Funny; I’m sitting on the deck on a summer day reminiscent of summers past before hot became oppressively so. It’s overcast, not unusual in this part of the country, with temperatures forecast for no higher than 74 degrees. I know, it’s not nice to boast, when the rest of the country huddles in front of their air conditioners escaping the sweltering heat. We’ll get ours next week; 3 days forecast for greater than 90 degrees. Lest you think that’s “nothing”, relative to what one is used to, that’s enough to send me into hibernation.

As I read the text Stuff, written in 2010, increasingly I find myself represented in the stories there. Just yesterday I found myself wandering around the shop, looking for items needing to find their rightful place amongst ALL of the inventory I couldn’t do without. Then, as I asked myself if I didn’t already have enough of that one item, I found myself dumping the least attractive of said item in the trash. Noticing that, I was ecstatic, realizing I had the capacity to discern amongst them. That’s one of those habits I need to excercise many times each day. I also sat down and made use of tools for a few hours, attempting to repair an item. Ultimately I put it aside for a later dose of enthusiasm, but at the very least I was making use of the collection of tools I constantly curate. I think that can be labeled “hobbiest” instead of collector/hoarder, far more acceptable to me and anyone who might sit in judgement over the habit.

Some years past, I volunteered for some short-term medical missions across the ocean. On each of these adventures I made similar observations. The people in those places were every bit as clever and more so than I was. They also made do with far fewer material resources than I enjoyed in my place of practice. They accomplished at least 85% of what I could do with about 15% of the resources. I learned that medical volunteerism was far more a two way street than a philanthropic gift. That experience shaped my view of the value of some stuff over others. It certainly made me more thoughtful about how I used things. I became less of a “throw-away” sort of person. While that is fundamentally good, when taken to extremes it becomes a case of the “highest and best use” syndrome; a mild sort of compulsive behavior. There’s a small difference between saving something because I might need it and saving something because someone else might also find use for it. oNe has to connect that sentiment with a second one; the desire to move that item to a place where they can access it now. My rule of thumb when I volunteer is “take something to donate each time you volunteer, and make sure the net flow of things is out, not in”. I’m trying…

Lloyd Alter, a Canadian of interesting background, writes on the topic of sufficiency, in contrast to abundance. His thesis is that if we critically examine what we actually need as opposed to what we might want, we’ll live with a far lighter footprint on the earth and we might actually have a long term future as a species. He backs his arguments with a deep and wide pool of data, lending credibility to his calculus. When I think this way, I find it liberating, lightening my existential burden. I do want to live higher on the earth, less cluttered in my own nest and with a more spacious sense deep in my soul. I want to make room for wonder, for a sense of adventure and possibility, a sense that there’s space to fill with new and fascinating experiences, even as those experiences may become a bit less physically adventurous with advancing years.

Where do you find that sense of wonder and adventure in discovery that described you as a child? What stands between you and that state of mind? Are you dragging around a huge load of unfinished business, of stuff collected with good intentions and no offramp? With what should we replace that tendency to collect things perhaps as surrogates for memories and experiences? How often would a digital image suffice, rather than yet another item in yet another display case or worse? Occasionally I joke to my son, saying that when we’re gone (wife and I), he should simply light a fire under it all and burn it to the ground. That would lighten his load very considerably as our only heir. He wouldn’t miss the vast majority of it.

I intend to keep this topic front and center as I continue to encounter/confront my personal collection. My promise to myself is to move items in the right direction; towards the door, the car and the thrift store receiving bay, leaving just the most precious residual for a later round of winnowing. Perhaps the best legacy and inheritance I can leave to my Alex is a few iconic symbols of life in my time, with which he is free to do whatever he wants, include gifting them forward for someone else to discover at a screaming deal in a second hand store.

So, in what I assume to be the twilight of her life, I am purging the family home, in preparation for it to host a new family. I’m not doing this alone, but I am the one available child with the physical and emotional capacity to drive the process; other siblings are too close to the situation to have the “purging perspective”.

You see, she hasn’t lived there for a number of years now. The house has continued to serve a critical role, as the destination for her somewhat far-flung children from Oregon, Montana and Switzerland. More recently, it has been the part-time domicile for Ruth, my dear sister who has tirelessly looked after mom’s welfare for a number of years, overseeing her wellbeing, managing caregivers, paying bills, stocking the pantry, doing the taxes for her as her own capacity to manage those things diminished. However, it remains the main source of value in her estate and its value is now needed to support her care going forward; thus the purge.

Our family are all carriers of the collector’s gene, to one extent or another. I trace this back directly to our paternal ancestors. My granny on Mom’s side did store some stuff, but she lived a very contained existence in her tiny house and one car garage in Pacific Beach for all the years I knew her. There was adequate room in the garage to put out cots for grandkids to sleep on when we visited. How she managed to stuff 6 people into that little place for 2 weeks when we came to visit still amazes me; I remember that my designated sleeping spot was on the sofa in the living room.

Mom joined the Kemalyan family through marriage, from whence came the collector’s gene. Her generation and the one before it were heavily influenced by the Great Depression, and one just didn’t discard things after a single use, whether or not they were designed for durable service. Things found secondary, even tertiary uses, like the clothes that became hand-me-downs, then eventually rags and finally, pillow stuffing.

My family comes from modest means on both sides. Grandfather Musgrove managed a lemon packing facility and succumbed to encephalitis, or maybe a brain tumor, in his 40’s. I really don’t know how Granny managed all those subsequent years, but she did. On Dad’s side, Grandpa Kemalyan made his living first as a photoengraver, then as a piano technician, working well into his 70’s, several years after becoming a widower. Material possessions were precious in those days. In fact, in the days before plastics and “single use” items, garbage was largely food waste, as even things like paper and packaging could be used as kindling in the wood-stove and there were scrap dealers for metals and old appliances. Poor people were by necessity savers, only a short degree removed from collectors.

I don’t need to describe to anyone of say, 40 years of age or older, the vast ascendence of cheap, imported, mostly plastic, mostly Asian-origin consumer items that now are bulging from every crack in our houses, garages, storage lockers and waste containers. This has all occurred in my lifetime, more or less. When the age of the Depression baby met the new age of cheap material possessions, we were ALL confronted with the issues around STUFF. Hoarders have existed as long as there were settled people, but modern industrial and business processes have made it far easier to yield to this tendency to one degree or another by us all. Goods are cheap and easy to manufacture. The robust industry of storage locker warehouses is not sustained by the wealthy, who can easily create storage opportunities on their own home ground. Vast numbers of individuals of modest means but plentiful possessions find it easier to rent a storage locker than to constrain themselves to the items that will fit in their average sized homes, average sized garages, apartments, condominiums. When the accumulation gets too dense, there’s always a storage locker nearby.

In our case, 7 individuals once lived in the large country home with two generous outbuildings. The number of inhabitants declined, but a lot of the stuff lived on, even increasing with time. A number of years back, we performed a massive decompression event including a garage sale and made the place pretty tidy. Slowly somehow , stuff re-collected until it became overwhelming, to me anyway. Truth be told, we struggled with stuff in our own homes and encountering another pile of it, deeply enmeshed with precious archival materials, sentimental heirlooms from our youths and etc, made for a terrible conundrum. I found it oppressive, and depressing. It was far easier to simply turn away, return home and leave the growing collection for another time. Except, that time has finally come.

When one confronts one’s own collection of possessions, I like the analogy of peeling an onion; with each layer, you cry a little more. In my own case as a reasonably successful professional, the solution was periodically up-sizing to a larger house. The number of banker’s boxes grew and the storage solutions became more sophisticated, but the volume of stuff rarely contracted. Who needs an old college chemistry text, stored for decades for the very infrequent momentary sentiment of viewing it and then replacing it into the cardboard tomb from whence it emerged? What about those once sexy electronic devices that have been made long obsolete by the smart phone. The smart phone captures more data-dense images than the old digital point-and-shoot camera. Image transfer is so easy that one doesn’t need memory cards, external hard drives or any other means of storage. Film cameras are true relics, interesting mainly to the enthusiast.

I wonder if we don’t have some deep seated need to keep a record of our lives by the collection of items reminiscent of a given period of time? Possibly, we derive a sense of comfort from being surrounded by physical evidence of our past, things we have accomplished, made sweeter by the sentimentality that comes with remembering earlier times as they recede further and further from us. Who doesn’t wonder at times what it would be like to be transported back, with the benefit of hindsight, to earlier times in our lives? Not so much to undo, or redo, but simply to experience daily reality of a former era in real time.

My father used a high-boy dresser for his clothes, but the top drawer was reserved for the many items that find their way into a pocket and then need unloading. As a small boy, that drawer was like catnip to me. I’d find a step stool, open the drawer and become lost in my imagination for what all those gadgets were intended to do. The idea of removing one was unthinkable; I would most surely be immediately found out, so they all remained there as a sort of mini-museum for mankind’ ingenuity and men’s sentimentality. He also collected medical journals; the classics AND the specialty-specific labels. They were neatly stacked against a bedroom wall, only they grew to truly precarious heights. After he passed on, a major purge of the bedroom occurred, including several hundred pounds of old journals; once treasures, now junk.

As I type, I am watching a nephew removing possessions from the “barn” in preparation for transporting them in their next destination; mostly stuff he won’t view or use for years to come. The collectors gene appears to be a dominant one with a high phenotypic penetration, as he is five generations removed from the dirt-poor Armenian immigrants who came to America to escape to brutality of the emergence of modern Turkish state. They came with what could fit in a few steamer trunks, 40 years before the Great Depression, but they carried that gene with them in their physical selves.

Like all collectors, we made considerable effort to organize things, understanding the conflict created when one knows one owns an item but can no longer find it, forcing the decision to buy a new one. This violates the law of “highest and best use”. The law encompasses things you need now but also things that you probably will need someday, or might need, or your sibling or loved one might need, or somebody might need. It applies to heirlooms, highly valuable items, more everyday generic items and in its extreme form, pure junk. It is also a reaction to this age of excess “one time use” packaging and even tools. No need for Tupper Ware anymore; cheaper plastic trays, containers with airtight lids, zip-lock everything are purchased with every grocery store visit. There are movements now afoot to eliminate plastic packaging and return to products like butcher paper, waxed paper, durable shopping bags, so as not to litter the planet with still more petrochemical products. We now are aware of “micro-plastics” in massive quantity, finding their way into every corner of the earth, even the most precious recesses of our bodies. We rejoice when biologists find some obscure microbe able to feed on such waste, deep down in the ocean around some thermal vent somewhere. We are all conflicted to some degree with the profusion of “one time use” packaging that then floats down the rivers of our lives to be deposited in the no-longer-endless expanse of oceans. We are soiling our nest in every conceivable way on a planetary scale. Perhaps this is what defines the Biblical “end times”, when we can no longer survive in our own earth-sized landfill.

I’m concerned with far more mundane effects of collecting stuff. Stuff; inanimate, unconscious, immobile and passive, has a way of rooting itself in one’s sub-conscience and adding weight that must be carried. As it emerges from the more remote corners of our lives and begins to obstruct our free passage around our own ground, it becomes a conscious burden on us, even as we continue to add to it. We become nervous organizers in an attempt to make that stuff more accessible, more usable, catalogued by category in our own personal warehouse, cohabiting in spaces far better left empty to give us a sense of emotional and psychological spaciousness. Stuff poisons Fung Shewei, that Japanese expression of artfulness in furnishing one’s habitation. Fung Shewei is not cluttered. It doesn’t include the throw-away society. It all boils down to the old saying; Things you own can come to own you. It’s hard to live a life rich in experiences when you’re weighed down with the ballast of a ton of stuff for which you have to provide space, shelter and even privacy, so your neighbors won’t call the public health department or sheriff to complain about the fire-hazard next door. He who dies with the most toys DOES NOT WIN, because his loved ones are left to deal with his treasures, ergo their trash. In America we talk about “down-sizing” when the kids have grown and gone. This is a periodic, somewhat painful episode marked by finding more boxes, making many trips to the thrift store, a few to the dump, perhaps a garage sale, making strategic dispositions of parts of the collection onto children and anyone else who might have a sentimental connection to a given item. Sometimes however, the owner of the stuff becomes incapacitated and is unable to carry out that periodic purge, so it is left to others to make the decisions for them. Many items with a higher and better use find their way to the dump in these circumstances. It is far easier to collect items day by day than it is to periodically disgorge them into society in an efficient manner.

Perhaps the best posture towards this insidious tendency is to be ever mindful of what one DOES NOT need to save and collect, and put strict limits on how much storage one is willing to devote with said stuff. Making a habit of giving, or “gifting” items before they become the detritus of our lives can unlock a kind of joy that both giver and receiver can receive. Items that will be stored for months and years, unused, are better served put back into circulation where someone else can make current use of them. We have mechanisms to do this. Common traditional ones are garage sales and thrift stores. More modern substitutes are on-line marketplaces like FaceBook Marketplace, Craigslist, Nextdoor and other internet platforms. The “right to repair” movement is a response to planned obsolescence of consumer items. As society struggles with its stuff, solutions do arise; it’s up to us to avail ourselves of them and break the cycle of best intentions that leads down the garden pathway to drowning in stuff. For me, this is a lifelong task. I’m not sure I’m any getting better at it yet. I have however become more aware of issue and have spent considerable time contemplating the life of stuff as I volunteer in a thrift store for a nonprofit organization. Stuff in active circulation supports the mission, which is a kind of virtuous cycle that spins off value as one person’s cast-offs become another persons “find”, with a modest exchange of cash as the entry price to the dance, diverted to whatever noble philanthropic cause for which the enterprise is named. There is a certain catharsis built into the business model, bundling volunteerism with gifting while celebrating the amazing ingenuity of people who design and produce things to ease our passage through modern life.

I’m optimistic about finding equanimity vis-a-vis my stuff, hopefully considerably less of it than is now occupying all those banker’s boxes on Gorilla Racks. What about you? Are you engaged in a battle with stuff? What do those stored possessions mean to you? Would they be better served in circulation, with the knowledge that similar items can easily be found at bargain prices virtually every day in the thrift world? What are the emotional and theoretical and real costs to you to maintain the collection? I challenge you to convert the dilemma into an enjoyable pastime out of reviewing, refreshing and becoming the executor of your stuff!

just sayin…

Last month, Mom celebrated her 98th birthday. I traveled down from Portland, OR., to be present for the occasion. As always, I stayed at the family home. What was different this time was the realization that this is the year the old house must yield its stored monetary value to fund Mom’s ongoing maintenance and caregiving.

I stayed there eight days, mowing, pruning and trimming the grounds, sorting, donating and discarding household items collected over many years and doing minor repairs around the house. I lit the burn barrel and processed countless cardboard boxes and paper materials that had outlived their usefulness. Three carloads went to the Salvation Army thrift store. The first of two birthday bashes was thrown the final day of my visit at her apartment in Lodi with siblings, grandkids, great grand-daughter and our dearest friend Emily, who has been a family member since she took over management of the family with her mom and infant son while my parents recovered from a motor vehicle accident in 1969.

I lived in the family home from ages seven through nineteen, twelve years that seem more like decades due to their outsized impact during my formative years. I have returned to visit once or twice a year ever since and have always considered the place my home, even after establishing my own residence in Oregon for the last 39 years. Many things about the house and property are unchanged from my childhood and the walls speak to me in a thousand ways every time I stay. The walls speak of the events that crowd my memory, more vivid than many years of my adulthood. I know the feel and smell of the soil, the smell of the cool basement, closets whose doors open rarely these days. The trees, older and more ponderous now, are doing what they have done for years, raining down leaves, berries, nuts and fruits without fail, each in turn through the seasons. Many years of Mom’s efforts are evident in the many fruit trees that bear amazing amounts of fruit of all kinds. The family vineyard still has vines that were probably planted by Mr. Lerza himself, heirloom varieties from the days when the Thomson seedless was the ONLY seedless grape to be found. The fig tree sets twice, once in late spring and again in late summer; the olive tree produces enough for the large Italian family that planted it all those years ago. Dad contributed the impetus to plant the mulberry tree out back, now a simply massive entity that has created it’s own temple within and under the canopy. There is really no place like it amongst all the places I have lived across the years.

