Two nights ago, my uncle Galen passed away after a return of cancer. I have said all that needs to be said in a forum more appropriate than this, but he was a second father for me at times; I will miss him dearly.
What I loved most was his direct approach to life. He never held back what he thought. Direct. Even blunt. In our final conversation, just hours before he passed, there was again story telling and laughter.
I am going to miss that. Thank you.
I know you only by your silhouette.
Walking, running, dancing in the sea’s foam.
I know you only by your outline,
glowing against the rising sun.
I know you only by the shape
of what I hoped we’d become.
The death of Leonard Nimoy is moving for me. Nimoy was an actor who incorporated the essence of what the character Mr. Spock meant for him, into his every day life.
Having grown up with Star Trek re-runs, even ten years after they had aired (played at prime times throughout the ’70s), much of who I am and what I yet expect of our species was given foundation in that sci-fi TV series.
Perhaps it is a curse, to always compare where we are to where we thought we’d be, but even 100 years from now it seems the foundation of Nimoy’s character Spock will remain an important goal.
He continually strove for balance between the deeply rooted emotional, reactionary side of being a human and the reasoning which enables us to work together, to grow beyond our animal foundation and achieve what no one person can do alone.
Yes, live long and prosper. But more importantly, perhaps, find balance and thrive.
Morning fog mixes with city pollution, the heavy haze filters the sun through white and brown.
Eager surfers wade into shallow water, others stretch, meditate, and welcome the sun.
A woman who each morning wears only a one-piece suit, no matter the weather, has already finished her routine swim.
Car park attendees tote florescent yellow striped vests over three layers of winter garb, waiting simultaneously for the heat of the sun and for the first patrons to arrive. Mercedes, BMW, Toyota and Ford. For me, barefoot in shorts and a T-shirt, this is a warm day spring day in Colorado.
On the beach, my bare feet press into the soft sand where the high tide delivered seaweed and shells hours before. Poorly paid employees of an unseen entity will labour in dress shoes and slacks to remove the undesirable debris.
I bend forward, barely able to reach my ankles, let alone toes. I welcome the pain that cascades through muscle in my back, shoulders, and lower legs. Heavy eyelids yet sleeping are flushed of excess blood, made lighter and more awake.
I commit to a half dozen simple moves borrowed from yoga, wondering if those who never stretch feel more or less ready for the run. As though my arms grew longer, or my legs less, I reach my toes, even press fingers into the sand.
In response to an invisible gun, I turn East and run.
Quick, light strides. The cool breeze at my back, my chest is a sail.
The front of my feet displace the quartz crystals, heels seldom leaving a mark. Head up, shoulders back, chest out. I look forward and around, the view compelling.
To my right the waves tumble over one another, competing to reach the shore. A half dozen attempts and then one spills over the others and well past where they had arrived before.
Feet, ankles, and lower legs now wet with salt tell me if the current comes from East or West, the temperature this day relatively warm.
I reach the first estuary outlet. Surface ripples the colour of tea reflect its depth. Soft waves of sand mirror those on the surface, the water only knee deep this time. I recall stream crossings in Colorado, Alaska, and Washington State, face upstream, and shuffle side to side to keep my balance.
Picking my way through the sharp shells deposited for a dozen meters on the other side, I again drop into my runner’s pace. Hard packed sand gives rebound to my mass for as much as it softens my stride.
The path before me is the one I have taken many times, and yet it is rebuilt twice with each orbit of the Moon around the Earth. I feel selfish, the labour of unseen hands prepare for me a totally new route for every run.
Perhaps someone will notice I have not renewed my membership to this facility, yet this morning I am unchallenged by those who claim payment due. Another kind of runner yet lies dormant in narcotic slumber.
Nearly four kilometres finds me at the second estuary outlet, a deeper, wider channel I have not yet attempted to cross. Its odour is strong, deep red from the natural oils of the local fauna or pollution I do not know.
I pause to enjoy the way in which the dunes have been reshaped over and over again. What was a meter high wall of sand just at the ocean’s edge is now a hundred meters wide, sickle shaped inlet whose serpentine channel moves brackish water in both directions.
Turning, I scan the dunes for potential confrontation, lean forward and begin the return. Conscious of my form, I open and close my hands, roll my shoulders, and make arcs with my arms. When my feet grow weary, heels again contacting sand, I emphasize the arc of my legs, draw knees higher, and increase my gate.
