RJ – Page 48 – Brimmings: up from the well

And so there were no more elephants

Source: Aljazzera: Tusks seized from poachers

This past week, perhaps missed in most headlines, is news of the machine gun slaughter of a family elephant herd in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park, the worst of its kind ever seen in Kenya. Horrendous as it is, it’s hardly an isolated incident in Africa, where wildlife are being gunned down at a record pace, including endangered species, by poachers financed by international criminal interests. Says Drew McVey, African elephant and rhino specialist, “This horrific crime demonstrates the lengths that poachers will go to get ivory—even killing a two-month old calf.”

What are the principal causes of the decline in Africa’s wildlife?

Habitat loss: Disruption of the ecosystem through deforestation and agriculture expansion continues unabated.

Poaching: Widespread and growing, corrupt government seems involved as evidenced in a Uganda military helicopter assault from the air in Garamba National Park in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. Twenty-two elephants died, their tusks later cut from their bodies.

Population growth: The world’s fastest population growth is taking place in Africa. Today, there are 2-billion Africans, with an average of five children to a family. At present growth rates, the population will double at mid-century.

Poverty: It’s easy to understand the economic impetus behind poaching when a pound of ivory can glean as much as a $1000. Even without widespread poverty, such prices would continue to fuel the market. According to the NYT, tusks from a single adult elephant can be worth more than ten times the average African income. Reports abound that “in Tanzania, impoverished villagers are poisoning pumpkins and rolling them into the road for elephants to eat. In Gabon, subsistence hunters deep in the rain forest are being enlisted to kill elephants and hand over the tusks, sometimes for as little as a sack of salt.”

Terrorism and civil strife: Armed bands like the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Shabab have been on killing sprees to secure funds for weapons. Escapees from the LRA report that LRA head, Joseph Krony, has ordered unlimited killing of elephants. The LRA isn’t alone. In January 2012, the worst massacre on record took place in Bouba Ndjida National Park in Cameroon with 300 elephants slaughtered by Darfur militia 600 miles from home.

Which animals are most vulnerable?

Africa has a variegated animal population, much of it under duress. Among familiar animals, elephants, lions, rhinos, hippos and gorillas face immense survival challenges due to human exploitation.

What is the rate of decline?

Elephants have declined by 99% since the 1930s from an estimated 10 million to about 400,000 currently.

Only 10,000 rhinos survive, representing an 85% reduction since 1970. Of these, the black rhino, which once roamed throughout Africa, is down to just 2500 and confined to East Africa.

Lions have seen their numbers drop by 50% since the 1950s, when they were in the 40,000 range. Ranchers have been the primary cause for their decline.

Where is smuggling most prominent?

Most of the illegal trade takes place in Asia, with Hong Kong its primary center, despite diligent control efforts. In the last three months, custom officers have seized three shipments of ivory with an estimated worth exceeding $6 million. An estimated 70% of ivory smuggling ends up in China. There even exist popular online forums that give counsel on smuggling techniques.

What feeds this demand?

Medicinal: Rhino horns have been long regarded as an aphrodisiac.

Affluence: The pro-longed economic boom in China has fueled the rise of an affluent class that sees possession of such contraband as reflecting status. It’s the same principle behind why some people choose more house than they need or a price-prohibitive car for the general populace. China, however, is not the only country driving demand. Thailand and Vietnam engage in this activity as well. Last week, Thai custom officers seized a suitcase at Bangkok airport containing more than $500,000 worth of rhino horns. The perpetrator, who had just arrived from Ethiopia, has been arrested.

Ignorance: A 2007 poll conducted in China by the International Fund for Animal Welfare showed that 70% percent of the Chinese did not realize an elephant had to be killed to remove its tusks.

Can anything be done?

There are 177 current signatories to the Convention on In international Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), limiting trade in wild animals and their body parts. Collectively, the accord provides some measure of pledged protection for 33,000 plant and animal species. http://www.cites.org/ Unfortunately, this 1989 measure needs more teeth. Domestic as well as international trade bans need to be implemented. As is, apprehended poachers often receive just a slap on the wrist.

Obviously there needs to be greater domestic intervention, with serious penalties. This takes resources and, frankly, the need for surveillance helicopters, rangers, night vision goggles, jeeps, etc. Unfortunately, even an increase in resources may not be sufficient. Garamba has about 150 rangers on a shoot first basis, yet it experienced its own horrid elephant massacre and the perpetrators escaped.