Mom made comprehensive use of that place in her primary task of raising a tribe of kids and supporting an over-busy professional husband for many years. She was a consummate home economics engineer, a fantastic cook, a green thumb gardener, food preserver and steward of the many living things that shared the space with us. In addition to humans, dogs and cats, geese, parakeets, cockatiels, doves and a lone goat made their homes there. Later, she became the bookkeeper and manager of the family agricultural enterprise until Dad’s passing, after which she converted those assets into rental properties in town.

How does one say goodby to such an old friend? My oldest sister Martha lived out her life in that home, her ashes sprinkled under one of her beloved peach trees in the front yard. There’s no monument commemorating her life, just that tree that bears its fruit faithfully every year. A nephew was married under the trees in the back yard. Countless big family gatherings occurred over the years there, including a reunion that attracted family we had never previously met from across the state.

One way to do it justice is what I am now committed to; make it spit and polish for the pageantry of its final chapter in our story, culminating in presenting it to the public and hoping for a next family who will cherish it as we have. Aside from the obvious wish to maximize its market value, the more personal and sentimental wish is to honor its contribution to our lives and to send it off in style. Maybe we will stop by now and again in the future as did the Lerza kids, just to see how the old place is holding up.

There’s always a jumble of words banging around between my ears. I’m told that my older sisters would hang out, giggling, outside the bathroom door while I sounded out words in supposed secrecy, placing emphasis on various syllables, using words in sentences so as to learn to sound urbane and sophisticated. Some thoughts occur at a level beneath words and sentences; others need to be internally articulated in order to take form, achieve clarity and be fit for sharing. Some need an editorial oversight, in order to be received gently and without misinterpretation, so that the meaning matches the vernaculature. My mother was certain I’d become either a preacher or a lawyer as I was prone to rattle off lengthy monologues, packing all the words I had learned into narratives of uncertain origin and destination.

I like to call all of that nonsense “fun with words”. I’ve been afflicted with that pastime all of my life, even now that my cadence is slowing and difficulties with word finding has become a common theme. Several years ago, even in a period of deep darkness, the thought-machine never stopped churning out streams of thought, sometimes a bit disorganized but always full of some of my favorite words.

In recent months and years, as I have labored to articulate an internal response to the bizarre and unpredictable trajectory of public discourse in current affairs, I have had to learn some new vocabulary words and assimilate their various meanings in different contexts. Rather than a chore, this has been a little place of delight, as it has turned new pages in the dictionary during my random musings about the world.

As you may be aware, I like to write in this journal as a means to gain clarity over confusion. I only became aware that a slow trickle of readers had gathered when Substack began pointing it out to me and I had to reconsider my writing in the context of no longer writing solely to myself. I became aware that not all readers might find my thoughts relatable, or potentially even offensive. I had to decide whether I was speaking my own internal “truth” or writing for the entertainment of others. I sit somewhere in the space between those positions, wanting to be honest with myself and also wanting to seem agreeable, approachable, relatable to a virtual audience, some of whom are personally known and loved, others who are fellow travelers along the stream of electrons we call the blogosphere.

These are such confusing times. The news cycle is a firehose of events, proclamations, deconstruction of conventions we thought were set in stone in our country and our place in the world, occurring so rapidly in sequence that I can scarcely regard the current one before the next crowds in behind it. Heretofore, I didn’t think much of what it meant to be an American citizen or how we might influence others outside the firewall of US Citizenship. I always just assumed that citizens of other places lived their lives largely unaware or blissfully unconcerned about what occurred in America. How naive of me…only as our historic position amongst nations, what we represent in the pantheon of national identities, is being rapidly deconstructed have I become painfully aware of where we were, are and are becoming as a nation. For all of our warts, we actually WERE a shining light on a hill to much of the world; hence the clamor of individuals risking their lives to reach our borders. That light has been tossed off the hill and lies mostly broken and dark at its base, amongst the rubble of failed political experiments which we seem doomed to repeat once again ourselves.

What about these words? Franklin said we are “a Republic, if you can keep it”. Recently, words like imperial presidency, authoritarianism, fascism, would-be dictatorship, kingdom have been offered to describer where we are going. One of my favorites; cacastocracy, describes a nation run by it’s least qualified citizens.

As I read it, our dear leader looks back to his experience as a reality TV host as a fundamental qualification for high office. One of the few common characteristics of the persons he has appointed to high office is their history as commentators on Fox News. The particular competencies best suited to leadership for a particular position don’t seem to matter. One particularly prominent appointee was heard to say “don’t take medical advice from me, I’m a lawyer” as he carries out a wholesale dismantling of our medical-scientific federal agency structure. He is a “cacastat” I say this with a small sense of irony, given the coincidental and unintended ( I suppose) similarity to a word describing a human excrement.

Pundits have had a field day thinking up words and phrases to describe the dear leader. To understand that, I had to learn the definition of “meme”, a term which eluded growing up. One of my favorites is the acronym OOO, or “Occupant Of the Office”. It is politically neutral, but at least vaguely suggests a settled fact dissociated from the concept of qualification for that office. Included my new vocabulary are words that should not be uttered. I managed to go at least 2 years without saying or writing that certain name, preferring meme-like substitutes such as His Largeness, The Orange Emperor, Humpty Dumpty and others not uttered in polite company. I’m over that now, having decided that all creatures great and small are at least deserving of their given name, whatever the visceral response might be to using it. POTUS is an acronym which seems acceptable and devoid of presumed value statements, so I use that one liberally.

The whole category of political vocabulary is one from which I derive little satisfaction however, Just the fact that I need a basic political vocabulary points out the undesired attention I have been paying to the topic, rather than things much more dear to me.

One of my favorite subjects for fun with words is the practice of dreaming up new names and titles for the four legged (and two legged, feathered..) furry friends that occupy my property. The homestead is now home to twelve domestic critters and four, soon to be five humans. This morning I encountered the little bunny that pops out of the brambles in the back yard at dawn and dusk. The transitory visitors that stripped the leaves from my new fruit trees number somewhere between one and four. I have to stay up late, in the dark, to encounter them from my picture window looking out over the back acre. More and more, I view them all as members of my current tribe. It makes the idea of ever leaving the place increasingly distasteful, even though there’s nothing I’d like more than to be living at least an hour from urban civilization, near a town with one intersection. I comfort myself in thinking that as long as I don’t range more than a quarter mile from my driveway, it FEELS like I’m living in the forest somewhere.

Now that life has slowed to a pace well under two miles/hour at a walk, I have plenty of time for words that elude me to be resurrected, toyed with and used in sentences. I spend most of that time outside and alone and stating them out loud so as to hear how they sound in sentences attracts no secret listeners other than Bi, the bossy Aussie and Danny Boy, aka the BBD or big brown dog. It’s a happy little community, held together by familiarity, kibble, cracked corn and various treats, the only common language being mutual affection and a love of snacks.

Here’s hoping you have a secret vocabulary that amuses, comforts and elevates you, whatsoever may be happening in the world around you!

just sayin’

I’ve always liked that song by the Mama’s and Papa’s. And then there’s Stormy Monday, written and recorded in 1947 by TBone Walker. I like the Allmann Brothers version, as well as BB King’s. There’s a thread of truth in those lyrics. For many in the world, Monday (not Sunday) marks the beginning of the week, the beginning of one’s toil to put food on the table. I’ll admit to feeling the Monday morning blues on occasion. Most Monday’s, I skipped to work, knowing I’d be doing something I loved, working with people whom I admired, meeting many more in elevators, stairwells and hallways who shared the same daytime environment, filled their unique roles and kept the institution at the top of it’s game. Then came a time when it all slowly soured, impacted and assaulted by forces from outside, by persons rarely or never seen, disguised by words like “consultant”, “quality”, “efficiency”, “best practice”. The front-line workers generally knew how to navigate the policy and regulatory environment and still get the work done as efficiently as could reasonably be accomplished while preserving a semblance of compassion, humanism, humor. I found that middle management was a revolving door, where each successive occupant of the role came with the mandate to “change things for the better” and report up the chain of administrative command and then be rotated out mere months later, having stirred the pot with well meaning but ill-informed ideas about how things could be more efficient.

I came to dread Mondays. I never knew which Monday would bring another policy change from on high, whose net effect was to do more with less, while poisoning the esprit-de-corps that our highly functioning team had enjoyed for many years, before the ascendant C-class turned it’s cannons on us.

Then, one day, it all stopped. Everything. I left that place. As years have passed, the acute disaffections have faded, the pleasant memories of earlier times have continued and I now look back on that era with pleasure.

I had to re-learn how to “be” once I stepped off the hamster wheel. It took some time. I sought and found help. Now I’m in a better place, and I look forward to Mondays again. In fact, I look forward to essentially every day! Mondays in particular, the latest iteration of my routine is to arise early and hoof it down to my favorite coffee bar (dogs encouraged!) for a latte or cappuccino shortly after opening. I have some quiet time, armed with a little pile of treats for the canines and then about 0800 or so, my friend Stuart arrives. We enjoy a leisurely chat before heading on down to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, where we volunteer together. Monday is metal recycling day. It’s also a form of dumpster diving, where items sent to scrap are examined, sometimes tested and set aside for rehab, repair, second-chance retail or adoption. We both have a soft spot for vintage hand tools.

Stuart is a remarkable individual. He’s gentle and quiet, but has exquisite skills in woodworking, furniture building to be exact. He has a well appointed shop in his garage. He shared his magic formula for de-rusting of old tools with me. It’s GREAT! toss in a rusty old tool and the next day, it rinses clean and polishes right up with a quick turn on the wire polishing wheel. Most of the tools I salvage go back to be sold. They invariably are much better appreciated after polishing and treating wood handles with Tung oil. I might spend 5 minutes on a tool. I learn a lot from Stuart. it’s such a pleasure to have earned his friendship!

I’m very sentimental about old tools. I define old as “pre-plastic”, with a few exceptions. This all hails back to kindergarten. That year, we lived with my paternal grandparents in their old victorian style home in Alameda, CA. In the “front basement”, the one with a cement floor and walls, was my grandpa’s shop. He tuned and repaired pianos for a living. He also built furniture. All of his workbenches were self made, massive and full of soul. In the drawers were vintage woodworking tools. On the shelves were every manner of potion for preserving, painting, repairing and reconditioning hardwoods. It was a magical place. I’m sure I trailed after him many days after kindergarten, asking endless questions. Once, he took me with him to tune a piano, on an AIRCRAFT CARRIER at the naval base!

51 years later, guess where all that precious equipment and shop furniture lives? In my basement shop. I love spending time there! I have added things; I call it curating my tool collection. I struggle to keep things tidy, as there are always several projects in evolution at the same time. Currently a long handled chain-saw pruner is disassembled on the main bench, awaiting a part from far away, while two or three other small projects sit in and amongst the workspace.

What makes this all particularly special is that I feel Grandpa’s presence in that space where his workbenches and tools reside. Likewise, I imagine that each of the vintage tools that I bring in, soak and polish and return to circulation has a story and someone’s grandpa attached to them. Yes, it’s fanciful and sentimental, but it makes me smile whenever I add my little part to their history and divert them from the recycler.

So, Mondays are a day for fellowship, discovery and doing a bit of God’s work supporting homebuilding for folks who could otherwise not afford to buy a home.

I am now going so far as to go to bed earlier, so I can get up earlier to start the day on Monday. Does that represent a transformation or what?!

Right now in the world, terrible things are happening. Missiles are flying, bombs are falling, people are dying for no good reason at all. America is under assault from the inside. The political season is in full swing and my email inbox and text message inbox are littered with solicitations for money on an ever more urgent basis. My “swipe left” motion is honed to a razor sharp edge. In the interest of my mental health, I have turned substantially away from media sources of current events. While the outrage takes various different forms, the underlying theme is generally the same, and I just don’t need to wallow in that swamp.

We’re five weeks into a glorious spring time. Plants just keep blooming and blooming and blooming. The last of my 5 bare-root fruit trees has finally begun to leaf out. The blueberries are blooming. The raspberry vine has begun its reach for the trellis wire. My little fig in the massive terra cotta pot is leafing out and my two tender little cornelian cherry trees promise to double in size this year. Finally, the three stands of timber bamboo I planted 4 years ago are now pushing their culms skyward. I’ll never stop being amazed at how fast they grow; 11 months of root network development to support 30 days of almost visible daily growth ( more than 12 inches/day!) Each year the culms get bigger and bigger, taller and taller. One day there will be enough to harvest and begin to make garden structures.

So, where did those song lyrics come from? Getting older has its challenges, but I think I can safely say that they were singing about a former me, not the current version.

So, here’s wishing you a wonderful, glorious spring Monday.

I awoke early this morning. It was a morning much anticipated, as the water has been out at my house for over a week as I searched and dug to find the pipe and the leak. It was finally patched last evening and I planned an overdue early morning shower. After a week of camping canisters, sips of grocery store water to brush teeth and wash faces, rooftop rainwater to keep the toilets working, I luxuriated under hot water for longer than I care to admit, then slipped out the door for a leisurely cuppa cappuccino and a long read at my favorite coffee bar. The sun came out, warmed up the view out the window and I enjoyed the chance to meet and greet several neighbor dogs who passed through the cafe. Later in the morning, I met my young associate at another favorite locale for a long conversation on joint projects inspired by CAD design and 3D printing, whom I’ve been sponsoring through the business. He was unemployed and almost homeless when the spark of an idea struck me; I pitched it to my business partner (his older sister) and a virtuous enterprise sprang to life. He has a roof over his head, her anxiety about family members has been alleviated, he was introduced to new technology to which he has adapted like a duck to water and I was able to resurrect some projects that went dormant with COVID six years ago. Today’s visit is something I try to do weekly with him; we step away from the printer and review where we are in the grand scheme of things; his ideas and mine moving forward with no particular deadline, but driven by mutual interest and a sense of adventure. We talked for 2 hours until our backsides began to flatten, then agreed to meet tomorrow for a CAD lesson for me. I headed off to the hardware store to find solutions for the faucets that still don’t work. That leaky pipe collected sediment which was transferred INTO the house and landed in random locations that now require back-flushing to come back on-line. As with all do-it-yourself projects, none of the solutions seem to work the first time. It’s either time and effort or a whopping plumber bill; I have more time than money these days, so I’m exercising my patience gene (recessive) and trying not to exercise my least admirable vocabulary (dominant), remembering all of those dollars I’m saving by doing it myself.

Tonight is Good Friday celebration at my parish church; in spite of very challenged hearing in that echo chamber of a sanctuary, I’ll show up and meditate on the far greater grace that is freely available to me than the small ones I enjoyed earlier in the day. Even without running water, my last week was free of bombs, missiles and bullets, free of lies and hateful rhetoric, marked by adequate, healthy food, a warm bed, dry roof and the deep well of love from my wife and all of our critters.

