Bearded Heroes of a Resurgent Boston

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I watched the Rolling Rally on NESN Saturday with pride and emotion as it wound its way along Boylston Street, over to the Common, then into the Charles (quite literally).   Two million strong, Bostonians lined the streets, often forty deep; stood on steps, looked out windows; and, yes, gazed from roof tops, cheering wildly as their Red Sox heroes passed by in duck boats normally used for touring, waiving back, sometimes slapping hands. Duck boat diplomacy! Certainly, assuredly, unlike so much in life, everything conspired to make this day a success, not least, an unusually warm day in November Boston, a day that will replay itself in memory long after.

Who would have thunk it: that last year’s record 97 losses and last place finish in the American League East would give way to World Series winners?  This was a  motley team in some ways stiched together remarkably, if not cunningly, by general manager Ben Cherington into a flamboyant weave that included a new skipper, John Farrell, articulate, knowledgeable, and able.

Even then, it seemed a no go for the Sox as relief pitching woes mounted up what with sore arms and inability to put out fires.  Ominously, ace pitcher Buchholtz, after a 9 and 0 start, developed a clavicle problem, removing him from the mound till September.  Even in the Series, there was the bullpen collapse of normally reliable Breslow (the Yale biomed whiz).

Chalk up their success to maybe the overachiever syndrome that sometimes compensates for handicap and wins through?  Well, maybe.  For sure, they didn’t get to the winner circle from any embedded superiority.  You might even say this was a David vs. Goliath scenario, replaying itself nightly throughout the season and into the post season against all odds.

The American League playoffs proved better than their hype, the Sox facing an always menacing Tampa Bay, followed by a heavy hitting Detroit team replete with two of the games superior hurlers. Finally, the perennial winning St. Louis Cardinals with, again, fine pitching and, on paper, a knock out bullpen.

It didn’t matter.  The clues, if you think about it, had a way of happening, and kept happening, from the very outset, with the Sox finding ways to win, coming from behind, usually in late innings; each game, a new hero: Big Pappi, Victorino, Gomes, Napoli, Nava;  sometimes Ellsbury on the bases, setting the table; often, a leaping catch by an ever nimble Pedroia or Drew of a smash drive or a diving, in-the-web grab by Gomes.  Slowly I began to believe.  And so did Boston.

They did it so often, thirty times, that it seemed a given–just wait.  Hey, they scratched out one run wins, thrilled us nightly with walk off scenarios, and then there fell into place, as  it were, our secret weapon, passionate, diminutive Koji Uehara, who hitters couldn’t hit.

And how about Lester, fading, only to find himself again, winning games, and anchoring our rotation in the playoffs and Series? Not far behind, Lackey, back from Tommy John surgery, pitching gem after gem right through the Series. “A beautiful thing,” as colorful commentator Dennis Eckersley likes to say.

So many stories here. So many heroes!

But for me, the most important story is that of April’s human wrought mayhem on Patriot’s Day at the finish line of the world’s favorite marathon.  Once again, as in all such misdeeds, I’m reminded of the human capacity to enact evil.  But I also have faith in the resident goodness of the vast majority to confront and transcend such evil.  As Big Papi famously put it, “This is our … City.  Boston needed to be strong and as the President said, “Boston would celebrate again.”

sox5And that’s where the Red Sox came in, showing the way past adversity to renewal.  That’s what the huge crowds were all about.  They identified with the sleeve patch each player now wore:  “Boston Strong.”

Sadly, in this day of free agency and change as one of life’s non-negotiables, we’ll not see their like again with their bearded idiosyncrasies. Peavy ended up buying the duck boat on which he rode.  (He had previously given us the cigar store Indian, which became a dugout fixture, home and away). Saturday evening, the celebration seemingly carried on, captured in a photo of Napoli, apparently inebriated, bare chested, wandering the streets.  I doubt few Bostonians care.  He earned his indulgence and drinks on the house.  I do know we’ll miss that nightly tugging of the beards!

Every now and then I come across some who disdain sports as a volatile vanity out-of-place in a troubled world.  But I don’t see it that way.  Here we can learn something from wise Vergil, who also knew the depth of suffering first hand.  In one episode of his great Aeneas, he writes entirely of several sport contests.  In his prescience, he knew their analogy with life.  Sports give diversion, and what’s wrong with a time out anyway?  But they are more than that, testing and teaching character, a word whose meaning we’ve largely lost to our own detriment.  Tell me how athletes play the game and I’ll tell you if you can count on them in life.  Their true value lies not in victory, but in pursuit.

