Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

The Inevitability of the Flow

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[Image: “Echo Reservoir Panorama,” by John E. Simpson. At this point of our trip, in mid-July, we were headed east into Wyoming from Salt Lake City. Having been all through California and across northern Nevada and Utah by that point, in the summer of 2022, we were rather stunned by the revelation of so much freshwater simply there, by the highway, apparently a quiet dismissal of the drought conditions which prevailed throughout much of the west.]

This is one of those (rare) occasions when I’ll have to just share a fragment of wisdom from whiskey river‘s weekly collection, without my usual sort of response to its call. (Nothing worrisome, just nearly 100% preoccupied by real life!) I hope you — whoever you are — have been well, and are looking forward to whatever comes next.

So, then… From whiskey river (italicized portion):

The Next Time

I

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
Is becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzle

Of light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changes
Wrought therein, just as our waywardness means

Nothing against the steady pull of things over the edge.
Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,

Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,
And so many people we loved have gone,

And no voice comes from outer space, from the folds
Of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this

Is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew
How long the ruins would last we would never complain.

II

Perfection is out of the question for people like us,
So why plug away at the same old self when the landscape

Has opened its arms and given us marvelous shrines
To flock towards? The great motels to the west are waiting,

In somebody’s yard a pristine dog is hoping that we’ll drive by,
And on the rubber surface of a lake people bobbing up and down

Will wave. The highway comes right to the door, so let’s
Take off before the world out there burns up. Life should be more

Than the body’s weight working itself from room to room.
A turn through the forest will do us good, so will a spin

Among the farms. Just think of the chickens strutting,
The cows swinging their udders, and flicking their tails at flies.

And one can imagine prisms of summer light breaking against
The silent, haze-filled sleep of the farmer and his wife.

III

It could have been another story, the one that was meant
Instead of the one that happened. Living like this,

Hoping to revise what has been false or rendered unreadable
Is not what we wanted. Believing that the intended story

Would have been like a day in the west when everything
Is tirelessly present—the mountains casting their long shadow

Over the valley where the wind sings its circular tune
And trees respond with a dry clapping of leaves—was overly

Simple no doubt, and short-sighted. For soon the leaves,
Having gone black, would fall, and the annulling snow

Would pillow the walk, and we, with shovels in hand, would meet,
Bow, and scrape the sidewalk clean. What else would there be

This late in the day for us but desire to make amends
And start again, the sun’s compassion as it disappears.

(Mark Strand [source])

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Opting into Social Jeopardy

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[Image: “Broken Chair,” by Tom Waterhouse. (Found it on Flickr, of course, and use it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) You can read the details of this piece’s history here, courtesy of the Internet Wayback Machine.]

Back in 2006, writer Ann Patchett gave the commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College; the address is widely cited, although I had difficulty finding a transcript of it. I’d hoped to because this week, whiskey river offered us an excerpt from a 2008 book which grew out of the widely cited speech; I wanted to see the excerpt’s context. For what it’s worth, I eventually did find a transcript, here (at least for now)… but of course, the quoted excerpt appears only in the subsequent book and not the original. So, to save you the same rigmarole, what follows is the full paragraph.

Background: Patchett has just described an encounter she had with a Hare Krishna in an airport, decades ago. He’d said he didn’t want to “convert” her, just to talk, but she — a college student at the time, timid around strangers — was skeptical. Ultimately, she crewed up her courage and just… listened. And talked. Had an actual conversation with him

At the end of the account, she says (whiskey river‘s excerpt italicized):

The Hare Krishna didn’t convert me (though honestly, I don’t believe he had tried) but he did teach me something I should have known all along: people need to talk, and often a willingness to sit and listen is the greatest kindness one person can offer to another. One of the first lessons of childhood is to be wary of strangers, and while this is good counsel to guard against the world’s very small nefarious element, it also teaches us to block out the large majority of those who just have something on their mind they’d like to say. We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs. By the time we reach adulthood, many have perfected the art of isolation, of being careful, of not listening in the name of safety. But the truth is that we need to hear other people, all people, especially in those moments when we don’t know exactly where we’re going ourselves. When it comes to finding our way we’re better off taking in as much information from as many sources as possible. If someone told you he didn’t need to listen to other people anymore because frankly he had life all figured out, he had all the answers, every single one of them, and was crystal clear on every last question in the universe, what could you do with that person but shake your head in despair? Chances are, anyone who claims not to need the input of any other person on the planet is probably crazy. So if you were sure you didn’t have all the answers and were spending long afternoons asking yourself What now? wouldn’t it be even crazier not to listen to people or to make up your mind against them based on the most superficial bit of information, say a saffron robe, perhaps? For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive. 

