right before them.

I do not blame the iceberg for sinking the ship even if the captain did not hit it of his own volition.

The third way made me empathetic, unable to hate once the anger would abate.

There is meaning in difficulty if it’s transformative, so I held the creative tension.

And outran Or and made me a spiritual hybrid.

The dirt from each rock would sink into my pores as I examined each damn stone I uncovered.

Eventually I was able to rise above the battlefield and feel for all those I hurt.

I have loved every person I have been privileged to have in my life.

How do you stop loving someone anyway?

Transformation has arrived when one doesn’t need to be loved as much as to love others.

Ego often stymied that love, but Spirit would always honor my brothers and sisters.

It protected me from becoming the opposite of what l wanted others to be.

They must have desired intimacy as much as I.

Ah, the ecstasy of recognizing ourselves in the other, so we are no longer other.

When I catch you sitting alone in your folding lawn chair,

Or think of the way you fold your ear when you are frightened,

I fold into you.

I have been lonely and frightened too.

The risk accrued to such stark-naked self-disclosure is taboo, alas.

Still, I believe in the possibility of a better conversation.

One without words or thoughts or feelings or memories.

Not a painting in a cave or even a clean, white page.

Just Isness.

A communion so intense that the soul of the Beloved is fused with the Lover.

Once I had the best conversation with an old friend I visited in a memory unit.

I knew her well enough to be able to read her expressive face and musical tone of voice

Without fully grasping the garbled words and repetitive ululating.

By simply mirroring her intonation and looking into her eyes warmly,

I quickly recovered the easy and affirming way we have always communicated.

I felt most connected during the brief silences when a tear rolled down her cheek

While she continued to project her sweet soul with her familiar smile, high cheekbones pronounced.

Driving home I was able to reflect and almost recover that rare and ineffable memory of Wholeness.

Unity and Oneness have become inadequate to describe the euphoria of eschewing individualism.

As Richard Rohr said, “Polarities, dualisms, and seeming opposites are not opposites at all

But part of a hidden and rejected wholeness.”

Gifted Irish lyricist Van Morrison expresses our yearning for that pretty place in “Hymns to the Silence”:

                              I want to go out in the countryside

                              Oh sit by the clear, cool, crystal water

                              Get my spirit, way back to the feeling

                              Deep in my soul, I want to feel

                              Oh so close to the One, close to the One

It comes in those odd moments of beauty that enhance the ordinary and pierce through despair.

The mundane is steeped in mystery like a reed in the river.

The always among the never.

The life spring of Grace is within us and it bubbles up when we forget to fear.

Then we begin to suspect we might just be a beloved child of God.

Wildly intuitive strokes of inspiration and genius cannot be summoned.

Just ask Bob Dylan who cannot explain the origin of the masterful words and images in his songs.

Inscrutable, enigmatic, amorphous refrains that never get old.

An ordinary child from small town Minnesota produced Nobel prize winning lyrics out of nothing.

Informed by experience, surely, but whence the timeless arrangement of words that seep soul deep?

Rituals must be handled with intention lest transcendence and truth be lost.

Jesus People do not realize that Jesus is the icon of Christ consciousness.

Christ is not his last name.

I am not embarrassed to admit that I still kiss the crucifix in my bedroom when I pass by.

Not so much superstition and ritual as a sacred reminder that Mother/Father God’s spirit is present.

I see it in the pictures of our parents and I feel their protection and approval again.

I confess there may still be a desire for absolution, especially for my sins of omission.

Like not visiting the sick or the lonely instead of streaming murder mysteries on TV.

I adored Mary and Jesus because they could intercede with a judgmental and easily angered God.

I pray that when my bones and ashes lie lifeless in the valley, the Son will press his mouth to mine

And breathe back into me the Holy Spirit that I might meet the Father who has lived His life in me.

Until that not-time consciousness repossesses me, I wish to stand upon the heights

And transmit that hope that lies hidden in the past.

Hope, the priceless pearl at the bottom of Pandora’s box, lies at the beginning of our journey

As a pulse of truth that sends us forth surrendering our fears

And flowing effortlessly through the heart of Love.

I will not leave a brother trapped in a hopeless now by the existential absurdity

That now is not at one with eternity.