Ironically, the American taxpayer has been footing the bill for millions of dollars in foreign aid to countries like Dafur, Congo, and Uganda for military assistance to defeat the LRA. So far, our State Department denies there is any connection between the militaries of these countries and the orchestrated killings such as in Garamba. I would call it political expediency. The bottom line is that Western governments can, and should, do more to apply pressure on such governments, including China, Thailand, and Vietnam.

A prosperous Africa would result in probable population stability, the pattern in the industrial nations. This would help curtail the destruction of habitat for agricultural expansion. A prosperous African continent, however, seems unlikely anytime soon.

For some, the best trade off, radical as it may seem, is to begin a program of detusking, elephants and rhinos. Obviously this is controversial and an alternative I need to study more before making-up my own mind, but here is a site that opposes this option vehemently: http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/opinion/cut-it-outhwww.

Africa, the world’s most troubled continent, defies any easy answers. Meanwhile, the carnage continues. It breaks the heart!

–-rj

FOR FURTHER READING:

http://www.cites.org/eng/prog/ETIS/index.php

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2013/01/2013181422525172.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/world/africa/africas-elephants-are-being-slaughtered-in-poaching-frenzy.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Global warming and its mockers, scoffers and deniers

Courtesy:yahoo.news: Destroyed home in Dunalley, Tasmania

I ran into a man in recent years, educated and professionally accomplished, who didn’t like a lot of my observations and beliefs. They were too liberal and sometimes he’d laugh or scoff. It so happens that I believe in such things as a woman’s right to sovereignty over her body, a more just system of taxation, dignity of death legislation, universal health care, gay rights, the priority of green living through simplicity, alternative energy, recycling and vegetarianism. I voted the Green Party in the recent election.

The last time we conversed, more than a year ago, he admitted to global warming, but thought of it as cyclic rather than human in origin. That’s ok with me, at least as far as a person’s right to a belief or opinion. However, I’ve often found a lack of fair exchange when it comes to beliefs like my own, perhaps because I live in conservative Kentucky or no longer have daily access to a university campus where my views often enjoy majority status and poetry is still admired. Perhaps views like mine simply make people feel uncomfortable with their resonance of gloom and doom, though I counter that acknowledging a problem begins its solution.

But let me confine myself to global warming at the moment. I find the facts are in: It’s horribly real and its effects are happening universally and exponentially faster than many of our experts had projected. Our hurricanes occur more frequently and grow more menacing; floods and drought devour our landscape. In Europe, a prolonged heat wave this past year killed hundreds. Storms of the century are now decade-ravages, with Katrina and Sandy coming to mind. Meanwhile, the accelerating polar meltdown threatens methane release, a component that exceeds carbon as a dangerous contributor to global warming. Sea tides are rising and coastal cities like New York have begun drawing-up contingency plans.

For another example of what’s going on, there is the current tragedy of bushfires in Tasmania, the result of prolonged drought, high temperatures, and persistent wind gusts. As I write, 65-homes have been lost, hundreds displaced, and 110 squared miles of land scorched. In its proximity to a warming Antarctica, Australia is fast taking on the prototype of our global future, compounded by the increasing impotency of our technology to cope.

Southwest Australia, in particular, knows the scenario of diminished rainfall all too well. Famed for its vineyards abetted by rich soil and ample rainfall, the region has experienced a 15% drop-off in rainfall since 1975. Wheat, another regional staple, has been devastated, as seen in the current deluge of impoverished farmers. Meanwhile, the metropolis city of Perth has seen a 50% decline in its surface water supply since 1975. Sydney in eastern Australia, may face an even greater crisis if drought continues, despite having some of the world’s largest water reserves (Tim Flannery. The Weather Makers, pp. 127-129; 131).

Climate change does, however, have its ardent critics, so my ethics demand fair play. In a recent Forbes article, Larry Bell, who comments frequently on climate and energy issues for the magazine, contends that “while most acknowledge that greenhouse warming may be a contributing factor, it is also true that a great many very informed scientists believe that any human contributions to that influence are negligible, undetectable and thereby grossly exaggerated by alarmists, while far more important climate drivers (both for warming and cooling) are virtually ignored. Particularly consequential among these are long-and short-term effects of ocean cycles along with changes in solar activity” (“Global Warming Alarmism”).