(Ann Patchett [source])

The whole initial episode — Patchett sort of skulking around the edges of human interaction, blanching at a stranger’s approach — struck me if not exactly painfully familiar, then at least exquisitely so…

I generally explain away this asocial behavior by pointing to my hearing-aided ears and raising my eyebrows, like, See?: “I can’t hear you well enough to talk much. So I’d really prefer not to open myself up to conversation (i.e., to ongoing frustration)!”

Some truth lies there, of course, but it’s a bit of a bogus, masked truth. Under the mask, well, it’s not so much the simple physical fact of hearing impairment that keeps me out of interactions. It’s tiredness. I’m tired of guessing what people say, tired of apologizing for guessing wrong, tired of explaining all the nuances (e.g., boosting your volume doesn’t help if you still don’t speak clearly), tired of putting off onto other people the burden of helping me “get” what they’re saying (which, for many people, makes them want to apologize for not having picked up the burden voluntarily)…

Over the last year-and-a-half, I’ve found, I’ve gotten increasingly lazy about all this. Prime example: regardless which of us, I or The Missus, has made a hotel reservation, it’s just easier to let her handle the conversation with the desk clerk from the get-go; I lurk behind her, ready to hand over my credit card and driver’s license if necessary, while admiring the potted plants, checking out the snacks and beverages available to patrons, hunting down a luggage cart, or whatever. In the meantime, she makes small talk and asks about hotel amenities.

In truth, this does simplify our check-in. On the other hand, it also ensures that the desk clerk and I remain strangers to each other. If, as often happens, I later have to stop by myself at the front desk for something or other, we have no previous grounds for knowing each other, however slightly…

Next week, I’m heading up to New Jersey for a ten-day stay, by myself, to help parents and sibs with some family business. I find myself almost looking forward to even five minutes with airline counter staff, car-rental agents — that sort of thing. Who knows? Maybe when I get back to Florida I’ll be Mr. Congeniality! (Aside: don’t lay your bets just yet, haha.)

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Stilling Those Tiny and Ever-Twitchy Antennae…

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[Image: “Storm Ahead (Badlands National Park),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

This has been an interesting week for me, in terms of what advancing age can mean…:

The Missus has been laid up — victim, apparently, of either a stomach bug or maybe even food poisoning (at least not COVID!); I’ve been carrying soup and crackers and ice water and ginger ale into the bedroom for her. One of her best friends began treatment for cancer. My mother and stepdad, in the meantime, have finally and formally arranged to move out of the house where they’ve lived for 30 years — it’s actually his childhood home — and into a senior, assisted-living facility. The Younger Sister-in-Law (YSiL), whose place we’re staying at for a short while, is out of town at a mini-reunion with high-school girlfriends; she’s my age, less one month. And YSiL and I spent one afternoon this week attempting to clean (possibly successfully clean) a living room rug on which I’d dropped a drink the day we arrived here; it was so damned heavy that YSiL was laid up, too, for much of the time until leaving for the reunion — having exacerbated a back problem…

And then along came whiskey river:

Surviving

There are days when the fear of death
is as ubiquitous as light. It illuminates
everything. Without it, I might not
have noticed this ladybird beetle,
bright as a drop of blood
on the window’s white sill.
Her head no bigger than a period,
her eyes like needle points,
she has stopped for a moment to rest,
knees locked, wing covers hiding
the delicate lace of her wings.
As the fear of death, so attentive
to everything living, comes near her,
the tiny antennae stop moving.

