Golden

The peepers are chorusing, my love made made me a surprise meal of my favorites (cheese plate, scallops, israeli couscous salad, roasted brussel sprouts, coffee heath bar ice cream, a bottle of extra dry champagne), a luxurious bath, watching candles flicker, and reading a great book – 13 is a lucky number in my family. 29 on the 29th is looking pretty damn good.

Chapter 13 [1]

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the glory-so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.

At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

 

Our species is the only creative species , and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirt of a man. Nothing was every created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by represssions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one things which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

***

Golden Birthday: Words from Steinbeck, East of Eden. Last year of my twenties, here I come. (Oh, and we went to Austin for 5 days, picture source!)

Just this.

 

It’s been a few weeks of manic crazy over here, and I think I’ve gone through the full range of human emotions at least three times. (I may also be binge-watching The Killing on Netflix).

That aside, there are some big moves in real life happening and while all positive, they’ve inspired a bit of a rethinking about what I’m doing here and why I do it.

The blog as it is will be taking a tiny rest, I’m sure to return in some form, but I gotsta get my good ole fashioned think on.

***

The Art of the Everyday – April 14: Inspiration.

Out of Commission

Welp. Can’t really type.

Let’s just say the onions at work and I had a disagreement about their need to be diced.

For tonight it’s just me and this fine, fine $5 pinot noir. Thank you Rite Aid and state that allows Rite Aid to sell me shampoo and wine.

Ow.

***

The Art of the Everyday – April 7: Ow.

Recollections

“Eventually my struggle brought me to this answer: In some respects it is death itself that makes life meaningful. Most importantly, the transitoriness of life cannot destroy its meaning because nothing from the past is irretrievably lost. Everything is irrevocably stored. It is in the past that things are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. Whatever we have done, or created, whatever we have learned and experienced – all of this we have delivered into the past. There is no one, and nothing, that can undo it.” – Viktor Frankl, Recollections

Many of us know Frankl, at least by name, from Man’s Search for Meaning, as well as his work as a psychologist and Holocaust survivor. One of the reasons I picked up this slim volume was to see more into the man himself, and perhaps glean some insight into a life full of early success, horror, recovery and even more lauded success.

“When someone asks me how I explain my accomplishments, I usually say: ‘Because I have made it a principle to give the smallest things the same attention as the biggest, and to do the biggest as calmly as the smallest.'”

Although the manner of writing is stilted (perhaps because it was never ‘written’ as an autobiography as such, and has been translated from German), there are some true insights into the human self and meaning that are powerful alone, but almost haunting given the context of  Frankl’s life experience.

Despite all he lost, and his intimate relationship with the worst humanity can do to one another, he insisted on belief in a supra-meaning, or an overall meaning of life that is beyond our comprehension. Although he does not shroud this supposition in religious terms, it obviously echos with many organized faiths.

What is striking, and was revolutionary, in his thought is that of personal responsibility and drive:

“It is not we who should ask for the meaning of life, since it is we who are being asked. It is we ourselves who must answer the questions that life asks of us, and to these questions we can respond only by being responsible for our existence.” 

He was inspired in his life by a quote mentioned to him by a colleague from Soren Kierkegaard – “‘Don’t despair at wanting to become your authentic self.’ It is difficult to believe what decisive turns in our lives we sometimes owe to even casual remarks made by another person.”

Along with personal responsibility, he posits that meaning is never lost – indeed nothing ever is truly gone. He holds the past, both individual and communal to be a wellspring of possibility that should be seen as a fount for recollection of meaning and creation of purpose. Again, no matter hat has occurred.

He distills his overall beliefs into a simple structure:

[I believe there are] “three possible ways to find meaning in life – even up to the last moment, the last breath. The three possibilities are: 1) a deed we do, a work we create; 2) an experience, a human encounter, a love; and 3) when confronted with an unchangeable fate (such as an incurable disease), a change of attitude toward that fate. I n such cases we still can wrest meaning from life by giving testimony to the most human of all human capacities: the ability to turn suffering into a human triumph.”

In this way, despite his truly epic place in history, Frankl posits that fulfilling meaning is open and possible for all of us. Although I struggle with his vision of ‘salvific suffering’ – it is obviously rooted not only in his psychological expertise, but his own base survival of Auschwitz.

And as a great clinician, in the end he again turns to us in his own autobiography and says: well, what are you going to do about it?