Thank you, Larry, for just the right cough syrup for what ails us. You wrote your article on May 28, 2012, and say at the very beginning that “global temperatures have been pretty flat despite rising CO2 levels since the big 1998 El Niño ….”. Are you not aware that we can track resilient CO2 particles over the centuries and it demonstrates a rise from 645 gigatons (billion tons) of CO2 prior to the Industrial Revolution, or 1800, to our approximate 869 gigatons currently? I’m sufficiently aware that association doesn’t confer causality, but it should caution skeptics to reassess. By the way, half of our present annual CO2 derives from burning fossil fuels. God only knows the fate of our planet with world population continuing to rise and more coal-fire plants and more cars in the works.

Critics needn’t belly ache about alarmists. They’ve got inertia on their side. It’s near impossible, for example, to get rid of plastic bags in our stores, given corporate interests and the abstract nature of a threat seen more theoretical and distant, and thus problematical, by many consumers. Besides, it’s just damn inconvenient to our comfort zone to change our ways. In a time of budget crisis, government is no help, deferring to present needs while defaulting on our children’s future, reminiscent of its widespread underfunding of pensions for future retirees.

Meanwhile, this just in from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA):

2012 was the warmest year ever recorded in the U. S., and second only to 1998 in the agency’s “extreme” weather listing.

It was also the driest year on record with an average rainfall of 26.57 inches, or 2.57 inches below normal. Wildfires destroyed more than 9.2 million acres, the third highest number in our history.

Worldwide, it’s much the same. According to World Meteorological Organizational Secretary-General Michel Jarraud, “The extent of Arctic sea ice reached a new record low. The alarming rate of its melt this year highlighted the far-reaching changes taking place on Earth’s oceans and biosphere. Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records.”

As I conclude my post, fire has also swept across large portions of New South Wales, where Sydney is located, destroying forests, pastures and flocks along with many homes. It’s summer down under, and like here, temperatures are at record highs.

–rj

South Pacific seascapes and my Siren temptress

Since I was a child I’ve always had this thing about the South Pacific, and, no, I’m not talking about the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, whose music still grabs me. No, I’m talking genuine volcanic rock strung out, pearl like, across the equatorial Pacific.

I’ve never gotten there, unless you count a military stopover in Honolulu on my way to Korea or our trip (Karen and I) to New Zealand in 2006. No, I’m thinking of other island hops: places like Tahiti, the Marquesas, Somoa and the Cook Islands. OK, let’s throw in Pitcairn Island, too. Hey, I’m thinking the likes of Captain Bligh, Gauguin, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

How did this hankering ever get started? Hard to say, but I think I drew from the deep well of books I insatiently imbibed as a street child lured daily into the quiet coolness of the Montgomery Street Library, the next best thing to a ten cent matinee ticket to the Jumbo theater on Girard Avenue or an open hydrant in providing relief from Phiilly’s baked asphalt on hot summer afternoons.

In particular, there was Bligh’s account, popularized hither and yon, in the Nordhoff and Hall’s riveting novel version of a mutinous crew and the aftermath of 17 souls set adrift for 41 days across 3600 miles, before finding safety. Just thinking about this book makes me salivate at reading it again.

The novel account had its movie version, one of several beginning in 1935, starring the swashbuckling Clark Gable as mutineer leader Fletcher Christian in bold rebellion against the tyrannical Bligh, portrayed by Charles Laughton. A box office biggie that shreds historical truth, I didn’t get to the Jumbo replay until many years later. I liked sequels, so I tried Pitcairn Island. By God, I was hooked!

I’d be in my bedroom, several hours nightly, supposedly working on my high school algebra, when the truth was I’d be looking at maps, charting mind-journeys. Their very names spiced my excitement: Manihiki, Pukapuka, Yasawa, etc. In another era, I’d have been a runaway, perhaps sailing with Columbus or Magellan.

Fast forward into adulthoood, I’d venture into travel agencies and ransack their slick, glossy pamphlets of South Pacific cruises, always in the end smacking into the reality that such things cost money, lots of it.