Celebrations of the birth, life, death and resurrection of God Incarnate in human form are packed into a short 100 days or so this year, far shorter than the interval in office of the man-child-king-wannabe we have endured in this country for over a year. In that time, pillars of our democratic way of life have been cast down, a war of fanciful delusion is under way, the first round of sycophants is being replaced by the second and we are counting the seemingly endless days to the next election. I hope against hope that Americans have learned a lesson in the price of wishful thinking; electing a pathological liar and convicted criminal is not a path to ongoing peace and stability in the world. I have been encouraged by the federal courts, who seem to have finally caught up to the deluge of unconstitutional, frankly illegal actions of the regime occupying the White House and executive branch in it’s first year and change, leading me to hope against hope that “we” will muster the resolve and courage to usher in a new congress that will stand up to the cabal that is trying to rewrite history and our republic’s accomplishments over the last 250 years.

If I have offended, I beg forgiveness. Having exhausted every bit of outrage in my bones, I am left with emotions including a deep sadness for the many benign, well meaning workers and institutions lost in the purges of 2025, and a new compassion for the targets of that hateful regime. Untold thousands of innocents whose lack of access to vaccines has resulted in early death in faraway places, civilians cut down as “collateral damage” by the hubris of officials in high places who treat war like a reality show, then ask allies whom they have serially insulted to come and help clean up the consequences, every manner of individuals who have hoped and labored for a quiet life of work and opportunity for their children, not to mention millions of citizens under rising financial hardship and the chronic stress of watching their national identity trashed on the world stage are all victims of a colossal failure of our democratic system. Past generations endured the Viet Nam war, Korean War, WWI and WWII, so I guess we have little to complain about; This one was an “own goal”, however, which makes it especially painful.

Please participate, if you are a believer, in the celebrations of this special weekend. If not, then appreciate the fact that many amongst us maintain hope and faith for a better world, one where compassion and the “agape” definition of love are our aspirations. I believe that the arc of human history DOES bend towards justice, but we must endure periods of recidivism due to the fact that we are fundamentally imperfect beings, prone to allowing hate in all it’s forms to creep in and take over for no apparent reason.

On my little homestead in a small patch of woods, small daily graces can be found in abundance. I’d like to share them with you in whatever way possible, whether face to face or remotely!

just sayin…

I’m waiting for the water to begin lapping at the edge of the lawn at Mar-a-Lago and a few of those golf courses in vulnerable places around the world, but I digress…

I was a child in the 60’s, a teen in the 70’s, a young adult in the 80’s and a rising professional in the 90’s. I turned 40 at Y2K and the world didn’t screech to a halt, in spite of the missing digit in the world’s clocks. Crossing the turn of the century more or less coincided with the dawn of consumer cellular connectivity, computers becoming nodes in the internet (Al Gore invented it, as I recall) which has since spread to every corner of the globe, has spawned a “dark side”, crypto currency and AI powered platforms that do far more than simply browse the internet. Artificial intelligence has the capacity to radically accelerate our ability to answer heretofore virtually impossible questions about the fundamental nature of life and the universe. Humans, ever the clever exploiters of technology, have quickly conquered the art of lying in every media, attaching naked bodies to the heads of politicians, celebrities and little children and every other conceivable form of deception aimed at separating you from your wallet, your privacy and your integrity and identity. Having made it to the turn of the century at 40, I felt like I had accomplished something, only to enter the “oughts” with a dawning disillusionment about where things appeared to be headed in the beloved profession to which I had sworn an oath as I graduated from medical school. By the “teens” I became frankly and increasingly disaffected from my beautiful life and career and I watched in horror as it all slowly fell apart over about 8 years. This happened in spite of strenuous efforts to understand the why of it, employing some highly educated and paid consultants in the process. I attempted to pivot towards more entrepreneurial interests and then absorbed a triple-whammy; COVID, personal illness and disability, and the discovery that the door out of career doesn’t easily swing back the other direction.

So, we are now half way through the 20’s, entering the second quarter of the century and I find myself squarely in retirement, in spite of my best efforts. Having reluctantly accepted that reality and struggled with the lack of preparedness and confusion over finding new meaning and relevance, recent events have transpired to allow me to discover a new tribe(s), a new way of thinking, new enthusiasm, new projects and a modicum of motivation to pursue them. It seems quite curious, even almost unbelievable that I would experience this in the midst of a time in history where tectonic shifts are occurring in how the world relates to itself, and not in a good way.

I must say, this has not been an immaculate conception; bruises, blisters, tears and periods of dark foreboding accompanied my long, strange trip into the present and potentially into the future as well. I did some sustained, confusing and exhausting work to find clarity out of utter fog. Still, I find myself repeatedly gobsmacked with the realization that it is, in fact, 20-twenty SIX, the dawn of the second quarter of the century. In all likelihood it will be the last quarter-century I will experience. I’ll be surprised to see 2050, and I’m not all that sure I want to, particularly if the most dire predictions of the climatologists come true. Negotiating the intricacies of Medicare and Social Security made me realize that retirement is not for sissies. Realizing that my time here is finite, possibly even brief by comparison to what’s in the rear-view mirror, I have some decisions to make and a nascent list of goals to accomplish. I think perhaps that the single most significant accomplishment has been that I am back to looking forward, rather than backward. Whatever happened to me happened; there’re no do-overs and it’s high time to move on and get after those tasks at hand. If old age and senescence are ahead, I think I’ll do my best to ride them down like a range-rider rather than sit in my recliner watching and waiting for signs of decline to take over. Where-ever you are, I wish you a similar paradoxical sense of hope, optimism and adventure as you ride into and through this quarter-century, as well as the second quarter millennium of our beloved country, bruised and battered as it presently is...!

350 million is almost a rounding error for Elon. Elon will come back around; after all, he holds contracts to serve the space station. He has the biggest satellite network of them all, and military coms prefer it. There’s now way he’ll stay out in the cold. Elon’s on his way to becoming a trillionaire. He should be good to fund the whole shebang in ‘28 if it’s needed after all.

The government is shut down? Who cares, let’s talk about the Lincoln bathroom. Gilded plumbing, gilded bowl, gilded clo, Gold foiled wall paper? Lincoln woulda loved it…(not). What’s more important important anyway; looking presidential or doing the people’s business? We all know the answer. Remember what Billy Crystal said about that?

East wing? it wasn’t all that important. who needed it, anyway? There was room elsewhere for those few executive offices. Better a great big Grecian Portico into the Trump Ballroom. That wing’s pedigree was sort of mundane anyway. No sordid affairs, no assassinations, no bastard children born there…And, it’s HIS house anyway, right? Who needs local permits, on the imperial presidency’s ground… He’s architect in chief, right?…along with law enforcer in chief, executive in chief, grifter in chief, pedophile in chief..wait a minute…strike those last two. (That was meant to be a private message, like the one about Cagy and Schiff) Maybe Melania would show up more often if those fake journalists would stop mentioning Jeffrey Epstein. Nice people don’t act like that.

He’s choosing the carpet, the draperies, the paint color (gold, gold on gold, any color in the rainbow, as long as it’s gold).

I think I might have been in a ballroom once, a long time ago; don’t have much use for them myself…never liked gold all that much, not as a decorating accent, anyway.

I’m wondering why they can’t dredge up a few billion for food stamps? Maybe he has other plans for the money. I heard there’s enough lawn around the White House to fit three holes and a driving range. At a billion and change per hole, 5 billion should about do it; that’s only a week’s worth of food stamps anyway; surely they can hold out for a week or two? It’s the Dem’s fault anyway, right? If they hadn’t shut down the government we wouldn’t be in this situation. Hell, they aren’t even in Washington. Don’t talk to me about negotiations when they’re extending their recess through holidays. Health care premiums won’t kick in until after the new year; that’s plenty of time to figure something out. Anyway, let’s get back to the Ballroom decor…parquet floor?

I was asked to sit with the title phrase and capture what came to mind. Curiously, the first thought that came to me was “I am here to live until my last breath”. Morbid? Resigned? Dour? Angry? Not really…just fundamental, I guess. Only two choices; live or die. Not optional. As in birth, I wasn’t given carte blanche. I was born male. I keep advancing in age. The “choices” aren’t even really that; I can only exercise ONE choice; to choose death, since I’ve been experiencing life since before memory began. In this world, our current society and for all of history, choosing death is/was taboo. We have only recently began to embrace a voluntary death under very restricted circumstances, when facing it anyway and under conditions of intolerable suffering. No worries; I’m not contemplating an early exit, just thinking about choices and purpose. If it weren’t for aging, accidents, wars and other acts of human brutality, there would be no choice, only life.

Being generally “stuck” with life and aging, an obvious next question is “well, if I’m here, I might as well figure out something to do with myself”. For the majority of us, choices are shepherded within a limited set of options in our early years, in our best interests so as not to die of starvation, injure or destroy our bodies out of ignorance, become social liabilities for others. So, we grow, we play, then we learn and eventually we work. If we make it far enough we reach a time when “work” ceases and just living becomes the default task. As a part of the big herd, I followed that path and now I’m in that “post-work” phase.

I entered this phase in the worst possible way. The plan was to keep on working until I could no longer sustain it. In one sense I fulfilled that plan precisely. I didn’t expect the will, the spirit and the mind to fail me before my body failed. And then, almost in spite of myself, the mind healed. Not without some scars, but substantially, essentially completely. Then, it seemed obvious that I should dial back the clock and return to work. But, I couldn’t figure it out. Returning to work became like threading a tiny needle while wearing mittens. If it were a matter of having to work or starve, I probably would have figured it out. I didn’t cast a very large net and eventually I stopped casting. The entry criteria may have been too strict during my search. It was about meaning…I sought an encore avocation that held the same charmed combination of interest, adventure, challenge, and obvious societal value as the former profession. That is well trod ground, however and I don’t want to compact the earth any further along that section of the pathway. Every day I awaken, I’m faced with the same questions; why am I here and how will I spend my day and the energy allotted me by the grand architect.

I’m not a total free bird. I have some modest obligations. There’s my wife, my son, one canine, three felines who are a part of my immediate family. The boy more or less manages his own affairs, as long as we supply a steady stream of money. He’s not fully emancipated yet, just on a longer leash, living in another city and following an acceptable path in early adulthood. My wife cares for me more than the other way around. I share in the stewardship of our four legged dependents. None of them see themselves as dependent, but they feed at the family trough and they don’t have paying jobs. By playing by the rules and socking away a lot of money while I had extra to spend, I earned the right to be idle from a financial perspective, but that hasn’t relieved me of completing that existential sentence above. Purpose, meaning, usefulness, value to humanity or to the entire biosphere are all tangled up in the blank space after the “to”.

A famous theologian/philosopher wrote a similarly famous book; “Man’s Search For Meaning”. I probably should have started there, had I been thinking straight. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t…

As a youngster, I was attracted to principles, rules without exceptions, concepts on which you could rely, always. I deemed things like emotions, feelings as ephemeral, subject to change, not necessarily reliable over the long haul. So, I pursued a grand plan for a life of substance and meaning, producing obvious societal value regardless of how one might feel about it on any given day. I made conscious decisions that placed “softer” realities like emotions and relationships in a contingent and subordinate place in my hierarchy of values and plans. It was only later in life, when my hierachy of values ultimately failed me that I came to realize that relationships and how I felt about things were EVERYTHING when it came to happiness. People found purpose and a sense of self-worth in every conceivable occupation, but the key to satisfaction in life lay elsewhere, in one’s sense of emotional wellbeing and in the quality and status of key relationships. My early confidence that doing the right thing would lead to happiness in life turned out to be substantially wrong.

I made a couple of friends on-line in the last several years. One was my friend Denny. We met about a decade ago; he lived only a mile or so from my home. Without cataloguing all the unique qualities of his character and our friendship, He was one of the most important people in my life for the better part of a decade. We drank hundreds of cups of coffee together in a selected few cafes, exploring ideas together. He died this summer after a long illness. I was relieved for the release from suffering, which was nearly overwhelming to him in his last few months, but miss him greatly. I don’t feel like our relationship has ended; someday we’ll reunite in another place in the universe. Then there’s my friend Leslie, also a coffee-date friend, who shares some history with me in the health care system in which I worked. In retirement, we have found many things to talk about, activities to share. She’s a great friend. I have reunited with a number of friends from past phases of life, some by email, text, video conference, scheduled meet-ups. Renewing ties has reaffirmed the value of our prior time together and the reasons for our friendships in the first place. Some of those friendships transcend the circumstances in which they were formed. So, I guess I’m here to sustain, renew and grow relationships. Or maybe it’s to affirm, reaffirm and be affirmed in the context of those relationships.

I’ve collected a lot of stuff over the years. It always threatens to overwhelm me. I know it’s out of control when I have to buy something because I can’t figure out where I put the one I already own. Recently I started a new volunteer gig, with the ReStore by Habitat for Humanity. I made a little rule for myself; try to donate something every time I go for my weekly volunteer shift. And, If I’m tempted to buy something there, make it smaller and lighter than what I donated. Well, it’s worked…sort of. The experience has allowed me many hours of contemplation about “stuff” and what it means in our lives. Stuff has a kind of life of its own. It circulates through our lives and beyond. Some of it outlives us by many years. A certain amount of stuff is useful, enhances our lives, adds to our sense of belonging and place. But then occasionally disasters strike, like fires, which cause us to lose everything. Inevitably we realize, it’s just stuff. What I paid dearly for some years ago is now a candidate for donation or the dumpster. Some of it served us well, some could have been easily done without. There’s that old phrase “he who dies with the most toys, wins”. It’s not true. He who dies with the richest set of experiences and the most friends at his/her memorial service wins. Interestingly, the acquaintances and friends I am meeting at the ReStore are part of the richness of the experience. They are all confronting their own relationships to “stuff” as they process and recycle other people’s stuff. The old saying “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure” is absolutely true. The whole business model stands on that fact. And, people come and gladly buy and take home other people’s cast offs. Some are truly treasures. Others are small things, but they find a little niche in another person’s life and live on that way. I’m fascinated by it. So, I guess I’m here to help preserve, conserve and recycle stuff in the world.

I do a different form of the same thing at my other two volunteer gigs. I one, I help recycle and repurpose health and medical care materials for organizations around the world who need them. And, I cook for a “pop-up cafeteria” that uses gleaned foods to serve a hot Sunday lunch to hundreds of down-towners every week. I love every aspect of cooking as a ministry to others. With declining hearing and difficulty in large rooms with poor acoustics, it has become my form of worship. After all, Jesus spent a lot of time feeding crowds, sitting down to meals with others, supping with societal outcasts. I like my team-mates who gather to make casseroles with me, the people downtown who serve the meals and the very colorful crowd that shows up to enjoy those meals, along with their motley crew of dogs! Dogs are amongst my favorite co-inhabitants of this world, so I get a great big dose of dog-love every time I drive for the meal service.

When I mentioned my critters at home above, I forgot to mention just how much I LOVE those critters. Each one has it’s own personality, it’s likes and dislikes, it’s response to my attention. Not a single one disdains me and I shower them with massages, favored foods, playtime and we share many naps together. They’re a whole set of best friends. My all time favorite coffee joint is a dog friendly business. I just LOVE meeting all the dogs who bring their people in for coffee. My Bi often accompanies me to coffee there. The people are nice, but the dogs are GREAT! I don’t even dare to compare myself to the great St. Francis, but we do share a love for animals. I like them all; every year 90% of my garden produce goes to the wild things who nibble and graze on my plants. I can’t bear the thought of caging off all my garden plants in prisons of wire. So, I’m here to love animals around me.