(Ted Kooser [source])

I have seen no ladybirds this week, and I have encountered no other omens or living, breathing metaphors. I’m grateful for such small mercies. Further, in my idle hours, I’ve been (among other things) reading a book with a terrific title — which drew me to it right away: Battle of the Linguist Mages — and a terrific premise. Without going all spoilery, the protagonist/narrator is a young woman who’s a very serious computer gamer, an international champion of one such, in fact. The game at which she excels is a roleplaying game: players join combat with opposing forces using the power of their voices to sling spells around the battlefield (“diva casting,” it’s called). I’ve been highlighting passages like crazy, simply because the nuances of this sort of magic are so interesting. But this one jumped out at me yesterday:

Once you’d accepted impossible facts about reality into your life, your mundane tasks in life became significantly more mundane. Like, really I just wanted to wander the streets shattering plate glass windows with my voice, because awesome.

(Scotto Moore [source])

This passage jumped out at me, I think, because it represents a kind of meta-observation — on reading about exciting events, even fictional ones, as well as actually living them. It explains, colorfully (the “shattering plate glass windows with my voice” aside), the whole raison d’etre of escapist media — books, movies and TV shows, dance music, and so on.

Well, I finished that chapter of the book. And because I didn’t want to disturb either of my laid-up companions du jour, I decided to watch some escapist fare — specifically, The Orville: New Horizons, Season 3, Episode 3 — ominously titled, “Mortality Paradox”:

Here’s a portion of Wikipedia’s summary of that episode, edited/redacted as needed:

[Several crew members from the Orville] find themselves caught in a series of increasingly strange and dangerous [and imaginary!] situations where they each have a brush with death… the illusions are eventually revealed to be the work of a group of immortal beings […] from the multiphasic world the crew discovered two years ago, their civilization having advanced 50,000 years since their last meeting. It is revealed that they subjected the crew to the scenarios to help themselves understand mortality as their society had begun to stagnate. The crew returns to the ship and discusses the implications of immortality.

(Wikipedia [source])

Yes: the implications of immortality — which of course implies the opposite: implications of mortality.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just overthinking things — dwelling on those “mundane tasks in life” to the extent that I’m losing my enthusiasm for that which is not mundane. If that’s the case, then, well, let’s just say I’m eager to get back to underthinking them!

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The Twisting of Perspective

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[Image: “Defy the Gordian Knot,” by a user on Flickr who goes by the improbable handle “GollyGforce.” Using it here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!]

[Note to visitors as of Saturday, 2022-08-13: Some strange stuff going on with the appearance of my posts here — particularly, italicized and/or hyperlinked words and phrases. I’m working to resolve this, but please in the meantime accept my apology for the typographical weirdness.]

So much can change in a year, in 18 months, in a decade… heck, overnight. The changing can occur gradually, incrementally, or (dinosaurs…asteroid!) in a few seconds. This week whiskey river (italicized portion) reminds us both of things which need to change, and of things which have never changed and shouldn’t:

In a society which is predicated on competition and really, very often, the ruthless exploitation of one human being by another the profiteering off of other people’s problems and very often the creation of problems for the purpose of profiteering the ruling ideology will very often justify that behavior by appeals to some fundamental and unalterable human nature. So the myth in our society is that people are competitive by nature and that they are individualistic and that they’re selfish. The real reality is quite the opposite. We have certain human needs. The only way that you can talk about human nature concretely is by recognizing that there are certain human needs. We have a human need for companionship and for close contact, to be loved, to be attached to, to be accepted, to be seen, to be received for who we are. If those needs are met, we develop into people who are compassionate and cooperative and who have empathy for other people. So… the opposite, that we often see in our society, is in fact, a distortion of human nature precisely because so few people have their needs met.

(Gabor Maté [source])

All of this is very true — I know and feel this to the marrow of my bones. Unfortunately, at the moment, I’m kinda self-preoccupied: keeping the big issues of the world in perspective is almost completely off the radar for me…

The Missus and I “downsized” from a house to an apartment in spring, 2019. It took us months, even with the help of friends, to get everything ready for that move: selling or otherwise dumping what we didn’t want, packing up what we wanted to keep — holding “keep for the apartment” lot separate from the “keep for the next house” one — prepping the house and yard for selling it, and so on. I’d never seen such turmoil, never been so exhausted. But it’d be worth it, because we were going to spend six months post-retirement, in mid-2020, traveling around Europe!

Ha. *cough*pandemic*cough*

Well, we managed to compensate to some extent, by going out on our year-long road trip around the USA. And one thing about the trip has especially interested me, aside from the destinations of course: my own, well, preference for inertia: unchangeability in everyday life.

