Mind Over Matter

Hurtling down the short but steep slope between a switchback, a sudden sharp stab in my lower back had me yelping. I was ten years old. “Stay on the pathway,” my father shouted. But I kept going , albeit more cautiously. That day, at the Llandudno Hospital, in Wales, the doctor examined the X-ray. “A muscle pull,” he mistakenly declared.

Often, over the next two years, stabs like that waylaid me. Then, in Pretoria, South Africa, my entire tailbone was taken out. Yet afterwards, the ‘pulled muscle’ pains stayed. “You’re making too much of it,” grownups said. I learned to hide it. I did not want to be 'a sissy.' Besides, with my cushion at school, my fellows laughed at me. Embarrassed, I let the evidence of alleviating my pain go. Eventually, in high school sports, the constant variants of pain became ingrained, natural. Besides rugby, cross-country running was worse; pain pounded its way into my neck. Sometimes I'd stop up to throw up in agony.

In 1970, the South African Army Conscription Officer demanded: “Surgery? What rugby teams did you play?” In earshot of my fellow graduands, I could not lie. My truth resulted in a brutal period of training, and call-ups, and intermittent stints of border warfare. I was then into my twenty’s, and full of the Shakespearean vainglory of being too ‘quick in quarrel.’ However, the parade drilling, parachute training, obstacle course training, and jumping from the back of moving trucks had me gritting my teeth, wincing, and sometimes groaning aloud. There were long and lonely nights of standing guard. At times I wept deeply for my pain-filled lot. Up on the border, callup after callup, I could hardly believe that a world beyond my immediacy existed. The persistence of pain, physical pain, was something I was learning to accept, but this psychological pain, how does one overcome that?

Mother had this same disease. Mostly bedridden from her late twenty’s, we’d watched her crumble to the chronic pain. As for me, at last diagnosed with congenital ankylosis spondylitis, (which sounds more serious than ‘spinal degeneration,’) I was absolutely determined not to succumb. Mother had taken many drugs. Father had taken many drinks. I would not follow suit. Besides, boarding school and the army had taught the paradoxical value of fearing consequences; one learned self-discipline. So, no, I did not do drugs. And neither did I get drunk. Nor would I smoke. Life was about living with the gnawing, ever present pain, yet being as active as possible. School rugby tackles were excruciating. Army stints took their toll. So, by 1975, I determined that there would be no more army.

AWOL, I absconded out of Cape Town aboard the S.A. Oranje, and then bicycled my way up Britain, hid in the Orkney Islands, and eventually made my way to Canada. Always, there were varying degrees of pain. In Nakina, Northern Ontario, on a building site in the deep November winter of 1976, a fellow worker heard my back snap “from ten feet away.” Dr. Remus, a specialist in Thunder Bay used bone chips from my hips to fuse my lower vertebrae. I really hoped it would solve my chronic condition.

It was not to be. Things grew worse. Like Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages’ of life, I had at times been ‘the mewling infant,’ feeling overly sorry for myself. In the ‘unwilling schoolboy’ stage, I was impatient, fretful, and angry. As ‘the lover,’ I pretended too much that all was good, and that despite my infirmity, I would make a good catch. And as for being ‘the soldier,’ it had fostered a self-resentment of my physical ‘weakness.’ Then came the result of that Nakina building site accident. I subsequently enrolled at Lakehead University. In a series of body casts and braces, throughout undergraduate studies, it was a long span of agonizing recovery. But at least I was able to walk, unsupported. Thereafter, in those ‘fifth age’ decades of the 1980’s, and 90’s, Calgary saw me working as a teacher, and as a community theatre director, where I hid my unrelenting infirmity as well as I could. A passion for work helped, but some saw me stumble, and gave me sympathy along the way. I became renown for having ‘a bad back.’