I find my little homestead, with yards and woodlot to be an endless source of dreams and imagination. I imagine far more than I do, but their existence grounds me in this place in a good way. Deciding how to manage the liminal space, the border between domestic and wild, occupies a good deal of my outdoor time and I don’t find it to be a chore at all. I look forward to the meditative aspect of pruning, clearing, even a bit of planting along those borders. The other day I had another grand epiphany; there is a deeded right- of-way adjacent to two sides of my property, perhaps a quarter mile in length. My land fronts about half of it. The other day I imagined recruiting neighbors to help turn that public strip of overgrown land into a food forest. Never heard of food forests? Look up the term; it’s like dropping into Alice’s wonderland. The neighborhood has beaten a path through that right-of-way; walkers, joggers, dog-walkers, who treat it with a great deal of respect; nary a piece of trash anywhere. I can imagine a gentle, gradual transformation of invasive plants into varieties that produce flowers, berries, fruit, nuts, both annuals and perreniels, all tended by folks who are on their daily walks in the neighborhood. What a vision, no? I am here to be a steward of the land, however that works out.

A guy at church, Chuck, organized a men’s breakfast group that meets on Wednesdays. I plucked up my courage and joined them on the inaugural occasion. I stayed with it and learned to know a number of guys in my age bracket and older, even one youngster. Over about 18 months, I have grown closer to several of them. I know a great deal more about them, and they about me, in the course of about 75 hours of conversation, coffee and breakfast. I recruited a few to help cook and clean up after a spaghetti dinner we held for the churches outreach programs; generated over 50k for several programs! Eventually, I noticed an old fellow who came to the same cafe for breakfast and routinely sat alone at a small table across the way from our group. Our eyes met a few time, then we exchanged names and pleasantries, and then one day I picked up my coffee cup and moved to his table as the group broke up. Dave became another regular friend. He shares his extensive experience from 84 years and I help interpret medical terminology for him. He needed a bit of advice I couldn’t give him, so I invited my friend and former co-worker Helen to breakfast this week. We had a great conversation, laughed a lot and she really helped him with some understanding of how he can manage an issue he’s experiencing. I hadn’t seen Helen for almost two years. I guess I am here to make connections between others, to their benefit as well s my own.

One of the great regrets of my life has been missing the connection I could have made with my son during that critical time between ages 10 and 16. His interests evolved and I was so wrapped up in my own over-drive career that we just didn’t sustain the closeness that I had to him as a little one. Then, I got sick and he did high-school while I was finding my way out of the wilderness of depression and disability. I began making a concerted effort to connect with him using the only means I could come up with; text messaging. Slowly, amazingly, he has begun to respond. Now, there’s also the fact that he’s maturing out of his teens and into adulthood, which is a time when young folks often figure out that their parents aren’t all that stupid after all, but I like to think that my effort has had something to do with the fact that we now communicate in sentences, he sends pictures of him and his friends and I am included in conversations between him and his mother, too! One never stops being a father, for better or worse. I am definitely here to be present for him into the indefinite future, to my last breath in fact.

I have I have 16 nieces and nephews, now all in early to mid adulthood, many with kids of their own spread across the world. That’s a lot of conversations to maintain. It’s my choice as well as theirs, but I am here to be their uncle and great uncle from afar, occasionally face to face. They will know me or not know me based on my efforts to be present in their lives, even if only by email and e-images. I am here to be in relationship with my family.

From this perspective, I really don’t have time to reset the clock and go back to being a medical professional. There are only so many years left to pursue all those other important roles. I gave over 30 years of my life to becoming and being a health care worker. I can still use that knowledge and experience to contribute uniquely to all these relationships. People appreciate my medical knowledge and experience, but even more, they appreciate it when I show up for them. I am here to be their family member, their co-volunteer, their business partner, their friend and someone who loves them in one fashion or another. That should be more than enough…

So, I accept assignments carefully, guardedly, even skeptically, unless they somehow strike a chord in me as particularly relevant. So, when my mentor asked me to complete the sentence “I am-”, I realized that this phrase encapsulates the primary imperative of my post-professional life, and felt the urge to rise to the occasion and see where the exploration could take me. My history of journal writing has been a serial effort to bring order from disorder in my mind, so this challenge seemed ideally suited to my unintended, but fiercely individual way of tackling the acquisition of new knowledge/viewpoint/clarity about a subject. As I write, I have no idea whether it will be a coherent, orderly or even useful exercise, but then ALL of my writing is extemporaneous, minimally edited and only occasionally re-read, for what that’s worth. I do find it entertaining to periodically read a bit of content from past months or years to see if I’ve actually progressed in any meaningful way from that point in time of the writing. I’m often surprised at the contrast between then and now, generally in a favorable sort of way, which is one of the motivations for continuing on with the journal habit. It seems to actually produce some measure of progress in a non-linear sort of way in my understanding of myself and my place in this tumultuous world.

I am….

an older adult. That’s an awkward phrase. Having attained the age of 65, I qualify for Medicare, Social Security, AARP, senior discounts at diners, but no preferred parking as of yet. I might be seen as elderly by some for whom 65 is far in the future, but it sneaked up on me pretty quickly. Maybe “a certain age” would best describe my posture towards the calendar. I definitely feel the effects of diminishing physical capacity, perseverate over whether to fight it with some sort of frenetic fitness regimen or simply accept what is coming eventually anyway.

a father. I would give myself a C- in that capacity. If my son holds my performance against me, he hasn’t made it obvious, but my conduct in that regard has been so far short of my own ideal that I won’t even go into detail examining it now.

a husband…what he said, in the prior paragraph.

a brother. I am the youngest of five, a unique and privileged position in the family.Each of my siblings was a role model in one or another fashion. I think I’ve done alright in that role. I make efforts to stay in touch and to be appropriately deferential to my elder siblings.

a son; that’s an easy one. My father passed away when I was 33, just before I completed my surgical training. I was aware that he was proud and pleased in my pathway following in his footsteps, but only indirectly, as we had relatively few opportunities to linger over the subject during my medical education and training. I remember the regret I felt at his death, having come so close to a time when we could relate to one another as peers, but that was not to be. I certainly understood him in a way that my siblings could not, from a standpoint of having trod a similar pathway to my professional career status, but missed the opportunity to compare notes on our anecdotal experiences. To my mother, I have always been the baby of the family. She ranks just slightly lower than the angels in my pantheon of heroes, even at the very advanced age of 97. I would do anything required of me to keep her safe and happy in gratitude for decades of unfailing support and affirmation of my potential to achieve my dreams.

an uncle and great uncle. I had a wonderful role model in this role. My uncle Bill ranks right up there with my mom. I derive a great deal of pleasure from reaching out and staying in contact with the many nieces and nephews and their children scattered across the world. I take full advantage of my exalted status to ask pointed, bordering on inappropriate questions about their lives and then gently teasing them by misinterpreting their responses. I’m careful to avoid insulting their dignity, however.

a retired professional; medical, surgical, burn and wound care sub-specialist. It’s truly hard to encapsulate this role and identity in simple terms. It was a very rich experience, worthy in every way of devoting a career to achieving mastery. While it was good, it was very, very good, fulfilling in a variety of ways. It was also the occasion of my relentless decline into disaffection, burnout, and deep clinical depression. It was the proximate cause of the slow motion, spectacular, technicolor crash out of my career. Compared to some of my peers, I didn’t fly all that high, but I flew high enough to fall rather spectacularly.

a child. Really? Well, in some respects, there’s an inner child with all of the primary emotions, needs, dreams in all of us that have been burnished by time and experience, but periodically rear their heads in a very primal way. This has to do with experiences of delight, joy, sadness, fear, anger, regret, vulnerability, desire for intimacy in it’s various forms, the need for connectedness and the search for identity and meaning.

A retiree…whatever that means. I certainly didn’t slip easily into retirement. I found myself there after about 4 years of attempting to find a suitable encore vocation that could fill the void of having crashed out of my surgical career. I backed my way into retirement, just like I backed my way into most of the major phases of my adult life. It’s actually amazing how little I knew about approaching the big steps in life, even after having multiple examples and mentors along the way. In the midst of the fog, I have learned that “retirement” is the most complex and challenging transition in my entire life. You see, my approach to retirement was to never retire. I fully intended to find a way to continue working as a surgeon until I either woke up dead or became so physically diminished that I could simply no longer do the work. God laughs while we make our plans…I am only beginning to become somewhat less than acutely uncomfortable with the title “retired” when asked what I am doing with myself these days. Retired is not a role with which I am comfortable. I never aspired to this title. I looked diligently for an alternative, but did not find it. I retain some idle hope that something might find me that fits my degree of energy, motivation and sense of adventure. I’m increasingly certain that it won’t be even remotely in the medical sphere, for all of the slowly aging fund of knowledge stuffed into every dusty corner of my brain from that phase in life. Surely there are deeper truths hiding beneath the technical details that could be applied to another sphere of endeavor. Matching the euphoria associated with that former, dominant role and identity would be truly a miracle.

a friend. Here’s where I believe I may have an actual talent. As a child I didn’t think much about the issue of friends; how many, how close, etc. I had a number of friends amongst my classmates, even a few older and younger by virtue of venues like the school band, church groups, etc. I had a couple of particularly close friends throughout each phase of my education. A single friend from school-days remains my longest tenured and one of my closest friends. In subsequent phases, the “crowd” in which I associated and individuals within it became a more important source of identity. I learned that I would have a finite number of significant friends, rather than a whole raft of casual friends. This was just my nature, a bit of introversion, some compelling subject-matter interests and an increasing tendency towards identifying certain traits in people that struck a chord of admiration and affection in me. From each phase of my education, I retained one or a few lifelong, close friends with whom I stay in contact over space and time. I described myself as a “head person” for the majority of my life, finding meaning in the sciences, mathematics, the pursuit of “how things work”; relationships were a by-product of those interests. However, as the years and decades passed, increasingly I came to understand that relationships mean EVERYTHING, and subject-based knowledge is a necessary but lesser valued currency. I believe that at the depth of our souls and personalities, we yearn for intimacy with others, to be in relationship over shared values and interests. The “who” in life is far more fundamental to our sense of equanimity and happiness than the what, where, how and why of our circumstances and experiences. I find that I am more hungry for knowledge of others than I am for achievements, possessions, pass-times, work and the like. Friendship is very much a two way street. To be a one-way friend is a another description for being a fan. It’s the mutuality in friendships that make them valuable. I think the highest form of intimacy is that of true friend. There are intimate relationships that rely on physical attraction and romance, but the best friendships transcend and are not dependent on them.

a traveler. I did my share of geographical traveling along the way between late teens and mid fifties. There were adventures, honeymoons (yes, plural), many professional education/vacation combos in interesting places in the world. My travels are now more spiritual and virtual in nature, a grand journey on the path to some form of enlightenment, to reach equanimity in a much more existential manner than I sought as a working professional. Then, I could quantify my impact in several ways. Now, I must find meaning and purpose in a far less empirical manner. I have used the concept “being, rather than doing” in the attempt to describe the fundamental shift in status I have experienced, although it doesn’t fully encapsulate the transition or the task of making sense of present and future.

a story-teller. This is a latent avocation. I wouldn’t be so bold as to call it a talent, more like a hobby. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my experiences added up to a story of some sort. More generally I realized that we all have stories. Some are stories of a particular experience, or a phase in life. They are articulated to make some sort of point about the world and how it works. On a grander scale, our lives themselves make up a story of many chapters. A writer recently introduced me to the contrast between “linear” and “cyclical” aspects of storytelling. Each of us is writing that epic story as we advance in years and experience. We are the writers, the editors and interpreters of that story. Making sense of it is our fundamental task, for which there is no simple formula. One can simply recite it, without interpretation or extracting any greater meaning from it, but I think we are hard-wired to seek meaning from our experience.

a philosopher. Truly, I have adequately described my fundamental task in life as trying to bring order out of disorder, understanding out of chaos, clarity out of confusion. Perhaps not uniquely, things seem reasonably clear in retrospect but largely obscure in prospect. When I get up to 10, 000 feet and the topic doesn’t touch particularly tender spots, I enjoy the architectural task of thinking and bringing some sense of order to my thoughts, even if it’s only in the method of approaching a topic rather than the actual components and conclusions therein.

a living being on this planet. I had no choice in this matter. I am tasked with living until I die. There is no alternative, and little means of modulating the experience. Like every other person and living being, I was obliged to experience infancy first, then childhood, youth, adulthood and now the meandering pathway into advanced age and ultimately death. No-one gets out of this life alive, immortal, or ever younger. We make great efforts at defining a “good life” in contrast to one wasted in various pursuits, on particular behaviors. As humans, we define healthy and unhealthy habits, socially acceptable behavior, consequences for socially unacceptable behaviors. We identify heroes and villains, stars and nobodies, we even sometimes redefine ourselves by “switching” genders, or at least gender identities. In many cases we are unable to live up to our own expectations and define ourselves as successful or as failures. However, just to live and to attain and pass milestones along the way could be deemed a success, given all the potentially lethal hazards in our world.

a child of God. Now, some will find this controversial, even deceptive or delusional. It’s a matter of belief, of hope in things unseen. Collectively, we humans seem to need origin stories, even if one’s favorite origin story starts with a big bang. My belief system is substantially adopted, having been exposed to it from a very early age. Later in life, I was introduced to a number of alternative belief systems, but never found it either necessary or compelling to abandon the one and adopt something different. I am content with my Judeo-christian world view, with some latitude to accommodate the geological and paleontological record in our world.

Seen from this point, in retrospect I have held many of these roles concurrently for several phases or most of my life. It was a faulty assumption to rely so heavily on the single title and identity of my professional life. True, attaining that status and then occupying the role for three decades consumed the majority of my adult life, but it was never “everything”, and for significant periods it was largely inconsequential to my well-being. I discounted much of what gave life it’s greater meaning while preoccupied with the tasks of career. This most recent phase required that I confront what I am no longer, and will likely never again be. In that regard, there’s nothing unique about my story. We all face the end of phases of our life and the obligation to move on and tackle the tasks of what follows. We carry some roles throughout our lives, take on and leave behind others. It has provided me with a strong measure of relief to grasp that leaving one dominant role and it’s associated identity behind is both natural and necessary to prepare for and grasp the following phase in life.

The prior phase was heavily populated with role models, instructors and mentors. This phase is well populated but far less homogeneous in nature. One finds role models and mentors where they are, not necessarily where you are. One has to be proactive, to go out and find that new tribe, the wisdom of elders, the writings of fore-bearers to help make sense of it. At it’s worst, it’s confusing and demoralizing. At it’s best, it is a grand adventure, full of endless possibilities. I’m coming around to the enjoyment in it, right here in front of me, without the need for dramatic events and achievements.

The leaves haven’t started turning yet, but autumn is in the air, without a doubt. My pumpkin plant IS slowly turning, leaves with yellow edges. I have one, just one, glorious pumpkin. Then, there were about five lemon cucumbers, maybe 15 tomatoes, an artichoke plant without blooms. It was a strange summer, seemingly without pollinators. I’ve been counting butterflies this summer, less counted than I have fingers and toes. My friend and neighbor Rob has two beehives, so I know there were plenty of them at work. They would gather every time we had a bit of rain, tanking up in the puddle on top of a wine barrel in my backyard. It’s been a summer for deer; I have seen several yearlings grazing along the edge of my garden beds, pruning the greenery. This summer we have a resident bunny as well. I see him/her every day, emerging from the brambles encircling my yard, enjoying the “grass” ( I mowed maybe twice all summer) and hanging out with some squirrels that like my huge Ginko tree.

