Since I last published to this blog, the whole world has changed. Some of it has been political, some of it has been religious, some economic, and I don’t even need to say anything about COVID.
We are seeing a different world than the one that we saw the last time I posted here. Ultimately, I believe the world will be a better place for many of the changes. But there are a host of people worldwide who have shown that they are not in favor of a civil society. Ignorance has been elevated for some to being a lofty goal, and they are working real hard at it. Critical thinking has been abandoned by a third of the people, embracing a selfish, angry and hateful view of the world.
Last picture before I got sick
The journey over the last few years has been hard, for me and for many others. I went through 18 months of waves of illness that left me, at times, unable to do anything but sleep, eat and manage bodily functions. I was isolated for about 14 months, never going into a store, restaurant, bar or anywhere else except for home and camping. But it gave me a chance to think, a lot. It gave me a chance to look inward and an opportunity to understand what is valuable to me.
Shingles was one of the things that I experienced
I was very angry for a while, but I have learned how to manage that on a spiritual level instead of an ego level. And I am much better for it. I am at peace (most of the time), and I have learned how to maintain that peace even when it seems like the world around me is embroiled in chaos.
I recognized that for me the meaning of life is love. And I have found the path to peace within me. It has been a profound period in my life.
I grew my hair and beard while I was in isolation. A lot of people don’t recognize me.
I lost my mom to Alzheimer’s. We lost my wife’s mother as well, though we don’t know how or why because it was in the middle of the first wave of the Pandemic in NY in 2020 and she was living in a nursing home at the time.
I got a chance to visit my mom right before she died. I was able to borrow a guitar and in her deathbed raise her from an uncommunicative state to singing, dancing and giving a war whoop at the end of a song. Two weeks later she was gone.
I’ve lost friends to Covid. But I have lost more to the ignorance that has been prevalent for the last two years. Frankly, if you are unwilling to wear a mask and get vaccinated to save my life, you really are not a person that is a friend.
So now I am back, different for sure, but healthy again and preparing for how I am going to spend the rest of my life with my wife. I have come to terms with being tied to an employer because of health insurance, even though that employer does not value me or any of my colleagues. And I guess that is okay. I recognize it for what it is, and will never again let that affect my well-being. It is a job, it is not my life. And it is sometimes really hard to get to a place where you can live with that in peace. But I have.
That is really all I wanted to say. I am changing providers that host this site, and so I wanted to check in so that it is at least a little current. Most of my effort goes into my other properties, but even those were left to linger while my health, the pandemic and a society hell bent on destruction took the stage. Hopefully things will start to normalize and I will be able to spend more time and effort on the things I love, like music, art and sharing my thoughts online.
I wish you all peace and love, they are what is important in all of our lives.
Hi! Surprised to see me? I am sort of surprised to see you too. I haven’t posted in well over a year in my musings. I guess my last post was deep enough to free me to focus a little time on other parts of my journey.
Man, it is a cool one.
The journey that is… it is cool journey. That is what I was referring to when I said “Man, it is a cool one”.
I celebrated by 30th anniversary to my wonderful wife this year. 30 years, hard to believe. It goes by so fast, it goes by so slow. But it definitely goes by. There is no stopping that.
And changes, they are about as steady as time. The one thing that is constant is change. Been a lot of changes since my spirit last called me to write here. Some of them seem good, some of them seem real bad. I guess only time will tell.
But life goes on. Until it doesn’t, and then it goes on for everyone else and we just don’t know what happens to you. We know the physical part, but we don’t know the spirit part, no not at all. Some of us pretend like we know what is out there. But shit!
We know nothing. And yet we let the stories we have been told lead us to war, and hate and violence. A lot of it in the name of religion. The stories we are told to teach us how to think, religion. The stories all tell us to love, but whenever I see hate out there, religion is right in there with it. Maybe not always, but near enough to always to count it.
If it isn’t stories, then it is something else stupid that we draw out to separate ourselves out from someone else. Color, nationality, what we do, or who we see. Something to make me think of you as different, so I can justify hating on you and loving on me.
What ever happened to we? What ever happened to you? What ever happened to me? What ever happened to we.
I am back. I have had a long period when I did not post, August until now. No excuses, I just didn’t write. But now I am back. I have some new projects going, and maybe along the way I will have some thoughts that are worth posting.
I’ll be back real soon, probably my next post will be about my adventure into building the systems to roast a whole hog.
If there is nothing else you understand about life, you should know that there are places and times when things change. It is in these places and times when you make decisions that will direct you until you reach the next.
At the confluence of two bodies of water, there is a seam that marks the point where the waters begin mixing. Usually there is a clear difference either in water color or temperature when the two first touch and the distinctiveness of this seam fades as the two waters begin to mix. If you ever find this seam, you should fish it, because that is where things are usually happening.
You see the same thing all over nature, seams that mark the change from one thing to another. If you are looking at a field that is returning from farm to forest, there is an area where they meet called “edge”. It is an area of neither field nor forest, and it is the place where life is more diverse, often more abundant and more interesting.
