THANKSGIVING, DARK THOUGH IT IS SOMETIMES

While rereading Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies a couple of nights ago, I came across a lovely poem by W.S. Merwin that captures my own sense of the need to remain grateful in a world that is often riddled with war, loss, and injustice.  Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, and may you find something in this poem that also resonates with your own lives.

THANKS

By W.S. Merwin

                    Listen

                    with the night falling we are saying thank you

                    we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings

                    we are running out of the glass rooms

                    with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

                    and say thank you

                    we are standing by the water looking out 

                    in different directions

                    back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

                    after funerals we are saying thank you

                    after the news of the dead

                    whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
                    in a culture up to its chin in shame
                    living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

                    over the telephones we are saying thank you

                    in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

                    remembering wars and the police at the back door

                    and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

                    in the banks that use us we are saying thank you

                    with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable

                    unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

                    with the animals dying around us

                    our lost feelings we are saying thank you

                    with the forests falling faster than the minutes 

                    of our lives we are saying thank you

                    with the words going out like cells of a brain

                    with the cities growing over us like the earth

                    we are saying thank you faster and faster

                    with nobody listening we are saying thank you

                    we are saying thank you and waving

                    dark though it is

HOPE FOR A NEW AMERICA

BARACK OBAMA
44TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

President Barack Obama did not just win reelection tonight. His victory signaled the irreversible triumph of a new, 21st -century America: multiracial, multi-ethnic, global in outlook and moving beyond centuries of racial, sexual, marital and religious tradition.

Howard Fineman
"Barack Obama Reelection Signals Rise of New America"
Huffington Post, November 7, 2011 

The arc of the moral universe is long, 
but it bends toward justice.

Martin Luther King


FORWARD!

ON THE SURREALITY OF SEVENTY

The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.

Robert Frost 

Today is my seventieth birthday—that biblical milestone of "threescore and ten years" that was etched into my mind at an early age—and I am compelled to admit that it's one of the strangest transitions I have ever experienced.  I'm not quite sure why it feels so odd, so disorienting, but I hope to work through the confusion by writing this little piece.  So please bear with me.  My words may need to walk in several directions before I can find the center of this maze.

For the most part, I have paid little attention to the boundaries that separate the unfolding decades of our lives.  Each transition has been negotiated smoothly, with little nostalgia and virtually no anxiety about the future.  Seventy, however, feels like a seismic shift in the tectonic plates beneath one's feet.  It's like one of those weather forecasts that you blithely ignore until the storm strikes your home unexpectedly in the middle of the night, banging the shutters, ripping off the roof tiles, and demanding that you pay attention—serious attention—to the realities of the moment.

As for the storm named Seventy, I have received the usual assurances that I'm only as old as I feel, and that, in any event, "seventy is the new sixty."  I appreciate these optimistic sentiments, of course, but they are simply inconsonant my own sense of reality.  Reaching seventy is the same as it has always been.  It represents seven decades of struggling to survive; struggling to live an authentic life; struggling to find and retain love; struggling to build and support a family; and struggling to find meaning and purpose in one's life.  It's seven decades of confronting one's fears and anxieties, while holding fast to the hopes and dreams that move each of us inexorably forward.

That's the reality of being seventy.  It's nothing more and nothing less than the accumulated history of our lives. But here's the odd part:  My personal experience of turning seventy seems completely untethered from reality.  It does not feel like becoming, reaching, or attaining anything.  Indeed, the image that comes to mind is one of floating—floating weightlessly above the earth as gentle winds nudge me out of one country and into another, the new one being far more more surreal than the former. This is a place the ancients would have clearly defined as terra incognita, warning unwary travelers that "here be dragons."

It may be that this feeling of surreality is simply the manifestation of an existential anxiety that seeks to abandon the subconscious and take up permanent residence in the conscious realm of my brain.  Instinctively, however, it seems like something quite different, something that is difficult to define and quantify specifically.  All that I can say for sure is that it involves the mounting losses that come with each passing year.