The cluttered back yard may look like a junk pile, but it is really several projects in evolution. I rehabilitated chicken house number 2, just need to paint it now. I produced two barrels of biochar, which is why the cement mixer is on my deck. The cross-cut saw is surrounded by lumber scraps, the result of rebuilding legs for the canvas canopy that serves as a yard equipment garage. I built a bipod hoist to lift log ends so I can get ropes around them. the plan is to tow/roll them out across the yard to a place where the mobile sawyer can convert them into timber. I’m going to build a timber frame parking pavilion. On the top, I’ll mount the solar panels I’ve been meaning to install. The ideal parking spot is in the sunniest corner of my back yard, so the grand plan will all come together presently, hopefully before it starts raining seriously. Now that I can tolerate being outside, I need to “make hay while the sun shines”, so to speak.

The radishes mostly went straight to seed this year. I got a couple of nice red radishes and the daikons seemed to be doing well, then everything bolted and turned into a jungle. Not having any better strategy, I just watched them flower and seed. They flowered and flowered and flowered all summer long. this piqued my interest and I looked up daikons to learn more about them. It turns out they are a favored winter cover crop. who woulda thunk it?! What’s especially cool about daikons, beyond the fact that they are really good at mobilizing mineral content in the soil into the biomass of the plant is that those great big, fat roots drill at least 12 inches down into the soil. If you simply leave them there to decompose, they have aerated the soil, deposited organic material deep into the soil and made big channels to allow water to penetrate easily. Since I have dense clay just below the surface, I’m going to try planting daikons to improve my soil, particularly in the areas that form a bog in the winter and take until late July to dry out enough to support a lawn tractor. The deer seem to like their leaves, too. I’m going to have a daikon radish meadow in October! I found a source and purchased 20 lb. of radish seeds and a compost/peat moss tumbler to spread seeds and top dressing across my yard. Does that sound like fun or what???

I like to think that there’s a guy like me on the opposite side of the earth, maybe in one of the -stan countries. He’s too old to be conscripted into the Russian army. He lives at least 2000 miles from Moscow and has little allegience to Putin or his hegemonic fantasies of recreating the Soviet empire. He owns a patch of ground in a small town, has a big garden out back. He worships in an Orthodox church in town, follows the Orthodox calendar. He has had a similar experience with daikon radishes this summer, looked them up and decided to do the same thing as I am doing.

If I could find him, talk to him and compare notes, we’d strike up an ad-hoc friendship over radishes. I’d learn about his goats, his cow and he’d learn about my history with backyard chickens. We’d talk about charcuterie, sourkraut, hard cider and cheese. He’d tell me about his work-shop and I’d compare notes with him about my grandfather’s tools. We’d reminisce a bit about being little boys in church, making mischief while our parents were being good saints in the pews. I’d learn that he mourns his grandson, who died fighting in a war with Ukraine for no good reason. I’d tell him how my brother barely dodged being drafted for the Viet Nam war. I’d tell him about losing my good friend to cancer and diabetes this summer and how I don’t have enough friends like him to afford losing one. We’d wonder together what it will be like to be 80 if we make it that far. I’d promise to check in with him in late October, once again before Christmas and see how his radishes are doing, tell him how mine are performing. We’d sign off with a “see you sooner than later”.

Later I’d realize that he and I are more similar than different. We both want to lead quiet and peaceful lives, enjoying our families and friends and the turning of the seasons. Neither of us wants to make a conquest of Ukraine, Canada, Greenland or any other place beyond our border. We’d both agree that we could live under more than one form of government, as long as it’s goal was the welfare of it’s citizens and peaceful relations with other countries. We’d agree that aid to places in crisis, places less fortunate would be far better than inconceivable amounts of money spent on futuristic armaments that become ever more lethal with each generation. We’d both wish for clean air, water, soil and safety for all the wild things that live beyond our fencelines.

In a few hours, we’re making a short trip we have been dreading for a few months now. Our elderly cat, the alpha critter in our household, is dying of cancer. It’s time to make that final trip to the kitty doctor and help him across the rainbow bridge. He’s been in our family for over 15 years, was an adult when he was adopted from an elderly lady back in the day. He follows a long line of auspicious forebearers. There were Maggie and Beuregard, Chloe and Victor (the cat), Roxie, Medelaine and Phoebe, Victor (the dog) and now Cyrus (Misty, until we learned she was a boy). We speak of them as if they were still amongst us. Our boy Alex knew them all, from his arrival in the family at 6 months of age until today at age 21 and change. They mark the passing of years in our family and three homes we have occupied. They are what is real to us. Their lives of 10-15 years each are little microcosms of our lives. They live them out as deliberately and inexorably as the turning of the earth around the sun. They are here for a little while and then live on in our memories, just as we will pass from this earth, other than the memories we leave behind in our loved ones.

I have no desire to be memorialized in stone, anywhere. I’d prefer to leave no footprint, but rather leave a patch of ground at least as healthy as I found it for the next person or family to enjoy. I hope my fig tree bears fruit, both for me and for them, who ever they will be. I hope they appreciate Cornealian cherries, grape arbors, timber bamboo, tall trees and blackberries. I hope they think we did a good job updating the house for their enjoyment after we’ve had our time here. I feel like I’m entering the autumn of my life, looking forward to winter before too long. I still have some time to enjoy it, while the weather holds and the leaves have not yet started turning. I wonder if my son will value any of the things I have collected, curated, loved. Can he treasure my grandfather’s tools, even though he has only seen a portrait of him? Will he value space and trees and all the things that live under them more than devices, machines, the virtual world of fantasy and nightmares? Will he and his generation accomplish what we are struggling mightily to do in ours; to transform from an extractive, ever more destructive and polluting existence, one which relentlessly crowds out all other forms of life in our blind averice for more, more and still more of what our world holds in trust? Are we even trustees at all? My hope is not for myself; I could leave tomorrow and be satisfied with what I have experienced in this life. What I hope is for my son, my neices and nephews and their children, that in the midst of global toil, we will collectively somehow come to value what the world brings to us, rather than what we can wring out of it. My faith tradition predicts an end time on this earth, one of great trial and tribulation, after which all things will be renewed under the all powerful architect of the universe. In the meantime, we are exhorted to work towards bringing that Kingdom of God into being here on earth. I can’t help but wonder if the forces and events acting on us today herald the coming of that age. I think people have wondered that for literally centuries, but they didn’t have enough nuclear warheads to obliterate life on the planet. They hadn’t pumped enough waste gasses into the atmosphere to change the weather. They hadn’t tossed enough plastics into the rivers that it is found in every corner of the earth and circulating in our own bodies. We are soiling our own nest, beyond the capacity of the world’s resilience to mitigate the effects of our existence. That is something never before experienced in the age of mankind.

So; I think I’ll keep on keeping on. There are things to do here on the homestead. Those logs need milling. The yard needs a good mowing before things go dormant. There’s compost, mulch and radish seeds to spread. The biochar needs processing, spreading, packaging, storing. There’s plenty of scrap lumber to turn into more char. I want to get some late season chicks who can mature to laying age by spring time. Then I’ll have bartering power with the neighbors who CAN make their gardens produce edible fruit. It’s all good, in direct contrast to what I read in my newsfeed every day. And, I’ll dream about that counterpart on the other side of the world, who’s life only makes sense when he focuses on things that are real, right in front of him, while he hopes and prays for the fate of the world. I see his profile reflected in everything I try to do on my own acre. Bring on those autumn leaves; I’ll be ready.

I met Denny several years ago, on line. It’s called NextDoor, a social media platform built around neighborhoods. I followed it actively for a while, until I tired of people complaining about finding someone else’s dog piles on their lawns. Sure, you should pick up after your dog. But, it’s not a felony and to complain about it to a whole community is petty. Denny once responded to such a post, with a somewhat wicked and sarcastic retort. I figured out how to send a private message. “You might catch more flies with honey then vinegar”, not expecting a response. But, the response came; “fair enough”, and he went back and edited his comment to be less ascerbic. I thought “wow, here’s a person I’d like to meet” and I carried the conversation forward. Before long, we had a coffee date and the rest is history. Denny was born into the Society of Friends, the Quakers. Later in life he became somewhat of a mystic, having studied eastern religions and philosophy while he spent most of his adult life in Asia with the state department.

During a dark time, I was carrying on about the tapes running endlessly in my head, trying to figure out the pile-up that described my exit from a beloved career. Denny listened and then suggested “Why not view your experience through the lens of a spiritual journey”. I was totally taken aback, having never imagined anything like that.

I went home, looked up both “Spiritual” and “Journey” in the dictionary and then proceeded to write six thousand words on the topic, exploring every possible iteration of meaning and consequence of that suggestion. It’s fair to say it was the single most helpful suggestion anyone EVER offered to help me on my way towards coming to equinimity about events in my life over the prior decade or so. Denny and I downed easily 200 fancy coffee drinks in local cafes during our acquaintance, talked about every topic in the encyclopedia. He was a fount of knowledge and experience in Asian cultures. I was his private health care consultant in a general sort of way.

Denny lived with diabetes for many years, then had the perverse fortune of developing multiple myeloma. He lived about 7 years with that disease. In recent weeks, his physical capacity deteriorated to the point that he needed 24 hour assistance, so he moved into an assisted living facility. I intended to see him there, but was too lackadaisical to get there quickly enough. I got that call while intending to visit.

I wasn’t able to see him at the hospital. He moved quickly from the ER to an ICU, where I found his family huddled together. When the young physician (PGY3) came to talk with us, I helped translate medical jargon into conversational language. His wife and son were distraught, but thankful for my presence and assistance. Siblings gathered and soon there were enough true family that it was obvious I’d be at the back of the line for visitation; He was already supported on a ventilator, so I felt the visit wouldn’t serve him anyway while sedated, so I returned home. Later that evening I received a text; “Denny’s heart stopped”. He had an advanced directive; no CPR.

Just 2 weeks earlier, I came across a new agent approved by the FDA for multiple myeloma in individuals who had failed at least three prior treatment regimens. It sounded something like a magic bullet. His oncologist was contemplating offering it, although it required hospitalization to monitor for adverse effects. Denny was so fragile they feared he wouldn’t survive the course of therapy.

Why had I not hustled over to the Marquam House as soon as he settled in there? Knowing Denny, he knew he wouldn’t be going home again and decided not to fight any longer. It was only 10 days before he weakened to the point he couldn’t life a glass anymore. I will regret my lack of urgency to see him, spend time with him, remind him how much I treasured our friendship, as long as I remain on this earth.

Cyrus (or Misty, by prior nomenclature) is the senior member of our 4-legged family. He (she) came to live with my in-laws a number of years ago. The story is that my mother-in-law took her in from an elderly lady going into assisted living. Rumor had it that the lady also adopted her from a prior elderly lady. She came with the name. She lived with the folks for several years and then moved with them into our home, in the daylight apartment on our ground floor. Within a year, Kathleens father passed away, her mother moved across country to live with her youngest son and family, leaving the cat and dog with us. That was 7 years ago, so the cat is at least 15, if not older. A few months ago, she began sneezing repeatedly, shaking her head and losing weight. She had a couple of episodes of epistaxis, sneezing blood all over the floor and wall. Her first trip to the vet with us, perhaps ever, revealed two things; Misty is a male cat, and Misty has very bad dentition, all on one side. We were dumbfounded. How could we have failed to recognize signs of a neutered male cat? So, we tested various stories (“trans-cat”), tried to re-orient ourselves to talking about “him” rather than “her”, and chose a male name of sufficient substance to match her regal nature. Medications made for temporary improvement. We had the teeth extracted; the sneezing and head shaking persisted. Breathing became louder. Cyrus’s appetite remains but he’s having difficulty eating and he has lost a great deal of weight. We demurred when offered a CT scan, having already spent nearly $3000 on the dental work under anesthesia. A plain x-ray of the sinuses suggests a malignancy. So, Cyrus, ne Misty appears to be dying. Cyrus had a companion from the in-laws; Victor, the Havanese dog. He was similarly elderly and passed over the rainbow bridge only about 9 months prior, while we were still living downstairs awaiting completion of the remodeling of our main floor living space. Victor was a quirky, irrascible old guy, but I appreciated him nonetheless and his passing left a considerable hole in the social structure of our little family. Now it’ll be Cyrus, the last four-legged member of the Cleland household and the senior member of our current menagerie. Cyrus has taken a liking to me, climbing into my lap and sleeping for hours, trapping me into a single position until I just can’t hold out any longer. He has the most luxurient fur of any cat I have known. There is no denying him his place of choice; I am his servant and have resigned myself to attending to all his needs; inside, outside, kitty treats, lap time, massaging whenever he demands it. I think he knows his time is short and he’s wringing every last drop of pleasure out of the days remaining. When he’s gone, it will truly leave a hole in the fabric of our lives.

It’s possible to go many years without losing a loved-one. When it happens, the ground shifts beneath our feet. That individual’s presence moves from one place in our conscience to another. The narrative stops and it’s replaced by remembrance; prior conversations float in and out of our conscious memory. With the critters, it’s not so much conversations, but habitual interactions that take on meaning much deeper than random observations. I am absolutely convinced that we share a language of sorts, as they make their needs known as well as their pleasure and their attachment to us. I think they are far more sophisticated than the animal behavioralists attribute to their behaviors.

Kathleen and I are well into the 3rd generation of critters in our combined family. We talk about them as if they were our children. Our boy Alex knew them all. In his very quiet way, he is very fond of the animals who share our home. The passing of a generation, be it human, canine or feline, gives me pause to think about my own tenure on this earth. I’ll be lucky to enjoy another 20 years here. Many more years are behind than in front of me. I wonder about whether my impact on the world around me is largely over. I no longer work as a professional, but I do participate as a volunteer in three separate spheres. The activities are less dramatic than my surgical past, but the impact is still potentially significant, even if my contribution is largely anonymous. I really can’t get close to the concept of retirement as a time to recreate, see the world, learn new hobbies and sports, etc. I am finding a good deal of pleasure paying more attention to all the living things that share my land. The idea of being a good steward to them appeals to me. I plant trees that won’t be mature until I’m already gone. Hopefully I’ll taste their fruit at least once. After 4 years, the timber bamboo I planted is beginning to show it’s potential. I imagine the things I might build out of those culms. I’m thinking about water; saving some of the 30,000 gallons of rainwater that fall on my roof to keep trees alive through our ever hotter and longer dry season. How much will I need? How can I make the system durable, but not so expensive as to be a budget buster. I don’t want all the temporate rainforest species around me to die on my watch. We still have plenty of rainfall, just not distributed so as to preserve the ecosystem around us. Perhaps it’s a fools mission, since weather and other forces of nature are really beyond my control in every sense of the word. Still, each of those trees is an individual, many of them decades older than me. It seems that they deserve to live.

The people in my life, the animals, the plants, shrubs, trees around me are what is real to me. All manner of news, mostly negative, flows through the virtual portals into my awareness. Simply by choosing alternative activities to staring at a screen, I can completely change my sense of reality. Most individuals would say I have a responsibility of staying informed, of participating in our democratic system, of making my voice heard. Sadly, all of that only brings me down. Focusing on people within reach of me, my home base and the woods around me is a different reality, one I can reach out and touch, one that doesn’t have a political philosophy, doesn’t take sides on existential issues, simply wants to live in peace until it’s time is over. I think my spiritual journey can play out right here where I live, without having to travel anywhere at all.

The other day we (as in we, America) deployed a dozen of the biggest, most powerful non-nuclear warheads against another nation. And they say we’re not at war with them, just at war with their uranium enrichment program. While the dust was still settling, we called for peace between nations, one of whom has sworn the annhialation of the other, and us for that matter. To them, we are the Great Satan.