This was a team of bonded brothers who went everywhere together.  They loved one another and how we loved them!   They helped Bostonians refocus. The poet Dante defined hell as a place of lost souls who had abandoned hope.  The Red Sox taught Bostonians how to climb out of hell and hope again.  Not least, a whole nation.

sox2How moving their stopping in Copley Square, the singing of God Bless America. Team and city united.  City and team become one.

What a wonderful day.  What a beautiful thing.

Boston Strong.

Thank you, guys!

–rj

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My Love Affair with Vermont

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I can’t say how it began, but I know I’ve always had this love affair with Vermont, even though I’ve never lived there.  I suspect it has a lot to do with its mountain greenery, since I’ve always been partial to mountains, those silent sentries walling out an octane world fulsome with pursuit and possession, safeguarding neat valleys of Yankee towns and villages anchored by white steepled churches.

I grew up in Massachusetts with vistas much like this, and Vermont, New England at its best, not far away.  I can’t think of a wooded vista excelling that stretch of aerial road known as U. S. 9 connecting Vermont’s  quaint Bennington and Brattleboro towns in the south that I used to travel often.

A few years back, or 2005, I finally canvassed the state right up to the Canadian border before twisting back to the Massachusetts coast by way of New Hampshire’s lofty White Mountains.  One special delight was visiting Swanton, just south of the Canadian border.  My grandparents had called it home.

Retaining its small population contributes to the state’s Edenic luster, despite the continuous threat of emigres from New York and Massachusetts, not infrequently buying up commanding views, cutting trees, and building spacious palaces of material privilege.

In Vermont box store giants are rare, and thus town centers of mom and pop stores prosper and prove gathering places.  Smallness and simplicity turn back the clock.

I like the democracy of these towns with selectmen, not mayors, held to account by their  citizens in weekly meetings of equals.

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For many of us, Vermont means dairy farms, cradled among gentle hills, producing cheeses by the score; undulating countryside redolent with flaming fall foliage and winter’s maple syrup like no where else.  But it’s also a place of considerable waterways, despite being New England’s only landlocked state.  Every town seems to have its murmuring stream or running river, which sometimes menace human artifacts with storms like last year’s Sandy.  And then there’s Lake Champlain, America’s sixth largest lake, 120 miles long, 14 miles across at its widest point and 400 feet deep.  What grabs me most are its myriad covered bridges, more than anywhere else, archives of a past of horse-drawn carriages catching shelter from cacophonous clouds unleashing summer deluge.

Apart from scenic splendor and sanctuary replete with serenity, I like the state’s progressiveness.  Vermont, by the way, is the only state represented in Congress by a socialist, registered as an Independent.  Small as it is, no state ranks higher in promoting the welfare of its citizens.  It was the first to abolish slavery.  It was also first in granting women the right to vote in 1880.  Unlike neighboring Massachusetts which recently blinked under religious pressure, Vermont has now joined just Oregon and Washington in passing death with dignity legislation.  Vermont was the first state to allow civic unions and, later, gay marriage.   Looking towards the future, it’s promoting a single payer, non-profit health system akin to European and Canadian models.  Concerned about climate change, it has joined eight other states in offering rebate incentives to purchasers of electric cars.

At times, I think of Vermont as almost another country independent of the body politic. In fact, for fourteen years, it was just that–a sovereign nation before joining the Union.  Funny I should write this, but when I was in my twenties I had looked to New Zealand as my deliverance from a meaningless Asian war, burning cities, and assassinations of progressive leaders, including a president who gave possibility to Camelot.  New Zealand responded with immigrant status and employment, yet I didn’t go, for my American roots lay deeper than I knew.

A few years ago, I visited New Zealand and beautiful Taranaki which would have been my home.  I happened to meet several American ex-pats, one of whom shared that California had grown stale for him with its exponential growth in population and social burden, despoiled environment and plighted cities, accelerating crime and sky high taxes, inflated mortgages and a growing economic divide.

I wish now I had asked him if he needed to go so far, even as I had once thought of doing.  Why not Oregon, Washington, Montana?  Why not Vermont?

I wish I had asked myself that question when blessed with those options uniquely granted to the young.