I have probably expressed this here before, but I’m so very tired of “living out of a suitcase” as the expression goes. I want to again have a single roof over my head for days at a time — not constantly and 24×7, no, but a single roof to return to every night…

We’re at a temporary stopping point for the next couple weeks, give or take, and then we head north to [somewhere] to seek a home. So we’re not anything like “at rest” yet — but headed in the right direction!

Note: I’ll be endeavoring a possibly complicated change to the “look” of RAMH soon — like in the next 24 hours. The change itself is simple, just upgrading to a new version of some software which controls the site’s appearance. But I don’t know what the fallout of that upgrade might be; it could be invisible, or it could cause the utter collapse of the whole pile of jackstraws. Life really needs to be more exciting, eh???

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Sparking Along at This Point in Time

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[Image: “Seed,” by Nicola?s Paris. (Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões; found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!)]

In recent weeks, time for me has sometimes seemed at a standstill. Or maybe, differently and more accurately expressed, I’ve felt like I’ve been in motion forever, on a treadmill, without actually getting anywhere (even though The Missus and I have of course been physically roaming about the western and central US).

It’s true: we have this summer seen some absolutely marvelous, well, marvels — both natural and human-made. (Gods, I would not have traded our couple hours among the redwoods for anything!) But the marvels have been bursts of exceptionality among rhythms of tedium and inactivity: packing and unpacking, driving for hours, deciding on meals prepared for us, worrying over finances and route planning…

But now, this week, things have changed:

At the moment, we’re in our last hotel of the entire, 400+-day road trip. When we check out Saturday morning, tomorrow, we’re heading for a few nights’ stay with some friends in Georgia, and then for a few whole weeks with family in Florida. Finally, we’re headed a couple/three states north to find a place to live, so that we may again say the words “our home” without metaphor or irony…

You’d almost think that this, from whiskey river a few days ago, must be more than a coincidental — a prescient — selection just for the benefit of the two of us:

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience.

We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.

(Alan Watts [source])

Likewise, or at least similarly:

Midsummer, Tobago

Broad sun-stoned beaches.

White heat.
A green river.

A bridge,
scorched yellow palms

from the summer-sleeping house
drowsing through August.

Days I have held,
days I have lost,

days that outgrow, like daughters,
my harbouring arms.

(Derek Walcott [source])

The thing about coincidences (like this week’s apparent whiskey-river-to-JES one), though, is that they, too, are illusions of time: of simultaneity or, well, continuity anyhow — continuity of effect or intention. They draw our attention, distract us, flirt with our fascination with the connectedness of things, which in turn comes from our determination to Make It All Mean Something…

Assuming no last-minute changes in our itinerary: today, we are in Tennessee; tomorrow, we will be in Georgia; next week, we will be in Florida. There is nothing co-incidental about this. That we recently visited, say, Badlands National Park is not a coincidence of our staying in Rapid City, South Dakota; that we unpacked our bags in Rapid City is not a coincidence of our having packed them in Buffalo, Wyoming. No: those actions and events were all just standalones. We could appreciate them (or not!) in their own terms, with no need to connect the dots.

That said, I am really looking forward to some timelines to replace the discrete points that have defined our life for so long.

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On Poking Into the Existential Mysteries Around You (There’s More Than One!)

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[Image: “Fractal Existence (Brachiations),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

Soooooo many essays about the state of the world in 2022 dwell on what seems obvious: we, all of us collectively, are in pretty bad shape (thanks to our active choices and to our passive acceptance of conditions we’d never consciously have chosen). Even good news — like the startling success of what’s currently called the James Webb Space Telescope — is shaded with awfulness. (In JWST’s case, there’s the controversy about commemorating its deeply flawed namesake. And at the other extreme — really deep, deep, awfulness — there’s just the absolute, undeniable realization that anything ALL humans can or will do, have ever done (let alone an individual human) really doesn’t amount to much when put in context with the vastness of the universe.) One of whiskey river‘s readings for the week seems to follow this trend:

So much of what we dream flickers out before we can
name it. Even the sun has been frozen on the next street.
Every word only reveals a past that never seems real.
Sometimes we just stare at the ground as if it were
a grave we could rent for a while. Sometimes we don’t
understand how all that grief fits beside us on the stoop.
There should be some sort of metaphor that lifts us away.
We should see the sky open up or the stars descend.
There are birds migrating, but we don’t hear them, cars
on their way to futures made of a throw of the dice.
The pigeons here bring no messages. A few flies
stitch the air. Sometimes a poem knows no way out
unless truth becomes just a homeless character in it.