Technical and scientific experts say there is no reason to enrich Uranium beyond 20% other than to create a nuclear weapon. I have no basis on which to dispute their proclamation. However, one way or another, this nation who calls us the Great Satan knows that we have already done so, a human lifetime ago, now some thousands of times over, as has one of our greatest adversaries and at least 8 other nations, at least one of which is an insular, xenophobic dictatorship in a locked-down country growing it’s ballistic missile capacity.

Here within our borders, we are relentlessly descending into a state of political polarities, using politics as a blood sport. Our public rhetoric is one of black and white, whose adversaries who are sub-human, threatening us with violence and subjugation.

I have more time these days than is perhaps in my best interest, to ruminate on these things. I have learned (the hard way, I should note) to turn the spotlight inward and ask myself how I am engaging in these hard topics that cut close to the bone of my core values and beliefs. I am, as we all are, trapped within my own body, unable to escape the biases that are as much a part of my as my beating heart.

The other day, while reading the writing of someone wiser than me, I encountered this organization called Braver Angels, whose mission is to teach “de-polarization” dialogue between parties who engaging with one another. I quickly made a small donation for my “membership” and accessed one of their on-line courses, one which focuses on the self and examines ways that we contribute to, or escalate tension while addressing topics fraught with strong emotional bases, or can choose to de-escalate by practicing “de-polarizing” speech. It is distinguished from falsely taking no position, as if to assign onesself the role of moderator, but rather to practice the art of finding ways to address the topic(s) while honoring others’ viewpoints as valid to them and attempting to understand how and why they came to hold them, just as I came to hold my own views on the topic. The excercise illustrates how it’s possible to internally hold conflicting views within onesself, for plausible reasons. If one can live with one’s own dissonance, can we not learn how to sit with dissonance amongst ourselves and not inevitibly follow a pathway into all-out conflict?

In my own life and career, I found myself in a place of conflict between my role in an institution and some of my most closely held values and beliefs. I didn’t adequately understand the art of diplomacy and became somewhat of a dissodent, which led to interpersonal conflict, disaffection, the destruction of relationships, the end of a beloved career and ultimately illness and disability. De-polarization and de-escalation requires skill and compromise, not necessarily in values, but in how one yields to others in the course of dialogue in the attempt to find common ground.

I have breakfast every Wednesday morning with a group of men from the parish church I attend. I am amongst the few “mid-sixties” members of the group, along with several more who are a decade or two my senior. They are/were highly accomplished professionals from multiple walks of life, some of whom ran in circles far greater and more powerful than mine in their active career days. You can imagine the spectrum of political persuasions in the group at the table . Perhaps the one thing we have in common is our common faith tradition and it’s teaching about how we should comport ourselves vis-a-vis our neighbors. We have been meeting long enough to know something of eath others’ personal and family histories, areas of expertise, favorite passtimes and the like. The most interesting and compelling dynamics emerge when the conversation veers toward current events, politics, existential threats to our way of life and our environment. Some otherwise enthusiastic participants become predictably quiet and cautious in their participation. Others betray strong biases in one direction or another. Our skills in dialogue become increasingly challenged. What holds us together is mutual respect and the pure enjoyment of each others’ company.

However, this recurring experience makes me long for better skills in conversation. I am highly interested, even intensely interested at times, in what these individuals have to say, because I know they collectively have many lifetimes of experience behind them and I don’t want to somehow spoil the punch, so to speak, and shut down dialogue with a passionately held position. I am challenged to adequately know and to artfully articulate my views without dismissing or diminishing the views of others. Inevitably, the art of active listening and asking questions becomes as important as prosecuting my own position. Most fortunately, my prior experience has humbled me considerably; I truly believe what I used to say in jest, when asked “whattayaknow?” My response? ”More and more about less and less!”

I have exhausted a lifetime’s allotment of outrage, anger, righteous indignation in my time. I hunger and thirst for reconciliation, for compassion, empathy in the midst of the incredible muddle in which we find ourselves. I can’t believe that those good people in other places “painted” a different color don’t love their kids, hope for peace and tranquility in their neighborhoods and towns and dread the possibility of conflict washing over them and destroying everything about the life they built. Then, I see pictures of bombed out villages in Ukraine, rubble fields in Gaza, refugee camps in Sudan and Ethiopia, I read about generations of tribal guerilla warefare in the Congo, forced labor camps in Myanmar, the 75 year legacy of unexploded ordinance in the killing fields of Laos and Vietnam from American carpet bombing, napalm and Agent Orange; death even lurking under the modern cities of Europe, just waiting for the excavation of a building site. There remains a simmering tension between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland (adherents to the SAME RELIGION, no less), endless emnity between Suni and Shiite sects of Islam, repression of Kurds, adherents to the Bahai faith, Sikhs, Hindu castes, adjacent nations with deep, deep common cultural origins.

Where do I fit into all of this? Are my words, typed onto a virtual page, contributing to polarization or to the opposite? Do I listen as much as I talk? Do I find polemic or humor in the space between us? Do I have any stomach left for conflict at all , even as I feel compelled by circumstance to speak up, speak out? Where does peaceful protest, civil disobedience fit into the big picture?

By coincidence or serendipity perhaps, I recently came into contact with a girlfriend of 40 years back and then my ex-wife ( I call it the “starter marriage”) of almost 30 years. Way down deep inside, I still harbor regrets for relationships ended and broken and have a latent desire to somehow mend the fabric that was torn in the process of parting ways. While encountering these two over the virtual and cellular media was a brief walk down a sentimental pathway, it awakened something much deeper within; the wounds collected and sequestered in the course of negotiating and surviving life itself. After long intervals and lots of water under the bridges, are my present thoughts and words agents of healing, or of running old tapes of conflict and dissolution? I fervently hope the former.

In the midst of foment in large concentric circles around me, I have this longing for a peace-making inner circle, in the places I really live, right on my own cul-de-sac and in my community. I should not, cannot, be a dispassionate spectator to it all. Equanimity demands that I stay engaged, but in a manner that build bridges, heals old wounds in others as well as myself. These things take time, a commodity it seems that we are increasingly short on, before something goes BOOM in a very big way, right here on our doorsteps. We fought for our beliefs and principles on our own soil 250 and 160 years ago, in times when you had to be an arm’s length from your adversary to be in battle; in this day and age the adversary can be just beyond the horizen or around the world. Our technology for killing one another on a massive scale far outpaces our tools for reconciliation, something that demands being face to face in the same room, over and over again until common ground is reached. The magic of the internet has not really brought us all that much closer together. Increasingly, it allows us to gather in virtual silos, echo chambers for our own views and biases.

Will we make use of the remarkable tools we are building to solve our endemic problems, or simply find ever more creative ways to distort reality, rewrite history and stereotype people who look, speak and interact differently than we do? I pray we’ll find ways to do the former, and turn away from the latter.

Namaste…

Just Sayin’

hmm… I’ve been claiming it’s primarily for me. It’s about trying to make sense out of confusion. If that’s the case, why do I write in a place where others can find it, can comment? What are my hopes and expectations?

I know one thing; I’m moved to write sometimes. I lead a life that is far removed from the one I knew as a professional. I like to say I was once a big fish in a small pond. To be sure, I interacted with more or less intensity with a lot of people over a sustained amount of time. There was ample opportunity to address many issues formally and informally in that space and time. Now, most of my waking moments are spent alone. Certain topics are better left un-addressed in my home. Agreeing to disagree isn’t an easy or natural thing; it takes practice and a willingness to really try and understand the “why” of differing opinions. I am, and maybe we all are, prone to listen to voices that underwrite our own opinions.

The fact is, however, always flocking with the same species can confine us to an echo chamber. In order to grow and evolve, it’s useful and necessary to hear and consider other perspectives, in a space where the tendency to take sides is least likely to interfere with careful consideration.

Where do we learn to listen? And, if we’re listening, how do we project that we ARE actually listening, rather than simply waiting for the slightest instant in which to interject our own opinion or rebuttal? Real listening takes practice. I think I may not be all that good at it. There’s no doubt that I’m substantially impressed with my own opinion about things. I’m a bit adventurous, I think, with opinions. I don’t like to think of myself as dogmatic, hopefully I am not seen that way. I’m certainly well persuaded, even when I go off on a tangent, exploring the logical or even illogical conclusion of a line of reasoning. I do like hearing others do the same; directly questioning the majority opinion, the status quo, but also with an attempt to build the alternative thesis upon plausable reasoning.

The thing is, my listening is infrequently in a place where I can engage in meaningful feedback. It’s why I like this blogosphere, particularly with authors who refuse to place the opportunity for feedback behind a paywall. The fact that I do read their work and take the time to offer feedback is a form of endorsement of their effort, whether or not I agree wholey with their content. I am selective in paying for a subscription. I don’t pay for acceptable ideology, or clever turn of phrase. I pay for sustained effort and evidence of real work in constructing, refining, editing and presenting ideas with the respect they deserve. Poor grammer and typos make me feel like those things don’t matter to the writer. It’s also why I have increasingly simply deleted any post that is an advertisement for live content. If I were looking for conversational posts, I’d restrict my subscription to podcasts. Still; the interchange between individuals is valuable to me, particularly if I’m one of them. A written conversation is a unique and special thing. It’s like someone’s personal history with a friend, recorded in letters over sustained periods of time. Each party responds to the other, but with enough forethought that retractions are seldom necessary.

I have breakfast with a group of guys every Wednesday morning, almost without fail. They all started out as mere acquintances, if that. A year later, it has become one of the events I look forward to most each week. I count each of them as friends. I just LOVE learning more about their lives, their activities, their hopes and dreams and their opinions on whatever topic we find ourselves discussing. In that activity, I have found a new “tribe”, albiet not as intensely as a 70 hour work week would offer. I have other small “tribes” in the places I volunteer. If I didn’t appreciate the folks who gather, I probably wouldn’t continue those activities, however noble they might be.

Those associtions don’t fully satisfy my desire to write, or to cultivate a few deeper, sustained relationships over habits like fancy coffee drinks.

I’m pretty convinced that the way forward to a world where we live amongst one another is through multilateral conversations, hearing and developing an understanding for the many stories that make up our society. I always find more to bind us together than to tear us apart, when sharing thoughts on a one-to-one basis, or in other conversational formats.

So, what about this format, where I jot down my stream of consciousness on a particular subject and then launch it into the great expanse of the digital universe, including a smaller subset of that group who have chosen to be on a “subscription list”? I can assure you I haven’t enrolled anyone to that list, although I have taken to including my posts on two platforms (Facebook and LinkedIn) where I participate in larger groups of people known to me from the non-virtual world. Some are dear friends and family, others simply people I appreciate from various associations across the years.

Those of you who are on a subscribers list are people I especially appreciate, even if we are linked only by virtual connections. I like to think you’d unsubscribe if you didn’t find here something worthy of your attention. If I could fulfill a single wish, it would be that you honor yourselves sufficiently to send back your opinion, your thoughts, any proof of life at your end of the stream of electrons. One potential advantage of this explosion of the “virtual” world is that it can connect people who are far away in space and time, bring them “face to face” through the miracle of the virtual world. You can reach me instantly from the opposite side of the world. How amazing is that?

How can we have real conversations, not just echo chambers? How can we shape one another’s opinions and views of the world, for the better? Do we care enough to make our voices heard, even in “small” places? If I review my own periodic essays across time, I’m surprised at how much underlying “longing” for being in community I find. I wonder if others have a similar desire for connectedness, even if physical circumstances prevent a vibrant social life?

There’s one more topic rattling around in my head lately, but I think two missives are plenty for a single day. That one can mature a bit inside the coconut before finding it’s way into prose.

I AM connected to the seasons and the weather. The days lengthen, for now anyway. Soon, they will shorten. On a different cycle, the days heat up. They won’t begin cooling for another 90 days, more or less. It will be drier, so I’ll have to enter the dance and add some water selectively to my surroundings. Why? because I like green and growing, rather than brown and withering. That time will come too, but more appropriate to September through November, I think. Early morning sunshine starts my day. later sun-down defines the evening. I’m praying for breeze, which makes everything more tolerable.

The still emerging veggie garden is facing it’s first real challenge in our mini-heat-wave. It’s a challange for me as well. My temperature band for activities has shifted colder and narrowed a bit as well, so when the thermometer passes 90, I’m heading for a cool corner out of the sun. I’ll break rank and water some sensitive spots before peak heat this afternoon, but I enjoy the excuse to curl up in a shady spot and follow my wandering mind where it leads.

I officially have a yellow thumb. Not a brown thumb, mind you, but not green either. I have had my successes, mainly with plants that don’t need much love. I have the most amazing rhubarb plant, comes back in all it’s glory year after year and doesn’t ask for anything in return. The grape arbor needs a focused day of pruning in dormant season, nothing more. This year I tracked down two Cornelian Cherry trees…look them up if you wish. My prospects of success there are good, if I take the one down the lane as an example. The blackberries, of course, do well in spite of me. We have a love-hate relationship. They constantly threaten to take over everything, I beat them back with a degree of enthusiasm and the result is always a bumper crop sometime in late July.

Annual veggies are something else. The tomatoes manage to produce each year, generally less than more, but still something. More tender species elude me regularly. One would think radishes, carrots, beets, chard, kale would be simple enough; just not here, in my hands. Still, I try. I’m not competetive in this regard; essentially noone sees my garden but me. Other critters enjoy my attempts, often small enough that I don’t ever see them. On that scale, I could be considered a great success, since they eat the fruits of my labors when they are still very small.

So, why do I try, year in and year out? It’s a long, winding, slow journey through variation after variation; locations, techniques, choice of species, early or late starts, peat pots, soil starts, more mature transplants and varying amounts of attention. It may actually be more about me than the plants; will I have the diligence to attend to them throughout their annual lives? I can’t ascribe any ill motive to the plants. For eons, plants have found their niche, places where they thrive unreliant on human interventions. We have simply attempted to corral them and shape them into something that suits our purpose. They have no guile, they simply live or die according to their immediate surroundings and factors like the weather. In the garden, their success is an act of God, their failure is mine.

Long ago, before clocking 65 years in history, I was born an optimist. The world was a playground, full of real and imagined adventures. I suppose it still is, tempered a bit by experience. Planting a garden is not a monumental feat. It can occur gently, in stages, across a few months of time. There are even “winter veggies” and my growing zone is condusive to things that don’t mind limited sun. So, I tackle my annual garden space in mini-steps, as allowed by the weather. Choosing seeds is fun. The packages promise big and bountiful results, along with detailed instructions. I am distinctly liberal in my interpretation, trusting nature and the Almighty to work their magic on my labors. Perhaps that has more to do with my yellow thumb than anything else, a tenuous relationship with following instructions too precisely. This year, I focused on the sunniest spot on my land. The variation is mini-raised beds within a surrounding garden bed. I have randomly spread seeds, with some companion planting tossed in for good measure. I’m using my long-tended compost, adding mulch, even biochar produced immediately adjacent to the garden. I misplaced the micorhyzzia, they’ll have to wait for another occasion.

I accept that, for me, gardening is more about hope than science. I willingly, joyfully even, engage each year regardless of recent experience. One can invest eye-popping sums in gardening. I prefer the low budget approach. It’s like fishing; loud, fast, expensive water-craft chasing dreams across the water, or a worm and a bobber. You’ll only find me on the shoreline with the bobber.

Hope is a marvelous thing, particularly when disappointment is gentle. It encapsulates the best of our intentions, emotions, our sense of place in the world. It recognizes an even celebrates our frailty. It is not compatible with the conqueror’s mindset, but rather a more gentle spirit with which we interact with the seed and soil, water and sunlight. Invariably something grows, just not necessarily that which we expected. The distinction between veggies and weeds is arbitrary. The deer see things differently than I do. So if all I get is volunteers that don’t go well in a salad, I consider myself a sort of forester, tending a small meadow for the wild things. It certainly softens disappointment as I continue to shop for food while waiting for home grown produce.