–rj

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Women are better lovers

byronThere is this passage in the poet Byron’s Don Juan that has always impressed me as one of the keenest observations concerning women to be found in literature:  “Man’s love is of his life a thing apart,/’Tis woman’s whole existence” (Canto I, 194).

In my thinking, most men lack women’s capacity to love fully.  I write this knowing the tendency of stereotype to overlook exceptions, which are often many.  Still, I think my observation holds.  And thus I count women superior to us men, for surely love is the noblest of human emotions.

Women think with their hearts, though not at risk of their intelligence, for they know how to discern; witness any shopping outing and you’ll catch my drift.  They’re no less so when it comes to sorting out men.

Women frequently assume risk, or gamble on love, unlike many men who prefer the safety of the status quo over commitment.  While marriage in the West continues its decline, given opportunity, most women prefer it; less so, men.  As the late Toronto Star columnist Merle Shain reminds us, “Men opt for security in lieu of feeling and call their decision maturity” (Some Men are more Perfect than Others, p. 6).

 Sometimes women lose heavily, having bet all, and thus they grieve; yet they excel even in their loss, since we’re defined more by what we attempt than what we lose.  The ancient Greeks had it right: assertion validates identity.  Far better to enter into your feelings and chance possibility than to awake one day to numbing emptiness, the sorrow of not having loved and wishing you had.

They say women adore intelligence in their males, and they do; but what really seizes their hearts are the courageous kind, who accepting their vulnerability, refuse to let fear foreclose on happiness.  With brave men such as these, love offers its amplest bloom.

–rj

A Woman for all Seasons: Ruth Bader Ginsberg

ginsbergI’ve been thinking a lot about her these days, surprising myself, since I knew her simply as a fact stored away in my memory for so many years.   Diminutive at just five feet and weighing only one hundred pounds, her small face accentuated by her landmark over sized glasses, there isn’t anything visible to recommend her apart from a flinty chin suggesting determination.  Just goes to tell me how short-sighted I  am when slipping into judging by appearances.  I guess that’s a topic for a follow-up blog.  Anyway, small packages  sometimes pack a wallop.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg hails from Brooklyn, the child of Jewish immigrants from Russia.  Think about how wonderful that is, the promise of America, that in a second generation, children of immigrants or an immigrant parent can weave their way into the American success story.  Think Steve Jobs (Syria), Walt Disney (Canada), Gloria Estefan (Cuba).  Nikki Haley and Nora Jones (India).  Think Barak Obama (Kenya).  Did you know that a good number of our biggest firms owe their existence to immigrants?  Think Boeing (Germany), 3M ( Canada), Home Depot (Russia) for just a few examples.

Now most of us know who Ginsberg is, though she doesn’t command the headlines like some of her U. S. Supreme Court colleagues such as Justices Roberts and Scalia.  Doubtless this stems from her minority position in a long-dominated conservative court, despite her frequent dissents always highlighted by their precocious acuity.

I’m not about to launch a verbose listing of salient background details about Kiki (her nickname), save to note her appointment by President Clinton to the bench in 1993.  I’m frankly more interested here in her character traits lending her the individuality for which she’s noted. 

Although she’s an ardent liberal (former ACLU litigator), she pals with the Scalias, sharing in their mutual love for opera.  Her favorites, Verdi and Puccini.  On the fun side, she’s been an extra in two operas.

Much of her early life was spent in fighting off sexism.  Just out of Columbia Law School in a time of very few female lawyers, justice Felix Frankfurter refused to interview her for a clerkship:  “Does she wear skirts?  I can’t stand girls in pants.”

Combatting injustice of any kind has always motivated Ginsberg throughout her legal career:  “I thought, well maybe the law could catch up with changes in society, and that was an empowering idea.”

By any measure, I admire Ginsberg for her spunky witticism.  On one occasion, Justice William Rehnquist queried her as to why she was making an issue out of gender equality.  Wasn’t having Susan B. Anthony on the dollar coin enough for her?  Famously, she quipped back, “No, your honor, tokens won’t do.”

I also find her very brave.  Twice she’s survived cancer:  colon (1999) and pancreatic  (2009).  With the colon diagnosis she didn’t miss a day on the bench, despite chemo and radiation regimens.  Twelve days after her Whipple surgery to remove a portion of her pancreas, she was hearing oral arguments.  Pancreatic cancer has very few survivors and apparently they got it early through a routine cat scan.  It was the pancreatic cancer taking the life of one of my icons, Steve Jobs, that aroused my curiosity about this angry organ, the pancreas, that led to my researching Ginsberg.