Most poignant, of course, are the losses of friends, family members, and those unique people who gave me unexpected solace, support, and joy.  Losses are not confined to people, however.  There is also the loss of innocence, the loss of opportunities, the loss of illusions that may have provided convenient props in youth and middle age.  Whatever the case, few persons of seventy will be able to deny the truth of what Annie Dillard writes in Teaching a Stone How to Talk:  We eventually become painfully aware of "the losses you incur by being here—the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay."

So what is one to do?  I, for one, will take my first clue from Stanley Kunitz, whose poem, The Layers, describes not only the terrain I must travel, but the best path through it.  In part, Kunitz writes:

                       I have walked through many lives,
                       some of them my own,
                       and I am not who I was,
                       though some principle of being
                       abides, from which I struggle
                       not to stray.
                       When I look behind,
                       as I am compelled to look
                       before I can gather strength
                       to proceed on my journey,
                       I see the milestones dwindling
                       toward the horizon
                       and the slow fires trailing
                       from the abandoned camp-sites,
                       over which scavenger angels
                       wheel on heavy wings.
                       Oh, I have made myself a tribe
                       out of my true affections,
                       and my tribe is scattered!
                       How shall the heart be reconciled
                       to its feast of losses?
                       In a rising wind
                       the manic dust of my friends,
                       those who fell along the way,
                       bitterly stings my face.
                       Yet I turn, I turn,
                       exulting somewhat,
                       with my will intact to go
                       wherever I need to go,
                       and every stone on the road
                       precious to me . . .
                       (emphasis mine)

The Swiss philosopher Henri Frederic Amiel wrote that "to know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living."  At this point in my life, I seriously question whether I can master anything during my remaining years, especially something so vast and complex as "the great art of living."  I can move forward, however—go where I need to go, do what I need to do.  I only hope that every step will hear my soul, in Yeats' immortal words, "clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress."  And it would be wise to remember something else that Annie Dillard wrote in Teaching a Stone How to Talk:

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

WALKING THE COTSWOLD WAY

A couple of weeks ago, I returned from a nine-day walk of the Cotswold Way, a U.K. national trail that runs approximately 102 miles from Chipping Campden to Bath. Set forth below are some photos taken along the way.  While I will occasionally describe the scenes, I will allow most photos to speak for themselves.

Gatehouse of Parish Church of St. James, Chipping Campden

(suggested by some guides as the preferrable starting point for the Cotswold Way)

Chipping Campden Market Hall (ca. 1627)
(official starting point of the Cotswold Way)

Thatched-roof cottage in Chipping Campden

 A pleasant place in Chipping Campden that could have persuaded
an old romantic such as I not to leave at all, but, of course, I did . . .

Leaving Chipping Campden Behind

Broadway Tower, Built in 1798 as a Landmark Folly for the Earl of Coventry

Descending into Broadway

Broadway Cottage

Leaving Broadway

A Rather Ornate Kissing Gate

On the Path to Stanton

Jacobean Gatehouse in Stanway

Common Waymark for U.K National Trails

Ruins of Hailes Abbey, Built by Richard, Earl of Cornwall and Brother of Henry III

Sudeley Castle
(the final home of Katherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII
 and the only one who was neither beheaded nor divorced)

Neolithic Burial Chambers

Top of Cleeve Hill, Highest Topographical Point on the Cotswold Way

Church in Painswick

Neolithic Burial Site (contained the remains of eleven persons)

Hang Gliding off of the Cotswolds Escarpment

Fruit and Vegetable Market in Wotton-under-Edge

Path Near Tower That Honors William Tyndale, 
Who Translated the Bible Into English

Dyrham House (where much of "The Remains of the Day" was filmed)

A Garden at Dyrham House

A Cotswold Farmhouse

Encountering Other Walkers as I Descend Into Bath

Bath Abbey (the southern terminus of the Cotswold Way)

REVISITING WANDERLUST

If one cannot be off on a long-distance walk, the next best thing is to dream about such adventures, and one of the best ways to fuel such dreams is to return to Rebecca Solnit's insightful book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking.  Set forth below are some of Ms. Solnit's observations on the fine art and unexpected pleasures of walking.  May you be inspired, as I am, to grab your rucksack and hit the road as soon as possible.