***

The Art of the Everyday – April 3: Weekly Book Review! Wherein I attempt to reach my goal of 63 books this year:

The Books Around: 2014

1. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
2. Home by Toni Morrison
3. Grandville by Bryan Talbot
4. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
5. Help Thanks Wow by Anne Lamott
6. Viktor Frankl Recollections by Viktor Frankl
7. How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
8. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett
9. Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
10. A House for Mr. Biswas by VS Naipaul
11. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
12. On the Mystery by Catherine Keller
13. In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz by Michela Wrong
14. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
14. King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild
15. Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
16. The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
17. The Journey Home by Radhanath Swami
18. Quantum by Manjit Kumar
19. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
20. Dispatches by Michael Herr
21. Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard Edited by WH Auden
22. The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson
23. Wool by Hugh Howey
24. Black Boy by Richard Wright
25. Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower
26. Cane River by Lalita Tademy
27. The Paradise of Bombs by Scott Russell Sanders
28. kira-kira by Cynthia Kadohata
29. Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
30. The Permanent Revolution by Leon Trotsky
31. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
32. Trinity by Leon Uris
33. Omaha Blues by Joseph Lelyveld
34. Airships by Barry Hannah
35. Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
36. Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
37. Passionate Nomad by Jane Fletcher Geniesse
38. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
39. Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaurder
40. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
41. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
42. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
43. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
44. The Brothers K by David James Duncan
45. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
46. Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
47. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
48. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris
49. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
50. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
51. Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler
52. Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey
53. The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Potzsch
54. World War Z by Max Brooks
55. Blindness by Jose Saramago
56. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre
57. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barberry
58. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
59. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
60. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
61. Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
62. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
63. Dune by Frank Herbert

A Walk in the Woods

Ah, April. Welcome.

My porch is here somewhere

Up and over and into the woods!

 

 

 

 

Aaaaaand down to my knee.

Pretty path

There she blows!

Thanks trusty boots!

Goodnight lake.

***

The Art of the Everyday – April 2: A Walk in the Woods

Nobody’s Fool

Be honest.

Be loving.

Be real.

Don’t leave people as a boat on your dock.

***

The Art of the Everyday – April 1: Foolin’ around. 

You Can’t Get There From Here

Getting off I-95 onto the smaller routes in Maine is to delve into the heart of the state. Often, as Highway 26 winds into Route 117 and then Route 118 and then Main Street, then back to itself again, you may find yourself a bit turned around.

An oft-joked about form of response, should you choose to veer off into one of the hamlets found in central Maine, is “You can’t get there from here.” It is to some extent a joke, but is often true.

When traversing this state, not only avoid the flocks of wild turkeys, the abundant deer, and somehow sneaky moose population, but plan for at least an hour added onto your travel time.

And throw that GPS out the window. Unless you like to go “muddin'” (no ‘g’) as the locals call it.

Assume Siri is wrong now and it will save you a lot of car repair bills in the future.

With this preparation, the bucolic sites of the interior of Maine await you.

That is, if you can find them.

***

The Art of the Everyday – March 31: Homemade, Local flavor, Write a piece about a typically “local” experience from where you come from as though it’s an entry in a travel guide.

Saddleback

Sometimes a day starts pretty rough (forgetting the vouchers after a 3hr drive) but then ends amazingly (beers in almost 70 degree weather after a full day on the slopes).

Bonus? A Burt! (Beer Yurt!)

***

The Art of the Everyday – March 30: Homemade, alpine skiing at Saddleback Mountain!

Cover It

The cover doesn’t make the book, but it doesn’t hurt.

As someone who truly does not have that one book they return to, again and again, my favorite books are ones that find me at the right time.

Sometimes that is through the power of its design, but regardless it’s some type of resonance I feel when I pick it up – either from a quip on the back cover, a leading sentence, or a recommendation.

I picked a few of my favorites above, and yea, I think they all meet the cover test.

Except Gibran – come on buddy, creepy almost police sketch? Not attractive.

(go find a hard copy, though, pro tip: the book itself is gorgeous)

***

The Art of the Everyday – March 29: Judgment day, If you were to judge your favorite book by its cover, would you still read it?

 

Glitch in the Matrix

I get déjà vu all the time.

As a vivid dreamer, I often chalk it up to simply that – an event or vignette that holds a strong similarity to something I’ve experienced before, either in a dream or waking life.

Most often it happens during the strangest circumstances. Like when I first moved to our small town in Maine and was hanging out in a coffee shop, talking to a kid about his dinosaur robot.

A situation so oddly specific yet unimaginable and unmatchable in my previous real experience.

Yet, I felt that sense of premonition – of knowing that this would happen. Some scientists chalk this feeling up to a small hiccup in our brain processing experience – that as an event is happing your brain doesn’t construct your experience in it correctly, and this creates a ‘false familiarity.’

With a memory as wonky as mine – which remembers some things so clearly (random facts anyone? that one article in the paper that one time?) but most others very, very vaguely (remember childhood/big trip/studying abroad? …I remember that big rain storm!) I am sure that my conscious self is most likely just missing the real connection.

My brain and body then tries to viscerally remind me of where its been and what it has seen – but the full association just doesn’t come through.

Rather than freaking me out, I’ve always been somehow comforted by my frequent déjà vu.

These feelings are, somehow, a confirmation of being right where I’m supposed to be. That life is progressing as it should. For someone that does not believe in predestination, that feeling is pretty nice. Even if it’s just created by my biological quirks.

Or we’re all in the Matrix. Either/or.

***

The Art of the Everyday – March 28: Déjà vu, Have you ever truly felt déjà vu, the sensation that you’ve already had the experience you’re currently having?