We are not victims of the world we see

For the world but reflects the beliefs we choose to hold.

We need a clear-eyed view of science, which can be as constricting as bad religion.

A narrow-minded belief in science so strong it has punched God into unconsciousness;

A slavish devotion to religion so powerful it has knocked Science into oblivion.

Yet truth abides immutable at our core where we can calmly hold both as one and the same.

Give me eyes that I might see.

Once we accustom our eyes to the light that is in every one of us,

We will recognize it in ourselves and we will never look at our brother the same.

The greatest epiphany is when we realize we do not pray to Jesus;

We pray to God through the Christ within us.

May They forgive my go-to pronouns and Christian labels as all poets rely on their own lexicon.

Leave us not in temptation.

The temptation, that is, to be something other than the spectacular Son I am.

How often have I entertained the dreaded thought that I am damned?

When we step out of self-love, we can be vicious to ourselves.

Then our ego defends itself by building a fortress that can become our prison

Until truth returns to set us free.

Enlightenment breaks through our defenses in the way seductive lovers do.

Then we stand naked and unashamed in the unshaded light of freedom,

No longer afraid because we know with no doubt

Our souls are sanctified and safe.

Our safety is in defenselessness.

We lay down our arms against love for they are pointed at ourselves.

It is now our turn to contemplate the questions that have vexed humankind throughout the ages.

We remain mindful, however, that we cannot know all the answers in this human skin.

We simply believe we know.

Therefore, we listen to and respect those who disagree while we chart our own course.

One thing I do know is that I see the splinter in your eye

When I cannot perceive the pine forest in my own.

Our egos tell us it will be different for us than it was for the generations before us

Who bashed and broke their boats upon the rocks of human destiny

Trying vainly to escape their past without reconciliation.

I never understood the last line of The Great Gatsby until the second half of my life:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

To ascend, we must fall back to the past I don’t know how many times.

If we do not periodically reread our sacred literature, we will have only a pedestrian understanding of

The subtext that can enlighten us on our human journey.

There is a certain light that, like mercy, is not strained as it seeps softly

Between the nearly bare branches and through my kitchen window

On a yellow morning in late autumn.

It takes me home in my mind.

A sleek brown deer grazes lazily beside the road.

A few stubborn yellow aspen leaves hang on the high branches.

A cabin chimney exhales wood smoke

As I ride my bike down a country road having a silent conversation with my peripatetic spirit guides

Who tell me God is not a noun but a verb, and so are we human beings.

Not being, but perpetually becoming as we are the growth in consciousness

That epitomizes dynamic spirituality.

Becoming requires a setting like earth, which is more resilient than any human.

It remains forever.

Let me accept that I am one with it now and long after my human journey.

I have seen six Amish men riding their bicycles against the wind

With the same dignity as they sit a horse and buggy with the wind at their backs.

Like the desert cacti and the mountain elk, they are an act of praise by their mere posture.

Sacred space, that place where everything is experienced in terms of one reference point,

Is not unlike first love.

It feels like home.

It can be experienced in the light or the dark, but the dark requires at least a spark of light

To know it is not light.

Jesus said, “I am the truth and the life,” or did Jesus purportedly say,

“I am the truth and the way and the light?”

I have no way of knowing what He said, but God speaks more directly to me

Through the mix of yellow aspen and the red, orange, and brown clumps of oak

Framed by my rearview mirror as they play past me in fast forward.

At home in the country I am aware that Christ is dying and Christ is rising at all times in all things.

Conformity and resistance are willful and futile.

To everything there is a season and a reason.

My heart breaks many times daily, but it must if it is to be reset.

While everyone is staring gobsmacked at the gaudy sunset, my eyes are transfixed

By a puff of pinkish clouds on the opposite horizon.

Early darkness descends and I am restless like Walt Whitman:

Til rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself in the mystical moist

night air and, from time to time, looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

Two things are best seen at play: kids and light.

I breathe in the luminous darkness of the clear night.

The secret agent that binds together the stars together

Is the infinite dark space between the points of throbbing light.

The hidden secret of the universe is that an infinite God desires intimacy with the human soul.

Rohr says, “God seems to have begun thawing this glacial barrier by coming precisely

In male form as Jesus, who exposes maleness itself as also naked, needy, and vulnerable.”