(Richard Jackson [source])

Another recent reading (not from whiskey river) approaches all of this from a slightly different perspective — the asking of unanswerable questions:

Who Says Words with My Mouth?

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

(Rumi [source])

So which is it? Shall we assert our despair, over and over? Shall we torture ourselves — and one another — by hammering at profound questions which cease to make sense almost the instance we utter them? We sense — we know (or so we tell ourselves) — that we’re all swirling down the drain. Isn’t there a way out? Let’s stampede toward the exit…!

Well, I don’t know. (Of course.) But I think of a couple of things:

First, I am reminded daily — often within a span of moments — of the value of grace notes: points of individual light which seem to fly in the face of what the world and the universe at large seem to insist is true. Vast, ungraspable “things” and institutions (politics, the natural environment, democracy, “the economy”) dominate the news, and they’re all concurrently exploding — going to hell, as the saying goes. And yet…

We stand in line in a restaurant and glimpse the look on a parent’s face as they dab with a napkin at the corner of a child’s face. We fumble with a handful of change, losing a quarter, which rolls away across the floor and out of sight, and just as we chalk it up as One More Damned Thing Going Wrong, a stranger approaches, thumb and forefinger pinched together, and asks, “Excuse me — did you drop this?” Even something as simple as scrolling through social media (all the ads and self-promotions, the noisy “stories” and “reels” overloading our senses): even that offers up moments of sheer innocent pleasure and delight — images of utter stillness and beauty, light-hearted stories of everyday human interaction, amazing tales of journeys taken (actual adventures or figurative voyages of the mind) and obstacles overcome…

Which do you look at? Or no, let me put it to you more pointedly: Which do you choose to look at?

This reminds me of another favorite passage, from James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold:

“I would like to dance, indeed,” returned the Philosopher, “for I do believe that dancing is the first and last duty of man. If we cannot be gay what can we be? Life is not any use at all unless we find a laugh here and there.”

[source]

Second: I have come to think that maybe, just maybe, the main (only?) problem with human existence is simply human awareness of human existence. We know some things; we don’t know much else; we tell ourselves we should do this or that, and/or that we should or must not do these two other things; we craft careful ideologies — institutions of belief — which admit of no inherent weaknesses and will fight competing ideologies to the death, if need be…

…all of which doesn’t make a lot of sense, in the grand scheme of things, because human beings are just, well, dots: infinitesimal microcosms of Everything Out There. The chain of being doesn’t ascend to human beings — and human creations — on Earth. It ascends from protons, atoms, molecules, proteins, ultimately DNA and evolution, through human beings — not to whatever comes next (sorry, science fiction!) but to whatever already is. Existence isn’t like a timeline of This and then That; it’s a myriad of concentric circles from tiny dot on up to cosmos.

I think if we could just lose our self-consciousness and -absorption, and just do What We Do, I think that we — like our atoms and our molecules, like the molecules of everything else (including molecules making up the JWST and those of the meteorite that dinged its lower rightmost mirror) — we could get through each moment of each and every day with much less anguish, with much less fear of (and/or hope for) whatever happens next.

Easier said than done, to be sure. (Above all else, Homo sapiens is the creature which frets.) But I think it’s worth trying.

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Choose Your Reassurance, But Above All: Be Reassured

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[Image: “Coco Cay Bahamas,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

My family — my birth family — is going through some difficult times at the moment. Oh, not to worry: compared to what so many must deal with, have been dealing with, we’re fabulously fortunate. We love one another. We miss one another when we’re apart. When we’re together, it’s like we were never apart in the first place. But it’s one of those periods of darkness during which people who love one another exchange glances, real or virtual, and — in these words, in other words, in no words at all — simply ask, What now?