Though she’s given up water skiing and horseback riding, she works out with a trainer two times a week and is up to twenty no cheat pushups.

She’s fluent in Swedish, acquired from two summers there and says she can watch Ingmar Bergman films without subtitles.

Some liberals want her to retire so that President Obama can appoint another liberal as deterrent against a subsequent Republican presidency.  Ginsberg refuses to budge, saying she’ll remain on the bench unless health issues interfere.  Though she’s known more for championing equality issues affecting women, it’s clear she’s also an exemplum of the senior citizen’s ability to continue contributing to the workplace and society as a whole.

I’m glad she’s there, offering rational balance in a time of deepening national division.

–rj

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Ransacking nature: Deforestation in Indonesia

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When we hear of deforestation we’re apt to think of Brazil with its persistent denigration of the Amazon jungle.  But an equally bad scenario is that of Indonesia, with half its rich forest tapestry now gone and complete decimation a mere decade away, all for the sake of plantation (usually for palm oil) and logging profits.

A heartless calamity in the making, it has consequences ultimately for all of us.  Consider, for example, that Indonesia ranks third in species diversity after Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo.  More specifically, it’s home to between 10 and 15 percent of the earth’s known plant, mammal and bird species.  It’s also residence for tigers, rhinoceroses, and elephants, increasingly refugees from a reduced or degraded habitat.  Soon the unique orangutan and Sumatran tiger may vanish into memory.

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While the central government in Jakarta has tried to impose a moratorium on logging, it goes on unabatedly in many distant local areas where law enforcement is rare.  Consequently, Indonesia is now the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which promote temperature rise.

Financial incentives topping a billion in U. S. dollars are now underway, but their success remains in doubt, given widespread political corruption.

What’s going on in Indonesia affects not only many of its citizens displaced by plantations, but the global village as well.  Indonesia’s vast peatlands store an estimated 35 tons of carbon.  Burn or drain them and you release their warming carbons into the atmosphere.

Several weeks ago the UN’s updated report on global warming made headlines.  While deliberately opting for a subdued, or conservative report, to avoid ridicule as alarmist, it warns of an approaching irreversibility in limiting global warming if we continue at our present pace of carbon emission.  As the UN report panel’s co-chair warns, “Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time.”

Unfortunately, there still exists a minority of skeptics even among scientists, who primarily proffer up the now recognized slowing-down of temperature rise over the last fifteen years.  The truth is that no one really knows why.  While acknowledging this, the report suggests it may be a matter of variability, or simply a cyclical pause, or staircase effect.  In the long term, however, it suggests tides by century end of up to three feet.  (Other reports put it at five feet.)

Regardless of the debate, the fact remains of our witnessing forest carnage in places like Brazil, Indonesia, and the Malayan archipelago with resultant permanent ecological loss and diversity reduction with unknown consequences for all of us.

If we could invest in humanity’s ultimately viewing its relationship with nature as one of dependence rather than exploitation, then we would surely find our way out of this morass; but this is an unlikely hope, given our seeming inveterate instinct to pursue self-interest rather than collective good, abetted in turn by ignorance and indifference.

–rj

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To Truman: Beloved Friend

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You came into our lives twelve years ago in late August 2001, a compact Bichon bundle of playful love, in a pre-arranged handoff at an I-64 road stop.  I had ordered you by phone from a breeder in Myrtle Beach.  It was instant mutual love.  We decided to call you Truman, and it fit you just right.

Rarely, but it does happen, a mind-boggling event brands itself into memory and we never forget what we were doing and where we were at.  My father often reminisced that early Sunday morning, December 7, 1941.  For me, it had been November 22, 1963 and July 20, 1969 that stood out.  And now a third:  You were getting your first shots.  Our vet, a dog show judge, was admiring your confirmation, saying it was the best he had come across among Bichons in his practice, when the news broke of horrendous misdeeds.  It was September 11, 2001.

Now that’s one of the compelling reasons I’ve always been drawn to dogs and cats.  Unlike many humans caught-up in calculated self-interest with cruel consequences, they want only to love and be loved.  You loved everyone and they loved you.  But you gave me preference, waiting at the door for Daddy’s entrance, then bounding up with enthusiasm on my legs.  How wonderful to come home daily from a world of stress and non-entity to unconditional, uninhibited affection.