In my late twenties, however, dream nearly took on verisimilitude when I was granted the next best thing: permanent resident status in New Zealand, with a teaching post waiting for me in Hawera in Taranawki on the North Island. As it turned out, this gave way to a greater priority–finishing my graduate studies. My wife and I, nonetheless, did visit Hawera on our memorable New Zealand venture in 2006. Still, no South Pacific paradisic lagoons!

After graduate studies, I went through a French phase, learning French and pursuing its art, especially the Impressionists and traveling to their haunts like Aix-en-Province and nearby Mont St. Victoire with their Cezanne echoes. But then I also discovered Gauguin and, naturally, quite understood his flight from the Paris bourse to, yes, the South Pacific.

In later years, I would catch-up again with Robert Louis Stevenson. (What child in that video-game free era of my early youth wouldn’t have enjoyed the likes of Treasure Island?) In graduate school, Stevenson’s sentient lyricism captivated me. Even more, I admired his uncommon fortitude in the face of debilitating illness. Then, of course, there was his leave-taking for Somoa, where his final home, Villa Vailima ( now a museum), gazes down into a verdant velvet of swaying palm, edged by Pacific waters.

I’m older now, and pragmatism has undoubtedly pinned my romantic palette like a butterfly to a wall. I also know that it’s the imagining and not the obtaining that often yields the most, or something like Keats meant when he wrote, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter” (Ode on a Grecian Urn). As a Jungian devotee, I know the universality of the Edenic quest and the lotus eater lure of its garden. I suspect, too, much of that once pristine garden world has now been sullied by commercial interests and tourist hordes.

Still, in those langorous moments that sometimes sweep ashore into daily life, my thoughts drift to paradisiacal islands like Raratonga, Bora Bora, Tauata, Moorea, Raiatea, and Aiutaki; soft murmurings of attending, giggling maidens; falling coconuts; gentle breezes; slumbrous waves; sheltering lagoons with coral necklace; and of life as approximating what in our musings we mortals sometimes dub “heaven” with its reprieve from time and event.

I think again of Keats (Ode to a Nightingale). Am I awake, or do I sleep?

Do well. Be well.

–rj

The quest for individuation: a Jungian looks at Matthew Arnold’s “The Buried Life”

Intelligent Life, the free cultural news magazine of The Economist, recently featured a fascinating several day exploration of the labyrinthian stream flowing beneath Paris’ infrastructure with its scenarios ranging from party venues to ossuaries and catacombs.

In those outliers of thought that often follow a stimulus, I found myself musing a poem I had presumed I’d long ago relegated to absentia, seeing I retired from college teaching seven years ago. But there it was, Matthew Arnold’s “The Buried Life,” in bold dress on my mental screen, refulgent in its own musings, pre-Freud, pre-Jung, cogently exploring in all its ebb and flow the subterranean river of the Unconscious that lies deep within all of us, frequently surfacing to veto or check our best intent with intuitive urgency.

Then I thought of Jung’s concept of the Shadow, that primordial aspect of ourselves that can express itself suddenly, individually and collectively, when repressed or unintegrated into consciousness, disrupting relationships and even contributing to social disorder. It isn’t evil in itself, or some kind of resident demon we try our best to confine. The Shadow, no intrinsically Hyde element spotting the cultured Dr. Jekyll of the day world, has potentiality for making ourselves whole as we acknowledge undeveloped aspects of ourselves.

Arnold’s prescient poem acknowledges the Shadow’s salient wisdom in shaping our psyches, especially in regard to our inhibitions, though of course he comes too early (1822-1886) to use that term. On the surface, the poem muses on how even lovers sometimes paradoxically conceal themselves from each other, given the intransigent ego in all of us. Here, the poem begins its prison imagery, prominent throughout the poem.

Alas! Is even love too weak to unlock the heart, and let it speak?
even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?

But the poem probes far deeper in exploring a resident conflict within ourselves arising from the tension between the Ego and the Unconscious, or Shadow element familiar to Jungians.

Ah! well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment, can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchained;
For that which seals them hath been deep-ordained!

Arnold gives tribute to this dimension working its will in us, instinctually, covertly, as our true source of identity. It works in stealth to keep us from tampering with its design to foster wholeness, for the human proclivity is to falsify true feelings in servility to convention:

Fate, which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be–
By what distractions he would be possessed,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity–
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being’s law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.