In the garden, unexpected, maybe undesireable results are also an act of God. In our public discourse, which is decidedly conflicted and controversial these days, undesired outcomes are our own collective responsibility. We own the decisions AND the outcomes. More and more, I prefer to focus on what’s directly in front of me. Something is ALWAYS growing in my garden, whether or not it’s something I planted, or maybe the birds, ants, coyotes and raccoons. That they also assist in the planting, consuming and disseminating of things also gives me hope. Their presence is reassuring, their absence is felt acutely and a source of concern each season. I am SO grateful that they share my little rural retreat in the midst of the big city. I’ll be happy to continue feeding them while attempting to feed myself. In a larger sense, my thumb IS green, if only that I hold space for them against the pressing influence of the built environment.

Tarrifs, trade wars, armed suppression of civil disobedience haven’t reached my little acre. I hope they never will. Now, it’s time to brave the heat and add a bit of water to my hopes and dreams. I hope your hopes and dreams all come true this growing season!

Something magical happened to me this spring; as the days lengthened and warmed up, I suddenly got the urge to get out of my recliner, abandon my laptop and everything virtual that streams through it and get outside. The result has been remarkable. I’ve rearranged all the unfinished projects in my back yard. Some have been renewed, some have been cleaned up and put to bed, some things have been repurposed to new and more useful objectives. The old, slightly raised-bed garden area has emerged from the brambles and hope in the form of seeds, veggie starts, compost and mulch have been carefully placed, in anticipation of a bountiful harvest by July. Truthfully, I’m probably feeding the deer, raccoons, possums, coyotes, squirrels and smaller life forms again this year. I refuse to enclose the garden like a Super-max prison. I own a yellow thumb; the single most successful planting in my history is the large rhubarb plant that comes back every year without my help.

It feels frankly fantastic to have somehow conquered the inertia. I hope it’s not just a temporary phase, before the cycle dips back towards hibernation. I always seem to recognize change in the rear-view mirror; It’s been nearly 5 years since I took a dive into the depths of catatonic depression; I’ve been climbing out of that hole in irregular and unexpected phases all this time. I can see a certain logical progression in retrospect; First there was coming to a complete halt, even the mind, for quite a long while. Then, after emerging, the mind had to learn a different way of regarding the world. It took at least 3 of those 5 years to abandon the idea of returning to the prior life, habits and world view. That represented another devolution to stationary. Then there was the discovery (rediscovery, maybe) of home, primary relationships, the immediate local place in which I live, how to live in it, how to imagine a future made up of things other than an all-consuming professional career. Finding permission to rediscover things I loved many years earlier (40+) and then pursue them was part of that awakening. Having done a lot of “work” with a coach, I have finally reaped some of the rewards of that work and am discovering both joy and fulfillment without that former ever-present sense of “I should be doing something important” lurking in the background. It turns out finding my mental health WAS that something important. Also, grasping the reality that phases of life and the activities that define them come to an end someday was one of the harder things I have done in my adult life.

So, with that lengthy preamble, what about this official day of remembering next Monday?

I know it’s officially about fallen warriors. There aren’t any of those in my immediate family, thank God. Three of four generations served in the military, but fortunately without bullets flying by. My brother had a draft card, barely dodged service in Vietnam, I suspect. I grew up in the age of rebellion against American hegemony. My nephew flew fighter jets off of an aircraft carrier, now is a flight instructor for the Navy. Now, approaching pension and benefits, I look back with a mild regret that I never served in one branch of our national defense or another. When I got around to inquiring, I was deemed already too old. Interesting, because the government was willing to pay for medical school in return for only 4 years of service, after which one could go on into the civilian workforce. I always felt I would work into my 70’s, even die with my boots on. “Retirement” never held much sense of adventure to me. Even now I think I might have had another 7 years or so, after the 5 years I spent recovering from burnout/depression, under other circumstances.

I do think of my grandfather, who enlisted at the tail end of WWI but wasn’t sent abroad. I think of my uncle Bill, who emerged from the radio room in the bowels of the aircraft carrier Lexington when she sunk during the battle of the Coral Sea in early WWII. He floated around in the sea for a while before being rescued and returned to Pearl Harbor, still smoking from the Japanese attack on Hawaii. My father served in the Army for perhaps 4 years, but avoided fighting in Korea. Two years of that were spent as an interpreter on the German-Czech border, interpreting for folks leaving the eastern block as it was becoming consolidated under the Soviet influence in the early 50’s. Any one of them might have become a casualty of violent conflict, but for the grace of God.

So, I have reason to reflect on their generations and the ultimate sacrifice made by hundreds of thousands of US service personnel in the 20th century, even more in prior centuries of our country’s history. In one fashion or another, every one of us have been engaged in the never ending battle for that “more perfect Union”, whether in war or peace, on our soil or foreign soil. There were warriors for freedom from slavery, for non-discrimination, for women’s rights, for assistance for the poor, for immigrants and other marginalized sub-populations amongst us, most recently those with non-heterosexual lifestyles and gender identities other than binary. Now, the battle over immigration and legal residence has been renewed in force.

I have lived my entire life during a period of time, in a place and under a political regime which afforded me an unparalleled quality of life, safety and opportunity unlike anything in prior history ANYWHERE on earth. While I’m always vaguely aware of that, this national holiday is a good time to reflect more deeply on that reality and what the costs have been to countless individuals over many years to make that possible.

So, while the flavor of Memorial day is one of solemn remembrance for fallen warriors, it can also be a celebration of what those sacrifices have yielded, a time for gratitude, thankfulness, admiration, reverence and amazement. At our best, we approach the concept of Heaven on Earth, even as we can just as easily create Hell on earth, as is being experience in places like Somalia, Ethiopia, Gaza and Ukraine. To realize that conflicts have not touched our soil in over 160 years is, in itself, a cause for profound gratitude. May we preserve a sense of awareness of how precious an inheritance has been bestowed upon us on this next Memorial day.

I huddled in hibernation for 90 days or so after the national election, first to honor my own sense of mourning over the death of common sense, and second because it wasn’t clear to whom I should listen and read. However, I did not withdraw from scanning headlines, even if I didn’t read the content under them. Slowly, haltingly, voices of resistance began to emerge with more than simple expressions of outrage at the new status quo.

I’ll admit that I am a political neophyte, inspite of being robustly opinionated on topics political. I had a general idea of how government worked, but it was not until a regime came along with no regard for “how things work” that I began to understand how fragile a thing democracy can be. The whole system works on a couple of premises; first, that it is imperative that we all follow the rules to the best of our ability, and second, that we share a core set of values about the rights and responsibilities of individuals vis-a-vis the institutions of government.

So, my evolving understanding of resistence includes the following;

1. Know the law and the constitution. For this, we must rely on scholars, attorneys and judges. None of these are pure sources; there are some who would use their title and position to subvert both the law and constitution, so one must listen to multiple voices and come to a decision about which are speaking truth.

2. One must call out the government in each and every instance where it ignores or willingly subverts the law or constitution. This requires platforms that work, to which many people pay attention. We relied on mainstream media for this, but more recently we have seen what happens when the media is controlled by oligarchs. It loses it’s nerve, it’s independence and it’s truthfulness.

3. One must use the powers of each branch of government to restrain the others. We have seen how the legislative branch can be sabutaged and wholey subjected to a powerful demagogue. We have seen how the Supreme Court can be manipulated over time into representing only one extreme viewpoint. Sadly, the voter is not a reliable check on extremes in any branch of government. The votor is at baseline ignorant, indulgent, disinterested and lazy, thus easily deluded.

The good news is, these institutions still have considerable leverage if the public unites around the principles our founding fathers articulated and exerts pressure where it can be exerted. There are two basic pathways to leverage; the ballot and suing the government in the courts.

Both of these methods are dependent on people being willing to subject themselves to the rules; rules governing elections and rules governing directives from the courts. The bad news is that our current administration is flirting with outright defiance of the rules and is actively twisting the meaning of same, inventing increasingly tortured interpretations of the law and it’s intent, attacking the institutions that carry out elections and jurisprudence, generally attempting to administer by threat, by gaslighting, by asserting an imperial quality to elected leadership and working to dismantle the means by which leaders are elected.

The MAGA core have not succeeded in convincing the majority of Americans, even the majority of conservatives, that abandoning our electoral and judicial systems are in our best interest. There are still many people willing to submit to the rule of law, to the rules surrounding elections and voting and even to actively work to protect these institutions. The regime cannot truly usurp power unless and until they can convince the majority of their subjects that these institutions should be discarded.

Irrespective of political system, the governed must consent at some level to being governed. The few cannot control the many without broad consent to be controlled. I think what we may be seeing emerge in these latest few weeks is the many demonstrating the limits of their willingness to have their agency and their individual rights to how they think and believe eradicated. The president and his toadies are wildly over-reaching what the electorate intended when they voted the scurrilous bastard into office.

We are now confronted with the limitation in means by which to corral him and his ilk, or replace him. To corral him, we’d need a supreme court reversal on the subject of presidential immunity from prosecution. Otherwise, the legal profession and the courts must laboriously challenge EVERY unlawful or unconstitutional executive order with a law suit. To replace him, we’d need a legislature willing to impeach and convict him. Neither of these options look likely in the near term.

A coup, or assasination could relieve us of a rogue president, but at a profound cost to our democracy.

I think we’ll see the courts, the mid-terms and eventually either impeachment or term limits and the 2028 election be the dominant means of containing and eventually rejecting Trump and his undemocratic regime.

I awakened this morning and cracked an eye at my cell phone, the ever-present small mobile external brain and memory bank. With relief, my news feed confirmed that the New York Stock Exchange’s indices were trending “up”. Everyone knows that a rising stock market is a good thing, except when it isn’t. Up is rarely a bad thing in the stock market, except that we get nervous as it goes up, up and up too quickly. We call that “irrational exuberance” and know that what goes up, must also come down. Still, over time up is better, and those who can make the value of their holdings grow more quickly (move “up”) are the winners.

It’s a curious fact that in our world, north is “up” and south is “down”. There can’t be an up without a down. It’s like the graphs we learned about in math; there are three axes on a graph. The x-axis goes up and down. The y axis goes left and right (right is “up”, or more positive) and on the z-axis, “up” points to you and “down” points away from you. Or rather, the vector pointing towards you is the positive (“up”) and the vector pointing away is the negative (“down”). Funny, particularly with respect to the x-axis, we don’t necessarily think of the vectors simply as being equal and opposite, although they are. We assign a positive and a negative, with the positive being “up”.

Our earth is round, or at least that’s the latest interpretation of reality. We understand our world to have electromagnetic polarity. Every so often (not very often) the polarity reverses. Interestingly, our geographic north pole is actually the earth’s magnetic south pole, where magnetic field lines enter the earth. Conversely, our geographic south pole is where magnetic field lines exist the earth, the magnetic north. When discussing magnetic polarity, positive and negative are inappropriate terms. The earth’s polarity reverses every few hundred thousand years, but not regularly and not at a constant rate. It’s actually a bit haphazard and has varied in frequency over time.

So, in common vernacular, why is it that we travel “up” to the north pole and “down” to the south pole? In fact, geographically, all north is “up north” and all south is “down south”. However, while standing on earth, our heads are “up” and our feet are “down”. So, up refers to outward from center and down refers to inwards towards the center. My American “up” is not China’s “down”, even though we sometimes joke about digging “down” to China. If we were to drill “down”, when we hit dead center in the earth’s core we’d be at the bottom and there wouldn’t be any more down.

Our sun also has magnetic polarity, which shifts every 11 years. It has no geographic polarity; no “up north” or “down south”. There doesn’t appear to be anything at the sun’s surface or within the sun’s core that is fixed and constant, a reference point around which you could assign a north or south, up or down. The sun does rotate on an axis, and it also orbits the Milky way, so there is, in fact, orientation. One could define geographic polarity relative to rotational or orbital axis, but practically it is meaningless to us mere specks in the cosmos. By contrast, the earth has things like tectonic plates, terrestrial continents that are essentially fixed (actually in very slow motion vis-a-vis one another).

Perhaps the fact that we consider north to be “up” and south to be “down” is purely a convention that got started sometime in the murky past, without a rational explanation. Personally I think we hold a sort of bias towards north being somehow better or higher in value than south. With a few exceptions, the northern hemisphere holds the wealthiest, most technologically advanced societies on earth. I think we hold a bias that the concentration of liberal democracies in the northern hemisphere are more advanced and therefore somehow more desirable than the concentration of countries with other forms of governance towards the south. This is by no means uniform; after all, Russia, an autocratic nation with only a thin, imitation veneer of "governance by the people” reaches well into the polar north; Australia and New Zealand, both liberal democracies, are about as far south as you can get on our planet short of Antarctica. Still, north is “up”, “up” is where our heads are oriented with respect to our feet, and there’s a kind of inherent bias towards where our head lives in relation to our feet.

We imagine (and now literally experience) flying “up, up in the air in my beautiful balloon”, a metaphor for freedom, lack of constraint, the release from the anchoring to the earth and our physical limitations. Interestingly, that force that anchors us is what makes the biosphere possible. We live in a thin band of atmosphere just above the solid surface of land, the surface of the oceans, anchored by gravity; we don’t simply float off into the vast expanse of space. We do think of the sky as being “up”. The big, fast planes fly high “up in the sky”. Down deep in the earth are interesting places, but also dark, confined, hot and scary places. On land, we’ve managed to dig “down” a few thousand feet into the earth and drill perhaps 5-10 times that deep with high tech tools. We have reached “down” 36,000 feet to the deepest recess of the ocean and have climbed “up” 29,000 feet to the summit of the highest mountain, on our own feet. And, we have traveled to the moon, 246,960 miles “up, above” the earth’s surface.

Our kings and leaders live “up” in high places. Some of us have friends “in low places”. Our most virtuous neighbors are “above” being so “low” as to behave badly.

Up is therefore higher, better; down is lower, not better. North is up, south is down.

We “woke” people would probably assert that these conventions are all wrong. There’s nothing intrinsically less valuable about places and people south of us. There is nothing intrinsically better about having our heads around six feet from the ground and our feet firmly planted ON the ground, than our pets, whose heads and feet are closer to parallel to the ground.

So much for geographical orientation; what about our reference to other aspects of our multidimensional lives? We have a bias towards growth, equated to “more”, and related to “up”. After all, as individuals we “grow up”, at least for the first 16 or so years of our lives, a process far more complex and nuanced than simply getting taller. As we multiply and increasingly inhabit every corner of the earth, the human population is on an “upward” trajectory towards 9 billion persons. There’s some theoretical limit to just how “high” a population our earth can support. We’re probably closer than half-way to that limit, unless we completely re-engineer every aspect of our existence, including our values about space, ownership and resource consumption (this is where my head explodes about now, thinking about it). As we move through life, we are somewhat comforted if the trajectory of our personal possessions and tokens of value (money) are on an upward path. Well, I think we’ve come to grips to a degree with the downside of collecting too much stuff, but we have not defined a healthy limit on how much our bank account balances should go “up”. I think we assume the more the better, even though we’re pretty certain it doesn’t leave this life with us. But, even on a macro-level, we consider growing growing the wealth of families, communities and nations to be the only healthy trajectory. Whenever these measures of our labors are in decline, or going “down”, we devolve into anxiety, conflict and every manner of bad behavior. Truly, as we strive to climb “up” the socioeconomic ladder, that can also lead to some very bad behavior (consider our current collection of oligarchs in the federal administration) but we all agree that seeing the numerical value of our personal assets going “up” is healthier than going “down”. We seek to climb “up” in societal circles, in economic and political power. We even keep count of the number of our social media “followers”. Up is good, down is not.