How you loved your backyard and how we loved watching you playing the mighty hunter card, one-cautious step after another, standing still, then more steps, gaining, then only, inevitably, the scurrying squirrel, knowing you were there all the time, hustling up the tree.  You at its trunk, patiently looking up, waiting for it to come down

You liked roaming the perimeter or fence line.  Your joy was complete when you heard neighbor dogs bark and scrambled full speed for canine fellowship.  I had read  somewhere that for all their human contact, given a choice, dogs prefer their own kind.  I can understand that, sometimes myself opting for their company over that of homo sapiens.

I remember how tiny you were at first and that there were several times you squeezed through the board fencing, even though I had spent days in winter cold nailing chicken wire over the gaps.  There was the time you got into the neighbor’s yard behind us where several llamas grazed and I climbed over the fence to rescue you from an advancing llama, only to have it come after me.  I grabbed you and jumped over to safety.  Close call for us both!

You liked walking on your leash with me down the street.  I never really had to train you at it, since from the beginning you took instantly to walking at my heel on my left, seldom pulling to get ahead.

But I did enroll you in an individualized obedience course.  Unfortunately, your trainer relied on treats and I could never find a way to wean you away from your addiction and do something simply because it was worthy for its own sake.  But then our own children aren’t all that different.  Getting you to stay was simply impossible for someone as passionate as you.  The gold standard was to take you to a safe area of a shopping mall and get you to stay.  I didn’t even try.  $300 dollars down the drain.  Ironically, you trained me!  Still, you did retain the habit of sitting on cue right up to the end, until your arthritic limbs compelled my pardoning you.

You liked keeping company with us on the couch, snuggling up to Karen and me.  You also had this funny habit of flipping the pillows off the couch and finding your way to the other arm and propping yourself up for a cozy snooze.

You also had this cute habit of carrying your metal dish over to your living room pad after your evening meal and licking it clean.  You delighted us with this gesture from the time you were a pup up almost to the end.

How excited you got to go outside with me to feed the birds whenever you saw me filling the plastic pitcher with seed!

At night when we turned out the living room lights, always the landmark clicking of your nails on the hallway floor as you made your way to join us in slumber.

When you were seven they found a heart murmur and I felt then the first scary pangs I might lose you.  You liked to run at full speed.

Around age nine, they found calcium crystals in your bladder, and so they put you on meds and a special diet.  I don’t know if the crystals caused you any discomfort.  You always acted the happy part.

At age eleven you had slowed down and seemed to labor in your walk.  We put you on glucosomine for that.

Just after your twelfth birthday, or this past June, I took you in for another checkup for the crystals and arthritis.  The ultrasound was distressing, showing not only more crystals despite your prescribed diet, but a tumor  over the right adrenal gland and a nodule adjacent to the left adrenal.  Ominously, the tumor occluded the vena cava, making any surgery risky.   The follow-up radiology report didn’t clearly indicate metastasis, but it remained a possibility.

You were still your active self through June, but then came the weight loss.  Once a robust 21 pounds, you were down to 18 by September, and 14 by the end.  You found it difficult to shadow Daddy from room to room and pretty much snoozed on the couch most of the day.  Your dark black eyes, tinged with sadness, gave off a pleading gaze–as if to say, “please help me”!

I knew things were getting really bad when you increasingly turned away from your food or ate very little, though I tried tempting you with lots of treats and canned meat in place of your former kibbles.  You were always crazy after peanut butter filled bones,  but now  you no longer could muster the appetite to enjoy the feast.

It hurt you to walk and even to lie down.  You couldn’t hold your water.  That last night, Tuesday, I knew we needed to do the right thing when you let out two yelps, one of them when Karen tried to pet your head.  Obviously you were hurting all over.

I caught myself in my own selfishness.  I had wanted to keep you forever.  I should have been thinking about your interests.  I needed to let go as my ultimate gift of love for you, my friend, our friend, always kind, gentle and loving.

Yesterday at the vet’s, we were with you in your final moments.  You seemed unafraid as I stroked you and laid a last kiss on your darling head. You went quickly and peacefully into that long sleep.  No more suffering.

I know that death is part of the deal we make for life, but it doesn’t lessen our grief or bridge the emptiness.  We miss you terribly.  You were a gift of love and we thank you for the daily joy you brought into our lives.  You will be in our hearts forever.