After the water crossing I am but several hundred meters from the bath house. More surfers have arrived. Instructors in pink and blue shirts over wet suits lead students to beach-side instruction. Lying on their belly they practice strokes.
I learn forward to pick up my pace, nearly double what was. Two hundred meters later I shift to my highest gear, pumping arms at my sides with knife blade hands slicing air. Bare feet force water to spray which soaks my shorts and lower shirt. Tender skin warms on the bottom of my feet. My lungs are pleased to meet the challenge and inhale larger, rhythmic volumes of moist atmosphere. My concerns for the day vanish as I am momentarily given the freedom of flight.
As the water moves from left to right, forward and back, the apparent speed at which I fly doubles then stalls and resumes.
Homeless men and women who have just finished bathing stop to look as I drop back to a jog just shy of their morning, temprary abode. I consider the luxury I have in my health and time to afford such a thing, knowing a warm shower awaits me behind locked door, key, and dry room.
1) Exercise for at least 30 minutes each morning. This induces an increased metabolism, oxygenation of blood, focus and creative output for up to four hours.
2) Drink (a lot of) water, juice, or tea. Low sugar content. No caffeine if you can help it.
3) Have within your reach, readily available, low-calorie snack foods you can eat all day (unflavored popcorn, low-carb crackers (digestives), grapes, apple slices, etc.).
4) Turn off Facebook, Twitter, and email. Work off-line as much as possible. Sketch with a pen or pencil as much as your work will allow. Experiment with various forms of music to learn which ones support reading, research, writing, math, art, and organization / composition / publication.
5) Get up and move every 20-30 minutes. Walk around the room. Look out the window. Run a flight of stairs–unless you are in a really good grove–then keep going!
6) Switch locations when all focus is gone. Find a couch and curl up with your laptop. Head to a cafe. Sit on the beach with your notebook. Anything to bring a positive outlook back to your work paradigm.
7) If frustration / anger enter the game, do physical exercise which invokes limited pain to relieve the angst: yoga stretches, push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups on door jams–until the frustration is simply worn out.
8) Choose from your list of tasks based upon how you feel, what looks interesting. If you force yourself to do something that does not feel right, chances are it will not get done no matter how hard you try. In the end, you’ll beat yourself up for not doing it, only adding to the downward spiral. Embrace what you can do, what your brilliant mind is capable of in that moment, and build patterns of self-praise in order to build capacity for total, quality, creative output and subsequent joy.
9) Choose activities after work / outside of school which support a strong, focused start the next day. Each and every day is just too damn important to waste a single morning, afternoon or night not fully engaged. Personally, no social activity is worth the loss of even an hour of the next day for that could be THE day in which I write my best poem or make a cognitive leap toward the end goal of my research … or invent something that truly helps humanity. Why take the risk that I may miss that opportunity?
10) Give yourself permission to just walk away. It is sometimes better to not push through a period of total distraction or lack of focus, but to embrace that part of your day as available for something totally new. Go for a swim, a run, or to your favourite cafe. Go home early, take a hot bath, watch a movie, bake a batch of cookies or fresh bread. You’ll have a fresh start the next day, clean and clear and ready to dive in again.
Isolation. We often equate this word with the dreaded mark of a highly communicable disease, a quarantine to protect those unaffected. Isolation is too often taken to be a kind of a social dysfunction, a shriveling of the virtual connective tissue which allows one person to reach out to the other.
I have lived since the 4th of June in relative isolation, on a remote ranch, some forty five minutes from the nearest town in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. The cabin was shared between the ranch hand, the owner, and myself off and on again through July. Since August, it has been mostly just me, alone.
In this space and time I am rediscovering isolation as a celebration of something far greater than how I interact with others, far more joyful than how I do or do not tell a joke at the right time, listen with full intent, or lead a conversation.
With nothing more than my thoughts and my surroundings, I have found simplicity, equality, and importance in all that I do such that waking with the sun rise, reading a chapter in a book, baking bread, chasing a coyote along an elk trail in the woods, and writing are of equal importance. No one task trumps the other. I move effortlessly from one to the next, without anxiety or concern for what is right or wrong, better or worse.
In isolation I have let go of any sense of good. In isolation I have found appreciation for every thing I do. Nothing is without reason. Nor is any one thing terribly important. Every hour of every day, each step I take simply unfolds.