In economic terms we speak of growth, which is also an “up” concept. Our entire macro-economic reality is built on “up”. Inflation, an evil word in modern economics, is bad when is too high, but is also bad when it approaches zero and enters negative territory. Deflation (a reduction in value of all goods and services) is scary, dangerous, undesirable. It represents the opposite of “progress”. The economic sweet spot is inflation of about 2% yearly. That means that the price of things is going, you guessed it, forever “up” but not too quickly. We aren’t comfortable unless wages are also going “up”, preferably just a little bit faster than the prices, so our net worth can also go “up”.

As a species, we are only beginning to imagine the redefinition of our value system on the basis of “enough”, rather than always more or always “up”. Certainly, population is a ticking time bomb if it only goes up. Runaway inflation (“up”) is terribly destructive; As the prices go up, the value of our labor and our money go down. Still, have you EVER experienced a period where the prices of everything have trended down, down, down over extended periods of time? Almost unthinkable…

Actually, in certain examples, this is true. Relative to our wealth, the price of many consumer goods has only gone down for some decades. Think about clothing for example. Cheap clothing from SE Asia is about as cheap as it has been in our lifetimes. The prices may be a bit higher than they were 40 years ago, but our ability to purchase, accumulate more and more of them has far outstripped rising prices. Right now, the prices of solar technology are dropping, have been dropping for 50 years since the first panels were developed. Technology, automation, raw materials prices (silicon, at least) have made this possible. A cheap cell phone now has more computing power than the Apollo lunar lander. So, prices of some things have gone the opposite of up, but the general trend is still up. The price of a modern car is higher than the price of my first home, purchased in 1988.

Several countries are grappling with the current and impending issues surrounding declining population. These include some of the largest and most highly developed societies on earth. Japan, China, Italy, Korea, even the US all have birth rates lower than the “replacement” rate to maintain current population. The US dodges this issue through immigration (current administration’s goals notwithstanding), but societies that don’t benefit from receiving immigrants or actually discourage immigration are wondering how they will support their aging populations with smaller and smaller successive age cohorts. Even if each individual somehow provides economically for their own support in advanced age, someone has to provide that care. Watching our individual longevity go “up” and our population’s average age also go “up” is clearly a mixed blessing with the current paradigm of providing social security for our aging populations. Why isn’t it possible to imagine a situation where nations can slowly decline in population in a healthy way? Why couldn’t a declining GDP be considered okay, as long as per-capita productivity is maintained? We in America are a consumer economy, but a growing consumer economy on top of a growing population must inevitably bump up against some real limit. We don’t want to eventually all be living on top of a pile of plastic packaging garbage, right? Somehow, the trajectory of these parameters on which we measure success and progress must be redefined in a fashion that doesn’t equate “up” with good and “down” with bad. We need new terms to express “enough”, “better, not bigger”, “less is more”, “less is better”, “bigger ISN”T better”.

Modern medicine showed that calorie restricted diets result in greater longevity amongst populations. In that case, less is more, up to a point. Our generation struggles to keep our weight “down”. We understand the virtue of using less fuel in our automobiles; curiously that means mileage is going “up” as fuel consumption goes down. We’re always looking for prices to be marked down, although it is often associated with food consumption going UP. High prices help us moderate our gluttony.

Alternative concepts to the usual and customary can stretch my mind to the point of a frontal headache. In some cases they are highly urgent, even to the point of existential consequences. If temperatures rise (up) another few degrees, we face almost inconceivable environmental consequences in a very finite number of years into the future. Population is another one of these threatening parameters. Resource consumption in the throw-away age is increasingly urgent. Plastics are now found in every remote recess of the planet, including tiny, tiny pieces within our brains. We need less, not more, for a healthy future. Biodiversity is facing existential threats as a result of ever more impact by human beings (more of us, more energy, more stuff, more waste, more heat, more and more, up, up and up…)

And now, it’s time to stop making the word count continue to go “up, up and away”…

I can freely admit I’m hooked on Substack. There are some things I don’t like as I see it evolve; First and foremost, I hate paywalls. I pay a subscription to 5 or 6 pages, hold free subscriptions to a few more that I find less reliable. There are two or three that will be my “forever” homes, some second echelon candidates through which I am slowly cycling my paid support, and some that have my allegience if not my credit card number. I have passed through many on the way to the current semi-curated list. I’m not enamored of “notes” or podcasts or virtual media empires masked as substack pages. I’m in it for the individual voices of writers who value the medium, not the paid subscription count.

I write far less diligently than I read. Of course, my comments are limited to those without a comment paywall, paid subscription or not. A few have been pre-ambles to internet businesses, just building a subscription list in the hopes of launching enough paid subscriptions to call it a business. I just abandoned a medical site that had some merit, only it was aiming directly at a subscription search engine. I felt my interest had been taken advantage of (grammer?). I don’t begrudge anyone their interest in internet commmerce, I just think that Substack is about the writing, about the exchange of ideas and the judgement on whether it’s worth a paid subscription should be voluntary, not coerced. Just one guy’s opinion, there…Feel free to express your own, even it it doesn’t line up exactly with mine!

After the post-election shocked silence and pause in posting vigor, an enthusiastic critique/resistence crowd has popped up. The opposition has morphed into the resistence to a degree. There’s such a rich trove of topics to dissect, new veins of outrage to mine, endless comparisons to what we believe to be the founding father’s intent and etc., it’s hard to even imagine a unique take that warrents a regular newsletter. For the non-entrepeneurs, non-journalists amongst us, it remains only to offer an occasional, more strongly held opinion on the times and the topics.

My theme has consistently been trying to bring a degree of clarity to perpetual confusion. My current confusion runs along two streams of though; where are we headed really, and what true leverage does the public have in our national discourse other than every second year elections? Activism in all it’s forms, at least if legal and peaceful, is clearly a very soft projection of power. It depends fundamentally on a baseline of commonly held convictions, the existence of shame and remorse, the power of pursuasion. In internal affairs, our military is constrained by the constitution. Law enforcement is less constrained, although still beholden to ideas like the first amendment, if you feel obligated to respect it.

We’re fully dependent on the executive branch’s claims that it still respects the directives of the courts, although its claims and its actions aren’t fully in alignment. Congress has control of only the most anemic of enforcement arms. The courts have no enforcement arm of their own. All law enforcement operates under some form of executive authority, whether federal, state or local. The concept that we can and must rely on the military or law enforcement to follow the constitution rather than an illegal/unconsitutional executive directive implies that we must consider insurrection at any level to be a democracy-preserving principle of last resort. We tested that concept twice, in the Revolutionary and Civil wars. It has been a long time since that has been even contemplated. I find it almost inconceivable to imagine myself hoping for a coup and martial law, or suspension of civil liberties at any level of society by government.

But, what if the government is in the business of dismantling itself? It’s abosolutely clear that approximately half of the public is starkely against that idea, and the other half is beginning to doubt it’s allegience to the current regime. It ends up always being about the money; health care, retirement income, social services for the poor, taxes, wages, employment (surrogate for money). Even immigration is couched in terms of “stealing jobs” or swelling the welfare ranks. Paying social services forward is called socialism or communism, not a mechanism for financing a public pension system. A department of education that attempts to level the playing field for public education between affluent and less affluent locales in the country is considered a way of robbing the public of their right to self determination in the form of supporting private versus public institutions of learning.

So, a decent plurality, even possibly majority of us are up in arms, saying “that’s not what we voted for”, as the regime tosses out it’s most experienced technocrats, eats it’s young and hurtles towards fuedalism. Do we really have any leverage beyond pitchforks and torches against the castle gates and walls? Do we have to lay siege and starve them out? What happens when the mainstream media decides to ignore the grassroots actions taking place around the country, because they are owned and controlled by oligarchs? How do forums like Substack capture the attention of the deluded masses? I guess it’s true that if every single pursuaded resistence, then a form of “wokeness” might insinuate itself into the masses as a form of infectious doubt in fealty to the “crown”. That has never been our concept of freedom, that we should have to fight a trench war to succeed in the battle of ideas. We have imagined a free and vigorous press, publicizing the public debate over exalted ideas of self governence. Currently we have active suppression of opposing thought, both from without and within. We’re in an ideological guerilla war. There’s a sense of subversiveness about it. One wonders when the watchers will start popping up on Substack, equating your tagline with your real identity and visiting your doorstep after dark to detain you for unstated violations of the new civil law. It’s not beyond comprehension when they are targeting graduate students with educational visas for things they published in university newspapers. A few small steps further and citizens will begin self censoring their internet personas.

It may be to my advantage to be hauled off to a re-education farm. If our retirement assets continue to depreciate at the rate they have since January, at least I can hope for three squares, a thin mattress and some prison blues as an alternative to being on tossed out onto the street. I think we fail to recognize how close even the upper middle class skates near destitution; only a couple of payments short of foreclosure on the MacMansion.

I have spent considerable time watching video of war-zones in Ukraine and border-regions of Russia. I pay particular attention to the infrastructure; houses, streets, businesses, public spaces, whether intact or in ruins. I realize that they have persisted over decades and centuries with material goods similar to mine, if not quite as modern or grandiose. Their local lives an traditions have carried on; education, marriage, family, worship, business and enterprise, home ownership, automobiles and bicycles, animals and farms, etc. The degree of freedom of expression and thought may be more constrained, but then I don’t preach my views from the streetcorner either. I think it’s possible to live a satisfactory life under many different arrangements, not just the American concept of democracy. However, the fact that I DO believe in the value of ideas, of higher principles such as equality in speech, opportunity, the fight against discrimination, being color-blind to race and origin mean that I have something for which to strive and something to protect. I’m compelled to make a choice; go along to get along, or take a stand when my government starts embodying onorous principles. If our country is hurtling towards autocracy, kleptocracy, kakistocracy, then I’m going to be one of those standing backward against the crowd, carried kicking and screaming over the edge rather than marching quietly and obediently after the big Orange pied piper in a blue suit and red tie.

I’m not given to gathering downtown and marching along a parade route to the local city hall. I’d rather make and post my sign on the street corner in my neighborhood. I’d prefer to write letters to the editor, to my congress-person, vote with my allegience to one business over another, with my subscription to periodicals, etc. Yes, I won’t be buying a Tesla any time soon, even though the automobile itself is not a reflection of it’s founding business tycoon. I don’t want to be cleaning lipstick off my windows every week.

But, I’m happy to do what I can to leave the hydrocarbon-based economy behind, within the limits of my personal agency in this world. I drive about 1/5th what I did 5 years ago. I recreate at home, rather than at the far end of an international flight. I travel virtually, through the screen in front of me. I engage in virtual international communities. Yes, I probably contribute to bigger and bigger server farms as an alternative to more and more asphalt, wider and wider freeways. I guess I’m hurtling along a number of different vector, shared with some and different than others, as my personal beliefs lead me. I consume less petrol and more electrons. Then again, I wear old clothes and walk more than I used to. I haven’t bought stylish clothing, shoes or fancy furniture in over 25 years. I think I live a relatively frugal existence, apart from the rich virtual environment in which I mingle. Even richer, however, is the natural world on my personal little woodlot. Yesterday I saw a doe down in a little ravine mere minutes from the front door. Spring is springing all around me. The trilliums are blooming along the trail behind my property line. Every manner of native plant is popping up, blooming, showing it’s first leaves. Robins congregate in large numbers on my lawn. All of this is far, far, from the halls of power in our country, not very likely to reach out and deprive me of the joy of living amongst the critters. I’m a little person, a near nobody, hardly worth browbeating in one direction or another. Thank God I wasn’t made with a thirst for personal influence or power, beyond that which puts food on the table and keeps order adjacent to my neighbors.

I guess I’m hurtling into the future along with all the rest of us. Even as I come ever more to rest in my home with the passing years. I am comforted by the idea that I will only be responsible for my piece of the whole complex mess for a finite remaining period of time; at the same time I ache for my young son, who has the majority of a century ahead of him in which to make his way in a world that seems to hurtling towards disasters of epic proportions. He seems to be enjoying himself in relative innocence, so I won’t try to pop his bubble with my epocalyptic visions of impending doom.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time getting outside and looking in on myself in recent times, so I observed my own pattern of consuming information through that season, which went from entertainment and fascination to worry and anxiety, a bit of prurient addiction, doomscrolling, searching for alternatives to the legacy media whose voices I thought I could trust, and finally utter exhaustion in the final weeks leading up to election day.

I joked about sitting Shiva, wearing black for a 90 day period of official mourning, retreating into silence, meditation and other somatic responses to the national scene. The interval between election and inauguration offered increasing opportunities for mounting anxiety, but the impact of the election had really turned a switch in my brain and the most I could do was scan headlines and then go look for sources of reading/watching that steered clear of politics altogether. I watched myself truly retreat, consuming entertainment (Netflix), non-fiction topics (Youtube and other sources), a huge contraction in my blogosphere participation (Substack, primarily), something like a major fast or “purge”, wondering how I would return to a more optimistic, care-free attitude towards the world. This was tempered as well by two highly charged regional wars in which the US has had a major proxy role.

Only a few days back, I came across a couple of thoughts that have given me pause to finally gain a bit of perspective on this confusing period in my personal history. For the first, I thank Elliot Kirshner. He was the first writer I encountered to think past the alarming series of events since January 21 eminating from our Executive branch of government, to a future time when we may have the opportunity to repair the damage to institutions, even reviving some that have been essentially destroyed. He pointed out that destruction is sometimes a necessary prerequisite to transformation, a sort of “phoenix rising from the ashes” experience. He referred to events in our history that give credence to that hope; post world war collaboration amongst nations and the civil rights movement, to name two. I think there is some truth to the concept that orderly and incremental changes that occur in the peaceful transfer of power at election times may not create enough momentum to make dramatic changes in the shibboliths that sneak into politics and become untouchable with time. A period of deep disruption may provide a unique opportunity to reconstruct our thinking on governance in a way that moves us forward towards the “more perfect union” that we hold out as a beacon in front of us.

The second, related, realization is far more personal; in my visceral reaction to the election; the need to turn away and look elsewhere for food for thought, I overhauled my laundry list of interests and emerged with a far more entertaining, constructive set of favorite subjects for my habitual daily reading. It’s a bit distasteful to admit that this is a direct result of the Orange Emperor and my revulsion from essentially everything for which he stands, but I was stuck in a rut, returning repeatedly to distressing subjects like a moth to flame; I have been liberated substantially from that. I am also finding the rapid evolution of a “resistance” political opposition to be both entertaining and optimistic when I do succumb to the temptation to dive back into the world of current events. There is a sense in which I like the idea of the US being taken down a peg or two, as we have largely lost sight of the “shining light on a hill” that we once claimed as our national pride and reason for a sense of exceptionalism.

Getting to 10,000 feet and gaining perspective on the immediate present and recent past is a laborious task, often requiring consultation with trusted individuals who have a degree of separation from one’s personal torments. While Mr. Kirschner is only known to me from his essays on the same platform in which I am writing, his thoughts were very instrumental in opening a new window in my perspective on my place in the current world. Then, there is also the early arrival of springtime, making longer days particularly inviting as we experience intermittent sunshine and dry spells to complement the normally gray and rainy pattern of northwestern winter-spring.

So, I’m basking in a sense of relief that I thought worth mentioning, in case it strikes a chord with anyone who may wander across my path. Here’s wishing you a pleasant St. Patrick’s day, March madness, ides of March, Lenten season or whatever calendar event(s) that capture your attention!

Just sayin’