This is hardly Freud’s dynamic of repression at work, but rather the Jungian perspective that each of us is actually two entities in antithesis. The “unregarded river” can be thought of as our instinctual self, defiant of culture, and a legacy of our evolutionary past, the Shadow entity resident in us analogous to the dark side of the moon.

Amid the often banality of our commercial world, we sometimes long for communion with this alter ego. Adroitly, Arnold coalesces mining and river imagery here. We yearn to track the line of ourselves, plumb to its depths, and extract its ore. At this level, the poem anticipates Jung’s concept of “individuation,” or the quest for wholeness; a pilgrimage for conjunction of the Conscious and the Unconscious:

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our True, original course;
A longing to inquireInto the mystery of the heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us–to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.

Alas, we never do succeed wholly, so deep is that hidden Self, and so we withdraw from the fray, giving ourselves up to distractions:

But deep enough, alas! none ever mines
.……………….
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on forever unexpressed.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well–but ’tis not true!

But neither can we escape this longing within for something more:

From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.

Sometimes, however, there occur those transient moments lovers experience, near mystical, when we intuit and achieve unity with our instinctual self, fathom all things about ourselves, and live genuinely with those we love:

When our world-deafened ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed–
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know,
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth forever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face, and an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose, and the sea where it goes.

Some years ago, psychiatrist Reuven Bar-Levav cogently observed that “most people today are at least superficially aware of unconscious motives, but few realize how powerful and how prevalent they are. Man is not what he claims to be” (Thinking in the Shadows, p. 19). Arnold uncannily fathomed this in “The Buried Life” more than 150 years ago, anticipating depth psychology and Jung in particular. Across the years, I have always found this poem riveting for its profundity, beauty and sincerity.

I hope you will like this poem, too.

Do well. Be well.

–rj

How the East can teach us to master our anxieties

In the daily round of life, all of us are prone to experiencing conflict. It’s just the nature of the beast; but what if I told you that a lot of this conflict is of our own making? As Jungian analyst Ken Wilber reminds us in his insightful No Boundary, we’re often into the habit of creating boundaries, by which he means barriers, walling off a great deal of life’s potentiality of larger experience, since we’d rather feel safe in the confines of the familiar.

That said, it reminds me of the fences Robert Frost writes of in his beloved poem, “Mending Wall, that people erect to wall out their anxieties: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Let’s sidetrack for a moment. Have you noticed how many things in life fall into contrary couplings, with one of them tending to be more positive? By way of some examples, here’s my partial list put into categories, and you can add yours:

Spatial: up/down, inside/outside, east/west, near/far, above/below, over/under, wide/narrow

Temporal: morning/evening, today/tomorrow, past/present, sunrise/sunset

Attributes: short/tall, beautiful/ugly, clean/dirty, brave/cowardly, smart/dumb

Theological: heaven/hell, good/evil, God/Satan, flesh/spirit

Philosophical: logical/illogical, realist/idealist, rationalist/romantic

Biological: male/female, child/adult, young/old, thin/stout

Psychological: bold/timid, aggressive/passive, introverted/extroverted

My point: These couplings belong to our world, not nature’s, which brings us back to “Mending Wall,” where nature abhors Man’s barrier artifacts represented in the stone wall. While nature may feature its own divergencies such as ripe and unripe, it possesses no mindfulness about them or the accompanying paroxisms that plague us. No dog thinks about its ending or worries about present illness. No bird deliberates on life or death or the hereafter. While nature includes pain and animals respond, it’s physiological and thus without angst.

By contrast, humans hover around their drawn boundaries as bastions preserving their control. In turn, this results in anxiety, limiting their happiness. Ken Wilber sums up our dilemma when he writes, “the firmer one’s boundaries, the more entrenched are one’s battles. The more I hold onto pleasure, the more I necessarily fear pain. The more I pursue goodness, the more I am obsessed with evil. The more I seek success, the more I must dread failure. The harder I cling to life, the more terrifying death becomes. The more I value anything, the more obsessed I become with its loss” (p. 19).

At the heart of what Wilber says, though he doesn’t mention it, lies the concept of polarity, largely an Eastern notion not understood in Western cultures with their foregrounding in dualism. In the polarity approach, which I’m proposing here, we encounter the healthier option, opposites being viewed not as contraries but complementaries, succinctly captured in William Blake‘s dictum that “opposition is true friendship.”