I believe the “Holy Ghost” is the love relationship between the Father and the Son.

As the father of two sons, I know something of that overwhelming love relationship.

I do not know, however, how to be a son.

I believe the child is the father of the man.

I must father that man before I enter the second childhood that arrives in the second half of life.

Forty years sober, I still haven’t vanquished the voices that cause my headaches.

And mistakes.

And the perfectionism that cannot forgive those mistakes.

There must be a reason therapists open with “Tell me about your relationship with your father.”

I cannot.

I still do not understand it.

I no longer need to.

We were born on different planets.

There is no translator.

It is not his fault, and it is not my fault.

The fault line is in a slip of a pen we didn’t hold.

For too long we interpret disappointing our parents as personal failure that must be denied.

How many judgments do we lay on ourselves, then transfer to others?

Dear reader, how much offense have you taken at the shibboleths I have used?

You know, the ones that do not match yours.

When do we choose to see the humanity we share in full?

Maybe now, in this instant, as I contemplate the words of Cole Arthur Riley:

I believe in the mysterious nearness of my ancestors,

But I believe they are located at the site of my own blood and bone.

How much nearer, then, are those still living in whom we recognize our self?

Ecstasy is a choice we make when we decide we are no longer better than, or even other than.

Ecstatic humiliation.

Maybe, just maybe, I can clear my head of our poorly perceived relationship and open a space for Spirit.

The trinitarian relationship between the Father and the Son.

The love that flows from the blood of one into the other.

For a father is like God whom we encounter not through words but through humble not-knowing.

St. Augustine said, “If you understand it, then it is not God.”

My father and I loved each other though we did not understand each other.

A stranger in a secular and scientific society, I still believe in God though I do not know Him.

I come close in my sleep when I lose control of the narrative and fly without wings.

Then wake languorously to the enchanting song the muse of my dreams still sings.

I sometimes dream that one day my gaze will meet God’s gaze across a crowded amphitheater

And I will be swept up by an eagle, like Ganymede, and spirited away to Olympus.

One must also acknowledge the possibility of…oblivion.

It is not so hard if one thinks of it as sleep without dreams.

Is that the true meaning of peace?

Have we created the illusion that peace must be comprised of joy and bliss?

Emotions have a way of getting in our way at every turn.

It distorts any story I can tell.

I cannot tell my own story with fidelity as I am a bit too close to it, so I will tell you another story.

Being sensitive and sensual, I may tend to color even this “true” story with the wrong shades of blue.

The images, memories, and perceptions may be more poetry than prose.

But who is to say which provides more fidelity?

Writing poetry is sometimes just a matter of splitting sentences and aligning each one on the page.

Like playing tennis without a net.

Merely lob in a little alliteration and internal rhyme.

Robert Frost I’m not though neither of us loves a wall.

He wrote that great poetry

“Begins as a lump in the throat…a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

Frederick Buechner uses the same terms to describe faith;

Perhaps poetry is the language of faith.

It certainly pairs well with love.

There are no adequate words for either, but I am no musician who channels meaning through melody.

Describe that feeling, avoid defining it, I am told.

Or simply go for a walk and take notes on nature.

Begin in delight and end in wisdom, Frost’s recipe for good poetry.

Good will do.

Great poetry would end in a wisdom born of pain and struggle.

Lamentations turned to liberation lyrics.

Every one of us has a chapter in our autobiography that we don’t want to read out loud,

And it is no one else’s story to tell.

We can still have a positive life story.

I aspire to sizzle with zeal without throwing the flames of zealotry.

Like the last bonfire of the year when the embers continue to smolder,

I hope my lust for life burns even as my body gets old.

In my most magical moments I contemplate the shiny penny of God’s love deep in my soul,

And I spend it on loving action to help those in need of love to find their own worth.

It is literally God helping His loved ones through me.

My treasure is returned beyond measure.

That is why I speak, why I write.

I promise to “tell the truth [a]slant,” as Emily Dickinson demanded,

As best I can with impotent words that never suffice.

The words “The soft breeze in my face” are not the soft breeze in my face.

Semantic satiation renders any word meaningless (breeze, breeze, breeze, breeze, breeze…),

Yet certain combinations of words may just evoke a shadow of the intended sensation.