–rj and kj

Memory: Something to be Cherished

Do you ever get something tossing around in your head that seemingly you can’t get rid of no matter how you try?  I get that way when I listen to music, for example, the lyrics wearing down my synapses like “We had it all/ Just like Bogie and Becall/ Starring in our old late, late show/Sailing to Key Largo.”  But sometimes it’s a memory that pops up, crazy like, since there’s no triggering context, maybe reaching way back into early childhood’s opaque alleys.

Sometimes something sticks because we associate it with an event or person that brought us great happiness or, alas, considerable pain.   Maybe we never forget anything really, the mind simply archiving everything that makes us who we are. While time may soften the edges of past experience, its essence remains

Freud built his formidable psychological schema on memory, which he argued was always latent, and thus influential on what we do and say, want and fear.  His former protégée, Carl Jung, contended memory transcended time and individuals, ultimately taking on evolutionary status as archetype, or primordial pattern, shaping both our thinking and behavior.  According to Jung, the repository of memory is defined best in myth, which reenacts the human repertoire of experience.  Its roman a clef  lies in symbols compressing our individual and collective destinies.

On the literary front, some of our foremost fiction writers like Joyce, Proust and Faulkner have made a legacy of memory in works like Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, and The Sound and the Fury.  In poetry, the English poet Wordsworth famously defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” building his poetic artifice on reflecting past experiences.  Perhaps the bottom line modus operandi latent in literary creation is to keep memory, or human experience, alive.

Often memory over time embellishes or distorts as we add or subtract.  It’s a good reason to keep journals. Verbal photos I like to call them.  Poor recall is the nemesis in legal matters when witnesses can’t accurately recall what they saw or heard or when witnesses prove contradictory.

Too often we take our ability to remember for granted, when the truth is it begins to decline as we age and increasingly we can’t find those damned keys, or forget what we came to the store for, or that doctor’s appointment.  Nothing to be worried about, save when forgetfulness takes on habit such as:

1 .    We repeat the same questions.

2.    We struggle for common words.

3.    We find it difficult to follow directions

4.    We lose our way in our neighborhood.

5.    We put things in odd places.

6.    We can’t recall something recently learned.

If I lost my sight or hearing, this would be debilitating and surely grievous, yet I think not equal to the loss of recall, condemned to an eternal present and essentially returning me to an infantile state as in dementia and its acute species, Alzheimer’s, that wipes away everything defining my humanity and lending  my life significance.

I don’t know, nor do any of us, what Fate holds, but in the meantime, I choose not to take this gift of memory for granted but to cherish it by nurturing it through learning new things, exercising regularly and vigorously, and eating nutritious foods.

Doctors who specialize in aging increasingly report that dementia may not necessarily happen if we keep our brains healthy by doing the right things.  Dr.  Majid Fotuhi, Chair of the Department of Neurology at Johns Hopkins, informs us that Alzheimer’s has only a limited genetic factor.  It can be delayed and even prevented with lifestyle changes undertaken in midlife.

I choose to run with that hope,

–rj

Fall Fever in Kentucky

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Autumn carries more gold in its pockets
than all the other seasons.  (Jim Bishop)

Of all the seasons in Kentucky, I like fall best with its myriad days bathed in soft light, keeping company with tepid warmth and gentle breezes following summer’s humid heaviness.  I like the way it lingers, sometimes right up to Thanksgiving, a seductress stubbornly clinging to her teasing ways.

Fall helps creation catch its breath and prepare for winter’s long sleep. The prescient wrens, doves, jays and cardinals jostle for space at their feeder, fattening themselves for aerial flight to distant climes.  Scurrying squirrels ransack the ground, greedy for winter  provision.  Trees flame and flicker in a palette of oranges, yellows, and reds, a few of their leaves–emissaries of snowflakes–softly eddying their way earthward.

My roses renew their glory, liberated from summer’s scourge of heat and insect.  And I am also quickened, eager to cross over the threshold of human artifact to immerse myself in Fall’s last blooms.

Oh that life might be like this–languorous days when even time stands still and we wake to find our haunting ghosts have fled.

–rj

What Being Centered Really Means

True peace is achieved
By centering
And blending with life (Tao 22).

You hear a lot about being centered, but just what is it?

The ancient Greeks advocated “the golden mean,” or middle way.