In 2003 I foolishly pushed our stalled car out from the carwash. Another severe yelp! I came out of the ineluctable surgery by specialist Dr. Hu, mid 2004, sporting a train-track of titanium rods and 12 screws. The Calgary Board of Education Health Officer asserted, “You’ll be on disability. We doubt that you’ll be able to work, or to walk again.” I looked up at him from my couch, and blurted, ‘Watch me.’

Despite being power-chair reliant, within two years I applied for a vacant post, and spent the next six years teaching drama at Centennial High School. Everything was managed from my chair. I needed a neck-brace too. Since my spine was in constant distress, I resorted occasionally to an aspirin. My muscles required perpetual tensing and relaxing to maintain my core strength. It kept my vertebrae from rubbing constantly atop each other. Too often I would have uncontrollable stabs, particularly with movement, and the students and staff became angels of care and consideration. So too for the members of Calgary Community Theatre, whom I continued to direct in show after show. The magic of being visibly handicapped is that people are altogether more considerate. They open doors. They fetch things for you. And they are even careful not to bump you. But things were not so before I was in a wheelchair. Without a cane, or crutch, people thought I was ‘normal.’ And I wonder just how very many of us bear scars, wounds, and afflictions that others do not see, physical, or psychological. Indeed, we are best off to approach everyone with compassion, always. They too have their story.

In 2011, in my sixth of Shakespeare’s ‘ages,’ I retired to Canada’s west coast, and spent the next three years still reliant on my powerchair. I grew worse and worse with pain. Stabs were very frequent. In 2014, in the Emergency ward of the hospital, the doctor admonished, “You’ve multiple pulmonary embolisms in both lungs. You must move if you want to stay alive.” Prescription for pregabalin in hand, I determined to walk again. Twelve years in a powerchair had been enough.

It took two more years to be free. I increased my steps, slowly, and eventually dispensed with my cane too. Then too, I weaned myself down from nine pills a day to just two, nightly. Pain is a constant. I have learned to minimize it, and to allow for it to give me an intense focus on other things. Escaping it is not an option. It is more about learning to integrate it, like an icon on a computer screen, enlivened if clicked on, but sublimated while focused elsewhere. Moment for moment. Day for day. Nowadays I can manage an hour or so of walking, unsupported, when out.

Now, at seventy-three, I’m at Shakespeare’s ‘seventh age.’ It has been a long haul of assimilating and accommodating the effect of unrelenting pain. Accepting the switchbacks, one moves forward. Resisting the path, pain can become more intense. Along the way, physical as well as psychological, allowing for others to help with their expertise, their medicines, their prayers, and their compassion, has done a great deal to help me. Yet still, cutting the medication down to the bare essential, for me, stays paramount. In the end, in the long, lonely hours of persistent pain, it is up to oneself to deal with it, to surmount it, to minimize it, and to integrate it. Then too, may one’s gratitude for all those who’ve cared and helped along the way, as has mine, help you too. ‘Mind over matter’ is no trite saying. Stay strong!

Train-Track Tolerations

 

Toleration can be an awkward exercise. It suggests a challenge to being fully integrative. It suggests an unelected pathway of having to humor another. It suggests that one is (or at least feels, however uncomfortably) ‘superior’. Yet in the long progress of being ‘fully human’, being tolerant might at best incorporate the practices of compassion, consideration, care, and co-operation. Still, being there, something or other too easily can upset one off track.

Such are the cracks in the tracks of our contact with others. Are you herewith included? Did we journey a relatively short while in the same train-compartment, and then you, or I, got off at a given station, and went on our individual way? 

The trainset on my plywood table goes round, and round. It usually obeys such power as I feed it. But occasionally, with the disuse of time, or because of the over-long interval in which I focused on another activity, the trains dislocate, stop up, or refuse to budge. Always, it takes quite some careful sleuthing to determine the problem’s cause.