In this state of equilibrium there is a kind of flow that carries me from morning ’till night, the isolation itself turning inside out when I realize I never was, nor am I now truly alone for all I need and desire is right here, inside me, all along.
Vitus: Vitus the Mad’s psycho-philosophical observation of the week: there are a plethora of zombie movies and tv series out now and more on the way. This genre may be popular because it is a sublimated expression of our fear that the thin veneer of civilization is about to be ripped off and reveal that humanity is a writhing mass of cruel idiots bent on consuming itself in apocaclyptic violence. Either that or it is more simply social programming by the ultra rich who are planning a depopulation crisis. I don’t watch scary movies much anymore.
Kai: I agree. The movies that came out of Japan following WWII about Godzilla, giant monsters from the deep, and heroes such as Inframan were a way of addressing the pain and fear of atomic weapons, and their impact on the Japanese culture at that time.
Daniel Dennett argues that most people don’t have a mind, let alone a soul and as such, are walking conglomerates of living tissue with only momentary true self-awareness, or for many, none at all.
Does not the majority of modern life mimic Zombie behaviour? Morning ’till night, routine without pause. A perpetual, frenzied effort to get things done that truly have no meaning. All of this compounded by a deep cultural pain through shootings in schools, movie theaters, and churches, wondering where and when it will strike next.
Yet, we continue to watch more and more violence on TV as violence increases in the real world. Perhaps we are the Zombies already, thriving on the living, undead without knowing.
Early training …
When we were kids, we spent summers on the family farm in Iowa. Among our many jobs, from mowing the yard to shingling old barns, to painting the white picket fence, we also had to rid the farm of thistles.
My brother and I rode on the back of the old Ford tractor, on a wooden platform with shallow sides connected by two hydraulic arms and a base swivel. My grandfather would take us from the chicken house along the Raccoon River in search of the tell-tale purple flowers, tall above the grass. Our arsenal of tools was a pair of gloves, a sharp knife, and a highly concentrated bottle of herbicide.
The Ford was even then over fifty years of age. Built in the 1930s, it was small but ran well. It’s engine had ample torque that you could count the number of strokes each piston made as the crank shaft went round and round. Slow, methodical, it could climb the steep bank of the river or take us over small fallen logs in the timber.
We would stop every few hundred feet, lower the hydraulic lift, the wooden platform settling to ground. We’d stand up, grab out tools, and spread out. My brother and I would cut the heads off, placing them in an old metal bucket. My mother would then spray the chemical down the hollow neck using a hand-pumped sprayer. My grandfather said this was the only way to make certain they didn’t come back next year.
As with so many things my grandfather taught me, I didn’t come to fully appreciate what I learned until many years later. If only he had known how those long, hot afternoons in the July sun would give me the knowledge to single handedly stop an invading army of Zombies, here on Buffalo Peak Ranch.
… for the real thing.
Alone now, the ranch hand and owner gone, I set out each day to work an hour or two, to earn my keep. A few days ago I left the back porch of the cabin and noticed a few thistles in the distance, just outside the wooden fence. “I’d better take care of those in the morning,” I thought.
When daylight came again, there were a few more. Some of them already inside the fence line. This took me by surprise. I had never seen thistles move that fast before.
These were not your common, Canadian, or milk thistle. Those don’t make much of a fuss. Just as when we were kids, you lop off the flowing head and they’d rarely came back the following year. But these, these were different. More aggressive, intent on claiming territory. From outside to inside the fence in just one day!
I went back inside and looked up types of thistles on the Internet. The reports were not many. Mostly unconfirmed rumours of a mutant strain. But then I found a reference to something that made my skin crawl—a fast moving, aggressive thistle with … with a craving for blood. The Zombie Thistle. The only way to stop them was to get them out of the ground, roots fully exposed to sunlight, and then cut off their heads.
I returned to the back porch and scanned the horizon. My god! They’re everywhere! Should I call the Sheriff? No, his cell phone reception was minimal in the back country. Or the Rabi and campers down the road? No, Catholic priests are much better equipped to deal with the undead. Bruce Campbell? No, getting through his agent would take too much time.
It was me, alone, against all of them.
I pulled on my sturdy boots, work pants, my favourite T, and sun glasses. Once again on the back porch, I counted an additional half dozen thistles, growing tall and strong. The purple heads turned in unison, staring back at me. In just ten minutes time they had doubled in number. An army was forming. I had to act fast before they took over the ranch.