Of course, we’re all adults now, and that comes with its own problems. We bear our burdens separately as well as together, letting them (or not letting them) spill over into our private lives as we will. We draw our own conclusions as we will. We speak to one another frankly, and we hold our tongues — as we will…

I love that whiskey river chose this week, then, to feature the following little meditation on recognizing what we can always fall back on, when the ground beneath our feet trembles:

Maybe love, too, is beautiful because it has a wildness that cannot be tamed. I don’t know. All I know is that passion can take you up like a house of cards in a tornado, leaving destruction in its wake. Or it can let you alone because you’ve built a stone wall against it, set out the armed guards to keep it from touching you. The real trick is to let it in, but to hold on. To understand that the heart is as wide and vast as the universe, but that we come to know it best from here, this place of gravity and stability, where our feet can still touch ground.

(Deb Caletti [source])

It’s a time, really, when reassurance — especially sustained reassurance, reassurance we can draw on for years, for decades — seems to have become the world’s rarest and most valuable commodity. We find ourselves yearning for reassurance beyond time, beyond the real world:

The library director nodded, her eyes wandering. She clearly didn’t want to talk about pandemics. “Let me tell you something magnificent about this place,” she said.

“Oh, please do,” Olive said. “It’s been a while since anyone’s told me anything magnificent.”

“So we don’t own the building,” the director said, “but we hold a ten-thousand-year lease on the space.”

“You’re right. That’s magnificent.”

“Nineteenth-century hubris. Imagine thinking civilization would still exist in ten thousand years. But there’s more.” She leaned forward, paused for effect. “The lease is renewable.”

(Emily St. John Mandel [source])

Should we find no such magnificence out in the world, we turn to the person next to us — and find there both reasons for needing reassurance, and the hint of solutions close at hand… and even closer than that:

It suits us to pretend that we all belong to the one world, but we are more alone than we realize. This aloneness is not simply the result of our being different from each other; it derives more from the fact that each of us is housed in a different body. The idea of human life being housed in a body is fascinating. For instance, when people come to visit your home, they come bodily. They bring all of their inner worlds, experiences, and memories into your house through the vehicle of their bodies. While they are visiting you, their lives are not elsewhere; they are totally there with you, before you, reaching out toward you. When the visit is over, their bodies stand up, walk out, and carry this hidden world away. This recognition also illuminates the mystery of making love. It is not just two bodies that are close, but rather two worlds; they circle each other and flow into each other. We are capable of such beauty, delight, and terror because of this infinite and unknown world within us.

(John O’Donohue [source])

We’ll be okay — me, my family, you, the people next to us. We “just” have to… choose. I think sometimes we choose unhappy helplessness rather than any of the real alternatives, just because we remember so poignantly the times when someone else had to make all the decisions for us. It’s just our turn now!

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At the Blurry Margin Between Two Natures

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[Images: “Heart Tree” (in color and — with a tiny exception — black-and-white), by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I came across this tree in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, during a morning walk; I don’t know that the dab of red paint was indeed meant to be a heart, but I haven’t been able to think of it otherwise.]

One of the weird things about being out in nature — if you’re not being hedonistic about it all, frolicking mindlessly in the surf, so to speak — is how it can focus you on the experience of being human. I don’t mean “human” in the sense of two-legged, opposable-thumbed, neurotic, confident, selfish or aspirational. I mean “human” in the sense of, well, vis-à-vis those beings which lie on the far side of some indefinable border — the far side, that is, of the line between human and not-human.

You stand on an ocean shore, by yourself, as the sun rises or sets over the horizon. You lie on your back beneath a jet-black sky dotted and smeared with stars, galaxies, aurorae. You stand in a grove of thousand-year-old trees, hearing the creak of timber untouched by human limb, hearing the rustle and squeak of unseen creatures (beetles, birds, rodents), feeling (without exactly sensing) the whisper of ferns and fungi and trees-sprouting-from-other-trees. You do that sort of thing once, twice, three times in the span of a few weeks — and you start to wonder how much, really, separates you from all that. Is a barnacle part of the rock it adheres to, or is it something… else?

Humans like to think of themselves as things apart from nature: encrustations. Yes, yes, they grant: there are similarities, there is shared DNA, chemistry in common. And yet, they insist: the differences are too great. We are other — i.e., more — than that, they say…

This week, courtesy of whiskey river (last stanza), we encounter Billy Collins meditating on the line ostensibly separating his civilized human existence from the unseen oceanic swell beneath the ground:

Water Table

It is on dry sunny days like this one that I find myself
thinking about the enormous body of water
that lies under this house,
cool, unseen reservoir,
silent except for the sounds of dripping
and the incalculable shifting
of all the heavy darkness that it holds.