We also have seams in our clothes, you know, those areas where the sewing is done to keep the parts together. How well these seams are done is often the determiner of the quality of the garment. You could probably say that they are what determines if the clothes are going to be a good fit, or not.
In life, we have similar transition points or seams. We have the first day of school, the start of summer vacation, switching from elementary to middle school and then to high school. You know, those transition points when it seams that life is going to turn upside down until we go through it.
As we move toward and through adulthood there are also periods of time when we transition from one phase of life to another. These seams are often turbulent, stress filled times in which we make decisions and changes that could have huge impacts on how we live our lives from that moment forward. Usually there is an increase in responsibility after one of these changes, but sometimes there is a reduction of responsibility. To better understand this, let’s take a look at keys.
Keys are an indicator of how much responsibility we have at any given moment in time.
What exactly is a key. It is a mechanism for controlling who has access to what and in what way. It is the basis for allowing someone access to or use of something. It is the thing that controls the lock. In short, it is an outward sign of responsibility.
In my life, I can look to specific times when the change in keys was highly visible and it related to what was going on in my life at the time. The first marked change was when I graduated from high school. Up until that point in time, I had slowly accumulated keys. I had a key to the house, a key to my car, and maybe a key to a locker. Not a lot of responsibility. Suddenly, I went off to college.
At this point, there was no loss of keys, just a new and rapid accumulation of keys. I had keys to a dorm, and a dorm room. I still had keys to home and car, and even though these keys were seldom used, they still marked a level of responsibility. I suddenly had quite a few keys. When I got a job as a resident assistant, it came with a key to get access to the “jailers key ring”, and that had keys to everything. Everything. There must have been 20 or 30 keys on that key ring, and we would carry that set of keys with us as we made rounds through the dorm. I used to shake the jailer’s ring as I walked so people knew I was coming. I didn’t want to have the responsibility for having to stop someone from doing something stupid, so I let them know I was coming. It was a good arrangement.
Then I graduated college. No dorm keys, no house keys, just one key and that was to my car. I also had no plans, no vision for where I was going and no real need to know what was ahead. I had a year to “kill” while my future wife finished up college and we could start accumulating keys together. Do you see where this is going? More keys, more responsibility, less keys means less responsibility. Later, when you get that apartment key, or that house key that you have to pay the mortgage on, then the responsibility goes up way fast. That house key is a killer load of responsibility.
So let’s go back and take a look at the points when you have the least amount of keys. This is interesting times because freedom from responsibilities means that you have the freedom to make decisions about what you want to do. Just like the animals and fish are drawn to the seams, we are too because that is where opportunities happen. There is a world of opportunity at these times, because you don’t have keys to make decisions for you. The world is your fishbowl just waiting for you to decide what you want to do.
When you first finish high school, you are in one of these magical times. You are faced with a multitude of choices that are seemingly being carried right in front of your face just waiting for you to reach out and grab one. Are you going to travel, get a job, go to college, or just sit around and wait for decisions to be made for you? This is the time to be adventurous, a time to set your path in such a way that you will be able to do interesting things.
If that decision you make is to go to college, you will be blessed with another opportunity to drop off one set of keys and make decisions about what you are going to do with your life before you start adding more keys. I was talking to a person I know professionally last week and he said, “I started to work on the Monday after I graduated. That was the stupidest thing I ever did.” Essentially, what he was saying is that he grabbed a hold of the first thing that floated by and it dragged him immediately into the current and filled his hands with keys. He is now a very successful person, but he never got that time to go out and just move about life unencumbered by keys.
As a college professor, I work daily with young adults (and older adults) who are approaching that magical seam that comes when you graduate from college. Unfortunately, most of them are carrying a heavy debt load from student loans, so the window for them to play within their seam is usually limited to about 6 months. But, when they ask me for my advice, I tell them to take advantage of this time when you are free from the responsibilities that will start making decisions for you. Usually I suggest they travel. Go some place you have never been, see things you won’t get to see and do things you won’t get to do once you have passed through this seam. These are the transitions that allow us to make decisions that can lead us toward exciting lives. They are the chance for us to slip into the current, dance the dance of life and do the things that will carry us through the mundane periods of life between transitions. Many of us don’t take advantage of these opportunities. But we should.
There is one other of these transitions that comes much later in life, that is when we shed our careers and the keys that come with them, and transition into the age of retirement. I haven’t reached that one yet, but you can bet that my wife and I are going to swim into that one with gusto. I have been told that divorce is another one, but I’m not going to get the chance to experience that one.
Then of course, there is the last one when we give up all of our keys and we enter into the biggest seam of all and give up the last of our responsibilities whether we want to or not. I hope that I have the ability to enter that transition knowing that I have done well with everything has come before, and with the peace of knowing I am ready for that transition.
In the mean time, live life the best you can and don’t be afraid to do something big with your transitions.