Are we at such a disconnect? Has it been too long since we gave power to our words, or gave continuity to our correspondence? Did either of us disembark, deplane, or detrain? The stations in our lives naturally involve new journeys. Details, foreign to another, take up much of our time and energy; the limitations in our sharing increases; we feel the disconnect becoming natural, non-affected, and sensibly tolerated. (Besides, one grows tired of talking just about Things; or just about Other People; and even one’s ‘wayward’ Ideas can simply become too frustrating to accommodate.)

Imprecision, quite unlike myself, is not tolerated by my trainset. Even the tiniest hair-crack in the connection points of the rails can freeze up the train’s motion. But we humans are not like that. We can accidentally reconnect with a wave, a word, a smile, or an intentional handshake. And like some strangers on a journey, we can even resume our old intercourse without the hiccup of an utter disconnect, at times sharing such intimacies of personal information as can take oneself by surprise.

We are connected. Despite all our discord and fragmentation and warmongering; despite all the Faustian pharmaceutical fallacies and their commercial iniquities; despite our ‘Territorial Imperative,’ (with its investment in our Identity; our need for Stimulation; and our want of Security,) * we cannot escape our essential inter-dependence. Our molecular osmosis is felt in the soul. At least, it is felt by those of us who are not too embroiled in an existential intolerance of others, such that our own pathways disallow the psychic current of our ‘entelechic’ energy to keep us evolving.

Unlike the relatively flat metaphor of a toy-train-set on a plywood board, the analogy of one’s place within the larger sphere of our observed universe is indeed multidimensional. It is that very multiplicity of advents, opportunities, perspectives, choices, and proclivities that impels us as individuals to make decisions for which we bear consequence, good, or bad. We are not ineluctably yoked to each other on a train-track, nor even collectively (anymore) societally mandated to 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd class conveyances for the rest of our lives. We are free to interrelate.

Tolerance, practiced with care, does much for us all.  

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*See: Ardrey, R. The Territorial Imperative. Athenium, New York. (1966)

A Pentacle Criteria for Perceptual Critique

Next to a taped-up poster of Mona Lisa on the blackboard, I draw a five-point star.

“Five points, referenced by a star shape, or conversely, by the fingers of one’s hand, make up a Pentacle of Criteria by which art, literature, (and much music too,) might readily be evaluated,” I say to my interested students. “For example, let’s take Mona Lisa.”

“Ha! She always smirks at us!” interjects Buddy, with a laugh.

I smile. “Very good. Humour, like our palms, may be central.” My hand high; I wiggle my fingers. “Yet, like all other possible points, not always obvious.” I draw a smiley in the star’s centre, then scribble a stuck-out tongue. “Next?” My index finger points. “What starts things?”

“How about ‘action’?” Roger suggests. “After all, adventures need ongoing action.” He points: “Look at those disappearing pathways, behind her. Like our ‘two paths in a yellow wood’.”

I turn, and at an arbitrary point of the star, I write:  Action/Adventure.

Purposefully, I thrust up my middle finger. “Next?”

“Sir!” Felicity demurs. “Don’t be rude!”

“Ah! Very good. But how do we know that it’s a rude gesture?” I ask. “In some countries it might be construed as a good luck symbol. Very many symbols have esoteric references, or intellectual terms, and like innocent children, we may yet come to learn their significance.”

“So,” Felicity ventures, “would the next point of the star be: Esoteric/Intellectual?”

“Say,” Clarence offers, “given the finger, we once discussed Shakespeare’s overt sexual references, or sensually subliminal ones, ‘not just to appeal to the commoners.’ But I do not see any of that in the Mona Lisa.”

“I do!” Buddy brags. “Look at that cleavage, and at her satisfied smile,” he adds, a trifle lewdly.

I shrug, give a thumbs-up, and write: Sensual/Sexual.

“But just look at her eyes!” Mandy suggests. “They’re full of love and care! Might the fourth point be: Romance, and Sentiment?”

After chalking up the phrases, I put up my pinky, and say, “Insightful observations, thanks. Now then, what might be the fifth? Given the over-arching intentions of this class, lesson after lesson, for what are we consistently searching? Is it just knowledge? Or is it something more?”