In our Western dualism for instance, we think of good vs evil as utterly opposed and embattled contraries. In the East, this becomes unfathomable as how can you have one devoid of the other? How can you know what good is, unless you have the yardstick of evil? How can you know love unless you also know what lacking it means?

Like virtually all Westerners, I couldn’t get a grasp around this notion of polarities, or two sides to one coin. Then one day it clicked and it’s been a norm for me, informative and helpful, across the years. I had been invited to give a paper at the University of Delhi. Afterwards, I fell into conversation with an Indian delegate and somehow, as often happens in India, it turned metaphysical. I mentioned the Problem of Evil, a salient concern in appraising the credulity of religious belief in the West. His response, simple and direct, startled me: “Problem of evil? What problem? Do we not have day and night, hot and cold, life and death?” The light turned on.

And how does any of this bear on our well-being? If you’re still belaboring this question, go back and review my earlier Wilbur borrowing, as it gets to the very heart of the matter.

When I try to wall out anxieties about what will happen today or tomorrow, or how people will regard me, or matters related to my health, finances, relationships, etc., I invariably allow worry to wreak its cortisol devastation to my health and on my daily well-being.

In the West, we measure progress across the board in science, religion, business and private life as movement towards the positive and elimination of the negative. This is the wrong formula for living the happy life, since it’s foreign to life’s dynamism, or plentitude. Those we love can decline, die, or even engage in perfidy.

Today’s job may not be there tomorrow. Accidents and genes may ultimately define our futures. I think of baseball: very few hitters ever bat 300 and when they do, fewer still repeat it.

To live life well, you need to take the spectrum approach that takes-in the full sweep of life’s potentiality. By the way, this is heart and soul behind why we get life and health insurance. We’re actually better off or lessen our anxiety in facing up to life’s quirkiness.

Opposites aren’t really mutually exclusive anyway. They require each other to exist. I can’t know pleasure apart from the possibility of pain.

Polarity, the notion of complementaries, can ease our wrestlings with our fears, reflected in our desperate folly of erecting fences or boundaries. It also teaches us to simplify our values, particularly the material kind; informs us that nothing is ever really ours, that everything is on lease as it were; helps us treasure what we enjoy now, our families and friends; most of all, enjoins us not to cling. When I give up my exclusions, an unexpected pleasure exhilarates, and I call it grace, for then I am set free. Or as The Bhagavad Gita, or Hindu scripture, has it:

He is to be recognized as eternally free
Who neither loathes nor craves
For he that is free from the pairs,
Is easily freed from the conflict.

Reflections on another New Year

Here we are, once again heading into a new year. With it comes the old anxieties and perhaps even new ones. Calendars are, after all, a human invention. Turning their pages doesn’t resolve life’s events or remove their burdens.

But a new year can also help us take time to cull the clutter of the trivial and reappraise the useful: old habits, bad memories, the good moments.

A new year traditionally triggers new resolutions or priorities. And that’s a good thing.

But good resolves need anchoring by becoming habits. Like newly planted seeds, they need watchful nourishing to assure they root and break the soil and survive Spring’s caprice. This means mindfulness and setting up an inviolable time and place.

New habits often take six to eight weeks to take hold and, even then, require our vigilance.

We can help ourselves to a better year by worrying less about what we’re powerless to change and forgiving those who’ve grieved us, knowing they’re the true prisoners. We can nourish ourselves in thinking the positive, and the reward may often be we we’re right. Through yoga, meditation and enhanced breathing, we can practice mindfulness, yielding discipline and reducing stress. We may not always avoid the stressful, but we can lessen its fallout by learning to bend with it, like survivor trees in high wind.

Maybe in addition to choosing better what we eat and exercising more we might do well to listen less to our daily news with its negative focus on human misdeeds. I’m not advocating an ostrich stance in this, but simply uprooting stress by focusing on life’s good things and how we might bring them about, perhaps by not taking ourselves so seriously and, instead, developing greater awareness of those around us and of nature and of each day’s new possibilities for marshaling happiness. What’s more rewarding than a kind word, a lover’s kiss, a child’s laughter, a red sunset, an airport embrace, etc.

Our resolutions ought to include more love and kindness, less worry, more acceptance.