That’s the best I can do without drugs.

No cliches, but a plethora of plagiarized phrases if someone else said it better than I.

One can easily bemoan autobiographical fiction replacing imagination.

Perhaps we write exaggerated memoirs when our memories are stronger than our imaginations.

Build then a bildungsroman from the rejected stones no one else could carry home.

Paint them the color of time.

Mortar the memories with the music that was the soundtrack of your childhood.

Let it transport you back to the astonishing moments that are the keystones of your memoir.

Kierkegaard said, “Life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward.”

Let us go back to a time when we felt more.

We have so much to learn about what we can never know.

Memory’s value is in the way it encourages us to go forward.

We must fall back before proceeding.

I was once struck by Holiday Mathis’ horoscope for Aquarius:

You direct a certain longing to the heavens.

Your need to reach upward is primal.

It’s inside every infant reaching for mother;

It’s in the limestone blocks of the pyramids and the jet fuel of rocket ships.

Now what if the heavens are not up there but back there?

What if my dementia can take me home?

Maybe I will write poetry by living in the poem as real poets do.

Just writing “homesickness” and “lovesickness” infects me with both.

Or have they always been there behind my desperate attempts to cover them over?

Poetry demands that I feel heartbreak all the way through to the other side.

If I trust the down, perhaps gravity will fail and weightlessness will lift me up.

Can I bear to feel words like “loneliness” and allow my heart to break with the memory of

People who broke down crying while trying to eat?

Comfort food is tragic enough when not mixed with the tears my grandfather cried during Sunday lunch After I drove him and Grandma home from church

Shortly after another grandson died at eighteen, electrocuted while working on a steel bin.

He was the one who usually drove them home because he lived closer.

Grandma would lose a son and her husband within two more years.

Grandma herself would suffer a fatal stroke in church in 1986 after seven years of grieving.

It was a tragically appropriate place to make her transition.

Her funeral was on my thirtieth birthday.

She got to hold my first-born son, but not my second.

Grandparents can be forgiven for favoring the ones who spend time with them;

It’s more complicated with parents, but they too must be forgiven.

Likewise, loneliness and grief must be borne on the road to spiritual transformation.

Henry Rollins reminds us that “Loneliness adds beauty to life.

It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.”

There is a luminous darkness after the sunset.

We are not happy with suffering, but as with labor pains, we can be happy with the outcome:

A new level of intimacy with the Love that suffering has brought to us.

I can say it no better than Oriah Mountain Dreamer:

I can stay awake and let the sorrows of the world tear me apart

and then allow the joys to put me back together,

different from before but whole once again.

To be sure, this story, or this telling of the story, is highly informed by my past as an altar boy.

A swinger of censers and a ringer of bells,

I served a host of impeccable but unapproachable “fathers” at St. Clement’s Church.

I also served an equally disapproving father on the farm where I was raised like a crop.

The story involves two things I cannot get out of my mind:

My friendship with the first boy I ever met with an imagination as out of control as my own,

And my obsession with the black and white ghosts of Bobby Fuller, Sam Cooke, and James Dean.

All four died tragically, but for as long as I breathe, or as long as this ink lasts, they are

Never to be forgotten.

Oh, but now I remember where the dried-up pen left off:

Oblivion. As a person of faith, I had never considered that possibility.

Up until now.

Now that the each i is topped clearly with its tittle, I am confronted with the power of the word.

It seemed inconceivable that a world could exist without me, without you.

A person is a person through other people.

And what happens to that part of me which is observing me even now?

Yet you are gone without a hit record or that spectacular book you would have written.

With your beautiful imagination.

And I cannot find you apart from your headstone, your brief obituary, and a death record.

All of which are not you.

Nor are you the technicolor memories I have of sharing comic books, superheroes, and dreams.

I miss the movie stars and music makers who died young but live through their art.

I never met them, but I knew you, or at least I thought I did.

Maybe you still exist in some other dimension at a much higher vibration.

Maybe your consciousness never ended but was heightened and you surpassed me.

Leaving me to the teasing, taunting and search for superheroes.

I hope you found your father.

I hope he was dressed like Batman.

I hope he kicked the shit out of your stepfather.