Little Linda, the youngest in our class, stands up. “We are in a search for wisdom, Sir. Always. We are, as we have often discussed, ‘spiritual beings, being human.’ And Mona Lisa does look as though she knows something that we do not, yes?”

I smile, and write the last label: Wisdom/Spiritual  

“Wonderful. Thank you. Now then, along with your insightfulness, we’ve devised, or divined, yet another rubric for what might be endemic to most enduring works of art, or literature, or music, and film too. Our criteria, even if subconsciously, variously appeals to the broad spectrum of humanity. What bears recalling is that, like the five fingers of one’s hand, those diverse aspects are not necessarily equally deployed. From our thick thumbs to our little pinkies, differentiation can be variously ascribed. Hence our circle, lest we presume that there is a necessary hierarchy, as opposed to a preferential focus. After all, just like humour, good for us as it is, every element is not necessarily in any and every classical artform. Why, even Mona Lisa, here, is but caught up in a moment.”

 “Yeah,” Buddy nods. “But what a moment! It keeps going on and on. See, she’s still smiling!”

 

Making Manifestations

 

Damocles also hung up his sword.

“You’re best to drive,” my wife caringly suggested, and added, “The Red Door Treasures is too far from here.” I looked back at our parking spot, under the shade of a tree, with the choc-a-block tourists thronging the street, many stopping to take pictures of the goats on the grass roof, and many making queues to get ice-cream and sundaes. I smiled at her care.  “I’ll be alright. I’ve walked it before, from here. And you said you’ll need about an hour in the market. I choose to walk.” “Well, let’s keep our phones on,” she responded, “I’ll come and get you, if need be.” And so, my adventure began.

It most often is not ‘one for all,’ and certainly it is not ‘all for one,’ no matter how inclusively round is our table. Rather, we each are individual and unique in our petri-dishes on Earth. Around us swirls the infinity of the Universe. Some cosmologists deem there are parallel corollaries. Some see loops in time where the repetitions are felt in de'ja vu moments, apprehended intuitively. We make much of Intuition. We make models with rubrics of mandated behaviours. We make Religion. We make supposition become fact. We make myth become reality. We turn history itself into the advantage of a whole race over another, and (lately) we become increasingly conscious of the impact of our collective responsibilities in our Colonialisms, appropriations, and usurpations. Yet despite the diversity of our collective acculturations, and the political pools of our firm-held contentions, as well as the familial obligations of our emotions, we have, as individuals, in our groups throughout our history, proven that it is the individual who affects others. One by one we influence each of us toward a paradigm shift, and so we progress through the timelines of our course, making manifestations of the things one first envisions. Yet still, much of what we manifest remains ‘just for me’.

“Just for me?” was my vacillation point, but I went past it. I pulled the sword from the rock. Well, at least, metaphorically. Thing is, back in 2008, I directed ‘Camelot’. Its King Arthur, a renown singer, did a splendid job for our Front Row Centre Theatre Company. So, since he’d worn my own Excalibur while on stage throughout the three weeks of shows, I gave it to him as a memento. But now, seventeen years later, in my man cave, I found myself picking up my copies of Arthurian writers, M. Ashley, G. Ashe, T. Mallory, and the inimitable T.H. White, and thinking of that old sword. A beautifully crafted replica, I’d had it for several years before directing the musical. But nowadays, thrown into the lake of the past, I doubted that I should ever see the gleam of that sword again. Until yesterday.

The roadside stalls alongside the tourist trap of Coombs are a colourful enticement of bric-a-brac. One may pick up a spanner, a wooden giraffe, or an old cassette tape. Should one have been manifesting something, (which is a wishing for some ‘thing,’ (if not an event) into existence,) it could well be there. And it was! Halfway twixt where I had been, and where I was going, lay yet another Excalibur, on a dusty table, unsheathed, soiled with fingerprints, yet unscathed by misuse. Avoiding anyone else cutting to the quick, that sword, as I type, is now mounted in my man-cave, safe, secure, and is again mine.     