This is the water that our well was dug to sip
and lift to where we live,
water drawn up and falling on our bare shoulders,
water filling the inlets of our mouths,
water in a pot on the stove.

The house is nothing now but a blueprint of pipes,
a network of faucets, nozzles, and spigots,
and even outdoors where light pierces the air
and clouds fly over the canopies of trees,
my thoughts flow underground
trying to imagine the cavernous scene.

Surely it is no pool with a colored ball
floating on the blue surface.
No grotto where a king would have
his guests rowed around in swan-shaped boats.
Between the dark lakes where the dark rivers flow
there is no ferry waiting on the shore of rock
and no man holding a long oar,
ready to take your last coin.
This is the real earth and the real water it contains.

But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain.

(Billy Collins [source])

And then there’s this, not from whiskey river, but brushing up against it, so to speak, in recognition — in affirmation:

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes….

This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived. […] Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near… When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.

(Richard Powers [source1; source2])

We spent the month of June more or less — and very much non-literally — sprinting up and down and across the state of California, and are now tentatively heading east: across the Rockies and Great Plains, down to (as they say) the heartland and then, eventually, Atlantic-ward and something like “home life.” The American West is a heck of a place to find nature, of course — nature which has nothing to do with human existence: nature in the form of things other than pets, livestock, vermin, cultivated or farmed plants — just raw, bare, nature. I don’t know that I’ll ever get over the experience — the experience, that is, not of feeling out of place, but spotting kindred souls in things and environments which, science often confidently asserts, have no souls at all…

When we’re in a hotel, and I go out into the hall or step out of the elevator and cross paths with another guest, they and I smile, nod, and say, “Good morning” — to all outward evidence, like two people who recognize and know one another, who acknowledge that they have something in common. And when I have lately stepped into a meadow, or a forest, or a mountain valley, without another “soul” around, I have the same experience: that boulder, that tree, that spring and I have stopped for a split-second, smiled at each other, nodded in fellow-feeling, and then gotten on with our lives.

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Pick a Point, Any Point, and Call It the Point

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[Image at right: the so-called “Big Tree” in Redwood National and State Park, California. My camera has a Panorama mode, which normally requires you to swing the camera from left to right, keeping the shutter open, to give you about a 180° field of view; I thought I’d experiment with doing a “vertical panorama,” swinging the camera — turned on its side — from treetop to base. (My phone’s camera has a Panorama mode, too, but it’s much harder to get it right with the phone.) Of course, with a subject this tall, what we call the “top” is a pretty arbitrary point in space… The tree, by the way, around 286 feet in height, is only the sixteenth tallest in the park. The tallest, at around 380 feet, is a tree named Hyperion — at a secret location somewhere within the huge park. Hyperion is actually in fact the tallest tree in the world.]

We’re in Reno, Nevada, today, the California leg of Road Trip 2021-22 behind us, and a couple thousand miles of eastward continent ahead. With luck, we’ll be able to unload the car — for at least a few months, anyhow — by September, somewhere in one of the East Coast states. The prospect makes me happy, which is slightly absurd: we’ve seen so many extraordinary things — shouldn’t I be sad to be imminently leaving all that behind?

Well, I don’t know… My Instagram account, such as it is, celebrates something I’ve been calling “the extraordinary commonplace.” (I don’t know where I picked up that phrase but I’m certain it can’t be original.) And I think that phrase may point to the source of my elation: if every day delivers to me remarkable, unfamiliar experiences, maybe it’s simply that I miss the unremarkable — the experience of opening my eyes and seeing the same things, at the same times, that I’ve been seeing them for years.

This all plays into the same general theme of my Friday posts here in recent week: how to be happy in a world which, well, seems to discourage happiness (to put it mildly). I found echoes of it in whiskey river entries of the past week, unsurprisingly. Echoes like this:

There Are Mornings

Even now, when the plot
calls for me to turn to stone,
the sun intervenes. Some mornings
in summer I step outside
and the sky opens
and pours itself into me
as if I were a saint
about to die. But the plot
calls for me to live,
be ordinary, say nothing
to anyone. Inside the house
the mirrors burn when I pass.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

…and this:

Sometimes when I meet old friends, it reminds me how quickly time passes. And it makes me wonder if we’ve utilized our time properly or not. Proper utilization of time is so important. While we have this body, and especially this amazing human brain, I think every minute is something precious. Our day-to-day existence is very much alive with hope, although there is no guarantee of our future. There is no guarantee that tomorrow at this time we will be here. But we are working for that purely on the basis of hope. So, we need to make the best use of our time. I believe that the proper utilization of time is this: if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.