It’s then we truly affect others, inspiring them to find their own radiance through our example of upbeat living.

All of this doesn’t come easily, so there’s truth to the axiom that bad habits die hard.

But as in a spring field erupting into its extravagant riot of weed and vegetable, we must begin the work of uprooting anything and everything that would overwhelm the tender shoots promising future harvest of what sustains.

As Voltaire reminds us, we can’t always alter time’s events, but where we are, whoever we are, we can till our own garden and make it bloom.

Do well. Be well.

I am what I remember: reflections on memory

What can it be like to not have anything to think about, or to lose the propensities of sentience, that dismal fate of those with dementia or Alzheimer’s? To lose one’s sight, or one’s hearing, or even one’s speech, are among life’s greatest wounds, but they dwarf up against the inability to recall. Universally, in myth and in legend, whether in the guise of the Sirens’ alluring song or the serpent’s Edenic mischief, or in Goethe’s overreaching Faust, man’s greatest quest has been his striving for knowledge. But without memory, his quest is nullified, for knowledge is its source. In Dante’s Inferno, the sinful dead are bereft of memory and hence doomed to an eternal present empty of knowledge.

Flipping through the calendar of years, I find myself more forgetful and, thus sometimes anxious, for I am what I remember. But I draw comfort in learning that even thirty-year olds sometimes lapse and cannot remember where they put the keys or what the errand was they had set out upon, or just what really did happen earlier that day at work.

I’ve learned long ago that there exist two kinds of memory: long and short. I’m pretty good at the former, but lousy at things I really ought to remember, since I had just heard them, like recalling a name. I envy the ability of some to hear a name and remember it for the next occasion; to see a face and know it in Walmart a year later, or even better, in a car at 45 mph, to see through shaded glass, and fetch a face. How does one work this magic? My wife does it daily, but doesn’t share her secret.

There may be blessings to all this forgetting, however, and if this is so, I’m a pretty lucky guy. Do I really want to remember everything I’ve bumped into along life’s road? As actress Ingrid Bergman put it, “Happiness is good health and a bad memory.”

Psychiatry has grown prosperous on clientele unable to forget the past, hence condemned to repeat its burden, each day renewing yesterday’s quarrel, betrayal or loss. T. S. Eliot, that cogent modern interpreter of memory overload, wrote of the coming of spring without revival and a new generation incarcerated by memory: “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory….”

In a landmark book, The Seven Sins of Memory, Daniel Schacter, former Chair of Harvard’s Psychology Department, tells us that for all our lapses in memory, memory provides a means to adaptation in helping us sort out the really useful. Memory sometimes blesses us when it malfunctions through transience (the weakening of memory over time), absent-mindedness (not remembering where you put things), blocking (the inability to recall a name or face), misattribution (assigning a memory item to a wrong source) suggestibility (implanting memory through leading questions), bias (the reshaping of memory through influential events or opinions), and persistence (the inveterate recall of disturbing events or information).

George Duhamel puts all of this into succinct summation when he writes in The Heart’s Domain that “We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.”

The poet Wordsworth must have had it right then, for more than any poet I know, he drew from the well of memory, creating a reflective poetry that nourishes us still in its ability to sort out life’s essentials that make for human solace.

But again, without memory we may exist, but without being. If life is in the blood as the ancients had it rightly, then it follows that memory lends it exuberance and hence the source not only of pain or loss, but of joy and renewal.

Ultimately, we are what we remember.

New York’s icon of courage: the Brooklyn Bridge

When I think of New York City landmarks, flashes of the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the legendary Yankee Stadium, alas, now gone, leap to my mind. But there’s an underdog landmark I like best: the Brooklyn Bridge, stubborn and stunning in its granite towers and glistening, criss-crossing steel cables. An inspiring story lies behind its construction against formidable odds involving three members of a remarkable family.

Opened on May 24, 1883, after 14-years of construction that would cost the lives of 27 workers, including its designer, it was the wonder of its era as America’s first steel cable suspension bridge. Celebrating its 130th birthday as of next May, it continues as a principal artery spanning the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn with 150,000 users daily.

It originated as the idea of a German immigrant, John Augustus Roebling, in 1863. He had built earlier bridges; for example, the bridge spanning the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, and another across the Niagara Gorge. When it came to the East River, many said it couldn’t be done.