Manifestations take on many forms. Their materializations occur so frequently that there is a disbelief that their happy happenstances are mere coincidences; (had I driven, it would not have been seen.) Yet it appears that the energies of wishful thinking, like the intentions of prayer, do collude to create circumstances of serendipity. Thing is, this story is indeed about a 'thing'. Other stories can be about persons, occasions, and dreams. We each are under the point of that sword of Damocles as we vacillate between our wants, and our needs. There is a price to pay for living. Ideally, that price is the freedom to choose. And as we make the choice, do we act from our uniqueness, or from our purported individuality, while each of us remains bound up within our acculturations? Choice, as is often the case, is indeed a double-edged sword. Excalibur defends, or attacks. All one’s choices bear consequence; Damocles would know.

Time To Change

 https://rpentelbury.blogspot.com/2025/04/time-to-change.html

Time To Change

April 30, 2025

At last, there are words. In the beginning, so it was too. Until then, all was an abstraction of energy not yet given any form, by man. And as our ‘sense of life’ developed, (to quote, in this April month, my beloved brother,) we began verbal constructs that not only turned sound into malleable meanings in our various languages, but that then became inviolate mental concepts that history has proven we are prepared to die for. Yet a house has very many shapes, dimensions, and locations, even though we understand it epistemologically to mean a place of shelter. So it goes. To formulate a paragraph of coherent meaning, let alone a series of phrases or sentences that inspire, is as much dependent on the muse of ancient and atavistic invigoration, as it is on the immediacy of the moment. Pausing to think, overlong, is to lose one’s energy on the train track of thoughts, despite such a break sometimes being but a period of gestation. Since the political slogan is ‘time for a change,’ what does that phrase really mean to you?

The difficulty of pretentious phrases is that it requires commensurate knowledge to participate in their comprehension, (much like the esoterica of knowing that Black Beauty is about a horse.) And if deprived from that cultural enlightenment as a child, so too may one not anymore know who Arthur the Great was, or what Hornby Dunblo means. Each of us is captured by the Petri dish of acculturation into which we are born. Some climb the lip and depart for yet some other grouping, but the predominances of life is what these words are about. One observes that we are persons each struggling much to maintain and persevere with our habitual norms. Yet all around, the world is yet again embroiled in the threats of great, ineluctable, change.

Political divisiveness slices into the fabric of our societies. We are hard put not to view the distinctions between Them, versus Us. And we are cautious in our interactions with friends and family to check into their proclivities, lest we tread on their firmly held beliefs, values, and constructs. The binary division becomes apparent. And the constructs of terminology, thought patterns, belief systems, and values can trounce ethics, morals, integrity, and temperaments, depending on whom one addresses. Yet even better, listening proves the most valuable. One’s vote is one’s own, and gathering whatever one can from others helps much to make one’s mind up, as uncertain, ultimately, as one may feel about the outcome. It is easier to stay in one’s lane, independent of who is at the forefront, and to vote as one’s habits have been, all one’s life. (As such the days may not, in deeds, become ‘sunny’.) Now there’s a Canadian yoking of constructs, paradigms, esoteric knowledge, and history, in a single phrase. Sonny?

Thing is, these words are not meant to persuade you. Nor are they meant to define the only way forward. They are but a nudge toward a more mindful meta-cognition, more intensity of action, more clarity of purpose, and more compassion for the whole. Without one recognizing that we all are struggling toward enlightenment, spiritual evolution, and even geopolitical peace and inclusion, at whatever level of application to task any of us may be observed, evaluated, or professed to be operating within, one is impoverishing oneself of hope, of empowerment, of influence, and of contribution toward the health of the whole. Yes, it is natural for some to be self serving and selfish, but now is the time for genuinely including, accepting, assimilating, and integrating the variables among all of one’s neighbours. By country. By nationality. By religion. By political affiliation. And by a universal sensibility toward The Whole. Still…

“I can do that, but what about them? They cannot! And if they charge at me, I’ve little choice but to retaliate in equal measure.” Yes. And the wars continue. And the political systems perpetuate divides. And the religions perpetuate hierarchies. And thinking, itself, wrestles and wrangles with the spirit, such that one is weary of it all, and sad, and at a loss for words, and fearful of getting this wrong.