The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.

* * * * *

To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking . . . Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.

* * * * *

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do.  It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart.  It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing.  Is is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.

* * * * *

Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord.  Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.  It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.

The rhythm of walking generates a kind of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts.  This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.

* * * * * 

The surprises, liberations, and clarifications of travel can sometimes be garnered by going around the block as well as going around the world, and walking travels both near and far.  Or perhaps walking should be called movement, not travel, for one can walk in circles or travel around the world immobilized in a seat, and a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane.  It is the movement as well as the sights going by by that seems to make things happen in the mind, and this is what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination.

* * * * * 

Of course walking, as any reader of Thoreau's essay "Walking" knows, inevitably leads into other subjects.  Walking is a subject that is always straying.

* * * * *

The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don't know you are looking for, and you don't know a place until it surprises you.  Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against the erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.

* * * * *  

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

A planned walk of the Wales coastline (Pembrokeshire Coastal Path) had to be cancelled earlier this summer because of conflicts on the home front.  If all goes well, however, I will be off to another destination within the next week.  More to come on this when I return . . . 

 ONWARD!

HIGGS BOSON AND OUR SLIVER OF TIME

Like many others, I find myself endlessly fascinated by the historic discovery of the Higgs Boson, the so-called "God particle" that is responsible for the creation of mass  of any kind.  "Without it," as David Horsey writes in today's Los Angeles Times, "the universe would fly apart and we would have much more to worry about than a jobless recovery, immigrants sneaking across the border or the fate of "Obamacare."

This is good news, of course, because there is enough chaos in my life without the universe flying apart.  Nonetheless, it's important to keep the Higgs Boson discovery in  perspective.  According to my understanding, the discovery does not change the fact that ninety-six percent of the universe, referred to by cosmologists as dark matter and dark energy, remains unknown and will probably never be known. Moreover, as Horsey writes in his fine LA Times article, there is more to human life than the subatomic particles:

Things so small and things so big boggle the human mind.  Immediately, they conjure the ultimate unanswered questions: If all matter is given mass by the Higgs boson, where did the Higgs boson come from?  It has been nicknamed the "God particle" because it makes everything else possible; did God make it?  If so, where did God come from?  Did this all start with a Big Bang and without a creator?  What set off the Big Bang? And what came before it?  And before that?

The news about the "God particle" is one of those challenging bits of information that can make everything else feel terrifyingly insignificant.  It is a reminder that each of us is merely a tiny, carbon-based organism existing for a brief moment on a small planet that, by the scale of the universe, is no more singular than a grain of sand on a beach.  We are dust in the wind, utterly inconsequential in the dark expanse of time and space.

At least that's one way to look at it.  Another way to see it is that, in all that vastness, only we are aware of the awesome complexity.  Only we strive to know and understand.  All the rest is mere physical phenomena.  What we do in our brief lives on this small planet may be the only thing that matters.

Thus, it behooves us to use our sliver of time well.  We can waste it watching "Dancing With The Stars" or we can reach for the stars.  We can squander it being petty, cruel, selfish or destructive, or we can be creative, compassionate, kind and just.  The Higgs boson may glue this universe together, but we are the ones who give it meaning.

The "God particle" has a big job to do in the infinity of the universe, but on Earth, as John F. Kennedy said, "God's work must be truly our own."

Yes, we may be little more than dust in the wind from a cosmological standpoint, but "what we do in our brief lives on this small planet may be the only thing that matters."  Now there is a thought that makes me want to stand up, applaud, and sip champagne with the discoverers of Higgs Boson.