I stepped off the porch and ran to the barn. I could hear their roots reaching through the soil, trying to ensnare my shoes and feet. The sound of their long necks straining.
Don’t look back! Just keep moving!
Once inside the barn, I shut the door behind me. I found a pair of leather gloves, shovel, and the keys to the UTV. I unlatched the front, sliding bay doors and started up the engine. I engaged the four wheel drive, threw open the doors and pressed it into high gear.
The path was yet clear, they had not reached the front of the barn. I drove back to the West, toward the far side of the fenced area, behind the hot tub. They saw me coming, they knew I was prepared.
I stepped from the UTV, walked toward them with the shovel in hand. They hesitated. Some withdrew. That was the moment I needed—I attacked!
I knelt low to the ground. With their vision less keen than their sense of smell, I hoped to remain downwind and catch the first few off guard.
I raised the shovel high, slammed it into the ground at the base of the first Zombie. The soil was hard and rocky. I missed my target and managed to only partially cut the base of the four foot tall monster. It turned, raised its horrid purple head, and leaned back to attack. It lunged forward and I was too slow. It caught my shirt, tearing at the fabric as I fell back on my hands in the mountain meadow. The shovel fell.
I rolled to one side as another two, then three attacked. But this time, my shovel found home and two heads came free. An acrid odour filled the arena and white blood sputtered from the necks of the decapitated thistles.
I jumped to my feet, knowing I had little time before they regrew. I raised my shovel again and drove it in hard and fast, at the base of all three of those immediately to my front and side. My foot pressed the shovel in further and then I leveraged the handle down to the ground and the roots came free. Their long, soil ladened tendrils an abomination to this otherwise perfect land, moved wildly, gasping in the direct sunlight and air. A few seconds later, they stopped. Dead.
A momentary calm fell over the meadow. I had struck my first blow. The Zombie thistles knew they had a worthy adversary. I did not hesitate and attacked the next half dozen directly in front of me. They were caught off guard and came free easily, their heads delivering a high pitched scream with each root ball that came free.
Just as I was raising my shovel overhead for another strike, one attacked from behind, more than five feet tall. It was the largest I had ever seen, it’s head the size of my fist and stalk strong enough to lift a car. It tore at my clothing, trying to get to my skin. My left sleeve was torn completely, my favourite shirt ruined.
That made me mad. I took a step back, turned, and attacked with a scream. My shovel sliced through the stem just below the head, back again in the middle, and then at the base. With just a few inches left above the ground, I delivered the final blow, the roots wriggling in the hot afternoon sun, the head and neck spread across the lawn. The stench was overwhelming, I could barely breathe. But the battle had just begun.
Over the course of the next two hours I unearthed more than four hundred of these monsters, their bodies piled high. When I finally came back ’round toward the cabin, approaching from the rear, the Zombie thistles knew they would lose this round. They shrunk in size, reduced in number before I could even come in for the kill.
Exhausted, I drove the blade of my shovel in again and again until every last one was delivered.
I spent the remaining daylight hours cleaning the battlefield, piling the bodies into the back of the UTV. Their legions are amassing near the upper pond in numbers far greater than what I had encountered today.
Tomorrow, it starts all over again.
Freedom is not something we can purchase,
nor give without willing receipt.
It is not found in wealth, nor time,
nor in the place in which we live.
Freedom is not the opportunity
to do whatever we desire.
It’s the way we move.
It’s the way we think.
Freedom is is not something found
in the casualties of war,
for it resides in the heart and mind
of those who choose to see.
Freedom is found in the brave,
the old, the youth, and the meek.
Freedom is found in you and me.
My father requested that I write a poem as his birthday gift this year.
Seventy three is but one more than seventy two.
We count the years as many, but for some they are few.If you were a Red Wood tree, tall and lean,
you would be but a child, only beginning.If you were a stone whose edges were made smooth,
your age would not be measured in years, but millennia.If you were a galaxy, long arms gradually closing in,
the embrace of your center would require eternity.But as a human, you are my father,
and I care not for these things.
Wisdom cannot be calculated nor can love be attributed to a clock, calendar, or the stars overhead. What I see when you turn from seventy two to three is one year more in which I have been blessed with a caring family.