So, we go with the flow. Or does one? Do we wait for change to be mandated from without, or are we each given to change, from within? Time, we gather, for each and every one of us, is finite. Truly, is change?

Foolhardy Fellowships

 

Presumptions can be foolish. The coach pointed at me. “You should all run like him. Do that again in slow-motion, boyo. Let’s see that perfect style of yours in action.” Well, for about 20 yards or so, I did it, focusing on the precision of ‘my style’. Being only 12 years old, I knew nothing, really, of ‘how to run.’ The sense of it came naturally to me. And as for ‘slow-motion,’ that too, for me, was just a concept. In those early years of the 60’s, going to movies in South Africa, for me, was a most infrequent thing, and I do not recall having ever seen slow-motion. So, on that hot and sweaty Sports Day I tried to present what I thought it might look like. “That’s good enough,” yelled the coach to stop me. “See,” he told the others, “that’s how to run.”

We were in the Pilditch Stadium grounds, just behind the soaring concrete structure, warming up. It was at last the all-schools’ meet, and I’d always made first in my own school’s playground, so sprinting was a delight. And now here, from the start, I’d impressed the coach with my take-offs. After all, with school practices, I’d come up with reacting to the ‘Buh…,” and did not wait for the “...ang!” of the teacher’s yell. Now, with this new teacher taking a special liking to me while warming us up, with each of us from a different school for the 100 yards dash, I thought I’d have the race ‘in the bag.’

And then, soon enough, we were in the big stadium. My first time. It felt very exciting to see all those people there. The grandstands looked full. The huge field had all sorts of simultaneous events going on. Long jump. High jump. Discus-throwing. There were even races like the 220 yards, the 440, and the fifteen-hundred-yard runs. I’d never conceived of them. (But no one, I discerned, sprinted quite like me.) They even had a real gun! Our impoverished school, Burgher Right Primary, had not had such things. Nor had we even had a track on which to practice. We ran on uneven ground. And a stake at either end had demarcated the start and stop of the 100 yards over a lumpy and uneven lawn. Never mind. I’d been the fastest in my school. And now, here at the big event with our warm-ups just done, I’d shown myself the fastest off the white line, and the best in style too. Sure, I was the only one in bare feet, (as I recall it,) but shoes would just weigh me down. So, when at last ready, with about eight or ten of us at the start line, I was determined to show all the people in the stands just how fast I was.

Hubris. Arrogance. Self-righteousness. These were not terms in my ken, back in those days. Nor was the obverse of those debilitating terms, with universal concepts like compassion, empathy, or concomitance. I was a boy, and like most of my fellows, I thought the best way to be a boy was to best others on every occasion. After all, ‘competition’ was designed to prove just who was ‘best’. So was swimming. So was running. So too, even, were exams.

But a strange thought overcame me as I waited for the, “On your marks!” command. What if I slow-motioned my start, and my run too, and showed them all how it’s done? Surely the very force of my energy would control the others, and we all would run in a slow motion too, and…?

Well, I came dead last. I recall the others springing up, with me still at the starter’s line, and then my still, foolishly, determinedly, running in slow-motion, perfectly, all the while intent on drawing the others back to run that way too. But of course, I never caught up.