Roman writer Vergil based his Aeneid on Pietas, or something akin to self-control.

Perhaps drawing on his Hellenic education, St. Paul advised moderation in all things.

Excess is always dangerous in any pursuit, for it forecloses on alternatives that may prove more tempered and thus wiser than those fostered by our passions.

Unfortunately, indulgence, or excess, defines history with its repeated accounts of obsession gone astray for power and possession.  History is narcissism writ large.

At the everyday level, we hear continually of people who have ruined their lives and hurt others simply because they were unable to rule themselves.

Because self-interest especially dominates in politics and religion, I generally am suspicious of them both.  As I write, there’s the rancor in Congress over raising the debt ceiling so government can pay its bills.  Currently, however, a persistent few are willing to shut down government unless they have their way.  As I’ve written  in an earlier blog, political parties lead to narrow partisanship, as President Washington so wisely observed in his Farewell Address.

In religion, we needn’t dial back to the Crusades or Inquisition to access the violence of fanatical fundamentalism.  If you look at a worldwide map, you’ll find religious mayhem abundantly distributed, whether in the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Burma, the Philippines, and Indonesia.  As for Africa, there’s last week’s heinous massacre at Nairobi’s West Gate Mall in Kenya by Somali militants, who selectively shot non-Muslims.  Nigeria has its own ongoing debacle with Islamic extremists. These things happen because without centeredness we lack balance and thus forfeit stability and often our humanity, too.

On the other hand, fraudulent centeredness can possess its own rigidity if focused merely on ourselves.  True centeredness serves as a reference point that proffers balance, always its marker, between extremes. Think acoustics. Think harmony.

Centeredness promotes equilibrium, a check on ego, a capacity to not confuse the parts with the whole, enabling us to respond more patiently and thus more wisely.  A state of being, it isn’t found in having.

Centered people aren’t dismayed by the fallout of time or chance.  They see the evolving pattern and not the ephemeral circumstance.  They’re grounded in the Eternal, not the transitory.  Thus change and loss and disappointment don’t throw them off balance.  In touch with themselves, they live in harmony with nature’s artifice. .

Writing from a jail cell and facing imminent execution, St. Paul could cogently advise his friends that they pursue “all that is noble, all that is just and pure, all that is lovable and gracious, whatever is excellent and admirable–fill all your thoughts with these things.”

This is centeredness.  This is harmony.  This is the fabric of Eternity.

–rj

Cajun Music: Addictive!

Cajun music instruments
Cajun music instruments

I like to work out daily on our elliptical machine, or at least 5 times weekly for 30 minutes a session.  It beats taking a vigorous walk in often hot and humid Kentucky for up to an hour.  In contrast,  I can turn on the fan in the exercise room, plug in my iPod, and be serenated.  Lo and behold, exercise done!

One of the marvelous things about music is that there’s something out there for every taste and mood.  Most of us like a fast paced tempo when we’re trying to get the heart pulse up.  Lately, I’ve discovered that Cajun music with its dominant, happy mix of accordion, fiddle and triangle gives you real foot-stomping stuff, even if you can’t get into the French lyrics.  A vibrant variant reminiscent of the blues also exists, known as Zydeco.  It will remind  you of swing dancing and it’s both sexy and passionate!

There are a good number of Cajun bands out there and I don’t think you can really err in your selections, but I like Michael Doucet’s BeauSoleil the best.  He founded the group to try to stave off the decline of Cajun culture, especially its language, which remains an endangered species.  Back in 1950, half of the Cajun people spoke it as their language at home.  That’s declined to just 10% presently.  Cajun, by the way, comes from the French word, Acadian.

You probably know this, but the Cajuns are descendants of the former French colony known as Acadia in today’s Nova Scotia.  The British exiled them when they refused to accept British sovereignty in 1755.  Their homes and crops were burned and many family members separated.  Many, nearly a half, lost their lives at sea.  Their plight is memorialized in Longfellow’s Evangeline.

Ultimately, most of them settled in central and Southwest Louisiana (the Bayou country), preserving their culture for two centuries.  Cajun is the Acadian dialect of their forbears.   Louisiana today has about 700,000 Cajuns, though the vast majority are Anglicized.  Nonetheless, Cajun festivals are popular and frequent in Louisiana, with Lafayette their apex.

Be careful though about sampling Cajun music:  Like its spicy cuisine, its joie de vivre music can prove addictive.

–rj

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