So, let us reflect what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren’t born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities—warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful and more peaceful–happier.

(Dalai Lama XIV [source])

I encountered an echo, too, in a non-whiskey river source. This comes from a book which I’ve been reading, intermittently and a bit at a time, for probably the last four or five years — as I’ve puzzled over what it means (to me, to anybody) to be living now:

My dog, fully in possession of the Buddha nature, has some lessons for me about the sacred in the secular. He wants to go out twice a day, and I live in New Hampshire, where the winters are usually snowy and bitterly cold. I walk out on a clear, dark night. My dog shoves his snout deep into the snow, apparently catching the scent of a deer or a neighboring dog. I look up and see Orion brilliant against the dark blue-black of the sky. Coming out on a cold night I’m well aware of my earthly existence and yet I’m pulled out of myself into wonder, once again, at the brilliant stars. Who am I in this tremendous context, and what is my fate and what do I mean in the huge expanse of galaxies and multiple universes? My mind can’t hold the vast openness and complexity, and I can’t twist my imagination to fit myself into such a place. And yet, here I am with my dog, waiting for him to do his business in the snow that mirrors the Milky Way, one of the great mysteries of my existence. Orion’s two dogs, Major and Minor, are up there, too, probably taking similar advantage of the milky-white galaxy.

(Thomas Moore [source])

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On a Ship to the Outer Solar System

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[Image: “At the Hinge of Daylight (Carmel-by-the-Sea, California),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

I’m going to start this Friday post, uncharacteristically, with a quotation from a source other than whiskey river — and not remotely a source I’d usually cite. (Fear not; the river‘s turn is coming.) It’s this:

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. —Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

(William Wordsworth [source])

In the face of so much wrongness in mid-2022 — I won’t bore you (or raise your blood pressure) with a catalog of specifics — who doesn’t sometimes dream, like ol’ Bill, of frolicking with the gods of antiquity? especially if the alternative is (as it seems to be) more bad news from every quarter?

Now let’s consider this, from whiskey river:

Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong.

(Wendell Berry [source])

…and this, not from whiskey river (and a pretty fair distance from William Wordsworth, for that matter):

I spent most of my [young] life angry, a chip on my shoulder, afraid. At some moment I simply changed my mind. I decided to be happy more or less, no matter the circumstance. Whatever I have to work with, and that’s not a lot really, I tell myself: imagine you are on a ship to the outer solar system—every single experience on this earth would be welcome, good or bad. Be on that ship, for one day this will all be over. Treasure it all. Be a joyful noise.

(Rickie Lee Jones [source])

Wordsworth wasn’t wrong to feel angry and frustrated with current events. (Haha, right: like I’m sure his ghost looks down upon my approval and sighs with relief.)

But really, at any given time in recorded history, you can find many, many smart, good people who believed that the world had gone to sh!t in their lifetimes. What’s hard for anyone to bear in mind is that those lifetimes (let alone the sh!t years) are mere blips in the universe’s — or the planet’s, or their neighborhood’s — history. Over centuries and millennia, the quality of “things” smooths out. And if anything, things — the arc of human history — tend to get better over long spans of time.

The difference for our age, I think, is climate change. I don’t know that I’ll live to see how it all plays out, but I mean, come on: we collectively as well as individually simply will not live forever. And all the angry storms, floods, droughts, fires, widespread extinctions of other species — all that, I believe, is pretty much just the world expressing its distaste for us. We’ve pushed it to the limits of its patience: we are too much with the world. I doubt that we’ll “win” in the contest of wills, nature vs. humanity.

But even if my fear is right, or even if everyone else’s — that war, indecent human politics, rampant capitalism, racism, transphobia, etc., are going to destroy us or ours — is right, well… it doesn’t matter. In the meantime, we can live our lives as we maybe should have been living them all along: just paying attention to what and who are in front of us at the time. We can have happiness. We just have to choose it.

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