Somewhere in our makeup is the sense that our behaviours, our connection, our similarities, are only individualized by the shells of our molecular inheritance. ‘All we need is love.’ All we need is each other. All we need is empathy, compassion, integration, and cooperation, so that others similarly, if not simultaneously, may conduct themselves the same way we do. But real life teaches us that birds of a feather do tend to gather, and even they have their pecking order. We generally have a compulsive need to be first, or better than, or at least be a part of, so that we can be secure with who we are, what we do, and even how we think. Yet I’m of a mind that right now, in the eighth decade of my life, with our world on fear-filled tenterhooks, one is best not to expect one’s behaviours to affect all others, other than to keep being the best that one can be.

Feeding Fears

 

We decimate things at our whim. The leaves from the three arbutus trees bothered both of us. He was out there, too frequently, with his broom and long handled dustpan, clearing his cobble-paved driveway, his immaculately swept pathways, his manicured flower beds. On the other hand, once in a long while, I cleared the fallen leaves on my side with my noisy battery-powered blower, and stuffed the fragmented offal into a black bag, ready for the garbage. Both of us were bothered by the fallen leaves, he much more than my little bit. And right from the start, when I first called the property mine, he’d let me know that he ‘feared that those trees would have to come down, someday’. After all, with that smaller one on my property line, and the two larger ones within his, they obscured my view, but not his.

Birds frequented them. Spring-time Robins. Summer-time Northern flickers. Winter-time Chickadees. Autumn Sparrows. And even resting hummingbirds. But the live leaves, bristling and waving, sometimes hid the birds’ flittings from us. Then too, the wide-spread branches reached up into the sky, a good fifteen feet high, and their rake did impede our ocean view. We’d see so much more of The Strait were they to come down. But I was most reluctant. Trees scrub the sky clean. Trees give life. Trees take decades to grow. Trees take precedence over our own preferences, surely?

But that neighbour also had a magnificent and deeply green and very tall Deodara tree. At some fifty feet in height, and at least twelve feet wide, it not only blocked some of our own vista, but also dropped its messy pine needles atop his other neighbor’s glass-top greenhouse. “For years now,” he uttered, uncertainly, “I’ve been meaning to cut down this tree, much as I don’t want to.”

Thing is, for most of us, excising the detritus of our lives, let alone the obvious, is a difficult thing to do. All over the yards through our very human existence there are the discards and rotten boats and rusted trucks and the heaps of rubbish that clutter our lives. There is the obvious. There is the dubious. There is the valuable, (which may not be useful.) And then there’s junk.

So too for our fears. We indeed have fear for a reason. It serves us. It can ensure that we are safe. But then too, our whole lives become conditioned to fear; fear that we are insufficient; fear that we do not measure up; fear that we do not have the latest; do not have the best; do not have what he or she has; and we can fear that we are not as worthy as any other. We do not wish to be called ‘cheap’. And so, commercialism feeds on our fears. So too do our politicians. So too do even our friends and families and neighbours. One ‘needs’ to ‘measure up’.

And so, we can hack away at the tall poppies within us. We can topple the evolving trees that may grow up from inside us, and we can scare away the birds of our thoughts that may choose otherwise to roost. We take on the constructs of others before us; we can adopt their religions; we often adopt their political stripes; we do sing beside their flags; and we follow the queues that would lead us to the troughs of acceptability, lest, like an escaped prisoner hurrying away from the ubiquitous wall, the spotlight falls on us, and we are arrested, recaptured, or shot.

Those trees on our property lines came down. All four of them. The sky grew bigger. But did our worldview? Did we really contribute to the health of the whole? Did we really gain in our yard’s value so that some future person may benefit, let alone ourselves? And do the birds now merely find some other resting place; just as does one’s own thoughts, when there simply is too much of the mind’s fluttering of fallen leaves with which to contend?

The trees were mulched. All four of them. Like letters of the alphabet in scrabble, their sense was reduced to nothing. And the snarl of chainsaws and growling augers eventually left too. So too did the birds. (But at least that awful volume of leaves shall no more be a bother, eh?)