For a time, it seemed the critics had it right. Shortly before construction began in 1869, Roebling’s toes on one foot were crushed in a freak accident when a ferry boat slammed into the dock on which Roebling was standing while taking compass readings across the East River. Following amputation of his toes, he succumbed to tetanus 3-weeks later.

His son, Washington, now took charge of the project. Tragedy, however, knocked on the Roebling family door again, when Washington came down with the bends, or decompression sickness from underwater labor, resulting in lifelong confinement to a wheelchair. Forced to watch the construction from a telescope, he conveyed his instructions to his wife, Emily.

Her feat is remarkable in its own right, since she had no previous knowledge of bridge dynamics. Over the next 11-years, mastering the intricacies of her husband’s calling including mathematics, catenary curve calculations and material substances, she would accurately convey his instructions to the workers.

Appropriately, in the ceremonies featuring President Chester A. Arthur, Emily was the first to ride across the bridge, a rooster in her lap as a symbol of victory.

A super icon of a super city, the bridge was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1964.

One of the best times to view the bridge is at night, when the Gothic charms of its pointed arches are bathed in light.

The noted historian David McCoullough details the bridge’s construction in The Great Bridge (1978) and Ken Burns followed with his first documentary in 1981.

San Francisco has its romantic Golden Gate, just maybe one of the most eye-pleasing bridges in the world. But for me, my first love remains the Brooklyn Bridge, in no small measure because my romanticism clings to the story of a family’s perseverance in the face of tragedy and thus lends hope to all of us.

New Yorkers know this especially well, whether its October 1929, or 9/11, or hurricane Sandy’s more recent devastation.

On the violence that ails us: reflections on low self-esteem

The news headlines thunder the shocking mayhem of school children gunned down at Sandy Hook and of four firemen ambushed in upper New York, leaving even the professionals pondering the mindset behind such horror.

Sadly, the truth may be that a good many people don’t like themselves and act out their self-loathing on others. Its origin can be subtle.

Perhaps it began as a youngster in an overly restrictive home heavy on reprimand, short on love.

Or in unabated sibling rivalry for the mother’s milk, as it were.

Perhaps from a short-fused teacher, scolding a child in view of other children, maximizing his humiliation.

Perhaps because other children excluded or bullied.

I’ve known for years the high impacting of poor reading skills on youngsters, usually boys. I had been a social worker for several years at a residential treatment center for boys 8-17, replete with its own school. Of my hundred boys or more, 90% were remedial readers with substantial low esteem and often a history of acting out in the classroom.

The origins are myriad; the result the same, and always damaging.

Nearly always a person falls into hating himself not because he’s intrinsically inadequate, but because others keep telling him so. Rejection messages accumulate their toxins like excessive radiation, fostering demise instead of intended healing.

Fairly often you can see such psychological fallout in the overachiever who flagellates himself with extraordinary effort to win approval, and hence self-validation.

Those suffering envy, and many do, languish because they’re at war with themselves. When people like themselves they don’t require what someone else seemingly has in the way of goods, talent, and reputation. They have no need to project limitations on to others and sully them through gossip, innuendo or criticism. Another’s success doesn’t hint at reprimand or reminder of personal shortcomings. Those liking themselves know their own worth and it’s quite enough.

Ironically, self-loathing may turn-up in the guise of narcissism, or conceit, a kind of whistling in the dark to keep the wolves at bay. Confident people rely upon results, not boasts.

Lacking self-esteem, every conversation, work, class or play endeavor musters into a contest for mastery in a quest for validation for those who suffer.

In the worst scenarios, self-hatred in its twisted logic leads to rage and inflicting pain on self and others. What begins as temper, may end in verbal and domestic abuse, eating disorders, drug addiction, delinquency, or even worse as our headlines testify.

Somewhere, always, its source lies in a wound that festers. It lashes out at innocents, ironically often the very sources that offer love, but can never suffice to close the gap. Fed by a flotilla of ghosts, the self-loather purees his fantasies into a malt of maiming. Filled with rage, he seeks to even the score.

As the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, put it so succinctly: “A man’s life is what he thinks about all day long.”

Happy Holiday!

My wife Karen introduced me to this wonderful YouTube Christmas segment filmed in Spain recently. Hoping you enjoy it and wishing all of you well.

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